By Patricia H. Kushlis
Georgy A. Arbatov, the founder of the Soviet Academy of Sciences USA-Canada Institute died on October 1, 2010 at the age of 87. The cause of death was cancer.
The obligatory press obituaries have now appeared. Most read as if they stepped out of the pages of Arbatov’s biography on Wikipedia. These include a longer and more comprehensive one in The New York Times and an amazingly abbreviated one for a man of Arbatov’s stature in The Washington Post.
I thought, in contrast, that I’d approach Arbatov’s life and impact on US-Soviet and now US-Russian relations from a somewhat different perspective. Georgy Arbatov was a controversial, enigmatic, complex and sometimes enervating individual for American diplomats who dealt with him over the many years. Yet, his importance in US-Soviet relations was undeniable because of his close ties to and influence on Brezhnev, Andropov, and Gorbachev as well as his advisors.
But was Arbatov simply a protagonist and propagandist for the Soviet Union and the successive leaders or did he play a far more complex role in the Soviet Union’s relationship with its chief adversary beginning at least in 1967 with the founding of the USSR Academy of Sciences’ Institute for US and Canadian Studies – the Institute he was chosen to head until his retirement in 1995?
Here is what Yale Richmond, Soviet specialist and former Counselor for Press and Culture at the US Embassy in Moscow and who regularly dealt with Arbatov then, wrote in response to Arbatov’s Obituary in The Washington Post on October 2:
Georgy Arbatov (Obits, Oct. 2) was an enigmatic figure in U.S.-Soviet relations. Some of the many influential Americans he knew saw him as a very effective propagandist and apologist for a series of Soviet leaders starting with Brezhnev, whose protégé Arbatov was. Other Americans, however, saw Arbatov’s Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies as a place where visiting Americans could get an accurate reading of Soviet policies, and where visitors could also be assured that their views would be transmitted by the Institute to Soviet leaders.
The Institute’s work was classified but its researchers had carte blanche for things Western. They could read things other Soviets could not. They were the first in the Soviet Union to have Xerox machines, and they could call long distance when other Soviets had to book overseas calls 24 hours in advance. Arbatov’s staffers also had most favored status in selection for the many grants for study in the United States under various exchange programs. As a result, the Institute became a place where seeds were planted for the glasnost and perestroika that emerged during the Gorbachev years. And for that we have to thank Arbatov.
Arbatov was also known for his clever one-liners. In December 1967, when he was named to head the new Institute, I asked him if he had ever visited the United States. With a knowing smile he replied that he had never visited the United States, that he was neutral on the subject, and that was why he was chosen to head the new Institute. Alas, it fell to me, as the American Embassy officer with contact to Arbatov, to inform him that his first visit to the United States, planned for September 1968, would not be appropriate [because it came so soon after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia].
The record shows that Arbatov did ultimately travel to the U.S. 25 times over the years, that he did help to explain America to a Soviet leadership that had had little or no experience with the West and that he and his Institute staff did indeed meet often with numerous high level American officials and private citizens in Moscow and the US and did have access to information – western books, periodicals, newspapers and Xerox machines – denied to other Soviet citizens. It should then come as no surprise that years later, researchers from this institute also formed part of the nucleus of reformers under Gorbachev who sought to modernize this huge country that for political reasons had fallen further and further behind the West.
For additional firsthand information on Georgy Arbatov see Yale Richmond’s Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003) pp. 81-92.