title: Henry Rollins

text: On December 3, 2009, Rollins wrote of his support for the victims of the Bhopal disaster in India, in an article for "Vanity Fair" 25 years–to the day–after the methyl isocyanate gas leak from the Union Carbide Corporation's pesticide factory exposed more than half a million local people to poisonous gas and resulted in the deaths of 17,000 people. He spent time in Bhopal with the people, to listen to their stories. In a later radio interview in February 2010 Rollins summed up his approach to activism, "This is where my anger takes me, to places like this, not into abuse but into proactive, clean movement."


title: Henry Rollins

text: Rollins is an advocate for the legalization of cannabis. Rollins has stated he does not personally consume cannabis but views the issue as an important matter of civil rights, arguing that its illegality is based in "bigotry and racism and financing the prison–industrial complex". Rollins has shared his views on the subject as keynote speaker at the Oregon Marijuana Business Conference and the International Cannabis Business Conference.


title: Henry Rollins

text: In August 2015, Rollins discussed his support for Bernie Sanders as a candidate in the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primaries.


title: Henry Rollins

text: Rollins has said that he does not have religious or spiritual beliefs, though he also does not consider himself an atheist. He has mostly avoided recreational drugs throughout his life, but experimented a few times with alcohol, cannabis, and LSD during his teens and early 20s.


title: Henry Rollins

text: Rollins is childless by choice, and says that he has not been in a romantic relationship since his 20s. He considers himself a solitary person, and maintains few deep relationships outside of his professional ones. One of his closest personal friends is musician Ian MacKaye, with whom he has been close since they met as children. He also enjoys a friendship with actor William Shatner, which developed after he performed on Shatner's album "Has Been".


title: Henry Rollins

text: In an interview with Jason Tanamor of Zoiks! Online, when asked about a longtime rumor of Rollins being homosexual, the singer said, "Perhaps wishful thinking. If I were gay, believe me, you would know."


title: Henry Rollins

text: In December 1991, Rollins and his best friend Joe Cole were the victims of an armed robbery and shooting when they were assaulted by robbers outside their shared home in Venice Beach, California. Cole died after being shot in the face, but Rollins escaped. The murder remains unsolved. In an April 1992 "Los Angeles Times" interview, Rollins revealed he kept a plastic container full of soil soaked with Cole's blood: "I dug up all the earth where his head fell—he was shot in the face—and I've got all the dirt here, and so Cole's in the house. I say good morning to him every day. I got his phone, too, so I got a direct line to him. So that feels good."


title: Henry Rollins

text: In a 2001 interview with Howard Stern, Rollins was asked about rumors that he kept Cole's brain in his house. He stated that he has only the soil from the spot where Cole was killed. During the interview, he also speculated that the reason they were targeted may have been because, days prior to the incident, record producer Rick Rubin had requested to hear the newly recorded album "The End of Silence" and parked his Rolls-Royce outside their house while carrying a cell phone. Because of the notoriety of the neighborhood, Rollins suspected that this would bring trouble because of the implication that there was money in the home. He even wrote in his journal the night of Rubin's visit that his home "is going to get popped".


title: Semiconductor

text: A semiconductor is a material, which has an electrical conductivity value falling between that of a conductor, such as copper, and an insulator, such as glass. Its resistivity falls as its temperature rises; metals behave in the opposite way. Its conducting properties may be altered in useful ways by introducing impurities ("doping") into the crystal structure. When two differently doped regions exist in the same crystal, a semiconductor junction is created. The behavior of charge carriers, which include electrons, ions, and electron holes, at these junctions is the basis of diodes, transistors, and most modern electronics. Some examples of semiconductors are silicon, germanium, gallium arsenide, and elements near the so-called "metalloid staircase" on the periodic table. After silicon, gallium arsenide is the second-most common semiconductor and is used in laser diodes, solar cells, microwave-frequency integrated circuits, and others. Silicon is a critical element for fabricating most electronic circuits.


title: Semiconductor

text: Semiconductor devices can display a range of useful properties, such as passing current more easily in one direction than the other, showing variable resistance, and having sensitivity to light or heat. Because the electrical properties of a semiconductor material can be modified by doping and by the application of electrical fields or light, devices made from semiconductors can be used for amplification, switching, and energy conversion.


title: Semiconductor

text: The conductivity of silicon is increased by adding a small amount (of the order of 1 in 10) of pentavalent (antimony, phosphorus, or arsenic) or trivalent (boron, gallium, indium) atoms. This process is known as doping, and the resulting semiconductors are known as doped or extrinsic semiconductors. Apart from doping, the conductivity of a semiconductor can be improved by increasing its temperature. This is contrary to the behavior of a metal, in which conductivity decreases with an increase in temperature.


title: Semiconductor

text: The modern understanding of the properties of a semiconductor relies on quantum physics to explain the movement of charge carriers in a crystal lattice. Doping greatly increases the number of charge carriers within the crystal. When a doped semiconductor contains free holes, it is called "p-type", and when it contains free electrons, it is known as "n-type". The semiconductor materials used in electronic devices are doped under precise conditions to control the concentration and regions of p- and n-type dopants. A single semiconductor device crystal can have many p- and n-type regions; the p–n junctions between these regions are responsible for the useful electronic behavior. Using a hot-point probe, one can determine quickly whether a semiconductor sample is p- or n-type.


title: Semiconductor

text: Some of the properties of semiconductor materials were observed throughout the mid-19th and first decades of the 20th century. The first practical application of semiconductors in electronics was the 1904 development of the cat's-whisker detector, a primitive semiconductor diode used in early radio receivers. Developments in quantum physics led in turn to the invention of the transistor in 1947 and the integrated circuit in 1958.


title: Semiconductor

text: Semiconductors in their natural state are poor conductors because a current requires the flow of electrons, and semiconductors have their valence bands filled, preventing the entire flow of new electrons. Several developed techniques allow semiconducting materials to behave like conducting materials, such as doping or gating. These modifications have two outcomes: n-type and p-type. These refer to the excess or shortage of electrons, respectively. A balanced number of electrons would cause a current to flow throughout the material.


title: Semiconductor

text: Heterojunctions occur when two differently doped semiconducting materials are joined. For example, a configuration could consist of p-doped and n-doped germanium. This results in an exchange of electrons and holes between the differently doped semiconducting materials. The n-doped germanium would have an excess of electrons, and the p-doped germanium would have an excess of holes. The transfer occurs until an equilibrium is reached by a process called recombination, which causes the migrating electrons from the n-type to come in contact with the migrating holes from the p-type. The result of this process is a narrow strip of immobile ions, which causes an electric field across the junction.


title: Semiconductor

text: A difference in electric potential on a semiconducting material would cause it to leave thermal equilibrium and create a non-equilibrium situation. This introduces electrons and holes to the system, which interact via a process called ambipolar diffusion. Whenever thermal equilibrium is disturbed in a semiconducting material, the number of holes and electrons changes. Such disruptions can occur as a result of a temperature difference or photons, which can enter the system and create electrons and holes. The process that creates and annihilates electrons and holes are called generation and recombination, respectively.


title: Semiconductor

text: In certain semiconductors, excited electrons can relax by emitting light instead of producing heat. These semiconductors are used in the construction of light-emitting diodes and fluorescent quantum dots.


title: Semiconductor

text: Semiconductors with high thermal conductivity can be used for heat dissipation and improving thermal management of electronics.


title: Semiconductor

text: Semiconductors have large thermoelectric power factors making them useful in thermoelectric generators, as well as high thermoelectric figures of merit making them useful in thermoelectric coolers.


title: Semiconductor

text: The most common semiconducting materials are crystalline solids, but amorphous and liquid semiconductors are also known. These include hydrogenated amorphous silicon and mixtures of arsenic, selenium, and tellurium in a variety of proportions. These compounds share with better-known semiconductors the properties of intermediate conductivity and a rapid variation of conductivity with temperature, as well as occasional negative resistance. Such disordered materials lack the rigid crystalline structure of conventional semiconductors such as silicon. They are generally used in thin film structures, which do not require material of higher electronic quality, being relatively insensitive to impurities and radiation damage.


title: Semiconductor

text: Almost all of today's electronic technology involves the use of semiconductors, with the most important aspect being the integrated circuit (IC), which are found in desktops, laptops, scanners, cell-phones, and other electronic devices. Semiconductors for ICs are mass-produced. To create an ideal semiconducting material, chemical purity is paramount. Any small imperfection can have a drastic effect on how the semiconducting material behaves due to the scale at which the materials are used.


title: Semiconductor

text: A high degree of crystalline perfection is also required, since faults in the crystal structure (such as dislocations, twins, and stacking faults) interfere with the semiconducting properties of the material. Crystalline faults are a major cause of defective semiconductor devices. The larger the crystal, the more difficult it is to achieve the necessary perfection. Current mass production processes use crystal ingots between in diameter, grown as cylinders and sliced into wafers.


title: Semiconductor

text: There is a combination of processes that are used to prepare semiconducting materials for ICs. One process is called thermal oxidation, which forms silicon dioxide on the surface of the silicon. This is used as a gate insulator and field oxide. Other processes are called photomasks and photolithography. This process is what creates the patterns on the circuit in the integrated circuit. Ultraviolet light is used along with a photoresist layer to create a chemical change that generates the patterns for the circuit.


title: Semiconductor

text: The etching is the next process that is required. The part of the silicon that was not covered by the photoresist layer from the previous step can now be etched. The main process typically used today is called plasma etching. Plasma etching usually involves an etch gas pumped in a low-pressure chamber to create plasma. A common etch gas is chlorofluorocarbon, or more commonly known Freon. A high radio-frequency voltage between the cathode and anode is what creates the plasma in the chamber. The silicon wafer is located on the cathode, which causes it to be hit by the positively charged ions that are released from the plasma. The result is silicon that is etched anisotropically.


