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Yuri Andropov

Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov (15 June 1914– 9 February 1984) was a Soviet politician who was the sixth leader of the Soviet Union and the fourth General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, taking office in late 1982 and serving until his death in 1984.

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. After Brezhnev suffered a stroke in 1975 that impaired his ability to govern, Andropov increasingly dictated Soviet policymaking alongside Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, Defense Minister Andrei Grechko and Grechko's successor, Marshal Dmitry Ustinov.

Upon Brezhnev's death on 10 November 1982, Andropov succeeded him as General Secretary and, by extension, as the 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. The Cold War intensified, 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 aged 69 on 9 February 1984, having led the country for about 15 months.

Early life
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 Jewish watchmaker and Finnish citizen, Karl Franzevich Fleckenstein, who lived in Moscow. He and his wife, Eudokia Mikhailovna Fleckenstein, adopted and raised her.

Andropov's earliest documented name was Grigory Vladimirovich Andropov-Fyodorov which he changed 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.

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.

It was also reported that Andropov's mother came from a line of merchants. Karl Fleckenstein was the rich proprietor of a jewellery business which was run by his wife after his death in 1915 when he was mistaken for a German during the infamous anti-German pogrom in Moscow and killed, although Andropov characterized the pogrom as 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.

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.

Early career in the Communist Party
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.

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.

According to his official biography, during World War II Andropov took part in partisan guerrilla activities in Finland although 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.

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.

Suppression of the Hungarian Uprising
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.

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 (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".

Chairmanship of the KGB and Politburo career
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.

Crushing the Prague Spring
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.

Suppression of dissidents
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 30 June 1982 issue.

On 3 July 1967, Andropov proposed to establish the KGB's Fifth Directorate to deal with the political opposition (ideological coun-ter-in-tel-li-gence). 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.

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.

The repression of dissidents was a big part of Andropov's agenda and targeted such prominent figures as Andrei Sakharov and Roy Medvedev. 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.

Beginning in January 1972, Andropov led the implementation of the Soviet détente strategy.

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.

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.

Role in the invasion of Afghanistan
In March 1979, Andropov and the Politburo initially opposed military intervention 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.

Role in the non-invasion of Poland
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.

Promotion of Gorbachev
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.

Leader of the Soviet Union

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.

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.

Economy
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.

Despite such reforms, Andropov refused to consider any changes that sought to dispense with the Planned 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."

Anti-corruption campaign
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 his 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.

Foreign policy
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.

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".

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.

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.

Death and funeral
In February 1983, Andropov suffered total kidney failure. In August 1983, he entered Moscow's Central Clinical Hospital, where he would spend the rest of his life.

In late January 1984, Andropov's health deteriorated rapidly. Due to growing toxicity in his blood, he had periods of falling into unconsciousness. 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.

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.

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.

Personal life
Andropov lived at 26 Kutuzovsky Prospekt, the same building in which Suslov and Brezhnev lived.

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

Legacy
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.

According to his former subordinate Securitate general Ion Mihai Pacepa:

"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."

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.

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.

Attitudes toward Andropov
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.

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.

Various people who knew Andropov well, including Vladimir Medvedev, Aleksandr Chuchyalin, 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.

Honors and awards

 * Soviet Awards
 * Honorary Member of the KGB, 1973

 * Foreign Awards

Speeches and works

 * Supreme Soviet - June 16, 1983.
 * Speech against the use of atomic Bombs - c. December 1982.
 * Supreme Soviet - June 16, 1983.
 * Speech against the use of atomic Bombs - c. December 1982.
 * Supreme Soviet - June 16, 1983.
 * Speech against the use of atomic Bombs - c. December 1982.
 * Supreme Soviet - June 16, 1983.
 * Speech against the use of atomic Bombs - c. December 1982.
 * Supreme Soviet - June 16, 1983.
 * Speech against the use of atomic Bombs - c. December 1982.
 * Supreme Soviet - June 16, 1983.
 * Speech against the use of atomic Bombs - c. December 1982.
 * Supreme Soviet - June 16, 1983.
 * Speech against the use of atomic Bombs - c. December 1982.

title: Yuri Andropov


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Autocracy

Autocracy is a system of government in which absolute power is held by the ruler, known as an autocrat. It includes most forms of monarchy and dictatorship, while it is contrasted with democracy and feudalism. Various definitions of autocracy exist. They may restrict autocracy to cases where power is held by a single individual, or they may define autocracy in a way that includes a group of rulers who wield absolute power. The autocrat has total control over the exercise of civil liberties within the autocracy, choosing under what circumstances they may be exercised, if at all. Governments may also blend elements of autocracy and democracy, forming an anocracy. The concept of autocracy has been recognized in political philosophy since ancient times.

Autocrats maintain power through political repression of any opposition and co-optation of other influential or powerful members of society. The general public is controlled through indoctrination and propaganda, and an autocracy may attempt to legitimize itself in the eyes of the public through appeals to ideology, religion, birthright, or foreign hostility. Some autocracies establish legislatures, unfair elections, or show trials to further exercise control while presenting the appearance of democracy. The only limits to autocratic rule are practical considerations in preserving the regime. Autocrats must retain control over the nation's elites and institutions for their will to be exercised, but they must also prevent any other individual or group from gaining significant power or influence. Internal challenges are the most significant threats faced by autocrats, as they may lead to a coup d'état.

Autocracy was among the earliest forms of government. It began as despotism, which existed throughout the ancient world in the form of chiefdoms, city-states, and empires. Monarchy was the predominant form of autocracy for most of history. Dictatorship became more common in the 19th century, beginning with the caudillos in Latin America and the empires of Napoleon and Napoleon III in Europe. Totalitarian dictatorships developed in the 20th century with the advent of fascist and communist states. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, most dictatorships have been characterized as authoritarian rather than totalitarian.

Etymology and use
Autocracy comes from the Ancient Greek auto (Greek: αὐτός; "self") and kratos (Greek: κράτος; "power, might"). This became the Hellenistic/Byzantine Greek word autocrator (Greek: αὐτοκράτωρ) and the Latin imperator, both of which were titles for the Roman emperor. This was adopted in Old Russian as samod′rž′c′ and then modern Russian as samoderžec. In the 18th century, the title for the Russian emperor was translated to authocrateur and then autocrateur in French, while it was translated to Autocrator and then Autokrator in German. These terms were eventually used to refer to autocratic rulers in general. The term has since developed a negative connotation.

Political structure
Many attempts have been made to define the political structure of autocracy. It traditionally entails a single unrestrained ruler, known as an autocrat, though unrestrained non-democratic rule by a group may also be defined as autocratic. Autocracy is distinguished from other forms of government by the power of the autocrat to unilaterally repress the civil liberties of the people and to choose what liberties they may exercise. It is distinct from democracy and feudalism, and modern autocracy is often defined as any non-democratic government. As with all forms of government, autocracy has no clearly defined boundaries, and it may intersect with other forms of government. Though autocracy usually encompasses an entire country, it can sometimes take place at subnational or local levels, even in countries with a more democratic government, if the national government has limited control over a specific area or its political conflicts.

