As with Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski and Carter Caldwell, Andropov and Zhukov parallel their American counterparts even to the degree that the former is historical and the latter fictional.
Yuri Andropov led the Soviet KGB from 1967 until relinquishing its leadership upon becoming General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) upon the death of Leonid Brezhnev in November 1982. Basically, the General Secretary of the CPSU was the leader of the Soviet Union. However, Andropov’s tenure was brief as he fell ill in mid-1983 and died in February 1984.
There remains some debate about Andropov’s views, not unsurprising given the secretiveness of his life following so many years as the KGB chief. According to some sources, he opposed a military intervention in Poland in 1981 as Solidarity, the Polish Labor movement, was on the rise, although he had been insistent on the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. He is also believed to have been an advocate of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, a move that he evidently regretted in later years as he inherited the problems that resulted when he became General Secretary.
In Conclave, I have moved the development of the Polish economic collapse, and the rise of Solidarity a bit forward in historical terms. Whether the Soviets were planning an invasion in 1978 or not, the election of John Paul II clearly eliminated that as an option when it was next discussed in 1981, and by then Andropov opposed such a move. That decision, when combined with the growing fiasco in Afghanistan, essentially doomed the Soviet Union, which collapsed in 1991.
John Paul II was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt by Mehmet Ali Agca in May 1981. Agca was a Turk with connections to a Turkish extremist group, the Grey Wolves. Agca was captured and spent many years in prison in Italy and Turkey, changing his story frequently on who was behind the assassination attempt. Agca at one point claimed it was the Soviet Union, worried about the Polish Solidarity movement, and later claiming that it had been ordered by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. In Conclave, the issue is not definitively addressed, other than in Andropov’s suggestion in Chapter 24 that the KGB will try again when the time is right.
As for Dimitry Zhukov, I decided to develop a young KGB officer who would surprisingly be put in charge of an operation that was, from the Soviet perspective, the opposite of the American perspective. For the Soviets, it was initially viewed as low risk with a high probability of success, whereas for the Americans it was potentially high risk and low probability. I made Zhukov the grandson of the legendary World War II Red Army leader to give him additional credentials for being given the lead in the Soviet effort despite his low position within the KGB.