title: Semiconductor

text: The last process is called diffusion. This is the process that gives the semiconducting material its desired semiconducting properties. It is also known as doping. The process introduces an impure atom to the system, which creates the p–n junction. To get the impure atoms embedded in the silicon wafer, the wafer is first put in a 1,100 degree Celsius chamber. The atoms are injected in and eventually diffuse with the silicon. After the process is completed and the silicon has reached room temperature, the doping process is done and the semiconducting material is ready to be used in an integrated circuit.


title: Semiconductor

text: Semiconductors are defined by their unique electric conductive behavior, somewhere between that of a conductor and an insulator. The differences between these materials can be understood in terms of the quantum states for electrons, each of which may contain zero or one electron (by the Pauli exclusion principle). These states are associated with the electronic band structure of the material. Electrical conductivity arises due to the presence of electrons in states that are delocalized (extending through the material), however in order to transport electrons a state must be "partially filled", containing an electron only part of the time. If the state is always occupied with an electron, then it is inert, blocking the passage of other electrons via that state. The energies of these quantum states are critical since a state is partially filled only if its energy is near the Fermi level (see Fermi–Dirac statistics).


title: Semiconductor

text: High conductivity in material comes from it having many partially filled states and much state delocalization.


title: Semiconductor

text: Metals are good electrical conductors and have many partially filled states with energies near their Fermi level.


title: Semiconductor

text: Insulators, by contrast, have few partially filled states, their Fermi levels sit within band gaps with few energy states to occupy. Importantly, an insulator can be made to conduct by increasing its temperature: heating provides energy to promote some electrons across the bandgap, inducing partially filled states in both the band of states beneath the band gap (valence band) and the band of states above the bandgap (conduction band). An (intrinsic) semiconductor has a bandgap that is smaller than that of an insulator and at room temperature, significant numbers of electrons can be excited to cross the band gap.


title: Semiconductor

text: A pure semiconductor, however, is not very useful, as it is neither a very good insulator nor a very good conductor.


title: Semiconductor

text: However, one important feature of semiconductors (and some insulators, known as "semi-insulators") is that their conductivity can be increased and controlled by doping with impurities and gating with electric fields. Doping and gating move either the conduction or valence band much closer to the Fermi level and greatly increase the number of partially filled states.


title: Semiconductor

text: Some wider-bandgap semiconductor materials are sometimes referred to as semi-insulators. When undoped, these have electrical conductivity nearer to that of electrical insulators, however they can be doped (making them as useful as semiconductors). Semi-insulators find niche applications in micro-electronics, such as substrates for HEMT. An example of a common semi-insulator is gallium arsenide. Some materials, such as titanium dioxide, can even be used as insulating materials for some applications, while being treated as wide-gap semiconductors for other applications.


title: Semiconductor

text: The partial filling of the states at the bottom of the conduction band can be understood as adding electrons to that band. The electrons do not stay indefinitely (due to the natural thermal recombination) but they can move around for some time. The actual concentration of electrons is typically very dilute, and so (unlike in metals) it is possible to think of the electrons in the conduction band of a semiconductor as a sort of classical ideal gas, where the electrons fly around freely without being subject to the Pauli exclusion principle. In most semiconductors, the conduction bands have a parabolic dispersion relation, and so these electrons respond to forces (electric field, magnetic field, etc.) much as they would in a vacuum, though with a different effective mass. Because the electrons behave like an ideal gas, one may also think about conduction in very simplistic terms such as the Drude model, and introduce concepts such as electron mobility.


title: Semiconductor

text: For partial filling at the top of the valence band, it is helpful to introduce the concept of an electron hole. Although the electrons in the valence band are always moving around, a completely full valence band is inert, not conducting any current. If an electron is taken out of the valence band, then the trajectory that the electron would normally have taken is now missing its charge. For the purposes of electric current, this combination of the full valence band, minus the electron, can be converted into a picture of a completely empty band containing a positively charged particle that moves in the same way as the electron. Combined with the "negative" effective mass of the electrons at the top of the valence band, we arrive at a picture of a positively charged particle that responds to electric and magnetic fields just as a normal positively charged particle would do in a vacuum, again with some positive effective mass. This particle is called a hole, and the collection of holes in the valence band can again be understood in simple classical terms (as with the electrons in the conduction band).


title: Semiconductor

text: When ionizing radiation strikes a semiconductor, it may excite an electron out of its energy level and consequently leave a hole. This process is known as "electron-hole pair generation". Electron-hole pairs are constantly generated from thermal energy as well, in the absence of any external energy source.


title: Semiconductor

text: Electron-hole pairs are also apt to recombine. Conservation of energy demands that these recombination events, in which an electron loses an amount of energy larger than the band gap, be accompanied by the emission of thermal energy (in the form of phonons) or radiation (in the form of photons).


title: Semiconductor

text: In some states, the generation and recombination of electron-hole pairs are in equipoise. The number of electron-hole pairs in the steady state at a given temperature is determined by quantum statistical mechanics. The precise quantum mechanical mechanisms of generation and recombination are governed by the conservation of energy and conservation of momentum.


title: Semiconductor

text: As the probability that electrons and holes meet together is proportional to the product of their numbers, the product is in the steady-state nearly constant at a given temperature, providing that there is no significant electric field (which might "flush" carriers of both types, or move them from neighbor regions containing more of them to meet together) or externally driven pair generation. The product is a function of the temperature, as the probability of getting enough thermal energy to produce a pair increases with temperature, being approximately exp(−"E"/"kT"), where "k" is Boltzmann's constant, "T" is the absolute temperature and "E" is bandgap.


title: Semiconductor

text: The probability of meeting is increased by carrier traps – impurities or dislocations which can trap an electron or hole and hold it until a pair is completed. Such carrier traps are sometimes purposely added to reduce the time needed to reach the steady-state.


title: Semiconductor

text: The conductivity of semiconductors may easily be modified by introducing impurities into their crystal lattice. The process of adding controlled impurities to a semiconductor is known as doping. The amount of impurity, or dopant, added to an "intrinsic" (pure) semiconductor varies its level of conductivity. Doped semiconductors are referred to as "extrinsic". By adding impurity to the pure semiconductors, the electrical conductivity may be varied by factors of thousands or millions.


title: Semiconductor

text: A 1 cm specimen of a metal or semiconductor has the order of 10 atoms. In a metal, every atom donates at least one free electron for conduction, thus 1 cm of metal contains on the order of 10 free electrons, whereas a 1 cm sample of pure germanium at 20°C contains about atoms, but only free electrons and holes. The addition of 0.001% of arsenic (an impurity) donates an extra "10" free electrons in the same volume and the electrical conductivity is increased by a factor of "10,000".


title: Semiconductor

text: The materials chosen as suitable dopants depend on the atomic properties of both the dopant and the material to be doped. In general, dopants that produce the desired controlled changes are classified as either electron acceptors or donors. Semiconductors doped with "donor" impurities are called "n-type", while those doped with "acceptor" impurities are known as "p-type". The n and p type designations indicate which charge carrier acts as the material's majority carrier. The opposite carrier is called the minority carrier, which exists due to thermal excitation at a much lower concentration compared to the majority carrier.


title: Semiconductor

text: For example, the pure semiconductor silicon has four valence electrons that bond each silicon atom to its neighbors. In silicon, the most common dopants are "group III" and "group V" elements. Group III elements all contain three valence electrons, causing them to function as acceptors when used to dope silicon. When an acceptor atom replaces a silicon atom in the crystal, a vacant state (an electron "hole") is created, which can move around the lattice and function as a charge carrier. Group V elements have five valence electrons, which allows them to act as a donor; substitution of these atoms for silicon creates an extra free electron. Therefore, a silicon crystal doped with boron creates a p-type semiconductor whereas one doped with phosphorus results in an n-type material.


title: Semiconductor

text: During manufacture, dopants can be diffused into the semiconductor body by contact with gaseous compounds of the desired element, or ion implantation can be used to accurately position the doped regions.


title: Semiconductor

text: Some materials, when rapidly cooled to a glassy amorphous state, have semiconducting properties. These include B, Si, Ge, Se, and Te, and there are multiple theories to explain them.


title: Semiconductor

text: The history of the understanding of semiconductors begins with experiments on the electrical properties of materials. The properties of the time-temperature coefficient of resistance, rectification, and light-sensitivity were observed starting in the early 19th century.


title: Semiconductor

text: Thomas Johann Seebeck was the first to notice an effect due to semiconductors, in 1821. In 1833, Michael Faraday reported that the resistance of specimens of silver sulfide decreases when they are heated. This is contrary to the behavior of metallic substances such as copper. In 1839, Alexandre Edmond Becquerel reported observation of a voltage between a solid and a liquid electrolyte, when struck by light, the photovoltaic effect. In 1873, Willoughby Smith observed that selenium resistors exhibit decreasing resistance when light falls on them. In 1874, Karl Ferdinand Braun observed conduction and rectification in metallic sulfides, although this effect had been discovered much earlier by Peter Munck af Rosenschold () writing for the Annalen der Physik und Chemie in 1835, and Arthur Schuster found that a copper oxide layer on wires has rectification properties that ceases, when the wires are cleaned. William Grylls Adams and Richard Evans Day observed the photovoltaic effect in selenium in 1876.


title: Semiconductor

text: A unified explanation of these phenomena required a theory of solid-state physics, which developed greatly in the first half of the 20th century. In 1878 Edwin Herbert Hall demonstrated the deflection of flowing charge carriers by an applied magnetic field, the Hall effect. The discovery of the electron by J.J. Thomson in 1897 prompted theories of electron-based conduction in solids. Karl Baedeker, by observing a Hall effect with the reverse sign to that in metals, theorized that copper iodide had positive charge carriers. Johan Koenigsberger classified solid materials like metals, insulators, and "variable conductors" in 1914 although his student Josef Weiss already introduced the term Halbleiter (a semiconductor in modern meaning) in his Ph.D. thesis in 1910. Felix Bloch published a theory of the movement of electrons through atomic lattices in 1928. In 1930, B. Gudden stated that conductivity in semiconductors was due to minor concentrations of impurities. By 1931, the band theory of conduction had been established by Alan Herries Wilson and the concept of band gaps had been developed. Walter H. Schottky and Nevill Francis Mott developed models of the potential barrier and of the characteristics of a metal–semiconductor junction. By 1938, Boris Davydov had developed a theory of the copper-oxide rectifier, identifying the effect of the p–n junction and the importance of minority carriers and surface states.