Autocracies impose few to no limits on the power of the autocrat, and any formal institutions that exist create only limited accountability. To maintain power, an autocrat must have the support of elites that hold influence in the country and assist the autocrat in carrying out their will. The amount of direct control that an autocrat wields in practice may vary. As an autocratic government solidifies its rule, it develops stronger institutions to carry out the autocrat's will. These institutions are necessary for maintaining control and extracting value from the state, but they can also serve as checks on the autocrat. Autocrats must also balance the affiliation that regional elites have over their jurisdiction; too little can prevent effective rule, while too much may cause the elite to favor the region's interests over the autocrat's. Some autocracies incorporate an elected legislature that has a limited ability to check the power of the autocrat, though these are not usually formed through free and fair elections. These legislatures may also be prone to corruption and can be influenced by the autocrat in exchange for preferential treatment. Other institutions, such as an independent judiciary or an active civil society, may also limit the autocrat's power.

Some autocracies emphasize a ruling family rather than a single autocrat. This has been the case of most monarchies. Such arrangements allow for royal intermarriage, which can join autocracies together through dynastic unions. Personalist dictatorships may also give significance to the ruling family through a cult of personality, such as the Kim family of North Korea.

Formation
The earliest autocracies, such as chiefdoms, formed where there was previously no centralized government. The initial development of an autocracy is attributed to its efficiency over anarchy, as it provides security and negates internal divisions. Mancur Olson introduced the term "stationary bandits" to describe the method of control associated with autocracy, as opposed to the "roaming bandits" that dominate anarchic society. Under this definition, autocrats as stationary bandits see long-term investment in the society that they exploit through taxation and other seizure of resources, as opposed to the bandits in stateless societies that have no incentive to improve society. This creates a Pareto efficiency in which both the autocrat and the subjects benefit over the alternative.

Douglass North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast describe autocracies as natural states that arise from this need to monopolize violence. In contrast to Olson, these scholars understand the early state not as a single ruler, but as an organization formed by many actors. They describe the process of autocratic state formation as a bargaining process among individuals with access to violence. For them, these individuals form a dominant coalition that grants each other privileges such as the access to resources. As violence reduces the economic rents, members of the dominant coalition have incentives to cooperate and to avoid fighting. A limited access to privileges is necessary to avoid competition among the members of the dominant coalition, who then will credibly commit to cooperate and will form the state.

There is great variance in the types of states that become autocratic. Neither a state's size, its military strength, its economic success, nor its cultural attributes significantly affect whether it is likely to be autocratic. Autocracy is more likely to form in heterogeneous populations, as there is greater inequality and less social cohesion. Autocracies formed under these conditions are often more volatile for the same reasons.

Stability and succession
Autocracies face challenges to their authority from several fronts, including the citizenry, political opposition, and internal disloyalty from elites. As autocrats must share their power with the state's elites to see their will carried out, these elites are the greatest threat to the autocrat. Most autocratic governments are overthrown by a coup, and most are succeeded by another autocratic government. These new governments are commonly a different type of autocracy or a weaker variant of the same type.

While popular support for revolution is often necessary to overthrow an autocratic government, most revolts are accompanied by internal support from elites who believe that it is no longer in their interest to support the autocrat. Overthrow of an autocratic government purely through popular revolt is virtually nonexistent throughout history, but popular support for democracy is a significant indicator of challenges to autocratic rule. Modernization and increased wealth are often associated with stronger support for democracy, though failing to provide these things also reduces support for the autocratic regime. Popular revolt is most likely to occur during periods of reform. Government reform can provide an impetus for stronger opposition, especially when it does not meet expectations, and it can weaken the centralization of power through poor implementation. When revolt appears likely, an autocrat may grant civil rights, redistribute wealth, or abdicate from power entirely to avoid the threat of violence.

Some autocracies use hereditary succession in which a set of rules determines who will be the next autocrat. Otherwise, a successor may be handpicked, either by the autocrat or by another governmental body. Pre-determined successors are incentivized to overthrow and replace the autocrat, creating a dilemma for autocrats wishing to choose a successor. The threat of overthrow is greater for appointed successors over hereditary successors, as hereditary successors are often younger and less influential. Other autocracies have no appointed successor, and a power struggle will take place upon the death or removal of the autocrat. These methods of succession are a common distinction between monarchical rule and dictatorial rule; monarchies use an established system of succession such as hereditary succession, while dictatorships do not. Autocratic rule is most unstable during succession from one autocrat to another. Orders of succession allow for more peaceful transition of power, but it prevents meaningful vetting of successors for competence or fortitude. When rule passes between autocrats, the incoming autocrat often inherits an established bureaucracy. This bureaucracy facilitates the transfer of power, as the new ruler gains immediate control over the nation without having to conquer its people or win their popular support.

Legitimacy
Autocrats may claim that they have legitimacy under a legal framework, or they may exert influence purely through force. Opinion on whether an autocratic government is legitimate can vary, even among its own population. An autocracy's approach to legitimacy can be affected by recognition from other nations. Widely accepted autocratic governments are more able to convince their own populations of their legitimacy. Less widely accepted autocracies may rally internal support by attributing their lack of recognition to malevolent foreign efforts, such as American imperialism or Zionism.

Historically, the most common claim of legitimacy is birthright in an autocracy that uses hereditary succession. Theocratic governments appeal to religion to justify their rule, arguing that religious leaders must also be political leaders. Other autocrats may use similar claims of divine authority to justify their rule, often in absolute monarchy. This includes the Mandate of Heaven in ancient China and the divine right of kings in 17th century England and France. When an autocratic government has a state ideology, this may be used to justify the autocrat's rule. This is most common in communist or ethnonationalist governments. Autocracies with unfair elections will cite election results to prove that the autocrat has a mandate to rule. Some autocracies will use practical considerations to legitimise their rule, arguing that they are necessary to provide basic needs to the population.

Types
Autocracy encompasses most non-democratic forms of government, including dictatorships, monarchies, and dominant-party regimes. Monarchies were common in medieval Europe, but in the modern era dictatorship is the most common form of government globally.

Autocratic governments are classified as totalitarian when they engage in direct control of citizens' lives, or as authoritarian when they do not. Totalitarian governments do not allow political or cultural pluralism. Instead, citizens are expected to devote themselves to a single ideological vision and demonstrate their support of the state ideology through political engagement. Totalitarian governments are revolutionary, seeking radically to reform society, and they often engage in terror against groups that do not comply with the state's vision. Totalitarianism is associated with communist states and Nazi Germany. Authoritarian governments maintain control of a nation purely through repression and controlled opposition rather than mandated adherence to a state ideology. These include most traditional monarchies, military dictatorships, theocracies, and dominant party states.

