A Diplomat for All Seasons

By George Russell

At 74, he displays greater vitality than most of his Kremlin colleagues. His hair is slate gray but abundant. His shoulders are only slightly stooped, and he walks without a shuffle. His dour, dark-eyed face has been etched over the decades with downturning lines, but it is still capable of all the familiar flashes of emotion: the rare, stray wisp of a smile, the characteristic sag of one side of his thin mouth to denote disapproval, the sudden contortions of carefully thoughtout anger. However he has changed over the years, Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko has also remained the same: the enduring personification of the ultimate Soviet diplomat.

The durability of that image is a tribute to Gromyko's formidable skills.

After 45 years in the foreign service, 27 as Foreign Minister and nearly eleven in the Politburo, Gromyko is at the height of his power. Long respected and reviled as the Soviet Union's most dutiful diplomatic technician, he has become not only the custodian of Moscow's foreign policy but probably its chief architect.

Not since France's Prince de Talleyrand, who survived the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte and the restored Bourbon monarchy, has a statesman pursued his craft with such success under so many different masters. Gromyko has served the Soviet state through all of its tortuous transformations, from Stalinist despotism to the vicissitudes of the Andropov and Chernenko years. He has dealt with nine U.S. Presidents, starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt, and 14 Secretaries of State. Says a diplomat who meets often with Gromyko: "He remembers not because he read a brief or a book, but as often as not because he was there in person."

Along the way, the man who once declared that "my personality does not interest me" has picked up a host of nicknames appropriate to his many roles. For his dour countenance he came to be known as Grim Grom; for his ability to conceal his mood, Washington diplomats began in the 1940s to call him Old Stone Face. The sobriquet, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote in his memoirs, "accurately described an impenetrable mask which may well have contributed to his amazing and unique record of survival."

The compliments are almost universal. Former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance has called Gromyko "a thoroughly professional practitioner of the diplomatic trade, a man of great skill and high intelligence." "I must say I am filled with admiration," says a Western ambassador who recently was face to face with Gromyko. "Here is a man of nearly 75 who is taking very good care of himself. And when he speaks, his mind is quick and he is a master of detail."

Above all, Gromyko is recognized as an indestructible practitioner of Realpolitik. Says a West German diplomat: "He knows the long-term objectives of Soviet policy as no other human, and he sees things in that light."

Gromyko is unique in the Politburo in that he has no dominant political base among the key institutions of the Soviet state, such as the military, the KGB or the Communist Party. His rise is the product of decades of unswerving political loyalty to whoever was wielding power, combined with his accumulated expertise: no one in the Kremlin knows the West better. Through a kind of bureaucratic osmosis, Gromyko has come to personify the basic attributes of Soviet foreign policy, from its caution to its doggedness--and now, its anger and frustration.

Born in 1909 to a well-to-do peasant family in the Byelorussian village of Starye Gromyki (the family name derives from the settlement), he worked on the family farm and attended local schools until the age of 17. He then progressed rapidly from an agricultural institute in Minsk to the Moscow Research Institute for Agricultural Economics. Gromyko joined the Communist Party in 1931 and five years later wrote a thesis on the mechanization of U.S. agriculture. Eventually, he joined the editorial board of the leading Soviet economic review.

Westerners who express surprise at Gromyko's strident tone forget that he is a summa cum laude graduate of the Stalin school of foreign policy. Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov recruited him in 1939 and less than a year later sent him to the Soviet embassy in Washington as a counselor. At 34, he became Ambassador to the U.S. Gromyko's aloof manner and late-night working habits quickly earned him the title "the oldest young man in the capital." During his three-year stint, he helped to draft the United Nations Charter at Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco, and assisted at the epic Yalta and Potsdam summit conferences.

