Controversy and later publications on the topicSince the time he was elected General Secretary of the CPSU, there has been speculation and controversy about his past. Files of Andropov showed that he adapted his biography to the demands of the Bolshevik times.[2] He made himself a son of an Ossetian proletarian, when he was actually from a rich Jewish bourgeois family. According to the files, Andropov was not accurate at first while inventing his family’s proletarian past. He was questioned at least four times in the 1930s because of the discrepancies in several forms he filled.[citation needed] Each time he managed to evade commissions that checked his background. The final version of his biography stated that he was the son of a railway official and was probably born in Nagutskoye, Stavropol Guberniya, Imperial Russia. Nevertheless, later publications show that he actually came from a Jewish family. His father, Vladimir Liberman, died in 1919. His mother, Yevgenia Fainstein, was a daughter of a rich Jewish merchant.[3][4][5]
