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 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.