The Foreign Service Journal, December 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2021 49 Khrushchev’s reckless decision to deploy ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads in Cuba in 1962 can be seen as a desperate effort to reduce the huge costs of building a new fleet of nuclear- armed ballistic missiles. His failure, labeled “adventurism and capitulationism” by the Communist Party of China, led to his removal from office in 1964. His successor, Leonid Brezhnev, who led the country for 18 years, strengthened the authority and priorities of the Soviet military-industrial complex and devoted enormous resources to building nuclear weapons and the means to carry the warheads to their targets in North America and elsewhere. (The SS-20 was a top priority in the aftermath of Khrushchev’s dismissal and fig- ured as a negotiating issue in Gorbachev’s later efforts to change relations with the West.) Yet his rule was later characterized by Soviet critics as the “era of stagnation,” which it was so far as the Soviet economy was concerned. Indeed, when Brezhnev died in 1982, Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB, is said to have favored Gorbachev as the next Soviet General Secretary, apparently because he agreed with Gorbachev that the Soviet economic system was not deliver- ing the goods and services needed by a modern state. Instead, Konstantin Chernenko, an elderly product of the Brezhnev era, was selected because he seemed next in line and was a safe bet to continue the policies thought at the time to have been supportive of internal stability as well as the Soviet Union’s international interests. Chernenko died after just 13 months in office and was succeeded by Yuri Andropov, who probably was thought capable of enforcing discipline in the Soviet workforce. But Andropov himself died in February 1984, after 16 months in office. I watched as his son, a member of the Soviet Union’s delegation to the 1984-1986 Conference on While all that was going on in the nuclear arena, Gorbachev was trying to end the Cold War in Europe.