An absolute autocracy may be referred to as despotism, in which the autocrat rules purely through personal control without any meaningful institutions. These were most common in pre-industrial societies, when large bureaucracies had not yet become standard in government. Sultanism is a type of personalist dictatorship in which a ruling family directly integrates itself into the state through a cult of personality, where it maintains control purely through rewards for allies and force against enemies. In these regimes, there is no guiding ideology or legal system, and the state serves only to bring about the leader's own personal enrichment. Other descriptors, such as tyranny and absolutism, may also be associated with variations of autocracy.

Though autocracies often restrict civil and political rights, some may allow limited exercise of some rights. These autocracies grant moderate representation to political opponents and allow exercise of some civil rights, though less than those associated with democracy. These are contrasted with closed autocracies, which do not permit the exercise of these rights. Several forms of semi-autocratic government have been defined in which governments blend elements of democracy and autocracy. These include limited autocracy, semi-autocracy, liberal autocracy, semi-liberal autocracy, anocracy, and electoral autocracy. These governments may begin as democratic governments and then become autocratic as the elected leader seizes control over the nation's institutions and electoral process. Conversely, autocratic governments may transition to democracy through a period of semi-autocratic rule.

Early history
Autocracy has been the primary form of government for most of human history. One of the earliest forms of government was the chiefdom that developed in tribal societies, which date back to the Neolithic. Chiefdoms are regional collections of villages ruled over by tribal chief. They are an emergent form of governance, originating from societies that previously lacked a centralized authority. Historical chiefs often held only tenuous power over the chiefdom, but they trended towards autocracy as heterarchical governance was replaced with hierarchical governance.

Early states were formed by warlords ruling over conquered territory. The first states were the city-states of Mesopotamia, which first developed around the 35th century BCE. These early states were ruled by kings who were both political and religious leaders. These were followed by the first empire, the Akkadian Empire, when they were conquered by Sargon of Akkad in the 24th century BCE. The blending of autocratic rule with religious significance continued under the Akkadian Empire, as the king Naram-Sin of Akkad was the first of several kings to be recognized as a god over the following centuries. Ancient Egypt also existed as an autocratic government for most of its early history, first developing states at the end of the fourth millennium BCE.

China has been subject to autocratic rule almost without interruption since its ancient feudal society was replaced by the Qin dynasty in 221 BCE, and even its feudal government had stronger elements of autocracy than other instances of feudalism. The early Chinese philosophy of Confucianism emphasized the importance of benevolent autocratic rule to maintain order, and this philosophy heavily influenced future Chinese thought.

City-states in Ancient Greece and the Etruscan civilization were often ruled by tyrants, though myth and historical revisionism later re-imagined these tyrants as kings with hereditary succession. The Roman Republic introduced the concept of the Roman dictator who would be temporarily invested with unchecked power to restore stability during periods of crisis. This temporary dictatorship was eventually subverted by Julius Caesar when he became dictator for life in 44 BCE, ending the Roman Republic and ushering the creation of the autocratic Roman Empire.

Several early military dictatorships formed in East Asia during the post-classical era. These include the rule of the Goguryeo kingdom by Yeon Gaesomun in 642, the Goryeo military regime beginning in 1170, and the shogunate in Japan between the 12th and 19th centuries.

Parliamentary monarchies became common in the 13th century as monarchs sought larger advising bodies that were representative of the kingdom. European nations moved away from feudalism and towards centralized monarchy as the primary form of government in the 14th century.

Modern era
Absolutism became more common in European monarchies at the onset of the 16th century as the continent struggled with weak leadership and religious conflict. Legislatures during this period were often tailored to enforce the king's will but not challenge it. This was sometimes justified through the divine right of kings, particularly in the kingdoms of England and France.

The French Revolution marked a significant shift in the perception of dictatorship as a form of tyrannical rule, as revolutionaries justified their actions as a means of combatting tyranny. In Europe, the original forms of dictatorship were Bonapartism, a form of monarchism that rejected feudalism, and Caesarism, imperial rule reminiscent of Julius Caesar. These were primarily used to define the First and Second French Empires. European monarchies moved away from autocracy in the 19th century as legislatures increased in power. In 19th century Latin America, regional rulers known as caudillos seized power in several nations as early examples of dictators.

The 19th and 20th centuries brought about the decline of traditional monarchies in favor of modern states, many of which developed as autocracies. The upheaval caused by World War I resulted in a broad shift of governance across Europe, and many nations moved away from traditional monarchies. Most European monarchs were stripped of their powers to become constitutional monarchs, or they were displaced entirely in favor of republics. Totalitarianism first developed as a form of autocracy during the interwar period. It seized power in many of these republics, particularly during the Great Depression. This saw the establishment of fascist, communist, and military dictatorships throughout Europe.

The communist state first developed as a new form of autocracy following the Russian Revolution. This type of autocratic government enforced totalitarian control over its citizens through a mass party said to represent the citizens. While other forms of European dictatorship were dissolved after World War II, communism was strengthened and became the basis of several dictatorships in Eastern Europe. Communist states became the primary model for autocratic government in the late-20th century, and many non-communist autocratic regimes replicated the communist style of government.

The decline in autocracy across Western Europe affected autocratic government elsewhere in the world through colonization. Regions with historically strong autocratic states were able to resist European colonization or otherwise went unchanged, allowing autocracy to be preserved. Societies without a state were readily colonized by European nations and subsequently adopted democracy and parliamentary government after it became common in Europe.

The strength of autocracy in global politics was significantly reduced at the end of the Cold War with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, but it saw a resurgence over the following decades through regional powers such as China, Iran, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. The fall of totalitarian regimes led to authoritarianism becoming the predominant form of autocracy in the 21st century.

Political activity
Political repression is the primary method by which autocrats preserve the regime and prevent the loss of power. This repression may take place implicitly by coercing and intimidating potential opposition, or it may involve direct violence. Autocratic governments also engage in co-optation, in which influential figures are provided benefits by the regime in exchange for their support. Coercing these elites is usually more efficient for the autocrat than intimidating them through violence. Political parties are a common method of co-optation and coercion, as they provide a mechanism to control members of the government, initiate new members, and discourage a military coup. Autocratic governments controlled through a political party last longer on average than other autocratic governments.

Control over the public is maintained through indoctrination and propaganda. Autocratic governments enjoy similar levels of public support to democratic governments, and a state's status as autocratic is not a significant indicator in whether it is supported by its citizens. Autocrats often appeal to the people by supporting a specific political, ethnic, or religious movement.

The different forms of autocratic government create significant variance in their foreign policy. Overall, autocratic governments are more likely to go to war than democratic governments, as citizens are not part of the selectorate to which autocrats are accountable. Totalitarian autocracies have historically engaged in militarism and expansionism after consolidating power, particularly fascist governments. This allows the autocracy to spread its state ideology, and the existence of foreign adversaries allows the autocrat to rally internal support.

