Andrei Gromyko, the great survivor

Press, 5 October 1984, Page 17

Andrei Gromyko, the great survivor

Andrei Gromyko well deserves to be known as the great survivor. He has seen many heads fall by the wayside in the more than 40 years he has served the Soviet Union. MARK FRANKLAND has sent this profile from Moscow.

He has been on public display more than any other Soviet leader. He has met a whole generation of world statesmen, talked with eight American presidents, and travelled round most of the world. Yet Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko, Soviet Foreign Minister for more than a quarter century, has taken on the colours of the policy he executes. Patient, cautious, and unrelaxing, he is not a man to reveal the cards in his own or his Government’s hand.

His meeting on September 28 with President Reagan was taxing even for this vastly experienced man, and not just because it was his first with the American who has so irritated and puzzled the Russians. It was also to be the first meeting with an American president in which Mr Gromyko himself was a maker of Soviet strategy, not just its executant. Under Stalin, Khruschev, and even Brezhnev, who in 1973 elevated him to full membership of the Politburo, Mr Gromyko was a diplomat, not a policymaker. There is little doubt that Yuri Andropov, five years younger than Mr Gromyko and his equal in Politburo seniority, was the mastermind of Soviet strategy while he lived. But the indifferent health and limited foreign policy experience of Konstantin Chernenko has given Mr Gromyko his chance to step into the centre of the stage. Mr Gromyko was born on July 18, 1909, near Gomel in Byelorus-

sia. Although he once said to a group of Americans of Byelorussian origin “Meet the Byelorussian who made good,” his passport has always given his nationality as Russian.

His parents were poor but supported him in what he later called his “irrepressible passion for study.” He showed a knack for economics, which in 1936 won him a place as a senior scientific associate in the prestigious Institute of . Economics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Mr Gromyko has maintained an active interest in the subject, finding the time to write several books on capitalism, the most recent appearing in 1982. It is a useful reminder that this is a man whose Marxism-Leninism is a matter of intellectual conviction.

Stalin changed his career, as he did for so many men of Mr Gromyko’s generation. A purged foreign service, placed in the reliable hands of Molotov, needed diplomats of a new, Stalinist mould. Mr Gromyko was summoned before a commission on which Molotov himself sat. In the

spring of 1939, aged only 29, he entered the Foreign Service as head of the American Department of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs.

It is now fashionable to talk of Moscow’s school of skilled young Americanologists. Mr Gromyko was an American specialist before many of them were born. He spent nine years there, as counsellor, ambassador (from 1943 to 1946), and as Soviet representative at the United Nations.

It was a fine schooling for a man whose main job has been the management of Soviet relations with the West. He is the only participant in the war-time conferences of Yalta and Potsdam who remains on the job. The peculiarities of the Soviet system meant that Mr Gromyko, appointed First Deputy Foreign Minister in 1949 and Minister in 1957, did not have to concern himself much with large parts of the world. The Soviet bloc was and remains the business chiefly of the party central committee. And in foreign strategy in general the Foreign Ministry has had less status than the party Central Committee’s

International Department, which has been headed for some 20 years by Boris Pon'omaryou. Mr Gromyko’s talent as diplomat and negotiator, recognised by his Politburo appoihtment, has now given him superiority over the 79-year-old, conservative Mr Ponomaryou. But his style was born in service to Soviet leaders who have all had a talent for bullying. He was indispensible. Khrushchev called him “our encyclopedia” but he had to know his place. Although he later recalled that he was probably the only Soviet ambassador to ignore advice from Stalin (the dictator had advised Mr Gromyko to attend church services

in Washington to polish his English) his career depended on obedience and competence. One without the other would not have been enough. Even with Brezhnev, who liked to be liked by the men around him, Mr Gromyko kept his head down. The Kissinger memoirs describe Gromyko smiling as Brezhnev made jokes at his expense. “Only his eyes remained wary and slightly melancholy, like those of a beagle who has endured the inexClicable follies of his master yet ent them to his will.” It was worse with Khruschev. On a hot summer day in Montenegro in 1963 he made Mr Gromyko,

dressed as usual in dark suit and tie, join in a Yugoslav peasant dance and grinned at his discomfort.

It is not surprising that Mr Gromyko has never much revealed himself to his Western colleagues. Dean Acheson saw in the young Gromyko of Washington days “gaucheness ... relieved by a grim sardonic humour.” An American who heard him describe in 1943 the fate of his family in Byelorussia — two brothers died in the war — noted that “tears came into the Russian’s eyes.” Germany remains a subject that can provoke rare flashes of emotion even in the mature Gromyko.

He is fond of hunting, goose and bear in particular. Alec DouglasHome gave him a shooting stick, bag, and drinking flask as a farewell present but Mr Gromyko turned down an offer to shoot grouse when he learned the moor was privately owned. He is a fastidious eater, exercises each morning, does not smoke and rarely drinks. The latter, alone, would have marked him out from most of Khruschev’s and Brezhnev’s cronies.

The impressive physical condition and head of closely-cut black hair long ago prompted a joke sign-off in the British Foreign Office — “Yours till Gromyko turns grey.” But he has had trouble with insomnia and was once taken ill at the United Nations.

His resilience may owe much to his wife, Lidiya, who insists that they live in a dacha outside Moscow. Bright and sometimes outspoken, she’s charmed many Westerners. It seems a very successful marriage. Both children — the son is head of Moscow’s Africa Institute — have done well.

Although Kissinger’s verdict was that “final greatness eluded him,” Mr Gromyko is a giant among today’s foreign ministers and a terror to those short on experience and skill. He is above all a man who makes few mistakes. Whether all this has been enough for his meeting with President Reagan at the moment of impasse in United States-Soviet relations remains to be seen. Mr Gromyko has more chance than ever before in his life to make policy. He is no longer just carrying out what more boisterous and politically far more powerfully-based leaders have laid down.

We do not yet know if he has the temperament or the power in Moscow to try his hand at creative statemams'hip. Copyright — London Observer Service.