Andrei
Gromyko, the son of peasants, was born
near Minsk in Russia in 1909. After studying
agriculture and economics he became a research scientist at the Soviet
Academy of Science. He later joined the diplomatic service and went
to Washington during the Second
World War.
In 1943
Gromyko was appointed as the Soviet ambassador in the United
States. In this post he attended the conferences in Teheran,
Yalta and Potsdam.
After the war he was made the Soviet permanent delegate to the United
Nations. He also served as ambassador to Britain (1952-53).
Gromyko
became Foreign Minister in 1957. He held the post for 28 years and
during this period was the main Soviet negotiator with the United
States government.
Mikhail
Gorbachev
appointed Gromyko President of the Soviet Union
in 1987. Andrei Gromyko died in 1989.
(1)
George
Brown,
In My Way (1971)
Gromyko was no politician
and I always thought really just another exceedingly able party official.
He, of course, did know the outside world and did not mind letting
his sense of humour show or letting his hair down on occasion. His
capacity to discuss and argue was to me very impressive, but, again,
getting much out of him was a very tough business indeed and in my
time certainly never happened again without the interval and the obvious
line-clearing elsewhere. While I was at the Foreign Office it seemed
to me that Gromyko was growing in importance. His influence seemed
to be becoming stronger and he probably was playing a much bigger
role than before in the apparatus by which decisions were made, and
was becoming much less simply the machine for carrying them out.
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