From his country dacha, the Soviet Union's top
America-watcher discusses Putin's Russia, US
foreign policy and nuclear proliferation. (By Jonathan Power.)
Georgi Arbatov, the éminence grise of the Soviet
foreign policy apparatus, was waiting for me at
the bus stop an hour out of Moscow. A little
bowed at 84, he grabbed me by the arm and leant
on his homemade walking stick, cut from a nearby
birch, and led me through the wood I had arrived
in to a clearing in which stood a small, shabby
block of flats, paint peeling in the entrance, a
year's dust and leaves on the staircase. Like his
mentor, Yuri Andropov, the former KGB chief and
later head of the Soviet Union, Arbatov has
always shunned many of the perks of the
apparatchiks, content with a modest flat in the
city and this "dacha" in the countryside.
We talked, as we did 30 years ago, over vodka,
coffee, cucumber and beetroot. The adviser to
every Soviet president from Brezhnev to Gorbachev
remains as lucid as he was when he told me in
1978 that if the west pursued a closer
relationship with China, turning China "into some
sort of military ally to the west"... then there
would be "no place for détente."
<http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10028>Link
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