title: Semiconductor

text: Agreement between theoretical predictions (based on developing quantum mechanics) and experimental results was sometimes poor. This was later explained by John Bardeen as due to the extreme "structure sensitive" behavior of semiconductors, whose properties change dramatically based on tiny amounts of impurities. Commercially pure materials of the 1920s containing varying proportions of trace contaminants produced differing experimental results. This spurred the development of improved material refining techniques, culminating in modern semiconductor refineries producing materials with parts-per-trillion purity.


title: Semiconductor

text: Devices using semiconductors were at first constructed based on empirical knowledge before semiconductor theory provided a guide to the construction of more capable and reliable devices.


title: Semiconductor

text: Alexander Graham Bell used the light-sensitive property of selenium to transmit sound over a beam of light in 1880. A working solar cell, of low efficiency, was constructed by Charles Fritts in 1883, using a metal plate coated with selenium and a thin layer of gold; the device became commercially useful in photographic light meters in the 1930s. Point-contact microwave detector rectifiers made of lead sulfide were used by Jagadish Chandra Bose in 1904; the cat's-whisker detector using natural galena or other materials became a common device in the development of radio. However, it was somewhat unpredictable in operation and required manual adjustment for best performance. In 1906, H.J. Round observed light emission when electric current passed through silicon carbide crystals, the principle behind the light-emitting diode. Oleg Losev observed similar light emission in 1922, but at the time the effect had no practical use. Power rectifiers, using copper oxide and selenium, were developed in the 1920s and became commercially important as an alternative to vacuum tube rectifiers.


title: Semiconductor

text: The first semiconductor devices used galena, including German physicist Ferdinand Braun's crystal detector in 1874 and Bengali physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose's radio crystal detector in 1901.


title: Semiconductor

text: In the years preceding World War II, infrared detection and communications devices prompted research into lead-sulfide and lead-selenide materials. These devices were used for detecting ships and aircraft, for infrared rangefinders, and for voice communication systems. The point-contact crystal detector became vital for microwave radio systems since available vacuum tube devices could not serve as detectors above about 4000 MHz; advanced radar systems relied on the fast response of crystal detectors. Considerable research and development of silicon materials occurred during the war to develop detectors of consistent quality.


title: Semiconductor

text: Detector and power rectifiers could not amplify a signal. Many efforts were made to develop a solid-state amplifier and were successful in developing a device called the point contact transistor which could amplify 20dB or more. In 1922, Oleg Losev developed two-terminal, negative resistance amplifiers for radio, but he perished in the Siege of Leningrad after successful completion. In 1926, Julius Edgar Lilienfeld patented a device resembling a field-effect transistor, but it was not practical. R. Hilsch and R. W. Pohl in 1938 demonstrated a solid-state amplifier using a structure resembling the control grid of a vacuum tube; although the device displayed power gain, it had a cut-off frequency of one cycle per second, too low for any practical applications, but an effective application of the available theory. At Bell Labs, William Shockley and A. Holden started investigating solid-state amplifiers in 1938. The first p–n junction in silicon was observed by Russell Ohl about 1941 when a specimen was found to be light-sensitive, with a sharp boundary between p-type impurity at one end and n-type at the other. A slice cut from the specimen at the p–n boundary developed a voltage when exposed to light.


title: Semiconductor

text: The first working transistor was a point-contact transistor invented by John Bardeen, Walter Houser Brattain, and William Shockley at Bell Labs in 1947. Shockley had earlier theorized a field-effect amplifier made from germanium and silicon, but he failed to build such a working device, before eventually using germanium to invent the point-contact transistor. In France, during the war, Herbert Mataré had observed amplification between adjacent point contacts on a germanium base. After the war, Mataré's group announced their "Transistron" amplifier only shortly after Bell Labs announced the "transistor".


title: Semiconductor

text: In 1954, physical chemist Morris Tanenbaum fabricated the first silicon junction transistor at Bell Labs. However, early junction transistors were relatively bulky devices that were difficult to manufacture on a mass-production basis, which limited them to a number of specialised applications.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov (– 9 February 1984) was the sixth paramount leader of the Soviet Union and the fourth General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. After Leonid Brezhnev's 18-year rule, Andropov served in the post from November 1982 until his death in February 1984.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: Earlier in his career, Andropov served as the Soviet ambassador to Hungary from 1954 to 1957, during which time he was involved in the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. He was named chairman of the KGB on 10 May 1967. In this position, he oversaw a massive crackdown on dissent carried out via mass arrests and involuntary psychiatric commitment of people deemed "socially undesirable". After Brezhnev suffered a stroke in 1975 that impaired his ability to govern, Andropov effectively dominated policy-making alongside Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, Defense Minister Andrei Grechko and Grechko's successor, Marshal Dmitry Ustinov, for the rest of Brezhnev's rule.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: Upon Brezhnev's death on 10 November 1982, Andropov succeeded him as General Secretary and (by extension) leader of the Soviet Union. During his short tenure, Andropov sought to eliminate corruption and inefficiency in the country by criminalizing truancy in the workplace and investigating longtime officials for violations of party discipline. , and he was at a loss for how to handle the growing crisis in the Soviet economy. His major long-term impact was bringing to the fore a new generation of young reformers as energetic as himself, including Yegor Ligachyov, Nikolai Ryzhkov, and, most importantly, Mikhail Gorbachev. Upon suffering kidney failure in February 1983, Andropov's health began to deteriorate rapidly. He died on 9 February 1984, having led the country for about 15 months.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: There has been much contention over Andropov's family background. According to the official biography, Andropov was born in Stanitsa Nagutskaya (modern-day Stavropol Krai, Russia) on 15 June 1914. His father, Vladimir Konstantinovich Andropov, was a railway worker of Don Cossack descent who died of typhus in 1919. His mother, Yevgenia Karlovna Fleckenstein (none of the official sources mention her name), was a school teacher who died in 1931. She was born in the Ryazan Governorate into a family of town dwellers and was abandoned on the doorstep of a Finnish citizen, a Jewish watchmaker, Karl Franzevich Fleckenstein, who lived in Moscow; he and his wife, Eudokia Mikhailovna Fleckenstein, adopted and raised her.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: Andropov's earliest documented name was Grigory Vladimirovich Andropov-Fyodorov; he changed it to Yuri Andropov several years later. His original birth certificate disappeared, but it has been established that Andropov was born in Moscow, where his mother worked at a women's gymnasium from 1913 to 1917.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: On various occasions, Andropov gave different death dates for his mother: 1927, 1929, 1930 and 1931. The story of her adoption was also likely a mystification. In 1937, Andropov was vetted when he applied for Communist Party membership, and it turned out that "the sister of his native maternal grandmother" (whom he called his aunt), who was living with him and who supported the legend of his Ryazan peasant origins, was in fact his nurse, who had been working for Fleckenstein long before Andropov was born.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: It was also reported that Andropov's mother belonged to merchantry. Karl Fleckenstein was a rich jewel merchant, owner of a jeweler's, as was his wife, who took over Karl's business after his accidental death in 1915 (he was mistaken for a German during the infamous anti-German pogrom in Moscow, although Andropov preferred to call it anti-Jewish). The whole family could have been turned into lishentsy and stripped of basic rights had she not abandoned the store after another pogrom in 1917, invented a proletarian background, and left Moscow for the Stavropol Governorate along with Andropov's mother.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: Andropov gave different versions of his father's fate: in one, he divorced his mother soon after his birth; in another he died of illness. The "father" in question, Vladimir Andropov, was in fact his stepfather, who lived and worked in Nagutskaya and died of typhus in 1919. The Fyodorov surname belonged to his second stepfather, Viktor Fyodorov, a machinist's assistant turned schoolteacher. Andropov's biological father is unknown; he probably died in 1916, a date in Andropov's 1932 résumé. During the 1937 vetting, it was reported that his father served as an officer in the Imperial Russian Army. Andropov joined the Communist Party in 1939.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: Andropov was educated at the Rybinsk Water Transport Technical College and graduated in 1936. As a teenager he worked as a loader, a telegraph clerk, and a sailor for the Volga steamship line. At 16, then a member of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League (YCL, or Komsomol), Andropov was a worker in the town of Mozdok in the North Ossetian ASSR.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: Andropov became full-time secretary of the YCL of the Rybinsk Water Transport Technical School and was soon promoted to organizer of the YCL Central Committee at the Volodarsky Shipyards in Rybinsk. In 1938, he was elected First Secretary of the Yaroslavl Regional Committee of the YCL, and was First Secretary of the Central Committee of Komsomol in the Soviet Karelo-Finnish Republic from 1940 to 1944.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: According to his official biography, during World War II Andropov took part in partisan guerrilla activities in Finland; modern researchers have found no trace of his supposed squad. From 1944 onward, he left Komsomol for Communist Party work. Between 1946 and 1951, he studied at the university of Petrozavodsk. In 1947, he was elected Second Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Karelo-Finnish SSR.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: In 1951, Andropov was transferred to the CPSU Central Committee. He was appointed an inspector and then the head of a subdepartment of the committee.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: In July 1954, Andropov was appointed Ambassador to Hungary. He held this position during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Andropov played a key role in crushing the uprising. He convinced Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev that military intervention was necessary. Andropov is known as "The Butcher of Budapest" for his ruthless suppression of the uprising. Hungarian leaders were arrested and Imre Nagy and others executed.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: After these events, Andropov suffered from a "Hungarian complex", according to historian Christopher Andrew: "He had watched in horror from the windows of his embassy as officers of the hated Hungarian security service [the "Államvédelmi Hatóság or AVH]" were strung up from lampposts. Andropov remained haunted for the rest of his life by the speed with which an apparently all-powerful Communist one-party state had begun to topple. When other Communist regimes later seemed at risk – in Prague in 1968, in Kabul in 1979, in Warsaw in 1981, he was convinced that, as in Budapest in 1956, only armed force could ensure their survival".


