People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1929–2007 ○ Natural causes

The arms-control negotiator who secured the INF Treaty and managed the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan

"Over two and a half years we brought the positions so close that we managed to sign a treaty on the complete elimination of the most modern weapons of that time. Thank God I had the chance to participate in that process — I'm very pleased about it." — on the 1987 INF Treaty

A Soviet and Russian diplomat who served as First Deputy Foreign Minister (1986–1990) under Eduard Shevardnadze, anchoring late Cold War Soviet diplomacy. As Ambassador to Afghanistan (1988–1989) during the troop withdrawal, he secured guarantees from mujahideen leaders that they would not fire on departing forces. As chief arms-control negotiator he helped deliver the 1987 INF Treaty eliminating intermediate-range nuclear missiles. His career spanned Chargé d'Affaires in Washington under Anatoly Dobrynin, ambassadorships to India and France, the last Soviet Permanent Representative to the UN, and Russia's first post-Soviet Ambassador to the United States (1994–1998). After retiring from diplomacy he served as UN Under-Secretary-General, coordinating the repatriation of Kuwaiti missing persons and property until his death.

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1949–

The interpreter who mediated summit diplomacy

He recalled interpreting as searching for the threads connecting two languages.

Pavel Palazhchenko is an interpreter and writer whose work documents the decisive conversational spaces of late Soviet diplomacy. As the English interpreter for Mikhail Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze, he took part in the US-Soviet summits at Geneva, Reykjavik, Malta and elsewhere. His memoir records not only leaders’ words but also the working processes of arms-control negotiations and the growth of trust, offering a Soviet-side account of the peaceful end of the Cold War. He later continued as an international-relations analyst and press official at the Gorbachev Foundation.