Moscow’s ‘Mr Nyet’ is a stayer

Press, 15 August 1984, Page 18

Moscow’s ‘Mr Nyet’ is a stayer

From

PETER MILLAR,

in Moscow for Reuter

He has been called “the eternal Foreign Minister” and certainly the Soviet Union’s Andrei Gromyko, now aged 75, has come to be seen as a permanent fixture in a world of transient international politicians. High office in Moscow has often proved hazardous but Mr Gromyko, Foreign Minister for the last 27 years, has displayed staying powers second to none, in itself a tribute to his diplomatic skill. If in the past this has required subordination to whims of difficult masters, Mr Gromyko is today' at the apex of his career with a commanding position in the Kremlin hierarchy and the voice of experienced authority in Soviet foreign policy. His almost unchanging sombre appearance and dour style have become so familiar that diplomats, East and West, can hardly imagine an international conference of note without him.

The hair is greyer but his slight stoop has not become pronounced. The brief lop-sided grin, which medical men say might be the result of a minor stroke, is as much a part of the image as his dark suits and quick wit. Mr Gromyko already holds most of the Kremlin’s top awards. In March, 1983, he was appointed one of three first deputies to Prime Minister Nikolai Tikhonov, aged 79, causing speculation that he might leave the Foreign Ministry, but so far there have been no such indications.

Among a Kremlin leadership which since Nikita Khrushchev has fought shy of the Western press, Mr Gromyko has shown himself ready and able to do verbal battle, ad-libbing replies, in turn witty, caustic, or grave.

Mr Gromyko’s foreign career left him without a party power base and little chance to be a contender for leadership, a fact which may have aided his political longevity. Once when a visiting foreign Minister asked him about a Politburo reshuffle, he shrugged his shoulders and replied: “You know how. it is here, a bit like the Bermuda Triangle. From time to time one of us disappears.” Born in Tsarist Russia, at the village of Groinyki near Minsk, he began his diplomatic career under Stalin and was in succession Foreign Minister for Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, and now President Konstantin Chernenko. .

Mr Gromyko, formerly an ambassador to Washington, helped draft the United Nations charter while Ronald Reagan was still working at his Hollywood career, Margaret Thatcher an Oxford undergraduate, and Mr Chernenko

a party bureaucrat in Moldavia. He soon left his early training in agriculture to study in the United States and was later — at the age of 31 — given a job as head of the Foreign Ministry’s United States Department by Stalin’s Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov. He moved to Russia’s Washington Embassy a year later and was ambassador by 1943, taking part in the conferences at Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam that shaped the postwar world. In 1946 he became Moscow’s first permanent representative to the United Nations. After a brief spell as an ambassador to London he returned to Moscow on Stalin’s death in 1953 as a Deputy Foreign Minister and retained the post until 1957 when Khrushchev ousted Molotov and gave Mr Gromyko the job he has held ever since.

Only last month it was confirmed that Molotov himself, now 94, had been quietly readmitted to the Communist Party after a quarter of a century in the political doghouse. At first, Mr Gromyko appeared little more than a foil for Khrushchev on. foreign trips. He often played the unflinching “straight man” on the receiving end of humiliating jokes.

When Khrushchev was unceremoniously bundled offstage in 1964, Mr Gromyko remained. Closely involved in the events leading to the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, he was also a key architect of the diplomatic “agreement to differ” which constituted the Four-Power accord on the city’s status a decade later. Only in 1973 did Mr Gromyko receive the full accolade of Communist power, a seat on the ruling Politburo.

He worked actively for the policy of detente under Leonid Brezhnev and its culmination in the 1975 Helsinki conference. Those in the West who claim to know Mr Gromyko say he wanted the conference to give international recognition to post-war frontiers, given the impossibility of a peace treaty with a divided Germany. Nevertheless, Mr Gromyko remained throughout a proponent of the Soviet line as implacable and intransigent as when he earned the title of “Mr Veto” after casting 25 “nyets” in the United Nations Security Council during the 19505. The former United States Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, wrote in his memoirs: “Gromyko knew every shade of a subject. It was suicidal to negotiate with him without mastering the record.” The record of issues on which Mr Gromyko has had to know his facts is longer than most: Berlin,

Cuba, Czechoslovakia, the Middle East, Angola, the Congo, China, Afghanistan, Poland, plus weaponry from nuclear ballistic missiles to space weapons. Even in advanced age, Mr Gromyko has often looked in better health than many of his Politburo colleagues. The only physical failing he showed publicly was a collapse during a speech at the United Nations in 1978.

He has since appeared fully recovered and is a notable figure in his grey astrakhan fur hat on Lenin’s mausoleum at Red Square parades. Mr Gromyko has a son and a daughter. His wife, Lydia, is one of the few Kremlin wives'seen regularly in public, at his side at official banquets. A fluent English speaker, Mr Gromyko nonetheless prefers to

conduct talks through an interpreter, giving himself the chance to hear everything twice as often as his opposite number. He readily musters his English for diplomatic small talk. When the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, visited Moscow last month, Mr Gromyko opened their conversation with a few homely remarks about the inclement weather.