title: Yuri Andropov

text: In 1957, Andropov returned to Moscow from Budapest in order to head the Department for Liaison with Communist and Workers' Parties in Socialist Countries, a position he held until 1967. In 1961, he was elected full member of the CPSU Central Committee and was promoted to the Secretariat of the CPSU Central Committee in 1962. In 1967, he was relieved of his work in the Central Committee apparatus and appointed head of the KGB on Mikhail Suslov's recommendation, and promoted to candidate member of the Politburo. In 1970, out of concern that the burial place of Joseph and Magda Goebbels and their children would become a shrine to neo-Nazis, Andropov authorized an operation to destroy the remains that were buried in Magdeburg in 1946. The remains were thoroughly burned and crushed and the ashes thrown into the Biederitz River, a tributary of the nearby Elbe. No proof exists that the Russians ever found Adolf Hitler's body, but it is presumed that Hitler and Eva Braun were among the remains as 10 or 11 bodies were exhumed. Andropov gained additional powers in 1973 when he was promoted to full member of the Politburo.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: During the Prague Spring in 1968, Andropov was the main advocate of taking "extreme measures" against Czechoslovakia. According to classified information released by Vasili Mitrokhin, the "KGB whipped up the fear that Czechoslovakia could fall victim to NATO aggression or to a coup". At this time, agent Oleg Kalugin reported from Washington that he had gained access to "absolutely reliable documents proving that neither the CIA nor any other agency was manipulating the Czechoslovak reform movement". His message was destroyed because it contradicted the conspiracy theory Andropov had fabricated. Andropov ordered a number of active measures, collectively known as operation PROGRESS, against Czechoslovak reformers during the Normalization period.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: Throughout his career, Andropov aimed to achieve "the destruction of dissent in all its forms" and insisted that "the struggle for human rights was a part of a wide-ranging imperialist plot to undermine the foundation of the Soviet state". To this end, he launched a campaign to eliminate all opposition in the USSR through a mixture of mass arrests, involuntary commitments to psychiatric hospitals, and pressure on rights activists to emigrate. These measures were meticulously documented throughout his time as KGB chairman by the underground Chronicle of Current Events, a samizdat publication that was itself finally forced out of existence after its last published issue, dated 30 June 1982.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: On 3 July 1967, Andropov proposed to establish the KGB's Fifth Directorate to deal with the political opposition (ideological counterintelligence). At the end of July, the directorate was established and entered in its files cases of all Soviet dissidents, including Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In 1968, as KGB chairman, Andropov issued the order "On the tasks of State security agencies in combating the ideological sabotage by the adversary", calling for struggle against dissidents and their imperialist masters.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: After the assassination attempt against Brezhnev in January 1969, Andropov led the interrogation of the captured gunman, Viktor Ivanovich Ilyin. Ilyin was pronounced insane and sent to Kazan Psychiatric Hospital. On 29 April 1969, Andropov submitted to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union an elaborate plan to create a network of psychiatric hospitals to defend the "Soviet Government and socialist order" from dissidents. In January 1970, Andropov submitted an account to his fellow Politburo members of the widespread threat of the mentally ill to the regime's stability and security. His proposal to use psychiatry for struggle against dissidents was implemented. As head of the KGB, Andropov was in charge of the widespread deployment of psychiatric repression. According to Yuri Felshtinsky and Boris Gulko, Andropov and the head of the Fifth Directorate, Filipp Bobkov, originated the idea to use psychiatry for punitive purposes.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: The repression of dissidents included plans to maim the dancer Rudolf Nureyev, who had defected in 1961. Some believe that Andropov was behind the deaths of Fyodor Kulakov and Pyotr Masherov, the two youngest members of the Soviet leadership. A declassified document revealed that as KGB director, Andropov gave the order to prevent unauthorized gatherings mourning John Lennon.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: In 1977, Andropov convinced Brezhnev that the Ipatiev House, where Tsar Nicholas II and his family were murdered by Bolshevik revolutionaries during the Russian Civil War, had become a site of pilgrimage for covert monarchists. With the Politburo's approval, the house, deemed to be not of "sufficient historical significance", was demolished in September 1977, less than a year before the murders' 60th anniversary.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: According to Yaakov Kedmi, Andropov was particularly keen to persecute any sign of Zionism in order to distance himself from his Jewish heritage. He was personally responsible for orchestrating the arrest and persecution of Soviet Jewish activist Natan Sharansky.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: In March 1979, Andropov and the Politburo initially opposed their subsequent decision to intervene militarily in Afghanistan. Among their concerns were that the international community would blame the USSR for its "aggression" and that the upcoming SALT II negotiation meeting with U.S. President Jimmy Carter would be derailed. Andropov changed his mind after the assassination of Nur Muhammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin's seizure of power. He became convinced that the CIA had recruited Amin to create a pro-Western expansionist "New Great Ottoman Empire" that would attempt to dominate Soviet Central Asia. Andropov's bottom line, "under no circumstances can we lose Afghanistan", led him and the Politburo to invade Afghanistan on 24 December 1979. The invasion led to the extended Soviet–Afghan War (1979–1989) and a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow by 66 countries, something of concern to Andropov since spring 1979. Some have proposed that the Soviet–Afghan War also played an important role in the Soviet Union's dissolution.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: On 10 December 1981, in the face of Poland's Solidarity movement, Andropov, Soviet Second Secretary Mikhail Suslov, and Polish First Secretary Wojciech Jaruzelski persuaded Brezhnev that it would be counterproductive for the Soviet Union to invade Poland by repeating the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia to suppress the Prague Spring. This effectively marked the end of the Brezhnev Doctrine. The pacification of Poland was thus left to Jaruzelski, Kiszczak and their Polish forces.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: From 1980 to 1982, while still chair of the KGB, Andropov opposed plans to occupy Poland after the emergence of the Solidarity movement and promoted reform-minded party cadres, including Mikhail Gorbachev. Andropov was the longest-serving KGB chairman and did not resign as head of the KGB until May 1982, when he was again promoted to the Secretariat to succeed Mikhail Suslov as secretary responsible for ideological affairs.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: Two days after Brezhnev's death, on 12 November 1982, Andropov was elected general secretary of the CPSU, the first former head of the KGB to become general secretary. His appointment was received in the West with apprehension in view of his roles in the KGB and in Hungary. At the time his personal background was a mystery in the West, with major newspapers printing detailed profiles of him that were inconsistent and in several cases fabricated.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: Andropov divided responsibilities in the Politburo with his chief deputy, Konstantin Chernenko. Andropov took control of organizing the work of the Politburo, supervising national defense, supervising the main issues of domestic and foreign policy and foreign trade, and making leadership assignments in the top ranks of the party and the government. Chernenko handled espionage, KGB, the Interior Ministry, party organs, ideology, organizational matters, propaganda, culture, science, and higher education. He was also given charge of the Central Committee. It was far too much for Chernenko to handle, and other Politburo members were not given major assignments.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: At home, Andropov attempted to improve the USSR's economy by increasing its workforce's efficiency. He cracked down on Soviet laborers' lack of discipline by decreeing the arrest of absentee employees and penalties for tardiness. For the first time, the facts about economic stagnation and obstacles to scientific progress were made available to the public and open to criticism. Furthermore, Andropov gave select industries greater autonomy from state regulations and enabled factory managers to retain control over more of their profits. Such policies resulted in a 4% rise in industrial output and increased investment in new technologies such as robotics.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: Despite such reforms, Andropov refused to consider any changes that sought to dispense with the command economy introduced under Joseph Stalin. In his memoirs, Gorbachev wrote that when Andropov was the leader, Gorbachev and Gosplan chairman Nikolai Ryzhkov asked him for access to real budget figures. "You are asking too much", Andropov responded. "The budget is off limits to you."


title: Yuri Andropov

text: In contrast to Brezhnev's policy of avoiding conflicts and dismissals, Andropov began to fight violations of party, state and labor discipline, which led to significant personnel changes during an anti-corruption campaign against many of Brezhnev's cronies. During 15 months in office, Andropov dismissed 18 ministers and 37 first secretaries of obkoms, kraikoms and Central Committees of Communist Parties of Soviet Republics, and criminal cases against high-level party and state officials were started. Biographers including Solovyov and Klepikova and Zhores Medvedev have discussed the complex possibilities underlying the motivations of anti-corruption campaigning in the Soviet Union during the 1970s and early 1980s: it is true that Andropov fought corruption for moral, ethical, ascetic, and ideological reasons, but it was also an effective way for party members from the police and security organizations to defeat competitors for power at the party's senior levels. Thus Andropov himself, as well as such protégés as Eduard Shevardnadze, could advance their power by the same efforts that also promised to be better for the country in terms of justice, economic performance, and even defense readiness (which depended on economic performance). Part of the complexity is that in the Brezhnev era, corruption was pervasive and implicitly tolerated (though officially denied), and many a member of the police and security organizations participated in it to various degrees, but only those organizations had access to the power to measure it and monitor its details. In such an environment, anti-corruption campaigning is a way for police and security people to appear to be cleaning up villains' malfeasance and coincidentally increasing their own power, when in fact one set of antiheroes may be defeating another set in a morally gray power struggle.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: Andropov faced a series of foreign policy crises: the hopeless situation of the Soviet army in Afghanistan, threatened revolt in Poland, growing animosity with China, the polarization threat of war in the Middle East, and civil strife in Ethiopia and South Africa. The most critical threat was the "Second Cold War" U.S. President Ronald Reagan launched, and the specific attack on rolling back what he called the "Evil Empire". Reagan used American economic power and Soviet economic weakness to escalate massive spending on the Cold War, emphasizing technology that Moscow lacked. The main response was to raise the Soviet military budget to 70% of the total budget and supply billions of dollars of military aid to Syria, Iraq, Libya, South Yemen, the Palestine Liberation Organization, Cuba, and North Korea. That included tanks and armored troop carriers, hundreds of fighter planes, anti-aircraft systems, artillery systems, and other high-tech equipment of which the USSR was its allies' main supplier. Andropov's main goal was to avoid an open war.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: In foreign policy, the conflict in Afghanistan continued even though Andropov, who now felt the invasion was a mistake, half-heartedly explored options for a negotiated withdrawal. Andropov's rule was also marked by deterioration of relations with the United States. During a much-publicized "walk in the woods" with Soviet dignitary Yuli Kvitsinsky, American diplomat Paul Nitze suggested a compromise for reducing nuclear missiles in Europe on both sides that the Politburo ignored. Kvitsinsky later wrote that, despite his efforts, the Soviet leadership was not interested in compromise, instead calculating that peace movements in the West would force the Americans to capitulate. On 8 March 1983, Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil empire". On 23 March, he announced the Strategic Defense Initiative. Reagan claimed this research program into ballistic missile defense was "consistent with our obligations under the ABM Treaty". Andropov dismissed this claim, saying, "It is time they [Washington] stopped ... search[ing] for the best ways of unleashing nuclear war. ... Engaging in this is not just irresponsible. It is insane".