Autocratic regimes in the 21st century have departed from the historical precedent of direct rule in favor of institutions that resemble those of democratic governments. This may include controlled liberties for citizens such as the formation of opposition parties to participate in unfair elections. Elections provide several benefits to autocratic regimes, allowing for a venue to restrain or appease the opposition and creating a method to transfer power without violent conflict. Many autocrats also institute show trials to carry out political repression rather than carrying out direct purges. This may be done to more publicly discourage future dissidents. Prior to this trend, autocratic elections rarely invited public participation. They were instead used by elites to choose a leader amongst themselves, such as in an electoral monarchy. The creation of a constitution is another common measure used by autocrats to stay in power; as they are able to draft the constitution unilaterally, it can be tailored to suit their rule.

Study and evaluation
Autocratic government has been central to political theory since the development of Ancient Greek political philosophy. Despite its historical prominence, autocracy has not been widely recognized as its own political theory in the way that democracy has. Autocratic government is generally considered to be less desirable than democratic government. Reasons for this include its proclivity for corruption and violence as well as its lack of efficiency and its weakness in promoting liberty and transparency.

Historically, data on the operation of autocratic government has been limited, preventing detailed study. Study of postcolonial autocracy in Africa has been particularly limited, as these governments were less likely to keep detailed records of their activities relative to other governments at the time, and they frequently destroyed the records that did exist. Study of citizen support for autocratic government relative to democratic government has also been infrequent, and most studies conducted in this area have been limited to East Asia. Collection of information on autocratic regimes has improved in the 21st century, allowing for more detailed analysis.

Autocratic government has been found to have effects on a country's politics, including its government's structure and bureaucracy, long after it democratizes. Comparisons between regions have found disparities in citizen attitudes, policy preferences, and political engagement depending on whether it had been subject to autocracy, even in different regions within the same country. Citizens of postcommunist nations are more likely to distrust government and free markets, directly hindering the long-term economic prosperity of these nations. Xenophobia is generally more common in post-autocratic nations, and voters in these nations are more likely to vote for far-right or far-left political parties.

Many democracy indices have been developed to measure how democratic or authoritarian countries are, such as the Polity data series, the Freedom in the World report, and the Varieties of Democracy indices. These indices measure various attributes of a government's actions and its citizens' rights to sort democracies and autocracies. These attributes might include enfranchisement, freedom of expression, freedom of information, separation of powers, or free and fair elections, among others. Both the choice in attributes and the method of measuring them are subjective, and they are defined individually be each index. Despite this, different democracy indices generally produce similar results. Most discrepancies come from the measurement of anocratic governments that blend democratic and autocratic traits.

The concepts of tyranny and despotism as distinct modes of government were abandoned in the 19th century in favor of more specific typologies. Modern typology of autocratic regimes originates from the work of Juan Linz in the mid-20th century, when his division of democracy, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism became accepted. The first general theory of autocracy that defined it independently of other systems was created by Gordon Tullock in 1974 through applied public choice theory. At the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama's theory of the end of history became popular among political scientists. This theory proposed that autocratic government was approaching a permanent decline to be replaced by liberal democracy. This theory was largely abandoned after the increase in autocratic government over the following decades. In the 2010s, the concept of "autocracy promotion" became influential in the study of autocracy, proposing that some governments have sought to establish autocratic rule in foreign nations, though subsequent studies have found little evidence to support that such efforts are as widespread or successful as originally thought.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Autocracy


text:
Cornett

The cornett, cornetto, or zink is a wind instrument that dates from the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque periods, popular from 1500 to 1650.

It was used in a variety of situations, including performances by professional musicians, state music and liturgical music. It accompanied choral music. It also featured in popular music in what are now called alta capellas or loud wind ensembles. Anthony Baines notes that the cornett "[...] was praised in the very terms that were to be bestowed upon the oboe [...]: it could be sounded as loud as a trumpet and as soft as a recorder, and its tone approached that of the human voice more nearly than that of any other instrument." It was popular in Germany, where guild laws made it illegal for residents to play trumpets. As well, the mute cornett variant was a quiet instrument, playing "gentle, soft and sweet."

The instrument has features of both the trumpet and the flute. Like the trumpet, the cornett has a mouthpiece or cup, where the instrument is sounded with the player's lips. Like the flute, it has fingerholes (and sometimes keys) to determine pitch; pitch can also be changed on low notes by the tension of the player's lips. Instrument-makers built cornetts in two styles, straight and curved. They also produced a variety of sizes from highest cornettino downward through alto cornett, cornone tenor cornett, and bass cornett. The cornett is not to be confused with the modern cornet. The spelling cornet which had applied to the instrument in this article since about 1400 A.D. was transferred to a brass-tubed trumpet (formerly known as a cornet à pistons ) from about 1836, and cornett became the modern spelling of the older instrument. The most common form is the curved cornett, also called treble cornett or alto cornett.

Construction
Pipes as short as the cornett are only able to play two or three notes, if the only tool is the wind going through the tube. The cornett then, can play A and the next octave A. Beyond the upper A, a trumpeter might be able to reach the 12th note E. Other short trumpets had this issue, including King Tut's Trumpet, capable of only playing 2 notes without a modern mouthpiece.

The cornett is not limited to trumpet notes; it also draws on fingerholes to achieve the notes between the natural upper and lower limits. The cornett has six fingerholes in the front and one thumbhole in the back. The holes allow the instrument to play a diatonic scale. Additionally, using "cross fingering" and different tension in the lips, the instrument can play the chromatic scale. A player in 1738 who mastered the cross-fingering and lip tension was documented to have reached 27 notes and half notes. In comparison, Praetorius gave cornetts credit for achieving 15 notes, before players used techniques to expand the range.

The bore of the instrument is conical, narrow at the tip and wide at the bottom. The ordinary curved treble cornett is made by splitting a length of wood ("plum, cherry or pear") and carving out the two halves to make the gently conical, curved bore. The halves are then glued together, and the outside planed to an octagonal cross section, the whole being bound in thin black leather.

Six front finger holes and a thumb hole on the back (like on the recorder) are bored in the instrument, and are slightly undercut. The socket for the mouthpiece at the narrow end is reinforced with a brass collar, concealed by an ornamental silver or brass mount. The separate cup mouthpiece is usually made of horn, ivory, or bone, with a thin rim and thread-wrapped shank, which is used to tune the instrument. Because it lacks a little-finger hole at the bottom, its lowest note is the A below middle C, though another tone lower G could be produced by slackening the lips to flatten the note.

The instruments were made with a very small mouthpiece described as "sharp", and as a result, images don't always show players blowing like a trumpet.

Mute cornetts were made of boxwood. The top of the instrument is narrow; the bore is about 4 mm wide at the top of the instrument, with a mouthpiece carved into the top 13 mm across and 9 mm deep. The mouthpiece is cone-shaped.

Cornett family
Cornetts were built in two styles, curved and straight.

The cornett was, like almost all Renaissance and Baroque instruments, made in a complete family; the different sizes being the high cornettino, the cornett (or curved cornett), the tenor cornett (or lizard) and the rare bass cornett. The serpent largely supplanted the bass cornett in the 17th century. Other versions include the mute cornett, which is a straight narrow-bore instrument with integrated mouthpiece, quiet enough to be used in a consort of viols or even recorders.

