Georgi Arbatov obituary

Georgi Arkadyevich Arbatov, who has died of cancer aged 87, was an adviser on relations with America to five secretaries general of the Soviet Communist party. He believed that the "oases of open thinking" he planted within the Soviet bureaucracy helped bring the cold war to a peaceful conclusion. As a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the central committee of the Communist party, and the supreme Soviet of the USSR, as well as the founder and first director of the Institute of United States and Canada Studies, Arbatov was a consummate Kremlin insider. For more than 30 years, on foreign policy issues, he had the ear of Soviet leaders including Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev. A fluent English-speaker, Arbatov served as a bridge between the superpowers at a time when they were divided by deep suspicions and hostility. He travelled frequently to the US and other western countries, seeking to establish personal links with government officials, businessmen and academics, appearing often on TV and becoming – particularly in America – something close to the public face of the Kremlin. This did not always make for easy relationships. At one point his strident criticism of President Ronald Reagan for describing the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" resulted in his visa being revoked to prevent him being interviewed on US television by Bill Moyers. He experienced difficulties within the Soviet Union too, where he ran up against Stalin's deeply conservative legacy in the form of a bureaucracy resistant to new ideas and a secretive, all-powerful military. After establishing his institute in 1968, under the umbrella of the Russian Academy of Sciences, he sought to make it a vehicle for injecting new and more modern ideas into the Soviet policy debate with the help of what he called other "oases" of reformist thinking around the country. Among western sovietologists, the reformers he encouraged were sometimes known as the "Bread Lane boys" after the Moscow street where the institute had its headquarters. To orthodox apparatchiks, however, they were "the slanderers" for persisting in showing up the bureaucracy's false arguments and unfounded claims of success. Arbatov's efforts to change the way the Soviet Union was run proved to be painfully slow and difficult. In his 1992 autobiography, The System: An Insider's Life in Soviet Politics, he recounts how he tried to persuade the Soviet leadership to take a more flexible and imaginative stance towards eastern Europe. His efforts were rewarded by the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 which, he wrote, left him "overcome by burning shame". Economic reform proposals first put forward by Arbatov in 1973 were found hidden nearly 20 years later in Brezhnev's safe by Gorbachev, who said that, had they been implemented back then, they would have made unnecessary many difficult changes he had to force through. Similarly, Arbatov warned to no avail against Moscow's decision to bring Cuban troops into the Angolan civil war, saying it would only hamper improving relations with Washington. He opposed subsequent Soviet interventions in Ethiopia, Yemen and Afghanistan. He also tried to prevent the deployment of the new SS-20 missiles at a time when the Helsinki process was improving security co-operation with western Europe. But even if his advice was not always followed, he was wise enough to retreat into silence when required. As a result, Arbatov's political influence remained intact and he was able to continue nudging the Soviet leadership towards improved relations with the west, economic change, and arms control. The conclusion Arbatov drew was that the profound changes finally introduced by Gorbachev in the late 80s, which effectively dismantled the communist state, were only possible because reformers like himself had worked "from inside the system, and not from outside" to encourage the growth within it of "oases" of open thinking. Born in Kherson, in what is now southern Ukraine, Arbatov suffered the disadvantage of having a Jewish father, who though successful for a number of years, was eventually purged and imprisoned by Stalin, although he survived. As a result, Arbatov was to suffer from antisemitic prejudice and doubts about his loyalty throughout his career. After serving as an artillery officer in the Red army during the second world war, Arbatov studied English and American affairs at university before working as a journalist and editor. He found his first oasis in the mid-50s when he went to work for Otto Wilhelm Kuusinen, a Finnish-Russian politburo member in a job that gave him plenty of access to news of the world outside. "It was probably then that I understood how backward we all were," he wrote. In 1964 he joined another oasis which Andropov had created in the central committee of the Communist party. "In this room you can come clean and speak absolutely openly," Andropov told him, "but once you get outside the door, that's different. Then, you obey the general rules." Four years later he moved on to set up his own oasis on Bread Lane. He is survived by his wife, Svetlana, and their son, Aleksei. • Georgi Arkadyevich Arbatov, political adviser, born 23 March 1923; died 1 October 2010