Gromyko, Andrei

Gromyko, Andrei Andreevich

 

Born July 5 (18), 1909, in the village of Starye Gromyki, in present-day Gomel’ Oblast. Soviet government and party figure. Hero of Socialist Labor (1969). Doctor of economics (1956). Became a member of the CPSU in 1931. Born into a peasant family.

In 1932. Gromyko graduated from an institute of economics. From 1936 to 1939 he was a senior scholarly worker at the Institute of Economics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. In 1939 he became head of the Department of American Countries of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, and at the end of 1939 he became a consul of the Soviet embassy in the USA. From 1943 to 1946 he was ambassador to the USA and at the same time was envoy to the Republic of Cuba. From 1946 to 1948 he was permanent representative of the USSR in the Security Council of the United Nations and simultaneously was deputy minister of foreign affairs of the USSR. From 1949 to 1952 he was first deputy minister of foreign affairs. In June 1952 he became ambassador to Great Britain. In April 1953 he became first deputy minister and in February 1957 minister of foreign affairs of the USSR.

Gromyko headed the Soviet delegation at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in 1944 for the creation of the United Nations and has since headed many delegations to sessions of the General Assembly of the United Nations. He took part in the work of the Yalta and Potsdam conferences of the heads of state of the USSR, USA, and Great Britain (1945) and in the work of the Political Consultation Committee of the member-states of the Warsaw Pact; and many other international conferences and convocations.

Gromyko is the author of scholarly works on questions of international relations and the chairman of a commission for the publication of diplomatic documents. At the Nineteenth Congress of the CPSU he was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee of the party and since the Twentieth Congress has been a member of the CPSU Central Committee. Since April 1973, Gromyko has been a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU. He was a delegate of the second and of the fifth through ninth convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. He has been awarded five Orders of Lenin, two other orders, and also medals.