Activities and affiliations

Diplomacy and international organization Soviet Union state institutions 1928–2014 ○ Natural causes, died

The Soviet foreign minister who ended the Cold War, then led Georgia

On 20 December 1990 Shevardnadze warned the Congress of People's Deputies that dictatorship was coming, announcing his resignation as foreign minister and his break with the party; some accounts date the speech to 21 December, so the date is disputed.

Born in 1928 at Mamati in Georgia, in a teacher's family. Interior minister of Georgia from 1965, he became the republic's party first secretary in 1972, waging large-scale anti-corruption campaigns and the Abasha experiment. In 1985, despite having no diplomatic experience, he was made Soviet foreign minister and negotiated arms cuts, the Afghan withdrawal and German unification. On 20 December 1990 he resigned, warning that dictatorship was coming. He returned home in 1992 and led Georgia as State Council chairman and president until the 2003 Rose Revolution. He died in Tbilisi on 7 July 2014.

Diplomacy and international organization United States state institutions 1929–

Reagan's NSC Soviet expert who assembled the 'Soviet 101' briefing papers and the last US ambassador to the USSR

Matlock recalled, "I've never had a better student than Ronald Reagan. He knew that he didn't know a lot of things, and he wasn't ashamed of it."

Jack Matlock was an American Soviet specialist who fell in love with Russia reading Dostoevsky and spent a 35-year Foreign Service career immersed in US-Soviet relations, beginning with translating Kennedy-Khrushchev messages during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis from the Moscow embassy. As Reagan's NSC senior director for European and Soviet affairs, he assembled the 'Soviet 101' curriculum: 24 briefing papers by CIA and State Department analysts, and role-played Gorbachev in mock summits to prepare Reagan for Geneva. Appointed ambassador to the USSR in 1987, he witnessed the country's final four years and later judged Gorbachev's failure to secure a written SDI-sharing commitment from Reagan at Geneva a 'strategic error.'

Diplomacy and international organization Soviet Union state institutions 1929–2007 ○ Natural causes

The arms-control negotiator who secured the INF Treaty and managed the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan

"Over two and a half years we brought the positions so close that we managed to sign a treaty on the complete elimination of the most modern weapons of that time. Thank God I had the chance to participate in that process — I'm very pleased about it." — on the 1987 INF Treaty

A Soviet and Russian diplomat who served as First Deputy Foreign Minister (1986–1990) under Eduard Shevardnadze, anchoring late Cold War Soviet diplomacy. As Ambassador to Afghanistan (1988–1989) during the troop withdrawal, he secured guarantees from mujahideen leaders that they would not fire on departing forces. As chief arms-control negotiator he helped deliver the 1987 INF Treaty eliminating intermediate-range nuclear missiles. His career spanned Chargé d'Affaires in Washington under Anatoly Dobrynin, ambassadorships to India and France, the last Soviet Permanent Representative to the UN, and Russia's first post-Soviet Ambassador to the United States (1994–1998). After retiring from diplomacy he served as UN Under-Secretary-General, coordinating the repatriation of Kuwaiti missing persons and property until his death.

Diplomacy and international organization United States state institutions 1930–

The pragmatic diplomat who engineered the Cold War's final transition

In his November 29, 1989 Malta briefing memo, Baker wrote that Bush should project a "new pace and purpose" while leading as much as Gorbachev.

James Baker was a lawyer and Republican political operator who became central to American conservative politics through his long alliance with George H. W. Bush. After serving as treasury secretary on currency and international finance, he became secretary of state and helped manage the diplomacy of the Cold War's final years, German reunification, and the Gulf crisis. He did not treat Gorbachev's reforms as a matter of faith, weighing them against American interests and allied stability, yet he persuaded Bush to reach toward perestroika and translated that choice into the agenda and working arrangements of the 1989 Malta summit. His cautious realism slowed the inertia of confrontation while turning rapid change into negotiations that Washington could help manage.

Diplomacy and international organization Soviet Union state institutions 1930–2013 ○ Natural causes

Soviet ambassador who personified perestroika diplomacy in Washington during the Gorbachev era

Presenting his credentials at the White House in May 1986 after a whirlwind transfer from the UN, Dubinin declared that the two superpowers had 'reached a point where we can no longer view each other as enemies.'