As the cold war began, Gromyko became Moscow's permanent representative to the U.N. Security Council. In the course of his two-year term, the Soviet Union cast 26 vetoes; Gromyko became notorious for his staged walkouts. He returned to Moscow in 1948 to become First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, and nine years later Nikita Khrushchev made him Foreign Minister. Gromyko has been personally involved in every major East-West crisis, from Berlin to the Congo to Angola, Viet Nam and the Middle East. Many Americans may remember him best for his performance during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when he asserted that the Soviet Union had installed no missiles in Cuba.

Gromyko's talent for fulfilling the wishes of his leaders, whatever they may be, is legendary. Khrushchev once boasted to Charles de Gaulle that if Gromyko were ordered to drop his trousers and sit on a block of ice "for months," he would do so. As former Secretary of State Alexander Haig wrote in his memoirs: "When ... he makes an ideological statement or engages in a fit of temper, it is safe to assume that he does so on instructions from Moscow or for tactical reasons." That is exactly the attribute, however, that may have changed in the past few months.

Among Gromyko's crowning achievements is the negotiation of the SALT I and SALT II arms-control treaties; in 1973, after the signing of SALT I, he was promoted to the Politburo. In the years of talks that went into the drafting of those documents, Gromyko demonstrated not only his prodigious memory but a virtually unlimited capacity for detail. Says Jean Franc,ois-Poncet, who as French Foreign Minister from 1978 to 1981 met repeatedly with his Soviet counterpart: "Gromyko never took a note, never looked at a folder or turned to his assistants for advice." In recent years Gromyko has shown his adaptability by mastering that most Western of rituals, the televised press conference. Unlike his reclusive Politburo colleagues, Gromyko can display pugnacious self-confidence in responding to the impromptu questions of foreign newsmen. He did just that on April 2, 1983, in Moscow, rejecting the U.S. position on intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe during a live broadcast that was carried to the U.S. by the Cable News Network.

Schooled in the unforgiving world of Kremlin politics, Gromyko has a merciless ability to exploit any sign of human weakness in an opponent. Says a U.S. analyst: "It would be difficult to argue with him during meetings of the Politburo. The older members would know better, while the younger ones would risk getting cut off at the knees."

Gromyko has impressed his Western interlocutors as a well-read and cultured man. Says former President Jimmy Carter, "During private lunches and banquets he seemed like a different man. He spoke English fluently, he obviously had a sense of humor, and he was familiar with American ways. He was a delightful dinner companion." Gromyko likes to play chess with his wife Lidiya, but his favorite outdoor activity is boar hunting. According to Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former Kissinger aide who has spent dozens of hours in talks with Gromyko, he is a great admirer of Prince Alexander Mikhailovich Gorchakov, Russia's Foreign Minister from 1856 to 1882, who skillfully rebuilt his country's power after the humiliating loss of the Crimean War.

Gromyko lives the kind of protected and privileged life that other Politburo members enjoy. He and his wife dwell in a modern apartment block built for ranking officials on Shchuseva Street in downtown Moscow. Gromyko is driven to work at the dark granite Foreign Ministry every day in a black ZIL limousine. He has two children, Anatoli and Emiliya; Son Anatoli is director of African studies at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Gromyko's most notable extravagance is his wardrobe: he wears expensive, well-tailored suits that draw envious stares even from other high Soviet officials.

Behind his dutiful fac,ade there lurks, without question, a Kremlin-size ego. An American who knows the Kremlin describes Gromyko tersely:

"He is a man with long memory, great skill, a not particularly generous spirit."

Gromyko, he says, is still "smarting from various slights or assumed slights" administered by the U.S. Says another U.S. expert: "That embitterment has given him a sharpness and has affected his judgment."

But perhaps the sharp edges have long been there. Former British Prime Minister Lord Home likes to tell the story of how Mrs. Gromyko once warned him that "if you buy a gun for my son, buy a better one than you buy for my husband, because my son lets the ducks rise off the water." The point is clear: sitting ducks can expect no mercy from the durable diplomat.

--By George Russell.

Reported by Erik Amfitheatrof/Moscow, with other bureaus

With reporting by Erik Amfitheatrof/Moscow, with other bureaus