Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko

Andrei Gromyko was born in 1909 in the village of Starye Gromyki in Belarus, a peasant's son. He studied economics and was headed for a researcher's life until the Great Terror changed his fate: when the purges swept away the senior ranks of the foreign affairs commissariat in the late 1930s, young party members of worker and peasant stock were promoted wholesale into the vacancies, Gromyko among them. Entering diplomacy in 1939, he was ambassador to the United States four years later, at thirty-four.

He took part in the working preparation of Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam, and signed the founding documents of the United Nations at Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco; at the conferences that designed the postwar order he sat from beginning to end. He went on to be the first Soviet representative on the Security Council, ambassador in London, deputy minister, and from 1957 foreign minister, a post he held for twenty-eight years.

That career, serving nine leaders from Stalin to Gorbachev, was the very continuity of Soviet diplomacy. His remark to a negotiating partner became famous: behind you stand a few years of an administration; behind me stand decades of a state.

Andrei Gromyko's diplomatic career began with the founding of the United Nations. In August 1944, at just 35, the Soviet ambassador led the USSR delegation at the Dumbarton Oaks conference in Washington, where the UN Charter was drafted: a young man sitting as an equal with elder statesmen from the United States and Britain. At Yalta in February 1945, he helped secure the great-power veto structure of the Security Council, and at the San Francisco Conference (April–June 1945) he signed the UN Charter on behalf of the Soviet Union. In 1946, Gromyko was appointed the first Soviet Permanent Representative to the UN, serving on the Security Council until 1948. During this period, he wielded the veto more than twenty times in defence of Soviet interests, and this immovable style became the practical origin of his later nickname, 'Mister Nyet.' As one diplomatic historian put it: 'Gromyko was both an architect of the United Nations and the man who turned it into the front line of Soviet diplomacy.'

Andrei Gromyko served as Soviet Foreign Minister for 28 years (1957-1985), the face and voice of Soviet diplomacy throughout the Cold War. Western diplomats nicknamed him 'Mister Nyet' for his immovable obstinacy at the negotiating table. His career traversed the USSR's entire rise to superpower status: the founding of the UN (1945), the secret backchannel of the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the détente-era arms control treaties (SALT I & II, ABM Treaty), and the diplomatic justification of the 1979 Afghan intervention. Yet his final political act was ironic: in March 1985, as the doyen of the conservative old guard, he rose to nominate Gorbachev as General Secretary: 'This man has a nice smile, but teeth of iron.'

On 18 October 1962, when Kennedy received Gromyko and Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in the Oval Office, 42 Soviet R-12 (SS-4) missiles including nuclear warheads and a 40,000-strong Soviet brigade were already in Cuba and launch-site assembly was under way. The Americans were preparing a mass invasion. In his memoirs Gromyko called this the hardest negotiation of his diplomatic career. Moscow had agreed with Khrushchev word for word on the reply to give if Kennedy asked directly about the missiles, but Kennedy never used the word 'missiles' and never produced the photographs in his desk drawer; Gromyko judged that this eased his position. He had earlier received the deployment without enthusiasm, expecting it to cause a political explosion in the United States.

The records of what Gromyko knew do not agree. In Secretary of State Dean Rusk's version, Kennedy gave Gromyko an opportunity to confess, answered with such an amount of brazen lying as Rusk had never heard. Feklisov's account has the Foreign Ministry and Gromyko deliberately kept uninformed of the operation, so that he could not give Kennedy truthful information, while Dobrynin's says Gromyko knew of the deployment but chose not to inform the Soviet ambassador. Official data say only that he contributed to the settlement of the crisis. Its decisive stage ran outside the official channel, through the KGB back-channel between Robert Kennedy and John Scali and between Feklisov and Sakharovsky, and on Gromyko's instruction Dobrynin also demanded the additional, non-public removal of US bases from Turkey. Under the agreements approved by Khrushchev and Kennedy by 28 October 1962 the missiles were withdrawn immediately and the Turkish bases were quietly closed in early 1963.

The constructive side of the same negotiations is recorded separately. Gromyko personally drove and signed the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty, the 1972 ABM Treaty and SALT I, the 1973 Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War, SALT II (1979) and the 1975 Helsinki Final Act; from 1946 he had proposed general arms reduction and a ban on the military use of atomic energy, and on the government's behalf he put forward more than a hundred disarmament initiatives. In the NPT talks, opened by his meetings with President Johnson and Rusk in New York and Washington in 1966, a clause banning any transfer of nuclear weapons or control over them to anyone was agreed directly between Rusk and Gromyko, and he considered his signature on this document his second most important, after the UN Charter. On the 1970 Moscow Treaty he worked through the text article by article to pin down inviolability against the German wording and blocked Egon Bahr's attempt to add that the treaty was not a peace treaty and did not close the path to German reunification; it was signed in the Kremlin on 12 August 1970 by Kosygin and Gromyko for the USSR and Brandt and Scheel for the FRG. In 1966 he and Kosygin mediated between India and Pakistan before the Tashkent agreement; from 1965 he was the first senior Soviet figure to meet a pope, Paul VI; and in 1973-74 he was one of the initiators of the Geneva Middle East conference.

The verdict is kept balanced. The Russian-language material notes that his role in the Cuban crisis is the subject of scholarly-historical debate and that he was a supporter of peaceful Soviet relations with the US and NATO states. It also records that he supported the 1968 entry into Czechoslovakia and shared political responsibility for the 1979 decision on Afghanistan. Some critics found that his exceptional memory and self-confidence made him inflexible, unimaginative and devoid of a long-term vision, while others credited his memory, intellect and endurance.

On 11 March 1985, the day the Politburo chose Chernenko's successor, it was the doyen Gromyko who set the meeting's course. He rose before anyone else to nominate Gorbachev, and before the elder's endorsement the other contenders held their tongues. The judgement he is said to have passed on Gorbachev, a nice smile, but teeth of iron, became the most famous line of the succession drama. Later memoirs show the endorsement was a bargain arranged in advance: through his son Anatoly, Gromyko had been promised an honourable exit.

As promised, that July he handed the foreign ministry to Shevardnadze and became chairman of the Supreme Soviet Presidium, the ceremonial head of state. In silence he watched the New Thinking dismantle the line he had spent a lifetime building. When Gorbachev decided in the autumn of 1988 to take even that post himself, Gromyko retired; he died the following July.

Verdicts on his record divide: the Cold War professional who managed the nuclear age's crises through negotiation, or the name that stands for the rigid diplomacy of the stagnation years. What is certain is that his last political act underwrote the accession of the man who would transform, and finally dissolve, the Soviet Union.