Georgy Arbatov, adviser to the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who believed that cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union was possible, died on October 1 at the age of 87. He was a master of compromise who sought to introduce a touch of human rationality to the totalitarian system.
Arbatov was director of the Institute of United States and Canada Studies from 1967 to 1995. He paid many visits to the United States and saw grounds for cooperation, recognizing the absurdity and artificiality of each side’s claims against the other, and the endemic suspicion that hindered any such cooperation.
The standoff between the USSR and the United states, which was to a great extent contrived by bureaucrats or orchestrated by Russophobes and Anti-Americans in each country, appears particularly absurd against the backdrop of the Cold War threat of a nuclear conflagration and the subsequent terrorist attacks that have, in recent decades, claimed thousands of lives.
These contrived positions rolled back in the face of real danger. In the 1970s they were replaced with détente after a long drawn-out arms race, the 9/11 tragedy in the United States was followed by cooperation in Afghanistan and the list goes on. The détente of the 1970s was Arbatov’s moment of glory and one of the main achievements in his career.
Arbatov was born in 1923 and took part in the November 7, 1941 military parade in Red Square from which the troops went straight to the front to fight the Nazi invaders. His was one of the most deprived generations in Soviet history, having witnessed the cultural and economic devastation of the country as a result of the civil war , the subsequent collectivization period, the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 which only 3% of his peers survived, the difficult years of post-war recovery, and the period of the Brezhnev stagnation.
RIA Novosti
