The Apparatchik's Lament

A reader of Anatoly Dobrynin's important memoir is likely to be struck by a sense of having seen all this somewhere before. Colored throughout by nostalgia for a great but vanished empire, it is written in a conversational now-this-can-be-revealed tone, containing large dollops of court gossip, intrigue, and wistfulness about the author's loss of high position. It suggests that things could have turned out much better had it not been for incompetence and even betrayal in high places. Then it dawns on you. Although Dobrynin, a long-time diplomat and ambassador, was a loyal servant of the communist regime throughout his career, his book reads for all the world as though it were written by a tsarist functionary in the wake of the 1917 revolutionary cataclysm.

As with many memoirs in this genre, Dobrynin's is a fascinating read; it will also be an essential source for historians trying to come to terms with the late Soviet period. Ultimately, however, Dobrynin gives little insight into fundamental questions. He certainly provides useful new information about such things as Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty negotiations and the fate of détente. But relying solely on his account would leave one wondering why the formidable Soviet empire, whose power and status until recently seemed to be a permanent fixture of the international scene, proved so brittle and crumbled so suddenly and completely. Like his tsarist predecessors, Dobrynin is at a loss to explain how everything he thought permanent could prove to be so ephemeral.

A MISTRUST OF CONVICTION

Dobrynin was an outstanding product of the second generation of Soviet diplomats, as was his longtime boss, Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko. The first generation had been composed of old revolutionaries, cosmopolitans whose experience of the world predated the Soviet period. They were a linguistically talented, heterogeneous lot whose broad knowledge of the non?Stalinist world, far from making them an asset to the great dictator's diplomacy as one might think, doomed them to the concentration camp or the bullet. They were too independent for Stalin's taste. Dobrynin's class, which stepped into the not?yet?cold shoes of this vanished group, was selected precisely to be a new breed--not self?important experts but obedient executors of a rigidly centralized foreign policy. Caution was, and would remain, the hallmark of this post?purge class. They would serve the system faithfully, simultaneously advancing their careers, but unlike their predecessors they were not true believers. A consistent theme of Dobrynin's account is that, throughout his career, he was most uncomfortable dealing with people, Soviet or foreign, who held strong personal beliefs. They contradicted his survivor's ethic.

Dobrynin was an aircraft engineer in 1944 and was less than delighted when informed he had been selected for the foreign service. Like Gromyko, who was an agronomist and had been drawn into diplomacy six years earlier, Dobrynin had no prior knowledge of foreign affairs or indeed foreign languages. He gives a wry account of his hasty training, which consisted of a combination of rushed language instruction and drilling by a Soviet Miss Manners. He reveals that, obsessive Soviet secrecy being what it was, diplomatic trainees were not cleared to read foreign "bourgeois" newspapers. Instead, he had to polish his English skills with such masters of prose as the communist Daily Worker. Apparently the object of the training was to create a class of diplomats who could deliver Moscow's notes competently without the embarrassment of proletarian etiquette.

The bulk of the memoir deals with Dobrynin's long tenure as ambassador to the United States, from 1962 to 1986. His chapters correspond to changes in American presidential administrations and the issues at stake. Here it is interesting to read observations of Washington's leadership by an acute, if hostile, observer. Dobrynin provides pen portraits that teach very little beyond demonstrating that the view from the Soviet embassy concurred with received wisdom. Thus, Robert Kennedy was emotional and difficult; Lyndon Johnson personalized the Vietnam War and became obsessed with it; Henry Kissinger was clever and able but overly fond of diplomatic intrigue; Jimmy Carter was "erratic" and suffered from "emotional instability"; Alexander Haig "was a typical bully." Dobrynin is less certain what to make of Ronald Reagan; he was the sort of conviction politician that made Dobrynin uncomfortable. The president's anticommunism was "not just some political pose," and Dobrynin's ambivalent portrait of Reagan is one of the work's more interesting features.

It is less pleasant to read how during election years presidential candidates and their minions from both parties routinely courted Moscow's favor, often assuring Dobrynin, as Lyndon B. Johnson did in 1964, that anti?Soviet campaign rhetoric "would in no way signify any change in Johnson's position toward the Soviet Union." Two decades later, Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill warned Dobrynin that Ronald Reagan's reelection would be catastrophic: "Reagan will give vent to his primitive instincts . . . probably put us on the verge of a major armed conflict. He is a dangerous man."

SOVIET SENILITY