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minister. A candidate member of the Central
Committee since 1952, he gained full member-
ship in 1956. After the failure of the
ANTI
-
PARTY
GROUP
to unseat Nikita
KHRUSHCHEV
in 1957,
Gromyko replaced
MOLOTOV
as foreign minister.
For the next 28 years, he survived various
changes in Soviet leadership, becoming a full
member of the Politburo in 1973, from where he
consolidated his control of Soviet foreign policy.
Gromyko made the Soviet Union an indispens-
able actor in international affairs, without whom
no major crisis could be resolved. He supported
the 1968
WARSAW PACT
invasion of Czechoslo-
vakia and was one of the small group of insiders
who made the fateful decision to invade
AFGHANISTAN
in 1979. At the same time he was
active in the disarmament negotiations that led
to the SALT and START treaties and that helped
usher in an era of reduced tensions with the
United States and Western Europe in the 1970s.
A somewhat reluctant convert to the cause of
internal reform, Gromyko was one of the “king-
makers” who supported
GORBACHEV
's election as
party secretary in March 1985. He was also one of
the early victims of Gorbachev's reformist course
when Eduard
SHEVARDNADZE
replaced him as for-
eign minister in June 1985. In deference to his
status, however, Gromyko was appointed chair-
man of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the
ceremonial position of head of state in the Soviet
system. In September 1988, Gorbachev appointed
himself to that post, and in April 1989 Gromyko
resigned from the Central Committee, along with
other elderly party leaders. His memoirs, pub-
lished in 1988, provide an important account of
the internal world of Soviet diplomacy by some-
one who besides his grim public persona was a
connoisseur of English literature.
founder and leader of the moderate conservative
Octobrist Party after the 1905 Revolution. His
support of
STOLYPIN
's dissolution of the second
DUMA
and the introduction of a far more restric-
tive franchise in June 1907 earned him the
antagonism of liberal, democratic politicians in
the following decade. As speaker of the Third
Duma (1907-12), he also earned the wrath of
the imperial family for his harsh attacks on
RASPUTIN
in 1912 and for circulating correspon-
dence between Rasputin and the empress,
which he had somehow obtained. During World
War I he took an active part in the Progressive
Bloc in the Duma, and as chair of the Duma
committee on military and naval affairs pressed
for greater parliamentary involvement in the
conduct of the war. From 1915, as chair of the
War Industries Committee, he assumed an even
more vocal role in criticizing the government's
war effort for its inefficiency. During the final
days of the
FEBRUARY REVOLUTION
, he took great
pride in traveling to Pskov with V. V. Shulgin to
arrange for the abdication of the Czar Nicholas II.
His parliamentary background made him an
obvious choice for minister of war and navy in
the first Provisional Government. But events
were moving too quickly for a man of moderately
conservative views, and when, in May 1917, the
Petrograd garrison issued the famous
ORDER NO
.
1
that, among other things, undermined officers'
authority over soldiers, he resigned from the gov-
ernment. After the
OCTOBER REVOLUTION
he fled to
Paris, where he occupied a prominent role in the
Russian émigré community until his death almost
20 years later.
gulag
Drawn from the Russian acronym for the Chief
Administration of Camps, a branch of the secret
police created in the 1930s, the term
gulag
has
become synonymous with the vast empire of
concentration camps, labor camps, and transit
prisons that developed in the Soviet Union dur-
ing Joseph
STALIN
's long rule. The history of labor
camps in the Soviet Union begins almost from
Guchkov, Aleksandr Ivanovich
(1862-1936)
industrialist and politician
A scion of an
OLD BELIEVER
Moscow business
family, Guchkov played an important role in the
final decades before the Russian Revolution as
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