Early Life
Andropov was the son of a railway official Vladimir Konstantinovich Andropov, who was a member of an Don Cossacks noble family. His mother was Yevgenia Karlovna Fleckenstein, a daughter of a wealthy Moscow businessman, Karl Franzovich Fleckenstein, a German Russian from Vyborg. Andropov was educated at the Rybinsk Water Transport Technical College. Both of parents died early, leaving Yuri an orphan at the age of thirteen. . As a teenager he worked as a loader, a telegraph clerk, and a sailor for the Volga steamship line.
Read more about this topic: Yuri Andropov
Famous quotes related to early life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)