Some quotes from the book Socialism betrayed:

Andropov is worth honoring with a lengthy part from Keeran & Kenney's Socialism Betrayed:    [Historian Eric] Hobsbawm quoted a former CIA director as saying, “I believe that if [Soviet leader, Yuri] Andropov had been fifteen years younger when he took power in 1982, we would still have a Soviet Union with us.” On this, Hobsbawm remarked, “I don’t like to agree with CIA chiefs, but this seems to me to be entirely plausible.” We too think this is plausible.

Andropov was born in 1914 in Stavropol. His father was a railroad worker. Andropov left school at sixteen and worked as a telegraph operator and boatman on the Volga. Beginning in 1936, Andropov held a series of positions in the Komsomol (Young Communists), becoming First Secretary of the Komsomol in the Karelo-Finnish Autonomous Republic (Karelia) that bordered Finland. During the war, the Germans occupied Karelia, and Andropov joined the partisan movement against them. After the war, he became Second Secretary of the CP of Karelia. In 1951, Andropov went to work for the Central Committee in Moscow. In 1953, he became Counsellor to Hungary and in 1954 Ambassador to Hungary. From 1957 to 1962, Andropov worked for the Foreign Affairs Department of the Central Committee, where he dealt with other Communist countries. In 1962, he became Secretary of the Central Committee. In 1967, Andropov became Chairman of the KGB, a post he held for fifteen years.

The details of Andropov’s career were even more impressive than the résumé. On his way up, Andropov worked with three of the great figures of the CPSU. While in the Karelo-Finnish Republic, Andropov became the protégé of the old Bolshevik, Otto Kuusinen. Kuusinen had been a comrade in arms with Lenin since 1905, was the founder of the Finnish CommunistParty and the First Secretary of the CP of Karelia, when Andropov was Second Secretary. Kuusinen, who remained an important figure in the CPSU until his death in 1964, doubtlessly helped bring Andropov’s abilities to the notice of others. As Ambassador to Hungary, Andropov worked under the Foreign Minister, the old Bolshevik, Molotov. As Ambassador to Hungary, Andropov also developed a close relationship to Mikhail Suslov, who became his second mentor after Kuusinen. Suslov’s career in the Party stretched back to 1918, when he had joined the Young Communists. Suslov was a serious student of Marxism-Leninism and a leading ideologist of the Party under Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Some commentators believed that Andropov modeled himself after Suslov, since Andropov’s austerity, intellectuality, and work ethic resembled that of the older Suslov. When Suslov died in 1982, Andropov replaced him as the Party’s leading ideologist. Andropov’s career was studded by occasions that demanded great courage, calmness, and tough-mindedness [...]

Later, as head of the KGB, Andropov took responsibility for the crackdown on dissident intellectuals, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Andropov’s willingness to defend these actions openly and to withstand the criticism of Western commentators and such Soviet intellectuals as Yevgeny Yevushenko, strongly suggested that Andropov would have avoided Gorbachev’s blunder of turning the media over to anti-socialist elements. As head of the KGB, Andropov also showed courage and conviction by investigating corruption in high places. On his KGB watch, the entire Party Presidium and government of Azerbaijan were dismissed for corruption, bribery, and embezzlement. Moreover, in 1981, Andropov’s deputy exposed and arrested some of the “black market-ridden dolce vita crowd” that included Brezhnev’s daughter and son-in-law. Even investigating crime in the General Secretary’s family did not daunt Andropov.

In his brief tenure, Andropov also addressed problems related to Party standards, personnel, democracy, ideology, and the national question. He made clear that the Party would not tolerate corruption, bribery, or embezzlement. He insisted on a restoration of “Leninist norms.” According to Ligachev, after Andropov became General Secretary “everyone went from an abbreviated workday to a longer one.” Andropov also abolished Brezhnev’s “stability of cadre” policy and forced out the old and incompetent and brought in new and effective Party and state officials. One of his first moves was to replace the head of the Transport Ministry, which had been a source of persistent bottlenecks in the economy. To improve democracy, Andropov attacked the excessive formalism of Party meetings and demanded an end to their scripted character.He demanded the removal of obstacles to initiatives in the workplace, and according to Ligachev, introduced “the practice of holding preliminary discussions of Party and government decisions in work collectives and factories.” In June 1983, Andropov devoted a plenary meeting of the Central Committee to a discussion of the improvement of ideological work. [...]

Unquestionably, Andropov understood the problems facing the Soviet Union and the CPSU and undertook serious reforms. Some writers in the West suggested that the Soviet leader was a closet liberal, but they were wishing to make it so.144 Nothing in Andropov’s words or deeds showed the slightest interest in the path that Gorbachev would follow after 1987. It was not simply that Andropov quoted Marx and Lenin and hewed to the Party line. The Party expected no less of any Party leader. Rather, Andropov distinguished himself, as his speeches between 1964 and 1983 show, by the creative application of Marxist-Leninist ideas to immediate problems, the bold defense of tough policies, and the ability to rebut Western criticism with strength and sophistication. In precisely those areas, where Gorbachev would exhibit the most vacillation, Andropov showed the greatest steadfastness. Similarly, Andropov took a more tough-minded approach to socialist democracy, nationalism, and the second economy than Gorbachev would [...] No aspect of Soviet life drew more of Andropov’s censure than “money-grubbing,” “the plundering of the people’s property,” and the use of public posts for “personal enrichment.”Personal acquisitiveness could not be harnessed or encouraged for the benefit of socialism. It reflected a bourgeois value that socialism had to transcend. In what may have been his last article, Andropov said, “The turning of ‘mine’ into ‘ours’...is a long and multifaceted process which should not be oversimplified. Even when socialist production relations have been established once and for all, some people still preserve, and even reproduce, individualistic habits, a striving to enrich themselves at the expense of others, at the expense of society.” [...]

There is every reason to think that Andropov’s approach to reform would have worked. As a Communist leader, he had everything going for him except his health... Andropov accomplished a great deal in his fifteen months, which in any case was a very short time to reform an entire society. His accomplishments were all the more impressive considering that illness consigned him to a hospital bed for half of this time and his successor lacked the capacity to continue what Andropov had started.