A key practitioner of Gorbachev-era diplomacy, Dubinin served as Soviet ambassador to the United States during the INF Treaty negotiations and the Malta Summit that marked the Cold War's end. Born in Nalchik, he graduated from MGIMO and built his early career at UNESCO and the Soviet Embassy in Paris, becoming a seasoned European specialist. After a brief stint as Permanent Representative to the UN in early 1986, he took up the Washington post and worked to keep the Reagan–Gorbachev back-channel functioning through the decisive years of disarmament diplomacy. He moved to the Paris embassy in 1990 and remained there through the dissolution of the USSR, later serving as Russia's deputy foreign minister and then ambassador to Ukraine, where he was the principal architect of the 1997 Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation.

Diplomacy and international organization Soviet Union state institutions 1931–

The post-coup foreign minister of the collapsing Union

On August 21, 1991, with the coup still unfolding, Pankin appeared on Czechoslovak television — the only Soviet ambassador to publicly condemn the putsch as 'a fatal mistake on Yanayev's part,' demanding he 'correct it as soon as possible.'

A journalist who transformed Komsomolskaya Pravda into the Soviet Union's boldest youth paper and a literary critic who won the USSR State Prize. As a diplomat, he was the only Soviet ambassador to openly condemn the August 1991 coup. Appointed the last Soviet foreign minister, he established diplomatic relations with Israel and launched US-Soviet disarmament talks in his brief tenure before the Union dissolved.

Diplomacy and international organization Hungary state institutions 1932–2013 ○ Illness

Hungarian foreign minister who cut the Iron Curtain, and reform prime minister

On 27 June 1989, Horn and Austrian Foreign Minister Alois Mock took bolt cutters to the barbed-wire fence on the Hungarian-Austrian border, cutting the first hole in the Iron Curtain before the cameras of the world.

A Hungarian reform-communist diplomat who became prime minister after democratization, Horn as foreign minister in June 1989 took bolt cutters to the barbed-wire border fence with Austria alongside Alois Mock, staging the iconic image of the Iron Curtain's demise. He drove the decision to open Hungary's border to East German refugees seeking passage to West Germany, a breach that helped trigger the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification. Leading the Hungarian Socialist Party to a landslide in 1994, he served as prime minister and imposed the Bokros austerity package, laying the framework for Hungary's market-economy transition. His political life embodied the contradictions of 20th-century Hungarian socialism, suspended between his service in the armed militia that crushed the 1956 revolution and his historic 1989 opening of the border.

Diplomacy and international organization United Kingdom state institutions 1932–

From ambassador to Moscow during perestroika to author of Afgantsy, the British diplomat who knew Russia from the inside

'On Christmas Day 1991 we were still wearing our funny hats and eating our mince pies when Mikhail Gorbachev came on television to tell the world that he had resigned as President of the Soviet Union,' recalling the end from Moscow.

British diplomat and author who served as ambassador to the Soviet Union (1988–1991) and then to the Russian Federation (1991–1992), witnessing perestroika, the August 1991 coup, the rise of Yeltsin, and the Soviet collapse from the inside. On close personal terms with Gorbachev, he later served as foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister John Major and chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. His 2011 book Afgantsy, the key revisionist account of the Soviet-Afghan War, argues that the Soviet 40th Army was never defeated on the battlefield and withdrew in good order, challenging the Western 'Soviet Vietnam' narrative and recasting the war as a failure of intelligence and political judgment, not of arms.

Diplomacy and international organization Soviet Union state institutions 1933–

The last regular Soviet foreign minister

In 1988, after testifying on the INF treaty before the Soviet parliament, Bessmertnykh lingered in a Kremlin corridor to chat with an American journalist in easy English about the treaty's political significance — informality unusual for a top Soviet official.

A career diplomat and the first MGIMO graduate to head the Soviet Foreign Ministry, Bessmertnykh succeeded Shevardnadze in January 1991. A seasoned Americanist shaped by thirteen years at the Soviet embassy in Washington, he oversaw the signing of the START I treaty, laid groundwork for the Madrid Middle East peace conference, and became the first Soviet foreign minister to visit Israel. He advanced a 'belt of friendship and cooperation' concept to reorient Soviet diplomacy toward all perimeter states. Refusing to join the GKChP during the August 1991 coup but declining to publicly condemn it, he was dismissed within days. He later founded Russia's Foreign Policy Association and continued as an analyst.

