‘Ten years of negotiations are better than one day of war’

On July 18th, our legendary countryman Andrei Gromyko would have turned 115 years old

Andrei Gromyko, Minister of Foreign
Affairs of the USSR

He became a legend, and his name is mentioned among the greatest diplomats of all time. He was the man, thanks to whose efforts the Cold War never turned into the third world war. The international influence of the USSR under him reached its peak. He is also the highest-ranking Byelorussian of the Soviet era, and looking ahead, this is not about his position of Minister of Foreign Affairs. Yes, all of this refers to Andrei Gromyko. He would have turned 115 on July 18th.

Real Poleshuk

The author of these lines happened to visit Staryye Gromyki [Gomel Region] — the village where the future chief Soviet diplomat was born. It is the Chernobyl zone now. That place strikes with an amazing silence, and only birds chirp and twitter tirelessly around. The wooden peasant houses have sunk into the ground and are overgrown with moss. However, the graves are clean, well-groomed, with white rooshniks [Belarusian traditional embroidered towels] on the crosses. In this regard, we can recall the first riddle of Andrei Gromyko: who is he by nationality? The fact is that different information has been preserved. Some documents list him as Russian, others — as Byelorussian. According to legend, Joseph Stalin once called him ‘a stubborn khokhol’ [ethnic nickname for Ukrainians]. Andrei Gromyko himself, in his memoirs, thoroughly analysed the history of his native places, focusing on Old Believer traditions. It turns out that he was a real Poleshuk [nickname given to a person living in Polesie, Gomel Region] both by origin and by nature. Poleshuki seems to have absorbed the features of all the East Slavic nations while remaining an authentic ethnographic group.

In any case, Gromyko spent the first 25 years of his life, when a human personality is formed, on Byelorussian land, where he received an education and joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at a fairly young age of 22 years old. He married a Byelorussian girl, Lidiya Grinevich, and the first child of the Gromyko family was born in Borisov. According to eyewitnesses, Andrei Gromyko, like his wife, retained a recognisable Byelorussian accent. Here is how Andrei Gromyko described the influence of his native places in his book Memoirs,

“A sense of patriotism is born literally from the beginning of life. It encompasses the attraction to the house where you were born and uttered the first word, the devotion to your city, town, village, which will forever remain in your memory, the hills and rivers next to which you grew up. All this together is love for the Motherland.”

Andrei Gromyko signs the United Nations Charter on behalf of the Soviet Union. San Francisco, June 26th, 1945

From conferences ‘on the front porch’ to the UN

The fact that a native of a small village in Polesie managed to become a diplomat and then rise to the political Olympus is just no mystery. The Soviet government, especially in the first decades of its existence, gave such a chance. Many children of illiterate odd-job workers and peasants became marshals and generals, party leaders and academicians. However, it is still not completely clear how Gromyko managed to master the English language so quickly and almost perfectly, and how his fate turned out to be connected with work in the United States.

In 1934, a young graduate student from Minsk was transferred to Moscow, where he defended his thesis on a somewhat unexpected topic about the development of agriculture in the United States.

Andrei Gromyko and his spouse

At the same time, learning English was surprisingly easy for him. This can be explained by the phenomenal memory that Gromyko retained until the last years of his life. Yet, some researchers suggest that his father, Andrei Matveyevich, had managed to go to Canada to work before his son was born, and returned home due to an injury he got there. In general, the case was not uncommon in the early twentieth century, but there is no evidence of that. It is known, though, that his father had a great impact on the future prominent diplomat. Conferences ‘on the front porch’ — this is how Andrei Gromyko called conversations with his father and fellow villagers. Olga Evgenyevna, Andrei Gromyko’s mother, who was also an avid book reader, was called ‘professor’ in the village. Obviously, the skills, knowledge and training acquired in childhood and adolescence came in very handy for the future politician. Taking this into account, it can be assumed that Andrei Gromyko was fibbing a little when he said that any peasant or working-class guy could have been in his place. The origin did make a difference in Soviet times, although personal qualities played a decisive role.

