Word: gromykos
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...accord. But the largest obstacle to speedy approval remained the staunch opposition of a group of right-wing Senators led by North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms. One of Helms' more imaginative objections: that Party General Secretary Gorbachev, because he is not head of state (technically, President Andrei Gromyko is), had no right to sign the treaty...
...Andrei Gromyko, the perennial sourpuss of Soviet diplomacy, used to say when reacting to peaceful rhetoric from the West, "One must distinguish between words and deeds." That advice has always applied particularly to the U.S.S.R. Soviet foreign policy has been marked by tactical retreats and no- more-Mr.-Tough-Guy public relations campaigns before. In 1919 Vladimir Lenin cautioned his Foreign Minister, Georgi Chicherin, who was preparing to address an international conference in Genoa, "Never mind the hard language." Lenin pursued conciliatory policies toward Poland and the then independent Baltic states. By the 1940s, those nations had all been brutally...
...most obvious example is the Soviet Union's conduct of its all-important relationship with the U.S., especially in nuclear-arms control. Gromyko had a penchant for saying nyet to American proposals. The new crowd has mastered the politics of da. Gorbachev has spun out a dizzying array of initiatives, and he has agreed to U.S. proposals that Western negotiators thought the Soviets would never accept...
Having dealt with nine U.S. Presidents, from Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan, Gromyko declares that "perhaps the most complex" discussion of his career was with John Kennedy at the White House during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. "Not once in the whole course of the conversation did Kennedy raise the question of the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba," Gromyko asserts. "Consequently, I did not have to answer whether or not there were such weapons in Cuba." Gromyko's favorite President is Roosevelt, but he also expresses admiration for Richard Nixon's studied pragmatism. Gromyko has little to say about...
...Gromyko provides scant detail about the six major Soviet leaders under whom he served. He calls Joseph Stalin a "cruel man" who "created a monstrous ) tyranny," a view consistent with the latest winds of glasnost, but he refuses to condemn Stalin's terror outright. One of the most revealing anecdotes in the book is Gromyko's account of a telephone call he received from Konstantin Chernenko one day in 1985 in which the ailing Soviet leader asked whether he should resign because of ill health. "There's no need to hurry," Gromyko cautioned. Three days later Chernenko was dead...