KISSINGER INTRODUCTION - GROMYKO MEMOIRS

9/15/89

Andrei Gromyko served his country for fifty years as ambassador, Deputy Foreign Minister, Foreign Minister and President. His tenure of some thirty years as Foreign Minister - from 1957 to 1985 - is without parallel in any major country in this century. He served every head of the Soviet Communist party since Lenin. Gromyko was relieved of his job by Mikhail Gorbachev whom he had himself nominated for the office of General Secretary of the Communist party of the Soviet Union four years before, saying that his candidate had a pleasant smile but teeth of iron.

-2-

Gromyko died 18 months after leaving office. No major Soviet figure attended his funeral.

Soviet politics are brutal. Leaders emerge from an internecine struggle between chieftains of various factions of the Communist party or from the governing bureaucratic apparatus, the nomenclatura. But these chieftains have no other legitimacy than victories garnered in previous internecine struggles. In the absence of elections or other recognized forms of legitimacy, winners are ever bound to feel the precariousness of their position. They can trust only their personal retainers. Every new rule therefore begins with a purge and ends in stagnation. Until now, the Soviet method of government has been more akin to a feudal regime than to a modern bureaucracy - not to speak of a modern democratic state.

It was a tribute to Gromyko's technical mastery that he rendered himself indispensable through five turn-overs in

-3-

the Soviet leadership. But the price he had to pay for his
indispensability was the rationalization of ambiguity. To
those who were obliged to deal with Gromyko, he appeared
unflappable, almost mechanical, well-prepared and sin-
gle-minded. But the Appendix of these memoirs dealing with
Stalin shows that reality was more complex. Even if one
grants that it was written in the Gorbachev period, the
chapter contains too much detail to represent simply an
opportunistic bow to orthodoxy - all the more so as these
memoirs were written after Gromyko had been deprived of all
offices.

The Appendix recounts not only a staggering statistical
list of atrocities, but gives them concreteness by casting
them as human vignettes over a period of thirty years. They
are, in fact, the prelude to questions that go to the core
of the legitimacy of the Communist system: was there an
objective need for the Soviet Union and its political system

-4-

to develop along the lines chosen by Stalin? How was it
possible to twist the country onto a path of the cult of a
single individual whom nobody had ever invested with that
power?

Gromyko does not answer these questions; he simply
multiplies the tale of monstrosities. But surely posing them
constitutes its own commentary. For, in truth these are
unanswerable challenges. The Communist system, lacking
legitimacy, rewards the most ruthless, those who, uncon-
strained by traditions, legal forms or the need for periodic
elections, emerge with free reign to consolidate their power
essentially arbitrarily. This in fact is the primary chal-
lenge to Soviet reformers.

Gromyko, undoubtedly a devout believer in Marxist
ideology, never resolved the contradiction which he himself
raised. Similarly, Gromyko, a dedicated Russian nationalist,
always left me with the impression that his dogged

-5-

persistence was due at least in part to his desire to obscure the weaknesses of the state he represented. Despite the intransigence of his rhetoric, Gromyko's tendency was to stay far away from anything that might provoke physical confrontation. His top priority was relations with the United States. He gave nothing away; but he seemed also careful to avoid showdowns in so far as he had the discretion to do so.

These dichotomies give an intriguing if ambivalent aspect to Gromyko's memoirs. He quotes a whole series of statements he made to foreign leaders from Popes to Presidents and in each case reports that they met with the approval of his interlocutor. But what he presents himself as saying is so hackneyed and the purported agreement so improbable that Gromyko - a highly intelligent man - is either striking a pose or - possibly - has his tongue in cheek.

-6-

Some events could not have happened as Gromyko describes them. For example, he quotes me as advocating the division of Cyprus into a Greek and Turkish state during a meeting in Cyprus in May 1974. But the meeting concerned Middle East diplomacy entirely. Cyprus was neither on the agenda nor at that time at a crisis point - this is why Nicosia was chosen as the meeting site in the first place. And one would have to be worse than incompetent to raise the issue of partitioning a host country in a meeting room supplied by the alleged victim.

Similarly, someone seems to have softened the transcript concerning Berlin in my last conversation with Gromyko in January 1989, printed in the Appendix. To begin with, it is interesting that any transcript should exist of a meeting held in the Presidential suite of the Kremlin. In any event, I asked about Stalin's aims in the Berlin blockade of 1948, specifically why he ran such risks so soon

-7-

after suffering huge casualties in World War II. I remember
Gromyko saying that Stalin was convinced the United States
would not resort to nuclear war over Berlin (despite our
atomic monopoly), that an attempt to relieve Berlin would
have been resisted, but that Stalin was determined to avoid
a general war. The transcript of this conversation weakens
these points somewhat and gives the Soviet Union credit for
ending the crisis by withdrawing tanks from a confrontation
with American armor. But that event occurred in 1961, eight
years after Stalin's death and at the time of the building
of the Berlin wall. It had nothing to do with the Berlin
blockade.

