While respected for his people skills and understanding of American politics, Dobrynin wasn’t a policymaker. No one in Moscow warned him in advance about the missiles shipped to Cuba in 1962 or the tanks sent to Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979. Thus his memoir, In Confidence (672 pages. Times. $30), does not change the contours of what we know of the cold war. Nor is the book a confessional. In contrast to the current crop of former KGB agents and party hacks who are eager to tell Americans–for a price–that they knew all along that Soviet communism was rotten, Dobrynin’s political views have not changed hugely from a decade ago.
What the author provides is a bulging album of irresistible backstage snapshots featuring the cold war’s major characters. While Dobrynin takes tea at Brezhnev’s home, the Soviet leader vanishes, then reappears in uniform with all his medals, asking how he looks. Dobrynin cries “Magnificent!” (“What else could I say?”). Convinced Nixon has palmed a cheap geegaw off on him, Brezbnev hands the gift to Dobrynin, who tells him that the Steuben glass eagle is worth $30,000 to $50,000. “Really?” says Brezhnev. “Give it back.”
Americans confided in Dobrynin, expecting Soviet secrecy to conceal their comments into semi-eternity. George Bush told Dobrynin how startled he was to find Ronald Reagan dominated by “Hollywood cliches” and the ideas of wealthy, poorly educated California friends. The intimacy with the White House was greatest during the Nixon years. At last, Dobrynin had found a president who shared his exalted notion of a “confidential channel” between Washington and Moscow–through Dobrynin.
Diplomats are rarely moralists, and Dobrynin is no exception. He criticizes the Kremlin’s abuse of Soviet Jews not as wrong but as “counterproductive.” Of those Soviet leaders he closely served, his most scathing reprimands are reserved not for Khrushchev and Brezhnev, who maintained the police state, but for Gorbachev, the man who sacked him, who “frittered away” Moscow’s “negotiating potential.” Dobrynin blames the Soviet collapse not on the people turning against a flawed system but on “our incompetent but highly ambitious leaders” and “domestic events in which the great majority of the population did not participate.” Lenin should have taught him that some mass movements are not merely manipulations from the top.