title: Yuri Andropov

text: In August 1983, Andropov made an announcement that the USSR would stop all work on space-based weapons. One of his most notable acts as leader of the Soviet Union was in response to a letter from a 10-year-old American child, Samantha Smith, inviting her to the Soviet Union. She came, but he was too ill to meet with her, thus revealing his grave condition to the world. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union suspended talks with the U.S. on intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe in November 1983, and by the end of the year the Soviets had broken off all arms control negotiations.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: Massive bad publicity worldwide came when Soviet fighters shot down a civilian jet liner, Korean Air Flight KAL-007, which carried 269 passengers and crew. It had strayed over the Soviet Union on 1 September 1983 on its scheduled route from Anchorage, Alaska, to Seoul, South Korea. Andropov kept secret that the Soviet Union held in its possession the black box from KAL 007 that proved the pilot had made a typographical error when entering data in the automatic pilot. The Soviet air defence system was unprepared to deal with a civilian airliner, and the shooting down was a matter of following orders without question. Instead of admitting an accident, Soviet media proclaimed a brave decision to meet a Western provocation. Together with the low credibility created by the poor explanation of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the episode demonstrated an inability to deal with public relations crises; the propaganda system was useful only for people and states aligned with the Soviet Union. Both crises were escalated by technological and organizational failures, compounded by human error.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: In February 1983, Andropov suffered total kidney failure. In August 1983, he entered Moscow's Central Clinical Hospital; he spent the rest of his life there.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: In late January 1984, Andropov's health deteriorated sharply and due to growing toxicity in his blood, he had periods of failing consciousness. He died on 9 February 1984 at 16:50, aged 69. Few of the top Soviet leaders learned of his death on that day. According to the Soviet post-mortem medical report, Andropov suffered from several medical conditions: interstitial nephritis, nephrosclerosis, residual hypertension and diabetes, worsened by chronic kidney deficiency.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: A four-day period of mourning across the USSR was announced. Syria declared seven days of mourning; Cuba declared four days of mourning; India declared three days of mourning; Bulgaria, North Korea and Zimbabwe declared two days of mourning; Czechoslovakia and Costa Rica declared one day of mourning. Andropov had a state funeral in Red Square, in a service attended by numerous foreign leaders, such as U.S. Vice President George H. W. Bush, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Italian President Sandro Pertini, East German First Secretary Erich Honecker, Polish First Secretary Wojciech Jaruzelski, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Cuban President Fidel Castro, and Irish President Patrick Hillery. Eulogists were Chernenko, Ustinov, Gromyko, Georgi Markov (head of the Union of Soviet Writers), and Ivan Senkin (First Secretary of the Karelian Regional Committee of the CPSU). Andropov was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, in one of the 12 tombs between the Lenin Mausoleum and the Kremlin wall.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: Andropov was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko, who seemed to mirror Andropov's tenure. Chernenko had already been afflicted with severe health problems when he ascended to the USSR's top spot, and served even less time in office (13 months). Like Andropov, Chernenko spent much of his time hospitalized, and also died in office, in March 1985. Chernenko was succeeded by Mikhail Gorbachev, who implemented perestroika and glasnost policies to reform the Soviet Union politically and economically. On 26 December 1991, the USSR was dissolved.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: Andropov lived at 26 Kutuzovsky Prospekt, the same building in which Suslov and Brezhnev lived. He married Nina Ivanovna, who was born not far from the farm where Andropov was born, and divorced her in 1941. During World War II, Andropov met his second wife, Tatyana Filippovna, on the Karelian Front when she was Komsomol secretary. She suffered a nervous breakdown during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and was not seen in public until Andropov's funeral. Andropov's chief guard informed her of her husband's death. She was too grief-stricken to join the procession and during the funeral her relatives helped her walk. Before the lid could be closed on Andropov's coffin, she bent to kiss him. In 1985, a 75-minute film was broadcast in which Tatyana reads love poems by her husband. She became ill and died in November 1991.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: Tatyana and Andropov had two children, Igor and Irina. Igor joined the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs and served as ambassador to Greece.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: Andropov's legacy remains the subject of much debate in Russia and elsewhere among scholars and in the popular media. He remains the focus of television documentaries and popular nonfiction, particularly at important anniversaries. As KGB head, Andropov was ruthless against dissent, and author David Remnick, who covered the Soviet Union for "The" "Washington Post" in the 1980s, called him "profoundly corrupt, a beast". Alexander Yakovlev, later an advisor to Gorbachev and the ideologist of perestroika, said: "In a way I always thought Andropov was the most dangerous of all of them, simply because he was smarter than the rest." But Andropov himself recalled Yakovlev back to high office in Moscow in 1983 after a ten-year exile as ambassador to Canada after attacking Russian chauvinism. Yakovlev was also a close colleague of Andropov associate KGB General Yevgeny Primakov, later Prime Minister of Russia. Andropov began to follow a trend of replacing elderly officials with considerably younger ones.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: In the West, if Andropov is remembered at all, it is for his brutal suppression of political dissidence at home and for his role in planning the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. By contrast, the leaders of the former Warsaw Pact intelligence community, when I was one of them, looked up to Andropov as the man who substituted the KGB for the Communist party in governing the Soviet Union, and who was the godfather of Russia's new era of deception operations aimed at improving the badly damaged image of Soviet rulers in the West.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: Despite Andropov's hard-line stance in Hungary and the numerous banishments and intrigues for which he was responsible as head of the KGB, many commentators regard him as a reformer, especially in comparison with the stagnation and corruption of Brezhnev's later years. A "throwback to a tradition of Leninist asceticism", Andropov was appalled by the corruption of Brezhnev's regime, and ordered investigations and arrests of the most flagrant abusers. The investigations were so frightening that several members of Brezhnev's circle "shot, gassed or otherwise did away with themselves." He was generally regarded as inclined to more gradual and constructive reform than was Gorbachev; most of the speculation centers on whether Andropov would have reformed the USSR in a manner that did not result in its eventual dissolution.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: The Western media generally favored Andropov, but the short time he spent as leader, much of it in ill health, leaves debaters few concrete indications as to the nature of an extended rule. The 2002 Tom Clancy novel "Red Rabbit" focuses heavily on Andropov during his tenure of KGB chief, when his health was slightly better. It mirrors his secrecy in that British and American intelligence know little about him, not even able to confirm he was married. The novel also depicts Andropov as a fan of Marlboros and starka vodka, almost never available to ordinary Soviet citizens.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: In a message read at the opening of a new exhibition dedicated to Andropov, Vladimir Putin called him "a man of talent with great abilities." Putin has praised Andropov's "honesty and uprightness". According to Russian historian Nikita Petrov, "He was a typical Soviet jailer who violated human rights. Andropov headed the organisation which persecuted the most remarkable people of our country." According to Petrov, it was a shame for the USSR that a persecutor of intelligentsia and of freedom of thought became leader of the country. According to Roy Medvedev, the year that Andropov spent in power was memorable for increasing repression against dissidents. During most of his KGB career, Andropov crushed dissident movements, isolated people in psychiatric hospitals, imprisoned them, and deported them. According to political scientist Georgy Arbatov, Andropov is responsible for many injustices in the 1970s and early 1980s: deportations, political arrests, persecuting dissidents, the abuse of psychiatry, and notorious cases such as the persecution of academician Andrei Sakharov. According to Dmitri Volkogonov and Harold Shukman, Andropov approved the numerous trials of human rights activists such as Andrei Amalrik, Vladimir Bukovsky, Viacheslav Chornovil, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Alexander Ginzburg, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Petro Grigorenko, and Anatoly Sharansky.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: According to Natalya Gorbanevskaya, after Andropov came to power the dissident movement went into decline, not on its own but because it was strangled. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, repression was most severe; many people were arrested a second time and sentenced to longer terms. The camp regime was not strict but specific, and when Andropov became General Secretary, he introduced an Article under which violations of camp regime resulted in a punishment cell and an additional term up to three years. For two or three remarks a person could be sent to another camp with non-political criminals. In those years, there were many deaths in camps from disease and lack of medical care.


title: Yuri Andropov

text: Various people who knew Andropov well, including Vladimir Medvedev, , Vladimir Kryuchkov and Roy Medvedev, remembered him for his politeness, calmness, unselfishness, patience, intelligence and exceptionally sharp memory. According to Chuchyalin, while working at the Kremlin, Andropov would read about 600 pages a day and remember everything he read. Andropov read English literature and could communicate in Finnish, English and German.


title: The Maze Runner (film)

text: The Maze Runner is a 2014 American dystopian science fiction film directed by Wes Ball, in his directorial debut, based on James Dashner's 2009 novel of the same name. The film is the first installment in "The Maze Runner" film series and was produced by Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Wyck Godfrey, Marty Bowen, and Lee Stollman with a screenplay by Noah Oppenheim, Grant Pierce Myers, and T.S. Nowlin. The film stars Dylan O'Brien, Kaya Scodelario, Aml Ameen, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Ki Hong Lee, Will Poulter, and Patricia Clarkson. The story follows sixteen-year-old Thomas, portrayed by O'Brien, who awakens in a rusty elevator with no memory of who he is, only to learn that he has been delivered to the middle of an intricate maze, along with many other boys, who have been trying to find their way out of the ever-changing labyrinthall while establishing a functioning society in what they call the Glade.


