SERGEI VIKTOROVICH LAVROV was born on March 21, 1950, in the twilight days of Stalin, a few years before Gromyko began his long run in the job of saying no. A classic product of the later Soviet era, he was born in Moscow to an Armenian father and ethnically Russian mother from Georgia, according to diplomatic sources. Although reported to be a bright physics student, he found his way to the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations, known by its Russian initials MGIMO and still today the only academic pedigree acceptable for a top Russian diplomat. After graduating in 1972, his first assignment at the Foreign Ministry was obscure -- language training in Sinhala followed by several years working with the Russian ambassador to Sri Lanka -- but then in 1981 he was sent to the Soviet mission at the United Nations, where he would spend much of his career before being named foreign minister.
This was no gray apparatchik. At the United Nations, Lavrov was an outsized character who often dominated the Security Council with his cutting remarks, edgy humor, physically imposing build, and big personality. He was known for his enthusiastic smoking and love of fine scotch, as well as for heading off to Vermont to go skiing when the Turtle Bay schedule permitted. In the summers, he went white-water rafting. "He drank like a fish," recalled one Western ambassador who served on the Security Council at the same time. "He definitely drank well before noon." When the U.N. banned smoking in 2003, he staged his own protest, refusing to stop puffing while vehemently complaining that then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan "doesn't own this building." He was famous as well for his drawings: Colleagues, according to David Bosco's book, Five to Rule Them All, would snap up from his chair the doodles Lavrov loved to sketch during the interminable debates.
"He wears fine Italian clothes and loves good wine. The Middle East drove him crazy. When we were in Kuwait he would complain about the lack of alcohol. He smoked like a chimney," recalled another former senior U.S. official who spent many hours across the table from him. "He reminds you of what diplomats used to look like in the 19th century."
Andrei Kozyrev, who would go on to become post-Soviet Russia's first foreign minister, also remembers Lavrov well, as the secretary of the Komsomol -- the Communist Youth League -- for his class at MGIMO, a few years ahead of Kozyrev. It was a prestigious title, the first of many. "He was always a socializing guy," he recalled, "always very friendly."
I reached Kozyrev recently in retirement in Florida. Kozyrev had been tapped in 1991 by Yeltsin to run the ossified Foreign Ministry, and he was determined to give Russia a new foreign policy for a new democracy, allying with the West it was trying to emulate at home. Needless to say, it didn't stick. In 1996, with Yeltsin struggling for his political survival against a possible Communist return to power, he unceremoniously fired Kozyrev in favor of the more old-fashioned hard-liner Yevgeny Primakov. All that switching of gears made it a bewildering time for Russia's Soviet-trained diplomats: "I made a U-turn," Kozyrev said. "Then Primakov was another almost U-turn. It's like they [the career diplomats] are a very good professional driver, a chauffeur. Why should you give up driving if your passengers are changing directions? One wants to go to the west, one to the east."
Kozyrev laughed out loud when I told him that Lavrov had cited the 19th-century Prince Gorchakov as a model for today's Russian diplomacy. He recalled how Primakov had also tried to resurrect Gorchakov. "They all pretend they are doing realpolitik, but it's realpolitik of two centuries ago," he said. "That's the problem with Russia: The world has changed. Europe is not at war, and no one wants to negotiate with us. The world has changed, but Russia prefers to pretend it has not."
At the same time, Kozyrev was surprisingly complimentary of Lavrov. "At least it's a sophisticated choice," he said. He recalled comments in recent years by various Putin allies praising Stalin's foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, author of the secret treaty with the Nazis carving up Eastern Europe. "It's better to pretend you follow Gorchakov than you follow Molotov," he said. "Lavrov is much better than that."
"Still," Kozyrev added, "he's a Soviet-breed diplomat. We were all brought up in the Soviet system, which professed a kind of ideological confrontation with the West." But for Kozyrev and many other Russians with whom I have spoken, this reflexive saber rattling is not in fact about the United States so much as it is about regime survival. "They are not looking for a real 'war' of confrontation with the West. It is domestically driven," he said, and as he made the point, it was hard not to think of the tens of thousands of protesters in the streets of Moscow after Putin announced his return to the Kremlin in the fall of 2011, of the ongoing legal crackdown against the movement's leaders, and of the frequent Russian government efforts -- by Putin, Lavrov, and many others -- to blame the demonstrations on the hidden hand of the United States. "In Russian foreign policy, nationalism -- patriotism -- is defined as opposition to the West. It was also an internal political instrument for the Soviet elite. It compensates for their lack of political legitimacy."
At least, he concluded, somewhat awkwardly, "Lavrov is able to present this ugly foreign policy in the most civilized way to the West."
EPA/GRIGORY DUKOR/POOL
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