Curved cornetts
Cornetts shaped with gradual curve, greater than 90°, a single curve like a comma, or an S-curve. The instrument had a conical bore, and the outside was octagonal.

Curved cornets were traditionally black, the wood covered in black leather.

Soprano

The cornettino is the soprano member of the cornett family. In Syntagma Musicum, it was presented as being about 1.5 feet long. It had a range from E4-E6 in the 16th and 17th centuries. In the 18th century that changed to D4 to D6.

Treble

The 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica defined this instrument using French name, It called the treble cornett, dessus and gave its lowest fingered note as A.

Its fingered range was A3 to A5, the lowest being one note higher than on the alto. To get below A3, players had to slacken their lips.

Sibyl Marcuse did not name the normal cornett, but gave its range, which is that of the treble. David Jarratt-Knock counted surviving instruments in museums to arrive at the treble cornett being the standard or most commonly found cornett.

Alto

The instrument was about 2 feet long in 1619 A.D., according to the scaled drawing in Syntagma Musicum.

It was built to start playing a tone lower than the treble and has a fingered range from G3-G5. Proper technique would start the lowest note at F3.

The 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica called this the haute-contre or alto cornet. Baines said that the use of this variant for an alto part was "widely speculated."

Tenor
The tenor cornet (or Italian cornone, French basse de cornetà bouquin, German Basszink) was the tenor instrument in the cornett family, and was about 3.5 feet long in the 1619 drawing in Syntagma Musicum. It was "proportionally wider" (bottom compared to top) than the treble and alto were, and that changed the tenor's sound quality to be more bugle-like.

Although the French and German names implies it was bass instrument, it is placed as a tenor instrument by musical-instrument historians Sibyl Marcuse and Anthony C. Baines, who separately point out that two examples of a "real bass" instrument exist. Both said that the bass instrument should be called contrebass de cornet à bouquin.

The cornone was pitched about a fifth below the alto cornett, from C3 to D5.

Even though tenor and bass instruments were created for the family, these came later in the instrument's development, perhaps as long as 50 years after the instrument became mainstream. The instrument was paired with other instruments to play the lower ranges, especially trombones.

Bass
There are limited examples of instruments that are tuned below the tenor cornett. One is called hautecontre de cornet à bouquin.

The other should be called contrebass de cornet à bouquin, and there are only two examples of it, one in the Paris Conservatoire museum and the other in Hamburg.

These were tuned "a pitch or so below the type instrument." This was put differently elsewhere as an octave below the cornettino. The instrument in Paris, a contrebass de cornet à bouquin, is described as having "an octagonal exterior and 4 extension keys." The Hamburg example has 2 extension keys.

Straight cornetts
Two kinds of cornets with a straight conical body with conical bore. These were light-colored, as the yellow boxwood was not covered in leather.

Straight cornett
The straight cornett has a straight, conical body. The specific instrument differs from the mute cornett by having a removeable mouthpiece.

Surviving instruments in museums are mainly treble with a range of A3 to A5. A few survive as tenor instruments, range C3 to D5.

In other languages, this is called gerader Zink and gelber Zink in German, and cornetto diritto or cornetto bianco in Italian.

Mute cornett
Straight cornett with the mouthpiece carved into the end of the instrument's body. The instrument tapers in thickness, until at the top it is about 1.3 cm wide. The instruments were mainly treble cornetts, tuned to the same range as the curved treble cornetts, G3-A5. The others found in museums are soprano cornetts, also tuned like curved instruments to E4-E6.

Praetorius drew a tenor mute cornett, with a seventh hole covered and labeled that a lower note could be reached by covering the base. In that range, the six holes with thumb hole could have delivered A3 to F5. The extra plate would make it G3 to F5, with the base covered F3 to F5.

This instrument's name tells something of its tonal nature. Its "gentle, soft and sweet" sound is different than the other cornetts because of its mouthpiece.

The mouthpiece is similar to that in a French horn; instead of being a cup like the other cornetts, it is a cone, about 9 millimeters deep. Inside it transitions from cone to instrumental bore smoothly, without "sharpness."

On the outside, there isn't an obvious lip carved.

In other languages, this is called cornet muet in French, stiller Zink in German, cornetto muto in Italian and cornetts muta in Spanish.

Virtuoso performance
The cornett, among other aerophones, were commonly used for virtuosic musical performances, equivalent to performances by a lead singer or violinist. A relatively large amount of solo music for the cornett (and/or violin) survives.

Giovanni Bassano was a virtuoso early player of the cornett, and Giovanni Gabrieli wrote much of his polychoral, with Bassano playing it. Heinrich Schütz also used the instrument extensively, especially in his earlier work; he had studied in Venice with Gabrieli and was likely acquainted with Bassano's playing.

The use of the instrument had declined by 1700, although the instrument was still common in Europe until the late 18th century. Johann Sebastian Bach, Georg Philipp Telemann and their German contemporaries used both the cornett and cornettino in cantatas to play in unison with the soprano voices of the choir. Occasionally, these composers allocated a solo part to the cornetto (see Bach's cantata O Jesu Christ, meins Lebens Licht, BWV 118). Alessandro Scarlatti used the cornetto or pairs of cornetts in a number of his operas. Johann Joseph Fux used a pair of mute cornetts in a Requiem.

It was scored for by Gluck, in his opera Orfeo ed Euridice (he suggested the soprano trombone as an alternative) and features in the TV theme music Testament by Nigel Hess, released in 1983.

The cornett was chosen to play colla parte (in which instrumentalists play the same notes as the vocal part) in works by Bach. These include Christ lag in Todes Banden, BWV 4 (paired with trombones) and Gottlob! nun geht das Jahr zu Ende, BWV 28 (paired with trombones).

Popular performance
Music books allowed non-professional musicians to learn instruments and play together. Such books included music theory, how to read sheet music, and instructions for how to reach notes on instruments. Professional musicians performed in public spaces and as part of official pomp before the country's residents. Images of heaven reflected a musicality that showed heavenly orchestras performing before God, and instruments were brought into churches.

Public performances where the cornett might be played included the alta capella and the Collegium Musicum.

Liturgical performance
Like the serpent, another fingerhole horn that was paired with it, the cornett was used to reinforce the human voice, accompanying choral music. The cornett was deemed to be similar to the voice of a boy soprano, a part found in English liturgical music which the cornett accompanied. Not only English, for Mersenne speaks of the cornett being "heard with the choir voices in the cathedrals or chapels."

Historically, two cornetts were frequently used in consort with three sackbuts, often to double a church choir, into the 18th century. This was particularly popular in Venetian churches such as the Basilica San Marco, where extensive instrumental accompaniment was encouraged, particularly in use with antiphonal choirs.

Origins
Cornets à bouquin1.jpg, 17th century

*alto or treble cornet, 17th century

*cornone, tenor cornett or bass de cornet à  bouquin, 17th century

*contrebass de cornet à bouquin  (bass cornett), 16th century

Front row: *tenor cornet, 17th century. ]]

The cornett has been considered by musical historians to be a development of the medieval horn, such as a cow's horn. Francis Galpin believed the horns preceding the cornett to be goat horns.