title: The Maze Runner (film)

text: Development of "The Maze Runner" began in January 2011 when Fox purchased the film rights to Dashner's novel with Gotham Group, Temple Hill Entertainment, TSG Entertainment as producers and Catherine Hardwicke intended to direct. In 2012, Ball was hired to direct the film adaptation after presenting a 3D computer-animated short film titled "Ruin" with a similar tone and was initially considered for a feature-length adaptation. Principal photography began in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on May 13, 2013, and officially concluded on July 12, 2013.


title: The Maze Runner (film)

text: "The Maze Runner" was released on September 19, 2014, in the United States by 20th Century Fox. The film received positive reviews, with praise for the performances and tone. Critics considered it to be better than most young adult book-to-film adaptations. The film was first at the box office in its opening weekend, grossing $32.5million, making it the seventh-highest-grossing debut in September. The film earned over $348million worldwide at the box office, against its budget of $34million. A sequel, "", was released on September 18, 2015, in the United States. A third and final film, "", was released on January 26, 2018.


title: The Maze Runner (film)

text: A teenage boy wakes up inside an underground elevator with no memory of his identity, and greeted by several male youths in a large grass area, called the "Glade," enclosed by tall stone walls. The "Gladers" have formed a rudimentary society, and each assumes specialized tasks. The boy learns that a vast Maze surrounding them is the only way out. During the day, designated Runners search the Maze for an escape route and return before nightfall when the entrance closes. After a competitive fight with Gally, the boy remembers his name is Thomas. The next day, he is attacked by Ben, a Runner who has been stung and left delirious by a Griever, one of the techno-organic creatures that roam the Maze at night. Ben is forced into the Maze and left to die as a direct consequence of his actions, along with there being no cure for his condition. Alby, the leader, and Minho, the lead Runner, later retrace Ben's steps inside the Maze the following morning. Minho reappears late in the afternoon dragging Alby, who has been stung, but are unable to reach the closing entrance in time. Thomas runs into the Maze to help, which leaves all three trapped. Thomas lures a Griever into a closing passageway, which causes it to be crushed. The three manage to survive the night and return the next morning.


title: The Maze Runner (film)

text: A girl arrives in the elevator, with a note saying that she is the last one to enter the Glade, and recognizes Thomas, but he cannot remember her. Thomas, Minho, Frypan, Winston, and Zart enter the Maze, locate the Griever corpse, and remove a beeping mechanical device from inside it. Gally claims that Thomas has jeopardized the fragile peace between the Gladers and the Grievers, and wants him punished. However, Newt, the group's second-in-command, instead designates Thomas as a Runner. Minho shows Thomas a hand-constructed model of the Maze that is based on previous explorations. The Maze's numbered sections open and close in a regular sequence and Thomas realizes that the device corresponds to a section of the Maze.


title: The Maze Runner (film)

text: The girl, Teresa, has two syringes filled with an unknown substance. One is used on Alby, and he recovers from the Griever sting. Minho and Thomas venture back into the Maze with the device and discover a possible exit. Several traps are activated, forcing Thomas and Minho to leave. That night, the Maze entrance does not close, and others open, allowing the Grievers to enter. Alby, Zart, Clint, and several others die and Gally blames Thomas for the events. Thomas, who has been having disconnected memory flashes since his arrival, stabs himself with a severed Griever stinger in an attempt to revive his memory before he is injected with the last anti-venom. Unconscious, he recalls that he and Teresa worked for the organization that created the Maze, WCKD, and the boys unknowingly have been test subjects for an experiment. Thomas awakens and confesses that he and Teresa worked with WCKD and studied the boys for years.


title: The Maze Runner (film)

text: Meanwhile, Gally has taken command and intends to sacrifice Thomas and Teresa to the Grievers to restore peace. However, several Gladers free them and enter the Maze, but Gally and a few others refuse to leave. As they attempt to access a possible exit, Jeff and several other Gladers are killed by Grievers. The Gladers eventually enter a laboratory strewn with corpses. In a video recording, Ava Paige, a WCKD official, explains that the planet has been devastated by a massive solar flare, followed by a pandemic of a deadly virus, the Flare. The group learns that they were part of an experiment intended to develop a cure. Paige is seen shooting herself in the video as the lab is overtaken by armed men. Gally, having been stung by a Griever, appears, insists that they will never be free, and points a gun at Thomas. Minho impales Gally in the chest with a spear, but he fatally shoots Chuck. While Thomas mourns over Chuck, masked armed men then rush in and take the group to a helicopter. It flies over a vast desert wasteland and approaches a ruined city.


title: The Maze Runner (film)

text: Later, the supposedly dead scientists meet in a room. Paige notes that the experiment has been successful and the survivors are now entering .


title: The Maze Runner (film)

text: On January 4, 2011, it was announced that 20th Century Fox had obtained the rights to a film adaptation of "The Maze Runner" by James Dashner, with Catherine Hardwicke attached to direct. On August 23, 2012 Wes Ball was confirmed to direct the film, with Gotham Group as producers. Ball produced a 3D computer-animated science fiction post-apocalyptic short film, titled "Ruin", and presented the short in 3D to 20th Century Fox. The studio initially considered a film adaptation of the short film, as it had the same tone of "The Maze Runner" novel they already planned to bring to the screen. Ball was then offered the chance to direct the novel adaptation.


title: The Maze Runner (film)

text: Creature designer Ken Barthelmey designed the Grievers for the film. In late 2012, director Wes Ball hired him to work on the design. Barthelmey created a test design that he presented to director Wes Ball. Impressed by Barthelmey's work, Ball asked him to add a mechanical scorpion tail to the design. Barthelmey used various animal inspirations to come up with the design, including coconut crabs, caterpillars and piranhas. Besides the Grievers, Barthelmey also worked on several Maze, Beetle Blade (cut from the film) and Crank designs.


title: The Maze Runner (film)

text: For the role of Teresa, Kaya Scodelario was Ball's first choice as she was "fantastic" and because he loved her in the TV show "Skins". Dylan O'Brien, the lead role, was initially rejected by Ball. Ball recounts, "Dylan was actually... I saw him early on, very early on and I overlooked him. It was a big learning experience there because I overlooked him because of his hair. He had "Teen Wolf" hair and I couldn't see past that and so we were looking for our Thomas and it's a tough role to make because he comes in as a boy and he leaves as a man, so it can't be like this badass action star that comes into this movie. It's about vulnerability upfront and then he comes out of it and comes into his own and then the next movies are about the leader that emerges from the group. So finally Fox says 'We just did this movie, "The Internship". There's this kid that's in this thing. He's like 20 years old. We think he's kind of got something.' So I watched his tape and was like 'Wait a minute, I've seen this kid before.' I looked him up online and there was one picture of him with a totally shaved head and it's this sweet vulnerable-looking kid and I was like 'Whoa, interesting.' I said, 'Wait a minute, he's just so familiar and I looked back at my old audition tapes, which we had thousands of, and there's Dylan. That guy I said 'No, definitely not him.' So we brought him back in and we started to talk with him and I'm like 'he's the coolest dude ever.'" Blake Cooper entered the film via Twitter. Ball revealed a lot on Twitter, and many kids wanted to be Chuck. Cooper constantly bugged Ball, until Ball told him to give his tape to his casting director, and Ball was impressed by Cooper's tape and cast him.


title: The Maze Runner (film)

text: Principal photography started in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on May 13, 2013, and officially ended on July 12, 2013. Post-production on the film was completed in June 2014.


title: The Maze Runner (film)

text: Composed by John Paesano, the soundtrack consists of 21 tracks and was released on September 16, 2014.


title: The Maze Runner (film)

text: The film was originally set to be released on February 14, 2014. On October 5, 2013, the film was pushed back. IMAX theaters released the film on September 19, 2014.


title: The Maze Runner (film)

text: Eleven character cards for the film were released in July 2013. Starting in January 2014, director Wes Ball released one image from the film once a week, leading up to the film's first trailer released on March 17, 2014. A viral marketing campaign launched by 20th Century Fox began on April 16, 2014. The campaign is a website featuring the main characters while focusing on WCKD, an organization in Dashner's novel series of the same name. The website has the domain wckdisgood.com.


title: The Maze Runner (film)

text: On June 26, 2014, O'Brien tweeted that the original "The Maze Runner" book would be re-released with a new book cover based on the film's poster. On July 29, 2014, the second trailer for the film was released exclusively on Yahoo! Movies.


title: The Maze Runner (film)

text: The film grossed $102,427,862 in North America and more than $245.8million in other territories for a worldwide total of $348.3million.


title: The Maze Runner (film)

text: Prior to its release in the U.S. and Canada, box office analysts predicted the film would be a box office success, citing effective marketing, good word-of-mouth publicity and a solid release date. Preliminary reports predicted the film would open with takings of over $30–32million in North America. According to movie-ticket sale website Fandango, "The Maze Runner" was the biggest seller accounting for more than 50% of early tickets sales. The film was released on September 19, 2014, in the United States and Canada across 3,604 locations and over 350 IMAX theaters. It earned $1.1million from Thursday night shows, and $11.25million on its opening day. It topped the box office on its opening weekend with $32.5million of which 9% of the gross came from IMAX theaters. Its opening weekend gross is the seventh highest for a film released in September, and the 18th highest for a young-adult book adaptation. The film earned a total of $102,272,088 at the North American box office becoming the 26th-highest-grossing film of 2014 in the U.S. and Canada.


title: The Maze Runner (film)

text: Outside North America, the film debuted in five countries a week prior to its North American release and earned a total of $8.3million. The film had a similar success overseas during its wide-opening second weekend earning $38million from 7,547 screens in 51 markets. It opened in South Korea with $5.5millionhigher than the openings of "The Hunger Games" and "Divergent", the UK, Ireland and Malta with $3.4million behind "Gone Girl", and China with $14.58million behind "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles". Other high openings were witnessed in Russia and the CIS ($5.75million), France ($5.2million), Australia ($3.4million), Mexico ($2.6million), Taiwan ($2.2million) and Brazil ($2million).