It is not a mystery but is a rarely mentioned part of Andrei Gromyko’s life that he never broke ties with Byelorussia, even when working far from his native places. This does not refer to nostalgic feelings at all.
Throughout seven convocations, from 1958 to 1989, Andrei Gromyko was elected deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in the Byelorussian districts: Molodechno, Gomel city, Minsk rural, Minsk city and Minsk-Moscow. As you can see, the geography is quite extensive. It is curious that for the first time, he ran in the elections in the same district with Sergei Pritytsky, the national hero of Belarus. They were not competitors, though. The clue to this is simple — the Supreme Soviet of the USSR consisted of two chambers. Gromyko ran for the Soviet of the Union, and Pritytsky — for the Soviet of Nationalities. The election was not a formal act. The Byelorussian deputy regularly visited his fellow countrymen, spoke in labour collectives, and actively worked with voters’ requests, no matter what part of the globe he was in at that time.
On July 17th, 1983, a bronze bust in honour of Andrei Gromyko was unveiled in Gomel, during his lifetime. There is nothing extraordinary about it. By that time, our countryman had twice become a Hero of Socialist Labour. Thus, according to Soviet laws, it was necessary to erect a bust in the homeland of a person awarded a high title.

High takeoff

There has been increasingly more talk recently about Andrei Gromyko’s role in another event that is not directly related to Belarus but certainly influenced the fate of our republic. This is his role in Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power. By the mid-eighties, Gromyko was a member of the supreme ‘Areopagus’ of the Soviet leadership.

The Potsdam Conference, July 18th, 1945. In the first row from left to right: Joseph Stalin, US President Harry S.Truman,

Soviet Ambassador to the United States Andrei Gromyko

Gromyko was not only the Minister of Foreign Affairs, but also a member of the Politbureau of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) Central Committee, and the First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. By the way, shortly before that, Kirill Mazurov — another native of Gomel Region — held the same position in the government. Even in the Politbureau, Gromyko enjoyed special authority. In 1985, he was the oldest member of this body, which concentrated all the powers in the USSR. In March of that year, after the death of Konstantin Chernenko, General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, the Politbureau held a meeting to decide who would occupy the highest post in the party and the state. It was arranged in such a way that the most respected participant in the meeting was the first to take the floor and express his opinion, which was supported by everyone else. Gromyko proposed Mikhail Gorbachev’s candidacy and the Politbureau approved that decision. Soon, in July 1985, Gromyko was elected Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. In other words, he formally took the highest public position in the country, which was sometimes called the ‘Soviet president’.

Now we know that there was a deliberate and carefully considered political combination behind those actions. Gromyko, who had already held the post of head of the Foreign Ministry for 28 years, felt that the years were taking their toll and decided to switch to an honourable but less stressful job in a nice way. Gromyko contacted Mikhail Gorbachev through his son Anatoly and conveyed his thoughts to him. Gorbachev agreed to that ‘exchange’. Nevertheless, let us not jump to conclusions and accuse Andrei Gromyko of such short-sightedness. At that time, few people could foresee what dramatic changes the reforms of relatively young and charismatic Mikhail Gorbachev would bring to the Soviet Union.
Whatever the case may be, Gromyko turned out to be the Byelorussian who took the highest position in the Soviet state.

Andrei Gromyko lived a long life. He died on July 2nd, 1989, just a few days before his 80th birthday. Researchers will continue to comprehend his legacy for a long time. Gromyko set the diplomatic style in work and life — strict, self-possessed, concise. In spite of speaking English perfectly well, he preferred to use the services of an interpreter in order to have time to think about what his counterpart said. Nowadays, one of Gromyko’s statements sounds especially relevant: ‘Ten years of negotiations are better than one day of war’. A Poleshuk will not advise anything bad.

Andrei Gromyko at a meeting with John F.Kennedy

By Vadim Gigin, deputy of the House of Representatives, Candidate of Historical Sciences

USSR Andrei Gromyko Minister of Foreign Affairs Byelorussian anniversary legendary diplomat memory history