Plain horns in the shape of animal horns have been found in medieval European art as far back as the Utrecht Psalter in the 9th century A.D. However, horns with fingerholes also began appearing in manuscript miniatures in the 10th century A.D. By the 12th century, these were being carved with a six sided or 8 sided exterior. In the 11th century, some of the fingerhole horns began to be made longer and thinner, beginning to take on the appearance of the cornett.

The French coradoiz, rendered now as cor à doigts, meant "fingerhole horn", was seen in the 13th to 15th centuries A.D.

The earliest cowhorn instruments were played with one hand covering four or fewer fingerholes and the other stopping the bell to create additional tones, much like on a French horn. In Northern Europe, these horns, referred to in Scandinavian languages as bukkehorns, were made from natural animal horns.

The name cornet was printed in English in the Morte d'Arthure, completed by Sir Thomas Mallory about 1470.

The cornett in its current form was developed by about 1500, as an improvement over earlier designs of fingerhole horns.

That was the path that led to the curved cornetts; another way led to the straight cornetts. In central Europe, cornetts were made from wood turned on a lathe; the fusion of these two instrument-building traditions as the cornett advanced in melodic capability explains the coexistence of the straight and curved cornetts, with the form of the latter most likely being a skeuomorphic trait derived from animal horns.

Ends and beginnings
The cornett was at the height of its popularity between 1550 and 1650. The instrument had declined by the 18th century. When the instrument was needed in the 19th century, it had gone extinct. Efforts to re-create it were not immediately successful and other instruments have been used in an attempt to replace it in classical music. These include the soprano saxophone, trumpet and oboe. Since the 19th century, the instrument is being made again and materials used for the body have widened to include resins. Recorded music of the instrument can be found.

Prominent cornettists today include Roland Wilson (ensemble Musica Fiata), Jean Tubéry (La Fenice), Arno Paduch (Johann Rosenmüller Ensemble), and Bruce Dickey (Concerto Palatino).

Playing the cornett
The cornett's pitches are controlled using a combination of the player's lips and fingerholes. The lips change pitch through different tensions. The fingerholes alter the length of the sound column.

Cornetts are made with a mouthpiece, similar to that on brass instruments, but very small. Unlike the brass mouthpieces, players don't press the instrument to the center of their mouths, as on a trumpet. Rather the technique to produce sound is to hold the instrument to the side of the mouth, where the player's lips are thinner. Players stretch their lips to tighten them, with help from cheek muscles.

The technique is not unique to cornets, but has also been used for the traditional animal-horn horns, such as the shofur and Slovak shepherd's horn, as well as for folk horns such as the Russian rozhok.

Girolamo dalla Casa wrote about how the coronet should sound when played, and in doing so revealed other ways it could sound as well. He felt that the instrument was meant to imitate the human voice, saying, "The cornetto is the most excellent of the wind instruments since it imitates the human voice better than the other instruments." He warned that improperly played, it would sound "horn-like or muted."

To play it properly, he said that player's must focus on the tone (with lips not spread apart and loose, or too tight and shrill). He felt tonguing was important to the sound, with energy but not too aggressive. Finally he felt that divisions or diminutions should be used, but sparingly and well. He said that cornettists should focus on making their playing sound like the human voice.

Learning to play
Books with cornett instruction included Grund-richtiger Unterricht der Musicalischen Kunst (Fundamentally correct instruction in the musical arts) by Daniel Speer, 1697 A.D. and Museum Musicum Theoretico-Practicum (Museum of theoretical-practical music) by Joseph Friedrich Bernhard Caspar Majer, 1732. Books written for other instruments were also applicable to the cornett. Among these were Ganassi dal Fontego (Opera intitulata Fontegara, 1535) and Bismantova (Compendio musicale, 1677). These books covered the recorder, but the instructions on "tonguing" with "force and speed" has application to the cornett, which was pictured on the Fontegara title page illustration.

Besides tonguing, books taught students to improvise. Students learning cornet music were encouraged to play in the "diminuative", looking at sheet music and adapting it by creating runs of fast notes to replace long slow notes in written works.

The book (Il Vero Modo Di Diminuir, 1584) by cornett virtoso Girolamo Dalla Casa focused on tone, tonguing and divisions to make the cornett sound like the human voice.

The cornett and authentic performance
As a result of the recent historically informed performance movement the cornett has been rediscovered, and modern works for the instrument have been written.

Modern performance

 * Online sound recordings of modern performance, by Antiqua
 * L'Arpeggiata with Christina Pluhar as conductor, (winner of the 2010 Dutch Edison) makes use of one or two cornetts
 * City of Lincoln Waites (The Mayor of Lincoln's own Band of Musick)
 * Concerto Palatino, a leading ensemble centered on the cornetto and trombone and directed by Bruce Dickey and Charles Toet.
 * The English Cornett and Sackbut Ensemble, a performance group that makes use of the cornett
 * Ensemble La Fenice, A French period performance group directed by cornettist Jean Tubery.
 * His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts (est. 1982), the pre-eminent, internationally renowned British cornett and sackbut ensemble.
 * Johann Rosenmüller Ensemble, a performance group directed by the German cornetto player Arno Paduch
 * QuintEssential – Sackbut and Cornett ensemble

title: Cornett


text:
Eleanor Bron

Eleanor Bron (born 14 March 1938) is an English stage, film and television actress, and an author. Her film roles include Ahme in the Beatles musical Help! (1965), the Doctor in Alfie (1966), Margaret Spencer in Bedazzled (1967), and Hermione Roddice in Women in Love (1969). She has appeared in television series such as Yes Minister, Doctor Who, and Absolutely Fabulous.

Early life and family
Bron was born on 14 March 1938 in Stanmore, Middlesex, into a Jewish family. Before her birth, her father Sydney had legally changed his name from Bronstein to Bron, in an effort to enhance his newly founded commercial enterprise, Bron's Orchestral Service. Her elder brother was the record producer Gerry Bron.

She attended the North London Collegiate School and then Newnham College, Cambridge, where she read Modern Languages. She later characterised her time at Newnham as "three years of unparalleled pampering and privilege".

Early work
Bron began her career in the Cambridge Footlights revue of 1959, titled The Last Laugh, in which Peter Cook also appeared. The addition of a female performer to the Footlights was a departure; until that time it had been all-male, with female characters portrayed in drag.

Film appearances
Bron's film appearances include the role of Ahme in the Beatles' film Help! (1965); her name inspired Paul McCartney when he composed "Eleanor Rigby". It is rumored that for some time after the filming, Bron carried on an affair with John Lennon. Other roles included the doctor who grounds Michael Caine's character in Alfie (1966), the unattainable Margaret Spencer in Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's film Bedazzled (1967), Hermione Roddice in Ken Russell's Women in Love (1969), and Sisters McFee and MacArthur in The National Health (1973).