Diplomacy and international organization Austria state institutions 1934–2017 ○ Natural causes

An Austrian Europeanist who helped open the Iron Curtain

On 27 June 1989, Mock and Gyula Horn cut the fence near Sopron, making the border opening visible to the world.

Alois Mock was an Austrian People's Party politician who made European integration a central aim of Austrian foreign policy. As foreign minister, he pursued Hungary's border opening and Austria's entry into the European Communities, helping shape Central Europe's reordering at the end of the Cold War. On 27 June 1989, he and Gyula Horn symbolically cut the border fence, creating an international image of the openings that enabled East German escapes and preceded the collapse of the Eastern bloc.

Diplomacy and international organization United Nations 1935–2014 ○ Sudden death

The Ecuadorian UN envoy who shuttled through six years of Geneva talks to frame the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan

Gorbachev decided to withdraw 'because of perestroika and diplomacy,' he later wrote in his memoir, 'reinforced by military pressure': not because of Stinger missiles alone.

Cordovez was an Ecuadorian diplomat and UN Under-Secretary-General who, as Pérez de Cuéllar's Personal Representative on Afghanistan from 1982, spent six years shuttling between the Pakistani and Afghan delegations in Geneva to broker the accords that framed the Soviet withdrawal. He entered the UN in 1963 as part of Raúl Prebisch's team that founded UNCTAD, rose to head the ECOSOC secretariat, and handled crises from the Iran hostage affair to the Iran-Iraq war. The Geneva Accords were signed on 14 April 1988; Cordovez, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, later served as Ecuador's foreign minister and UN ambassador.

Diplomacy and international organization Soviet Union state institutions 1936–2010 ○ Cancer

Gromyko protégé and arms negotiator remembered for the "Walk in the Woods"

On July 16, 1982, Kvitsinsky and Paul Nitze left the formal Geneva arms talks for an unofficial walk in the woods, sketching a compromise on intermediate-range nuclear forces. Both governments rejected it — but the conversation became Lee Blessing's Broadway play "A Walk in the Woods."

A leading Soviet Germanist and protégé of Andrei Gromyko, Yuli Kvitsinsky served on the front lines of Soviet diplomacy toward the West for over three decades. As head of the Soviet delegation to the Geneva INF negotiations from 1981, his famous "walk in the woods" with American negotiator Paul Nitze in July 1982, an informal attempt to sketch a compromise on intermediate-range nuclear missiles, became an iconic Cold War moment that later inspired a Broadway play. As Ambassador to West Germany (1986–1990), he helped prepare the "Two Plus Four" treaty framework for German reunification, and as First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1991 he oversaw European security affairs. After a post-Soviet hiatus, he returned as Russia's ambassador to Norway (1997–2003) and served as a CPRF deputy in the State Duma until his death.

Diplomacy and international organization Hungary state institutions 1941–

A historian who carried the memory of 1956 into diplomacy

At fifteen, he took part in the 1956 Revolution without a weapon.

Géza Jeszenszky is a historian who experienced the 1956 Revolution and a statesman who helped shape Hungary’s diplomacy during the transition from state socialism. He estimated that about 350 people were executed after the revolution, contributing to public memory of the repression’s scale. As a scholar he wrote on international-relations history and Hungary’s image abroad, while as a founding member of the Hungarian Democratic Forum he pursued new relations with the West.

Diplomacy and international organization Angola state institutions 1934/1929–2010 ○ Died of illness

MPLA diplomat and Angola's second foreign minister, a leading figure of the party's left wing

Angolan chemical engineer, diplomat and politician. While studying in Lisbon he signed the 'Manifesto de 1956', the MPLA's founding document, was monitored by PIDE from 1961, and left Portugal in 1962 to handle the MPLA's diplomacy from Conakry. He served as representative in Egypt and Algeria, representative-general for Congo-Brazzaville and head of the MPLA's information department, then as foreign minister from 1976 to 1984. A leading figure of the party's left wing, he argued in a 1998 interview that top party and state posts should be filled by Marxist-Leninist vanguard criteria rather than ethno-regional demographic weight. He died in Luanda on 26 June 2010 aged 76.