title: The Maze Runner (film)

text: Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes assigns the film a score of 65% based on 170 reviews, with an average rating of 5.9/10. The site's consensus states: "With strong acting, a solid premise, and a refreshingly dark approach to its dystopian setting, "The Maze Runner" stands out from the crowded field of YA sci-fi adventures". Metacritic gives the film a score of 57 out of 100, based on 34 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade of A− on an A+ to F scale. According to Tim Ryan of "The Wall Street Journal", critics considered the film better than most young adult book-to-film adaptations due to its "strong performances and a creepy, mysterious atmosphere".


title: The Maze Runner (film)

text: Rafer Guzman of "Newsday" gave the film a three out of four and described it as "solid, well crafted and entertaining". Christy Lemire of RogerEbert.com said she found the film intriguing, writing that "it tells us a story we think we've heard countless times before but with a refreshingly different tone and degree of detail". "The Seattle Times"s Soren Anderson said the film was "vastly superior to the book that inspired it" and gave it a score of 3/4. Tony Hicks of the "San Jose Mercury News" was "hooked by the combination of fine acting, intriguing premise and riveting scenery". Matthew Toomey of ABC Radio Brisbane gave the film a grade of A−, giving praise to its intriguing premise saying that "it held [his] attention for its full two hour running time". Justin Lowe of "The Hollywood Reporter" said it was "consistently engaging", and Ella Taylor of "Variety" wrote "as world-creation YA pictures go, "The Maze Runner" feels refreshingly low-tech and properly story-driven".


title: The Maze Runner (film)

text: Michael O'Sullivan of "The Washington Post" said ""The Maze Runner" unravels a few mysteries, but it spins even more", giving it a 3/4. Stephen Whitty of the "Newark Star-Ledger" wrote "it does leave you wanting to see the next installment. And that's one special effect that very few YA movies ever pull off". Isaac Feldberg of "We Got This Covered" awarded the film 8/10 stars, calling it "dark, dangerous and uncommonly thrilling", while extolling it as "one of the most engaging YA adaptations to hit theaters in quite some time." Rick Bentley of "The Fresno Bee" praised Wes Ball's direction, saying that he "created balance between a thin but solid script and first-rate actionand he doesn't waste a frame doing it". Bill Zwecker of the "Chicago Sun-Times" called it "a well-acted and intelligent thriller/futuristic sci-fi romp". Bilge Ebiri of "New York" magazine said he "was quite riveted". Michael Sragow of the "Orange County Register" gave it a grade of B and said, "Ball is deft, though, at evoking claustrophobia of every kind, whether in the open-air prison of the Glade or the actual tight spaces of the Maze. And he elicits a hair-trigger performance from O'Brien".


title: The Maze Runner (film)

text: Claudia Puig of "USA Today" said "a sci-fi thriller set in a vaguely post-apocalyptic future must create a fully drawn universe to thoroughly captivate the viewer. But "Maze Runner" feels only partially formed", giving it a score of 2/4. "Time" magazine's Richard Corliss said "like Jean-Paul Sartre's "No Exit"-tentialism, but more crowded and with the musk of bottled-up testosterone". Wesley Morris of the website Grantland said "I think I have a touch of apocalepsyexcessive sleepiness caused by prolonged exposure to three- and four-part series in which adolescents rebel against oppressive governments represented by esteemed actors". Steven Rea of "The Philadelphia Inquirer" gave the film a 2.5 out of 4 rating and said "it's bleak business, and as it hurries toward its explosive, expository conclusion, the film becomes nonsensical, too". Film critic Ethan Gilsdorf of "The Boston Globe" said "teens should eat up this fantasy's scenery-chewing angst and doom, and the hopeful tale of survival and empowerment (to be continued in the inevitable sequel or sequels)".


title: The Maze Runner (film)

text: On October 11, 2013, it was reported that Twentieth Century Fox had acquired the rights to the second book, "The Scorch Trials". A screenplay was written by T. S. Nowlin, with director Wes Ball supervising the scriptwriting. The sequel was released on September 18, 2015. On July 25, 2014, Ball announced at San Diego Comic-Con International that filming for the sequel would commence sometime between March and May 2015, should "The Maze Runner" become a success when it hits the theaters. However, two weeks prior to the film's release 20th Century Fox decided to move ahead with the sequel and pre-production began in early September 2014 in New Mexico. Cast members Dylan O'Brien, Kaya Scodelario, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Ki-Hong Lee, and Patricia Clarkson reprised their roles for the sequel, as did director Wes Ball. It was announced that Aidan Gillen would be joining the film to play Janson ("Rat-Man"), as was Rosa Salazar who portrayed Brenda, Jacob Lofland who starred as Aris Jones, and Giancarlo Esposito who played Jorge Gallaraga.


title: The Maze Runner (film)

text: On February 27, 2020, South Korean boy band BTS released their music video "On", which referenced set pieces from "The Maze Runner". The homage was noted by source book author Dashner on Twitter.


title: The Maze Runner (film)

text: Anson Lo said the opening of his 2022 song "King Kong" music video paid tribute to "The Maze Runner". He is the director of the music video.


title: Edmonton

text: Edmonton ( ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Alberta. Edmonton is situated on the North Saskatchewan River and is the centre of the Edmonton Metropolitan Region, which is surrounded by Alberta's central region. The city anchors the north end of what Statistics Canada defines as the "Calgary–Edmonton Corridor".


title: Edmonton

text: As of 2021, Edmonton had a city population of 1,010,899 and a metropolitan population of 1,418,118, making it the fifth-largest city and sixth-largest metropolitan area (CMA) in Canada. Edmonton is North America's northernmost large city and metropolitan area comprising over one million people each. A resident of Edmonton is known as an "Edmontonian".


title: Edmonton

text: Edmonton's historic growth has been facilitated through the absorption of five adjacent urban municipalities (Strathcona, North Edmonton, West Edmonton, Beverly and Jasper Place) in addition to a series of annexations through 1982, and the annexation of of land from Leduc County and the City of Beaumont on January 1, 2019. Known as the "Gateway to the North", the city is a staging point for large-scale oil sands projects occurring in northern Alberta and large-scale diamond mining operations in the Northwest Territories.


title: Edmonton

text: Edmonton is a cultural, governmental and educational centre. It hosts a year-round slate of festivals, reflected in the nickname "Canada's Festival City". It is home to North America's second largest mall, West Edmonton Mall (the world's largest mall from 1981 until 2004), and Fort Edmonton Park, Canada's largest living history museum.


title: Edmonton

text: Established as the first permanent settlement in the area of what is now Edmonton, the Hudson's Bay Company trading post of Fort Edmonton (also known as Edmonton House) was named after Edmonton, Middlesex, England. The fort's name was chosen by William Tomison, who was in charge of its construction, taking the fort's namesake from the hometown of the Lake family – at least five of whom were influential members of the Hudson's Bay Company between 1696 and 1807. In turn, the name of Edmonton derives from Adelmetone, meaning 'farmstead/estate of Ēadhelm' (from Ēadhelm, an Old English personal name, and ); this earlier form of the name appears in the Domesday Book of 1086. Fort Edmonton was also called "Fort-des-Prairies" by French-Canadians, trappers, and coureurs des bois.


title: Edmonton

text: Indigenous languages refer to the Edmonton area by multiple names which reference the presence of fur trading posts. In Cree, the area is known as (), which translates to "Beaver Hills House" and references the location's proximity to the Beaver Hills east of Edmonton. In Blackfoot, the area is known as ; in Nakota Sioux, the area is known as ; in Tsuutʼina, the area is known as or in Anglicised spelling "Nasagachoo". The Blackfoot name translates to 'big lodge', while the Nakota Sioux and Tsuutʼina names translate to 'big house'. In Denesuline, the area is known as , a metonymic toponym which also generally means 'city'.


title: Edmonton

text: The earliest known inhabitants arrived in the area that is now Edmonton around 3,000 BC and perhaps as early as 12,000 BC when an ice-free corridor opened as the last glacial period ended and timber, water, and wildlife became available in the region.


title: Edmonton

text: In 1754, Anthony Henday, an explorer for the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), may have been the first European to enter the Edmonton area. His expeditions across the Prairies of Rupert's Land were mainly to seek contact with the Indigenous population for establishing the fur trade, as the competition was fierce between the HBC and the North West Company (NWC).


title: Edmonton

text: By 1795, Fort Edmonton was established on the river's north bank as a major trading post for the HBC, near the mouth of the Sturgeon River close to present-day Fort Saskatchewan. Fort Edmonton was built within "musket-shot range" of the rival NWC's Fort Augustus. Although both forts were initially successful, declines in beaver pelt hauls and firewood stocks forced both HBC and NWC to move their forts upstream.


title: Edmonton

text: By 1813, after some changes in location, Fort Edmonton was established in the area of what is now Rossdale, beginning Edmonton's start as a permanent population centre. The fort was located on the border of territory that was disputed by the Blackfoot and Cree nations. Furthermore, the fort intersected territory patrolled by the Blackfoot Confederacy to the South, and the Cree, Dene, and Nakoda nations to the north. After the NWC merged with the HBC, Fort Augustus was closed in favour of Fort Edmonton.


title: Edmonton

text: In 1876, Treaty 6, which includes what is now Edmonton, was signed between First Nations and the Crown, as part of the Numbered Treaties. The agreement includes the Plains and Woods Cree, Assiniboine, and other band governments of First Nations at Fort Carlton, Fort Pitt, and Battle River. The area covered by the treaty represents most of the central area of the current provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta.