She also appeared in the films Two for the Road (1967) alongside Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn, and A Touch of Love (1969) with Sandy Dennis and Ian McKellen. She later appeared in film adaptations of Black Beauty (1994), and A Little Princess (1995).

Television work
Bron's earliest work for television included appearances on David Frost's Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life, My Father Knew Lloyd George and BBC-3, where she performed in sketches with John Fortune; they had already worked together at Peter Cook's Establishment Club. Later, her work included such programmes as Where Was Spring? (1969, also alongside Fortune), World in Ferment (1969), and After That, This (1975) – the one with the "egg" timer in the opening credits.

She collaborated with novelist and playwright Michael Frayn on the BBC programmes Beyond a Joke (1972) and Making Faces (1975).

From the mid-1970s, Bron made occasional appearances with the Monty Python team, such as The Secret Policeman's Ball series of concerts in support of Amnesty International.

She appeared in "Equal Opportunities", a 1982 episode of the BBC series Yes Minister, playing a senior civil servant in Jim Hacker's Department. Hacker plans to promote her—ostensibly to strike a blow for women's rights—only to be sorely disappointed.

In 1979 Bron appeared as Maggie Hartley, a stage actress accused of murder, in an episode of the popular British legal series Rumpole of the Bailey, entitled "Rumpole and the Show Folk", which starred Leo McKern in the title role. She and Leo McKern had appeared together in Help!. She appeared as Mary in The Day Christ Died (1980), and played Mrs Barrymore in the 1983 TV movie The Hound of the Baskervilles which starred Ian Richardson as Sherlock Holmes. That year also saw her appearance in an episode of Tales of the Unexpected (Series 6, The Tribute).

Bron appeared twice in the original series of Doctor Who. She had a brief comedic scene in the serial City of Death (1979) alongside John Cleese, which was at the suggestion of its co-writer Douglas Adams. The pair are art critics in Denise Rene's art gallery in Paris who are admiring the TARDIS (which they think to be a piece of art), when the Doctor (Tom Baker), Romana (Lalla Ward), and Duggan (Tom Chadbon) rush into it and it dematerialises. Bron's character, believing this to be part of the work, states that it is "Exquisite, absolutely exquisite!" She also had the main guest billing as the villain Kara in the Colin Baker era serial Revelation of the Daleks (1985). Bron later appeared in the Doctor Who audio drama Loups-Garoux (2001) starring Peter Davison, in which she played the wealthy heiress Ileana de Santos.

Bron played an art critic again in 1990, appearing in the BBC sketch comedy show French and Saunders in a parody of an Andy Warhol documentary. Later she made frequent appearances in Jennifer Saunders' television series Absolutely Fabulous. Bron played, via flashback, the recurring character of Patsy's mother, a woman who "scattered bastard babies across Europe like a garden sprinkler". After giving birth, she would always say "Now take it away! And bring me another lover." In 1992, she played Maria Lazlos in an episode of the first series of Heartbeat. She had a supporting role in the 1994 BBC ghost story The Blue Boy, and also appeared in the BBC's biographical TV movie Saint-Ex in 1996. She also narrated an episode on Wild Discovery.

Stage appearances
In 1973 Bron appeared in the West End musical The Card. Throughout the 1980s she appeared in Amnesty International's The Secret Policeman's Ball live benefit shows, working alongside Peter Cook and Rowan Atkinson, starting with the stage show that preceded those, A Poke in the Eye (With a Sharp Stick) in 1976. In 2005 she appeared at the Liverpool Empire Theatre in the musical play Twopence to Cross the Mersey. She appeared in the role of an abbess in Howard Brenton's play In Extremis, staged at Shakespeare's Globe in 2007. She also appeared in the dramatised version of Pedro Almodóvar's film All About My Mother, which opened at the Old Vic theatre in the late summer of 2007.

Bron also gave the premiere performance of The Yellow Cake Revue (1980), a series of pieces for voice and piano written by Peter Maxwell Davies in protest against uranium mining in the Orkney Islands. Bron has written and performed new verses for Camille Saint-Saëns' The Carnival of the Animals. She has also performed and recorded the female reciter part in William Walton's Façade (entertainment) with the Nash Ensemble.

Since 1985
In 1985 Bron was selected, for her authoritative tone, to become "the voice of BT" and can still be heard on various British telephone error messages such as "The number you have dialled has not been recognised, please check and try again".

In 1998, she appeared as Frau Luther in episode 2 "Stuckart" of the BBC Radio 4 adaptation of Fatherland, a novel by Robert Harris.

In 2001 and 2002, she appeared in the BBC radio comedy sketch show The Right Time, along with Graeme Garden, Paula Wilcox, Clive Swift, and Neil Innes. Another notable radio appearance was in The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in the 2002 episode "The Madness of Colonel Warburton". In 2001 she played the great-grandmother in the seven-part ITV series Gypsy Girl, based on books by Elizabeth Arnold.

In 2006, she narrated the BBC Radio 4 adaptation of the Craig Brown book 1966 and All That. Her other voice work includes a recorded tour of Sir John Soane's Museum in London, England.

In April 2010, Bron, along with Ian McKellen and Brian Cox, appeared in a series of TV advertisements to support Age UK, the charity recently formed from the merger of Age Concern and Help the Aged. All three actors gave their time free of charge.

In June 2010, she guest-starred in Foyle's War in the episode "The Russian House". She appeared in the long-running British TV series Midsomer Murders as Lady Isobel DeQuetteville in the episode "The Dark Rider", first aired on ITV1 on 1 February 2012. In 2019 she appeared as Maxine in "The Miniature Murders."

On 25 December 2013, Bron appeared on BBC One in The Tractate Middoth, an adaptation of the M.R. James ghost story The Tractate Middoth. On 25 July 2014, she joined the cast of radio soap The Archers, playing the part of Carol Tregorran.

In November–December 2019, Bron read Salley Vickers's Grandmothers in 10 parts on BBC Radio 4.

Personal life
Bron was the partner of the architect Cedric Price for many years until his death in 2003; they had no children. An interview with Bron in 2015 revealed that she had voted for Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour leadership election. Bron is a pescetarian.

Selected theatre performances

 * Elena Andreyevna in Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov. Directed by Michael Elliott at the Royal Exchange, Manchester. (1977)
 * Monica Reed in Present Laughter by Noël Coward. Directed by James Maxwell at the Royal Exchange, Manchester. (1977)
 * Margaret Barrett in A Family by Ronald Harwood. World premiere directed by Casper Wrede at the Royal Exchange, Manchester.(1978)
 * Heartbreak House by George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Jonathon Hales at the Royal Exchange, Manchester. (1981)
 * Jean Brodie in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark. Directed by John Dove at the Royal Exchange, Manchester.(1984)
 * Jocasta in Oedipus by Sophocles. Directed by Casper Wrede at the Royal Exchange, Manchester.(1987)
 * Lady Caroline Pontefract in A Woman of No Importance at the Vaudeville Theatre, London. (2017)

Writer
She is the author of several books, including Life and Other Punctures, a 1978 account of bicycling in France and Holland on a Moulton bicycle; and Cedric Price Retriever, an inventory of the contents of the bookshelves of her late partner, architect Cedric Price.

