Sergei Fyodorovich Akhromeyev

Sergei Akhromeyev was born in 1923 in a farming village in Mordovia and met the war as a naval cadet. Sent into the defence of Leningrad as an eighteen-year-old naval infantry lieutenant, he passed the harshest months in the trenches before the blockaded city, and stayed at the front even after frostbite ruined his feet. Like many soldiers of that generation, he saw in army and state the very thing his youth had been given to defend.

After the war he transferred to armour and climbed the field and staff ladder step by step: the archetype of the staff officer, far from flamboyant, master of papers and regulations. He entered the General Staff in 1974, headed its Main Operations Directorate, became first deputy chief, and in 1979 was involved in drawing the operational plans for the Afghan intervention. Several records say the General Staff leadership doubted the venture; once the decision was made, he planned it like a soldier.

He was made Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1983 and chief of the General Staff in 1984. In the seat of the army's finest brain, an unexpected role awaited him: to become the general secretary's most important military partner in ending the arms race.

Akhromeyev's most lasting contribution to history was his role in the arms control negotiations that brought the Cold War to a military conclusion. That the man who, as chief of the Main Operations Directorate, had formulated the invasion plan for Afghanistan was easily classified as a hawk. Yet after becoming Chief of the General Staff in 1984, he confounded expectations.

At the Reykjavik Summit in October 1986, Akhromeyev attended as Gorbachev's military deputy and personally presented a series of dramatic concessions: 50 percent cuts in strategic arms, the complete elimination of INF missiles, and a freeze on shorter-range missiles in Europe. Paul Nitze, the American negotiator, called him 'a first-class negotiator.' Though the summit fell short of final agreement over differences on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), Reykjavik laid the foundation for the INF Treaty.

In the following months, Akhromeyev visited Washington multiple times to work through the treaty's details with Secretary of State George Shultz, Admiral William Crowe (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs), and other American counterparts. His matter-of-fact, no-nonsense approach left a deep impression. Crowe later recalled him as 'a communist, a patriot, and a friend, in that order.' A declassified transcript of Akhromeyev's meeting with Nitze at the State Department on December 9, 1987 shows him negotiating article by article: the 50 percent reduction in ICBM throw-weight, bomber counting rules, cruise missile ranges. He also forged compromises on highly technical disputes.

Yet the INF negotiations also produced episodes that worked against Soviet interests. The most notable was the fate of the Soviet 'Oka' missile (SS-23). Its tested range was 400 km, below the treaty's 500 km threshold for elimination, but in April 1987 Foreign Minister Shevardnadze effectively agreed to its destruction during a meeting with Shultz: a concession made, as Akhromeyev lamented in his memoirs, 'almost in passing,' without consulting the Defence Ministry or the General Staff. The General Staff had been preparing a counterproposal to lower the range floor to 400 km, which would have also banned the American 'Lance-2,' but the diplomatic channel's unilateral move foreclosed that option.

Akhromeyev understood arms control not as unilateral surrender but as balanced compromise. He supported the treaties because he believed they reduced the risk of nuclear war while preserving Soviet strategic interests. When Gorbachev shifted after 1988 toward unilateral reductions that disregarded military equilibrium, Akhromeyev resigned in protest. Even after stepping down, as presidential military advisor he publicly stated that 'the army could be used to prevent the country's disintegration,' fighting to preserve what he had sought to protect through negotiation. For the man who helped engineer the military end of the Cold War, his country's peaceful dissolution remained an ending he could not accept.

In April 1987 in Moscow, Foreign Minister Shevardnadze met US Secretary of State George Shultz. Asked whether the USSR agreed to treat the SS-23 as a 'shorter-range missile,' Shevardnadze answered that this would not be a problem and that experts could be asked to work on it. It was effectively a positive answer. The memoir Akhromeyev co-authored records the exchange as the moment the Soviet side took on the elimination of the Oka almost in passing.

That evening the Foreign Ministry held a meeting of experts, but the General Staff was not invited and does not appear in its protocol, contrary to long-standing practice. The next day, in Gorbachev's talks with Shultz, the inclusion of the Oka was treated as settled, with no caveat that the range floor should drop from 500 km to 400 km.

Akhromeyev was called into the Gorbachev-Shultz talk of 23 April only midway. He learned of the decision the following day from newspaper reports, which even listed him as having been present. The military leadership was indignant, but the Foreign Ministry offered no explanations. Akhromeyev recorded the episode as the first serious rift between the military and Shevardnadze.

Before the treaty was signed the military tried to reopen the Oka question, and the attempt was suppressed. Negotiators who criticized the mistake at a Party meeting faced warnings of Party discipline. About a week before the Washington summit the military had to yield, and the internal decision to include the SS-23 in the treaty was formally registered. The Oka was eliminated along with its blueprints and technologies.

The memoir does not present the affair only as a unilateral move by the diplomatic channel. The Defence Ministry had itself, after prolonged pressure, agreed to include the SS-23 as part of an honest bargain: a proposal to ban all missiles in the 400-1000 km band, which would also have blocked the projected US Lance-2 (450-470 km). The tested range of the Oka did not exceed 400 km, so it should not have fallen under the treaty at all. Even so, the USSR destroyed more missile systems than the US (1846 against 846), and because the United States never finally abandoned Lance-2 production, the USSR could not respond in kind without violating the treaty. Akhromeyev's anger over Shevardnadze's handling of the Oka continued into the summer of 1991, when he was preparing a report on the condition of the army. A Russian popular account from the same period calls the Oka's elimination 'Gorbachev's gift' and asserts that the Americans never asked for its destruction, a polemical reading that conflicts in emphasis with the memoir's account of a Defence Ministry bargain.

In December 1988, at the very hour Gorbachev announced the unilateral cut of half a million troops at the UN, Akhromeyev's resignation as chief of the General Staff was made public. The official reason was health; it was read as a soldier's line: negotiation yes, unilateral cuts no. Yet instead of leaving he stayed on as the president's military adviser, a bridge between the army's grievances and the reforms.

In August 1991, on holiday in Sochi, he heard of the coup and returned to Moscow of his own accord to help the emergency committee with its situation analysis; he was neither a member nor summoned. On 24 August, after the coup's collapse, he took his own life in his Kremlin office. His note read: I cannot live while everything I have devoted my life to is collapsing. With it were found a note to his family and a record, calmly written, of the first attempt that had failed. Days after the funeral, grave robbers dug up his grave and stole the marshal's dress uniform, a last insult that showed the bottom of the times.

American officers who had sat across the table remembered the marshal as an honest soldier, and Admiral Crowe, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, publicly expressed his condolences. To historians his death reads beyond personal tragedy, as the obituary of a whole generation of Soviet soldiers who could not separate themselves from their state.