title: Edmonton

text: The coming of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) to southern Alberta in 1885 helped the Edmonton economy, and the 1891 building of the Calgary and Edmonton (C&E) Railway resulted in the emergence of a railway townsite (South Edmonton/Strathcona) on the river's south side, across from Edmonton. The arrival of the CPR and the C&E Railway helped bring settlers and entrepreneurs from eastern Canada, Europe, the U.S. and other parts of the world. The Edmonton area's fertile soil and cheap land attracted settlers, further establishing Edmonton as a major regional commercial and agricultural centre. Some people participating in the Klondike Gold Rush passed through South Edmonton/Strathcona in 1897. Strathcona was North America's northernmost railway point, but travel to the Klondike was still very difficult for the "Klondikers," and a majority of them took a steamship north to the Yukon from Vancouver, British Columbia.


title: Edmonton

text: Incorporated as a town in 1892 with a population of 700 and then as a city in 1904 with a population of 8,350, Edmonton became the capital of Alberta when the province was formed a year later, on September 1, 1905. In November 1905, the Canadian Northern Railway (CNR) arrived in Edmonton, accelerating growth.


title: Edmonton

text: During the early 1900s, Edmonton's rapid growth led to speculation in real estate. In 1912, Edmonton amalgamated with the City of Strathcona south of the North Saskatchewan River; as a result, the city held land on both banks of the North Saskatchewan River for the first time.


title: Edmonton

text: Just before World War I, the boom ended, and the city's population declined from more than 72,000 in 1914 to less than 54,000 only two years later. Many impoverished families moved to subsistence farms outside the city, while others fled to greener pastures in other provinces. Recruitment to the army during the war also contributed to the drop in population. Afterwards, the city slowly recovered in population and economy during the 1920s and 1930s and took off again during and after World War II.


title: Edmonton

text: The Edmonton City Centre Airport opened in 1929, becoming Canada's first licensed airfield. Originally named Blatchford Field in honour of former mayor Kenny Blatchford, pioneering aviators such as Wilfrid R. "Wop" May and Max Ward used Blatchford Field as a major base for distributing mail, food, and medicine to Northern Canada; hence Edmonton's emergence as the "Gateway to the North". World War II saw Edmonton become a major base for the construction of the Alaska Highway and the Northwest Staging Route. The airport was closed in November 2013.


title: Edmonton

text: On July 31, 1987, an F4 tornado hit the city and killed 27 people. The storm hit the areas of Beaumont, Mill Woods, Bannerman, Fraser, and Evergreen. The day became known as "Black Friday" and earned the city the moniker "City of Champions".


title: Edmonton

text: In 1892 Edmonton was incorporated as a town. The first mayor was Matthew McCauley, who established the first school board in Edmonton and Board of Trade (later Chamber of Commerce) and a municipal police service. Due to McCauley's good relationship with the federal Liberals, Edmonton maintained economic and political prominence over Strathcona, a rival town on the south side of the North Saskatchewan River. Edmonton was incorporated as a city in 1904 and became Alberta's capital in 1905.


title: Edmonton

text: In 1904, the City of Edmonton purchased the Edmonton District Telephone Company for $17,000 from Alex Taylor, a Canadian entrepreneur, inventor, and politician. Amalgamated into a city department as City of Edmonton Telephone Department, City Telephone System (CTS), 'edmonton telephones'. In 1989, City Council voted to create Edmonton Telephones Corporation (Ed Tel) to operate as an autonomous organization under a board of directors appointed by the city. In 1995, City of Edmonton ownership of its telephone service ended when Ed Tel was sold to the Telus corporation. City Bylaw 11713 created The Ed Tel Endowment Fund whereas the shares owned by Edmonton Telephones Corporation in Ed Tel Inc. were sold by the City of Edmonton to Telus on March 10, 1995, for $470,221,872 to be invested for the perpetual benefit of Edmontonians.


title: Edmonton

text: Unions and radical organizations such as the Industrial Workers of the World struggled for progressive social change through the early years, with the first reformer, James East, elected in 1912, followed by the first official Labour alderman, James Kinney, the following year. Many thousands of workers participated in the Edmonton general strike of 1919 and a strong block of Labour representatives were on council after the next election: East, Kinney, Sam McCoppen, Rice Sheppard and Joe Clarke.


title: Edmonton

text: The City used Single transferable vote (STV), a form of proportional representation, for elections from 1923 to 1927, in which councillors were elected at large, multiple seats filled in one contest but each voter casting a single vote, using ranked transferable votes.


title: Edmonton

text: Labour representation on city council became a near-majority in 1929, and a full majority from 1932 to 1934, during the Great Depression. Jan Reimer became the city's first female mayor when she was elected in 1989.


title: Edmonton

text: Edmonton is on the North Saskatchewan River, at an elevation of . It is North America's northernmost city with a metropolitan population over one million. It is at the same latitude as Hamburg (Germany); Dublin (Ireland); Manchester (United Kingdom); and Magnitogorsk (Russia). It is south of Alberta's geographic centre, which is near the Hamlet of Fort Assiniboine. The terrain in and around Edmonton is generally flat to gently rolling, with ravines and deep river valleys, such as the North Saskatchewan River valley. The Canadian Rockies are west of Edmonton and about to the southwest.


title: Edmonton

text: The North Saskatchewan River originates at the Columbia Icefield in Jasper National Park and bisects the city. It sometimes floods Edmonton's river valley, most notably in the North Saskatchewan River flood of 1915. It empties via the Saskatchewan River, Lake Winnipeg, and the Nelson River into Hudson Bay. It runs from the southwest to the northeast and is fed by numerous creeks throughout the city, including Mill Creek, Whitemud Creek and Blackmud Creek; these creeks have created ravines, some of which are used for urban parkland. Edmonton is within the Canadian Prairies Ecozone. Aspen parkland surrounds the city and is a transitional area from the prairies to the south and boreal forest in the north. The aspen woods and forests in and around Edmonton have long since been reduced by farming and residential and commercial developments including oil and natural gas exploration.


title: Edmonton

text: Edmonton has a humid continental climate (Köppen "Dfb") with typically freezing, dry winters and warm, sunny summers, prone to extremes and large swings at all times of the year. It falls into the NRC 4a Plant Hardiness Zone.


title: Edmonton

text: Summer in Edmonton lasts from June until early September, while winter lasts from November until March and in common with all of Alberta varies greatly in length and severity. Spring and autumn are both short and highly variable. Edmonton's growing season on average lasts from May 9 to September 22; having an average 135–140 frost-free days each year, resulting in one of the longest growing seasons on the Canadian Prairies. At the summer solstice, Edmonton receives 17 hours and three minutes of daylight, with an hour and 46 minutes of civil twilight, and on average receives 2,299 hours of bright sunshine per year, making it one of Canada's sunniest cities.


title: Edmonton

text: The city is known for having cold winters, though its weather is milder than Regina, Saskatoon or Winnipeg, all of which lie south of Edmonton. Its average daily temperatures range from a low of in January to a summer peak of in July, with average maximum of in July and minimum of in January. Temperatures can exceed for an average of four to five afternoons anytime from late April to mid-September and fall below for an average of 24.6 days in the winter. The highest temperature recorded in Edmonton was on June 29, 1937 and on July 2, 2013, a record high humidex of 44 was recorded due to an unusually humid day with a temperature of and a record high dew point of . The lowest temperature ever recorded in Edmonton was on January 19 and 21, 1886.


title: Edmonton

text: Edmonton has a fairly dry climate. On average, it receives of precipitation, of which is rain and is the melt from of snowfall per annum. Over 75% of the average annual precipitation falls in the late spring, summer, and early autumn, with the wettest month being July, having a mean precipitation of , and the driest months being February, March, October, November and December. Significant snowfall accumulation typically begins in late October and tapers off by late March. Dry spells are not uncommon and may occur at any time of the year. Extremes do occur, such as the of rainfall that fell on July 31, 1953. Much of the precipitation that Edmonton receives in the summer comes from late-day thunderstorms, which are frequent and occasionally severe enough to produce large hail, damaging winds, funnel clouds, and tornadoes.


title: Edmonton

text: The summer of 2006 was particularly warm for Edmonton, as temperatures reached or higher more than 20 times from mid-May to early September. Later, the summer of 2021 saw the temperature rise above on 23 days between June and August, while nearly breaking the record high temperature on June 30 with a temperature of . The winter of 2011–12 was particularly warm: from December 22 through March 20 there were 53 occasions when Edmonton saw temperatures at or above at the City Centre Airport, and even warmer in the city proper.


title: Edmonton

text: A massive cluster of thunderstorms swept through Edmonton on July 11, 2004, with large hail and over of rain reported within an hour in many places. This "1-in-200 year event" flooded major intersections and underpasses and damaged both residential and commercial properties. The storm caused extensive damage to West Edmonton Mall; a small glass section of the roof collapsed under the weight of the rainwater, causing water to drain onto the mall's indoor ice rink. As a result, the mall was evacuated as a precautionary measure.


title: Edmonton

text: Twelve tornadoes had been recorded in Edmonton between 1890 and 1989, and eight since 1990. An F4 tornado that struck Edmonton on July 31, 1987, killing 27, was unusual in many respects, including severity, duration, damage, and casualties. It is commonly referred to as "Black Friday" due both to its aberrant characteristics and the emotional shock it generated. Then-mayor Laurence Decore cited the community's response to the tornado as evidence that Edmonton was a "city of champions," which later became an unofficial slogan of the city.


title: Edmonton

text: Edmonton is at the centre of Canada's sixth-largest census metropolitan area (CMA), which includes Edmonton and 34 other municipalities in the surrounding area. Larger urban communities include Sherwood Park (an urban service area within Strathcona County), the cities of St. Albert, Beaumont, Leduc, Spruce Grove and Fort Saskatchewan, and the towns of Stony Plain, Morinville, and Devon. Major employment areas outside Edmonton but within the CMA include the Nisku Industrial Business Park and the Edmonton International Airport (including a planned inland port logistics support facility in support of the Port Alberta initiative) in Leduc County, the Acheson Industrial Area in Parkland County, Refinery Row in Strathcona County and Alberta's Industrial Heartland within portions of Fort Saskatchewan, Strathcona County and Sturgeon County. Alberta's Industrial Heartland also extends beyond the CMA's northeastern boundary into Lamont County.