Cultural influences
She is mentioned in the Yo La Tengo song "Tom Courtenay": "...dreaming 'bout Eleanor Bron, in my room with the curtains drawn...".

title: Eleanor Bron


text:
Talk:IEEE 802.11

WiFi 6 (new designation naming scheme)
FYI - the Wi-Fi Alliance has announced a new designation naming scheme.
 * Wi-Fi 6 to identify devices that support 802.11ax technology.
 * Wi-Fi 5 to identify devices that support 802.11ac technology.
 * Wi-Fi 4 to identify devices that support 802.11n technology.

https://www.wi-fi.org/news-events/newsroom/wi-fi-alliance-introduces-wi-fi-6

https://www.wi-fi.org/news-events/newsroom/wi-fi-alliance-introduces-wi-fi-certified-wpa3-security

• Sbmeirow  •  Talk  • 18:31, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

Frame Types
I've added more detailed info about 802.11 frame types, which I think would be too long and too detail to be crammed in single subsection of the article. Currently it is not linked to this article (orphaned), but IMHO should be linked.

Buhadram (talk) 17:10, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

Dubious use of source [1]
Part of the history section of this article reads:

''802.11 technology has its origins in a 1985 ruling by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission that released the ISM band for unlicensed use. ''

And references source [1]. Neither the current nor archived version of source [1] actually references 802.11 or any court ruling by name. Should the reference be removed? Trickypr (talk) 11:43, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

Spatial Streams
What exactly is a "spatial stream" ?

The term appears in every one of these Wikipedia 802.11 articles, 802.11n,ac,ax, and referenced MIMO links, &tc. (and everywhere else on the internet). But invariably, the only definitions of the concept are just substitutions of other words, like "multiplexing". And some hand-waving about doing it with separate antennas.

That doesn't explain even fundamentally what it is and how it's accomplished. For later 802.11 variants (802.11ax) it's easy to understand segregation of OFDMA subcarrier bands, much like channel bonding, that's a good starting point for the concept. Otherwise, for earlier 802.11 levels where "spatial stream" originated, what is it, how is it accomplished. Slots, timeslice, request+grants, what 2601:40D:8100:9400:6972:CAEC:953C:4038 (talk) 07:09, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

title: Talk:IEEE 802.11


text:
Third Council of Constantinople

The Third Council of Constantinople, counted as the Sixth Ecumenical Council by the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Churches, as well as by certain other Western Churches, met in 680–681 and condemned monoenergism and monothelitism as heretical and defined Jesus Christ as having two energies and two wills (divine and human).

Background
The council settled a set of theological controversies that went back to the sixth century but had intensified under the emperors Heraclius ((r. 610 – 641)) and Constans II ((r. 641 – 668)). Heraclius had set out to recover much of the part of his empire lost to the Persians and had attempted to bridge the controversy with monophysitism, which was particularly strong in Syria and Egypt, by proposing a moderate theological position that had as good support in the tradition as any other. The result was first monoenergism, i.e., that Christ, though existing in two natures (divine and human), had one energy; the second was monothelitism, i.e., that Christ had one will (that is, that there was no opposition in Christ between his human and divine volition). This doctrine was accepted in most of the Byzantine world. Still, it was opposed in Jerusalem and Rome and started a controversy that persisted even after the loss of the reconquered provinces and the death of Heraclius. When Heraclius' grandson Constans II took the throne, he saw the controversy as threatening the stability of the Empire and attempted to silence discussion by outlawing speaking either in favor or against the doctrine. Pope Martin I and the monk Maximus, the foremost opponents of monothelitism (which they interpreted as denying a human faculty of will to Christ), held a synod in Rome in 649 that condemned monoenergism and monothelitism. At Constantinople in around 653, some accused the Pope of supporting revolution; this was regarded as high treason, and Martin was accordingly arrested, tried, condemned and sent into exile, where he soon died. Martin and Maximus's position was supported by others at the Council of Constantinople.

Preparations
After Constans' son and successor, Constantine IV had overcome the Muslim siege of Constantinople in 678, he immediately set his sights on restoring communion with Rome: he wrote to Pope Donus suggesting a conference on the matter. When the letter reached Rome, Donus had died. Still, his successor, Pope Agatho, agreed to the Emperor's suggestion and ordered councils held throughout the West so that legates could present the tradition of the Western Church. There was a synod in Milan under Archbishop Mausuetus; another synod was held in 680 at Hatfield, over which Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury presided. Pope Agatho then convened a synod at Rome at Easter 680, with representatives from the regional synods.

Then he sent a delegation to meet the Easterners at Constantinople. The delegates set out bearing two letters, one from Pope Agatho to the Emperor and the other from the bishops of the Rome synod to those gathered in Constantinople.

In the meantime, Constantine summoned Patriarch George I of Constantinople and all bishops of his jurisdiction of Constantinople to a council. He also summoned Patriarch Macarius of Antioch, a Byzantine appointee permanently resident in Constantinople because of the Muslim occupation of his see.

Proceedings
On 7 November 680, a mere 37 bishops and several presbyters convened in the imperial palace, the domed hall called the Trullus. The patriarchs of Constantinople and Antioch participated in person. In contrast, the patriarchates of Alexandria and Jerusalem were represented by Byzantine appointees (because of the Saracen Muslim conquest, there was, at this date, no patriarch in either of these sees). The Pope and a council he had held in Rome were represented (as was customary at eastern ecumenical councils) by a few priests and bishops. In its opening session, the council assumed the authority of an ecumenical council. The emperor attended and presided over the first eleven sessions, participated in the discussions, and returned for the closing session on 16 September 681, attended by 151 bishops.

During the council, a letter by Pope Agatho was read, which asserted the traditional belief of the Church that Christ was of two wills, divine and human. Most of the bishops present accepted the letter, proclaiming that Peter spoke through Agatho, though this council also proclaimed another historical pope as anathema. Macarius of Antioch defended monothelitism but was condemned and deposed, along with his partisans. The council, in keeping with Agatho's letter, defined that Jesus Christ possessed two energies and two wills but that the human will was 'in subjection to his divine and all-powerful will'. The council carefully avoided any mention of Maximus the Confessor, who was still regarded with suspicion. It condemned both monoenergism and monothelitism as heretical and included those who had supported this heresy, including Pope Honorius I and four previous patriarchs of Constantinople. When the council had concluded, the decrees were sent to Rome where they were accepted by Agatho's successor, Pope Leo II. In his letter of confirmation of the council, Leo accuses, "Honorius who did not attempt to sanctify this Apostolic Church with the teaching of Apostolic tradition, but by profane treachery permitted its purity to be polluted".

At some point during the council's proceedings, a Monothelite priest claimed he could raise the dead, thereby proving his faith supreme. He had a corpse brought forth, but after whispering prayers into its ears, he could not revive the body.

title: Third Council of Constantinople