Yevgeny Maksimovich Primakov

Yevgeny Primakov was born in Kyiv in 1929 and raised by his mother in Tbilisi, Georgia. Trained in Arabic at the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies, he followed the Soviet path of the Middle East expert, where scholar, journalist and intelligence collaborator blurred. As Pravda's Middle East correspondent based in Cairo he learned the Arab world of Nasser's era from the inside, and his network among Arab leaders became a lifelong asset.

Back home he climbed the academic ladder to direct IMEMO and the Institute of Oriental Studies, and became a full member of the Academy of Sciences. His institutes were not purely scholarly bodies but think tanks interpreting the world for party and government, and Primakov was that world's most trusted interpreter.

His realism, trusting the balance of power over ideology and channels over declarations, was forged in those years. When perestroika began, the scholar caught Gorbachev's eye and walked into the centre of politics.

Primakov's Middle Eastern expertise never remained confined to academia. In August 1971, a Politburo decision entrusted him with a secret mission to establish contact with Israel, with which the USSR had severed ties. As deputy director of IMEMO, he traveled to Israel multiple times or met Israeli leaders in Vienna through 1977, operating under cover of his status as a 'public figure.' His interlocutors included Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, and Menachem Begin. With Kremlin approval and backing from KGB chief Andropov and Foreign Minister Gromyko, Primakov proposed Soviet and Western security guarantees in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza, occupied since 1967. The talks foundered on Israeli distrust of external guarantees.

In the 1970s he became the only Soviet representative in regular contact with Kurdish rebel leader Masoud Barzani in northern Iraq, and participated in drafting a peace accord between Baghdad and the Kurds. His proposals (Kurdish autonomy, elected local authorities, representation in government, and an Iraqi vice-presidency for a Kurd) went unimplemented, and armed struggle resumed in 1974.

Immediately after Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Primakov was dispatched to Baghdad as Gorbachev's personal emissary to meet Saddam Hussein. The mission had a dual purpose: freeing roughly 5,000 stranded Soviet specialists and persuading Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. Hussein allowed only 1,500 to leave, but, according to Primakov's report, the Iraqi leadership showed the first signs of grasping its international isolation and hinted at a political solution involving at least partial withdrawal. Primakov then flew to Washington to brief President George H.W. Bush, who made clear that any compromise appearing to reward aggression was unacceptable.

In March 2003, days before the US-led invasion of Iraq, President Putin summoned Primakov to the Kremlin on the night of the 17th and sent him to Baghdad the next morning. Primakov requested a one-on-one meeting with Saddam Hussein and delivered Putin's oral message: 'If you love your country and your people, if you want to spare your people from inevitable sacrifice, you must step down as president of Iraq.' Hussein listened in silence, then asked him to repeat the message in the presence of Vice Premier Tariq Aziz. Afterward, he patted Primakov on the shoulder and walked out. War could not be averted. These three Baghdad missions, spanning from the late Cold War to the dawn of the twenty-first century, illustrate Primakov's singular role as the USSR's and Russia's informal diplomatic channel at the frontline of Middle Eastern crises.

In 1989 Primakov became a candidate Politburo member and chairman of the new parliament's Soviet of the Union. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, he shuttled to Baghdad as Gorbachev's envoy and met Saddam Hussein three times. The mediation, an attempt to pull an old ally out of the war, drew American suspicion and finally failed, but it remains the scene of a collapsing superpower trying independent diplomacy to the last.

In the August 1991 coup he publicly denounced the emergency committee as a member of the Security Council. After its collapse Gorbachev gave him the KGB's foreign intelligence arm, which on the Soviet Union's extinction became Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR. The first scholar to head an intelligence service, he steered it through the upheaval for five years.

Surviving the party hierarchy, the intelligence world and Yeltsin's new order alike, his career showed that loyalty to the state rather than to a camp made him useful to every camp.

As foreign minister from 1996, Primakov changed the grammar of Russian diplomacy. His line, rejecting American unipolarity and urging a Russia-China-India triangle and a multipolar order, came to be called the Primakov doctrine. After the August 1998 default he became prime minister as the one figure both government and opposition could accept, and his cabinet, with the communist-backed Maslyukov as deputy premier, confounded expectations by stabilising the economy.

On 24 March 1999, en route to Washington, his plane received word over the Atlantic that NATO had begun bombing Yugoslavia. He ordered it turned around on the spot and flew back to Moscow. Primakov's loop remains history's most dramatic gesture of post-Cold War Russian protest against the West.

When his ratings began to rival the president's, Yeltsin dismissed him in May 1999, and that autumn the Kremlin's all-out media war broke his presidential bid. The winner was not he but Putin. Yet when he died in 2015, the road Russian foreign policy was walking lay, by any eye, on the map Primakov had drawn.