who headed the Secretariat’s International Department.
Ponomarev was replaced by Anatoly Dobrynin, a very different
figure. Whereas Ponomarev was a Comintern veteran, Dobrynin
had served as Soviet Ambassador to the USA from 1962 to 1986,
which gave him unrivalled insights into Western policy priorities,
and injected a worldliness into leadership discussions which com-
plemented that brought by Iakovlev following his decade in
Canada. There was also a major reorganisation of the ‘depart-
mental’ structure within the Foreign Ministry, which one observer
argued ‘had remained virtually unchanged since the time of Czar
Nicholas II’ (Miller, 1991: 57), and a shake-up of Soviet
Ambassadors abroad. These set the scene for a different Soviet
diplomatic image. A new information administration was estab-
lished, headed by Gennadi Gerasimov, who proved to be a droll
defender of Soviet positions. The new Foreign Minister also had
a very different style from his predecessor. I recall seeing Eduard
Shevardnadze, during an official visit to Australia, arriving at
Parliament House in Canberra, and rather than ascending the
front stairs on his left, instead turning right (to the consternation
of security staff) and plunging into a crowd of Afghan refugees
protesting the Soviet presence in their homeland. Such a spontan-
eous encounter with angry victims of Soviet policy would have
been unthinkable from Gromyko.
But in addition to these high-level developments, other changes
occurred in the making of policy. Specialists in relations between the
Soviet Union and the Third World were increasingly candid in the
views which they expressed about Afghanistan. Some did so under
provocation, such as Academician Oleg Bogomolov. In response to
an article by the conservative journalist Aleksandr Prokhanov which
sought to pin the blame for the original invasion decision in part on
poor advice from specialists on Islam and other experts, Bogomolov
struck back, pointing out that his institute, the Institute for the
Economics of the World Socialist System in the Soviet Academy of
Sciences, had written to the leadership on 28 January 1980 about the
danger of the decision (Bogomolov, 1988: 10). Others did so out of
deep conviction, such as Dr Nodari Simoniya of the Institute of
128 The Afghanistan Wars