Still, Gromyko's memoirs convey a very good sense of
the ways Soviet leaders wanted their country to be per-
ceived. They exhibit the various strands dominating Soviet
thinking before Gorbachev, the main elements of which must
still to some extent remain with many of the leaders: the

-8-

belief in objective factors rather than personal relations;
the insistence that Soviet motives are peaceful by defini-
tion; and, a latent inferiority complex masking as trucu-
lence.

Recognizing all these tendencies, I rather liked
Gromyko. We worked closely together for eight years. Often
the butt of heavy-handed joshing by his leaders, he never-
theless dominated the Soviet side of every discussion with
his competence. Normally Gromyko knew every detail of a
subject. It was suicidal to negotiate with him without
mastering the record or the issues. He was extraordinarily
skillful in accumulating marginal points; he cleverly sought
to trade an item which should never have been raised for
something really significant. Mirroring the history of his
country which had expanded from a small area around Moscow
all the way to the Pacific and the center of Europe not by
bold strokes but by relentless pressure, Gromyko relied on

-9-

the impatience of his interlocutors to extract opportuni-
ties. He understood that Western negotiators are uncomfort-
able with deadlocks and will seek to break every stalemate
with new ideas. Against unwary interlocutors this enabled
Gromyko to harvest concessions through protracted stale-
mates. Most likely he needed the stalemates for domestic
reasons as well. For he could not have convinced his suspi-
cious superiors that he had in fact squeezed the lemon dry
without prolonged deadlock.

Gromyko's dour demeanor made it hard to believe that
underneath was a fine if understated sense of humor. I met
him for the first time during the 1969 session of the UN
General Assembly in New York. He walked up to me at a
reception and said, "You look just like Henry Kissinger." I
replied, "And you look a lot like Richard Nixon." He gave me
a wary look and then his face creased with a smile as he
nudged me with his elbow. The next year, I was arranging for

-10-

him to come to the White House to see President Nixon.

Gromyko said: "Don't bother to tell me which gate to use.

I'll pick the gate and the guard is bound to salute."

In his memoirs, Gromyko states that I gave the impres-
sion in my own writings that I had outmaneuvered him. That
was not my intention; it is not my view. Statesmen of major
countries cannot be outmaneuvered, for one meets them over
and over again. Those charged with the responsibility for
conducting or designing foreign policy must never leave the
territory of analysis for that of mere maneuver. They will
be judged in the end not by their cleverness but by their
grasp of reality. And this is why - even with one distortion
- our mellow last conversation in these memoirs reflects the
mutual respect of two men whose duties had made them adver-
saries.

Gromyko was one of the ablest diplomats whom I have
met. He did not embody a great vision or put forward a

-11-

compelling model of a world order. But neither did the
system he represented. As the spokesman of a country that
had never prevailed except by raw power, he felt obliged to
test his mettle in every encounter. But he protected his
country amidst turbulence and confusion; he masked its
weakness by persistence; he acheived important objectives by
his skill. Rare is the Foreign Minister to whom one can pay
such a tribute.

9/14/89

Andrei Gromyko served his country for fifty years as ambassador, Deputy Foreign Minister, Foreign Minister and President. His tenure of some thirty years as Foreign Minister - from 1957 to 1985 - is without parallel in any major country in this century. Having served every head of the Soviet Communist party since Lenin, Gromyko was relieved of his job by Mikhail Gorbachev whom he had himself nominated for the office of General Secretary of the Communist party of the Soviet Union four years before, saying that his candidate had a pleasant smile but teeth of iron.

Soviet politics are brutal. Leaders emerge from an internecine struggle between chieftains of various factions of the Communist party or of the governing bureaucratic apparatus, the nomenclatura. But these chieftains have no other legitimacy than victories garnered in previous internecine struggles. In the absence of elections or other recognized forms of legitimacy, the winners are ever bound to feel the precariousness of their position. They can trust only their personal retainers. Every new rule therefore begins with a purge and ends in stagnation. Until now, the Soviet method of government has been more akin to a feudal regime than to a modern bureaucracy - not to speak of a modern democratic state.