Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan

In the summer of 1936, Anastas Mikoyan toured the United States for two months. As People's Commissar for Food Industry, he scoured canning plants, frozen food lines, vending machines, and hamburger production from New York to Chicago to Detroit. He brought back mass ice-cream production technology and frozen patty methods to the USSR.

The trip introduced to Soviet life: ice-cream factories, the Soviet version of Coca-Cola, hamburgers (then called 'Mikoyan cutlets'), and frozen foods. Mikoyan revolutionised the Soviet table, by learning from capitalist consumer culture.

Mikoyan's political survival is legendary. From Lenin to Brezhnev, he outlasted everyone. He was Stalin's close confidant, yet opposed the 1956 Hungarian crackdown and served as Khrushchev's backchannel to Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. His secret: adaptability, and a pragmatism that always produced what was needed.

The Soviet government welcomed Batista's overthrow by Castro's rebels in the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Seeing the potential of a Soviet ally in the Caribbean, Khrushchev dispatched Mikoyan, one of the top Soviet diplomats in Latin America. Apart from Soviet intelligence officers, he was the first Soviet official to visit Cuba after the revolution, and he secured important trade agreements with the new government. While preparing Khrushchev's visit to Cuba in 1959 he also traveled to the United States and negotiated with Fidel Castro on establishing Soviet-Cuban relations. The leaders of the Cuban Revolution impressed him; of Castro he said, "Yes, he is a revolutionary. Just like us. I felt as though I had returned to the days of my youth." He admitted that negotiating with Che Guevara could be difficult, joking that Guevara "lived up to the name Che, because che means no in Armenian", and he left Cuba with very positive impressions, saying the atmosphere made him feel "as though I had returned to my childhood".

Mikoyan was also the first person Khrushchev told of his idea of defending the Cuban revolution by placing a powerful Soviet troop grouping with nuclear weapons on the island. In May 1962 he was the only Presidium member who personally told Khrushchev and the Presidium that he disagreed with the secret delivery of nuclear weapons to Cuba; his position found no support. From his 1936 and 1959 trips to America he knew the US political system and understood that the reaction to nuclear missiles delivered secretly near the United States could be very harsh.

Even after the Kennedy-Khrushchev exchange of 28 October 1962 the crisis was far from over, for the Soviet group on Cuba included some 100 tactical nuclear weapons intended to repel a US landing. This ultra-secret and ultra-delicate mission was entrusted to Mikoyan, who had opened Cuba to the USSR and built unusually trusting relations with the whole Cuban leadership. On the first day of his stay his wife Ashkhen died in Moscow; rather than return for the funeral he stayed and sent his son Sergo instead before beginning negotiations with Castro. Over three weeks he persuaded Fidel and Raul Castro, Che Guevara and other Cuban leaders of the reasonableness of Khrushchev's decision. Castro was adamant the missiles remain; Mikoyan, seeking to avoid a full confrontation with Washington, argued otherwise. After several tense weeks Castro relented and the missiles and Il-28 bombers were removed in December of that year.

The irony was that Mikoyan had to defend before the Cubans, the Americans and the Soviet military on Cuba decisions he had disagreed with from the start. It is to his judgment that the withdrawal of the tactical weapons from Cuba is owed, rather than their being left as the original plan envisaged; the decision not to hand tactical nuclear weapons to allies became a precedent, and the USSR never subsequently transferred nuclear weapons to other countries.

In the summer of 1936, Anastas Mikoyan toured the United States for two months. As People's Commissar for Food Industry, he scoured canning plants, frozen food lines, vending machines, and hamburger production from New York to Chicago to Detroit. He brought back mass ice-cream production technology and frozen patty methods to the USSR.

The trip introduced to Soviet life: ice-cream factories, the Soviet version of Coca-Cola, hamburgers (then called 'Mikoyan cutlets'), and frozen foods. Mikoyan revolutionised the Soviet table, by learning from capitalist consumer culture.

Mikoyan's political survival is legendary. From Lenin to Brezhnev, he outlasted everyone. He was Stalin's close confidant, yet opposed the 1956 Hungarian crackdown and served as Khrushchev's backchannel to Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. His secret: adaptability, and a pragmatism that always produced what was needed.