Mikhail Gorbachev’s foreign policy adviser

Anatoly Chernyaev, an influential foreign policy adviser and speechwriter for Mikhail Gorbachev who argued passionately for military de-escalation and political openness while keeping a poignant, detailed personal diary of his observations during the final two decades of the Soviet Union, died March 12 in Moscow. He was 95.

The Gorbachev Foundation confirmed the death in a statement. Family members said he had been suffering from a respiratory illness.

Chernyaev, a World War II veteran who spent decades rising through the ranks of the Kremlin’s foreign policy establishment, came to larger attention as a member of a liberal circle of advisers to Gorbachev from 1986 until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Among Gorbachev’s most trusted confidants, he was a tireless proponent of the “new thinking” that would reform the Soviet Union after years of stagnation, demilitarizing its foreign policy and seeking glasnost, or openness, at home.

He urged Gorbachev to seek a historic reduction in nuclear arms with the United States; supported an immediate pullout of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, which the Russians invaded in 1979; and, as early as 1986, proposed considering the prospect of a unified Germany.

He was a constant fixture at Gorbachev’s summits with President Ronald Reagan, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and other world leaders. On the evening the Soviet Union fell, he was one of a few advisers who retreated with Gorbachev to the Kremlin’s half-lit Walnut Room to make mournful toasts over cognac. Both had sought reform, not collapse of the Soviet Union.

“He was probably the most sincere and greatest supporter of Gorbachev’s policies and thinking,” said Pavel Palazhchenko, Gorbachev’s former chief English language interpreter and the head of the Gorbachev Foundation’s media service. “Chernyaev viewed this as the opportunity of a lifetime to change foreign policy and, through that, to create conditions for real change at home in the Soviet Union.”

Despite shunning publicity — he often stood to the side during group photographs at summits — his influence was considerable. As Gorbachev planned a meeting with Reagan in 1986, Chernyaev told him that a planned suggestion for modest arms control provided by the Foreign Ministry was “no good.”

Earlier that year, Gorbachev had proposed abolishing nuclear weapons by the year 2000, a radical suggestion that many abroad interpreted as propaganda.

Chernyaev proposed making good on that statement, suggesting a significant reduction in strategic weapons as the focus of the meeting.

Gorbachev agreed, and with Reagan talked about the most far-reaching proposals to get rid of nuclear weapons ever discussed during the Cold War. The talks collapsed in disagreement over Reagan’s missile defense plans, but they provided the foundation for the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty that was the first to eliminate an entire class of nuclear arms.

Chernyaev was a decade older than Gorbachev, brought up in an intelligentsia circle in 1920s Moscow during the comparatively liberal years of Vladimir Lenin’s New Economic Policy, before Stalin came to power.

Anatoly Sergeevich Chernyaev was born in Moscow on May 26, 1921, into the family of a former tsarist officer. He fought against Nazi Germany during World War II as a platoon commander, hiding a lifelong asthmatic condition to avoid disqualification from military service.

After returning from war, he graduated with a history degree in 1949 from Moscow State University and then taught at his alma mater for much of the next decade. After a three-year stint working in Prague at the magazine Problems of Peace and Socialism, an unintentional incubator for liberal Soviet officials, he joined the international department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He became deputy head in 1970.

He was considering retirement by the time Gorbachev hand-picked him as his foreign policy adviser 16 years later. Nonetheless, he consented.

His wife of 47 years, the former Genya Solomonovna Vaynberg, died in 2005. Survivors include his companion of 12 years, Lyudmila Rudakova of Moscow; a daughter from his marriage, Anna Chernyaeva of Moscow; and a grandson.