Andrei Gromyko

Soviet diplomat and statesman who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR from 1957 to 1985 and as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR from 1985 to 1988, holding a Doctor of Economics degree earned in 1956. In 1944 he was appointed USSR Ambassador to the United States and led the Soviet delegation at the International Conference at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, USA, concerning the creation of the United Nations. He participated in the preparation of the Tehran conference, the Yalta conference, the Crimea conference in 1945, and the Potsdam conference in 1945. In the same year he headed a delegation that signed the UN Charter on behalf of the USSR at the San Francisco conference. Gromyko was a member of, and later head of, Soviet delegations to twenty‑two sessions of the UN General Assembly. From the late 1940s onward he exercised the Soviet veto in the UN Security Council more than twenty times, earning the nickname “Mister No” in diplomatic circles and the press. As a proponent of peaceful relations between the USSR, the United States and their NATO partners, he proposed over one hundred disarmament initiatives; his role during the Cuban Missile Crisis remains a subject of scholarly discussion. He advanced the initiative for a Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in Three Environments (1963) and, in January 1966 together with A. N. Kosygin, conducted negotiations that averted war between India and Pakistan. His participation extended to the Non‑Proliferation Treaty (1968), the Moscow Treaty with the Federal Republic of Germany (1970), the ABM Limitation Treaty (1972), the Principles of Relations treaty between the USSR and the United States (1972), the Prevention of Nuclear War treaty (1973), the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties of 1972 and 1979, and the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (1975). In 1968 he supported the deployment of Warsaw Pact troops to Czechoslovakia and the suppression of the Prague Spring; in 1979 he belonged to a small group of senior leaders that decided to send Soviet forces into Afghanistan. He was among the closest associates of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and held the top diplomatic post for twenty‑eight years, a record for both the USSR and the Russian Federation. In March 1985, at a Politburo meeting of the CPSU Central Committee in Moscow, he nominated Mikhail Gorbachev for the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He concluded his political career in 1988 as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the formal head of state. His diplomatic motto was “Better ten years of negotiations than one day of war.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov described him as a great diplomat of the Soviet era.