Georgi Arbatov

Georgi Arkadyevich Arbatov, a lion of the Soviet establishment whose influence spanned the final decades of the Cold War, passed away Friday in Moscow. He was 87. An obituary was published today in the New York Times, capturing his role as the founder and director of the Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada, and a bridge between the superpowers at a time of mistrust and suspicion.

One of Arbatov’s most important contributions to the end of the Cold War was carried out behind the scenes in the 1980s.

When Mikhail Gorbachev was looking for advisors who could help him navigate toward radical change, both at home and abroad, Arbatov was among those who became part of his progressive brain trust. Among other things, Arbatov urged Gorbachev to withdraw from Afghanistan, to impose a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing, and pull back the large Soviet conventional forces in Europe. Gorbachev did them all.

We sometimes forget that a revolution like that unleashed by Gorbachev could not have been the work of one person. To bring it off, Gorbachev needed the small group of reform-minded thinkers around him; they faced immense inertia and resistance. Arbatov had witnessed the years of stagnation before Gorbachev, and could have simply stood back and waited, but instead he became one of those trying to change the system from within. Much more ambitious change was to follow, but Arbatov played an important role in those critical early years, when Gorbachev was just at the outset of “new thinking.”

Anatoly Chernyaev, who became Gorbachev’s chief foreign policy aide, recalled in his book My Six Years With Gorbachev that the Soviet leader ordered all calls from Arbatov be put through to him immediately. Chernyaev said Gorbachev treated Arbatov with respect “for his outstanding, practical mind, his clear and nondogmatic views, his adherence to principle on political issues, and his sincere desire to help the country.”

In Russia and the Idea of the West, Robert English reported that three weeks after Gorbachev took office, Arbatov produced a 40-page memo that outlined a new approach to Soviet foreign policy, including an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan, and conciliatory steps toward Western Europe and China.

Eduard Shevardnadze told English that when he took over as Foreign Minister in 1985, he listened carefully to Arbatov’s briefings on arms control negotiations, which debunked the inflated threats provided by other Soviet officials, and provided a calmer, more realistic assessment of the military balance. “I knew that we had to go forward, but I had no real data or numbers,” Shevardnadze recalled. He found the answers from Arbatov and his institute.

Like many, Arbatov later became disenchanted with Gorbachev’s endless tactical maneuvers, which at times seemed to undercut his own reform principles. But Arbatov wrote in his own memoirs, The System: An Insider’s Life in Soviet Politics, published in 1992 in English, that he was slow to notice this because “I was so fascinated and enchanted by Gorbachev” in the early years.