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Электронное приложение к журналу «
Международная жизнь
»
Author : A. Bessmertnykh
Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, President of the Foreign Policy Association, Chairman
of the World Council of Former Foreign Ministers, founding member of the World Political Forum, vice
president of the Eastern Dimension international movement, member of the Presidium of the Russian
Academy of Social Sciences, Honorary Professor of Moscow State University
ANATOLY DOBRYNIN is one of those people typically re-
ferred to in Russia as samorodok, or a natural talent born and
raised in the plain surroundings of numerous working families.
His distant ancestors lived in a province near Moscow. His fa-
ther, a locksmith, was doing his best to let his son get a higher
education to become an engineer at some production plant. His
dream came true. Enrolling in Moscow Aviation Institute, from
which he graduated with honors and where met his future wife
Irina Nikolaevna, charming, intelligent, brimming with energy,
who has been his comrade and mainstay, Dobrynin got aJOB
at a pilot plant run by A.S. Yakovlev, the designer of the famous
fighter planes.
UNLIKE SOME AMBASSADORS who move during their career from one capital to another
and resign after 30 or 40 years of honestly serving their country, Dobrynin was destined to serve
as ambassador to Washington that hub of political passions for nearly 25 years.
The most memorable perhaps was the most perilous 1962 Cuban missile crisis that put the world
on the brink of nuclear disaster.
In my numerous conversations with Anatoly Fedorovich in the years that followed, he often re-
called this episode and taught me, an apprentice diplomat at that time, to never bend the truth
by adjusting it to the moods of the Center and provide information the bosses may not like,
come what may. I remembered that lesson serving as chargé d'affaires and then as ambassador
in Washington.
I must mention here Dobrynin's rare gift for building and maintaining reliable contacts in the
upper strata of the U.S. elite. I believe there were no influential figures in America he was not
acquainted with. I was amazed at the ambassador's ability to detect, even in trifling things what
later proved important tendencies. I put it down to his erudition, experience and being always
mentally tuned to guessing out the mainsprings of what was happening.
One of the most important postulates of Dobrynin's diplomacy was the professional conviction
that an ambassador gets posted in a country with the main objective in mind to safeguard rela-
tions with that country, but not at the expense of his own country's interests.
That's what Dobrynin remains today: famous, adored and leisurely because it is out of his char-
acter to clown before the public to quote from the Pushkin.
Ambassador of a Great Power: 90th Birthday of Anatoly Dobrynin