Getting your player ready...
Georgy Arbatov, 87, a foreign policy adviser to Soviet leaders and the country’s top America-watcher during the Cold War, died Friday.
Russian state TV, which reported Arbatov’s death, did not give the cause of death or say where he died.
Arbatov, who advised leaders from Leonid Brezhnev to Mikhail Gorbachev and was especially close to Yuri Andropov, was credited in the West and later in Russia for understanding the Soviet system was fundamentally untenable.
From 1967 to 1995, Arbatov ran the U.S.A. and Canada Institute, an advisory body to Soviet authorities that he founded and that had huge sway over policy toward the North American continent at a time of heightened tensions between the Cold War adversaries. The Associated Press
