To cite a few, they are Muammar Khadafi, Saddam Hussein, Mao Tse-tung, Deng Xiaoping, Richard Nixon,
Andrei Gromyko, Fidel Castro and Doris Duke.
As per Sebestyen's exegesis, Gorbachev's name as the new party General Secretary was formally proposed to the nomenklatura by former Soviet foreign minister
Andrei Gromyko, saying, among other things, "He has a nice smile, but Comrades, Mikhail Sergeyevich has iron teeth." "The Kremlin potentates had not chosen the new Soviet leader for his repartee.
Henry Kissinger described his longtime counterpart, Soviet Foreign Minister
Andrei Gromyko, as an "adversary, colleague and friend, all in one."
To understand better what happened, it has to be viewed in light of the statements by Walid al-Moallem last Saturday, when the Syrian foreign minister did a fine impression of
Andrei Gromyko. There would be no discussion of Assad or his future, Moallem insisted, because the president was a "red line." Moreover, the United Nations envoy, Staffan de Mistura, had overstepped his mandate by talking about presidential elections in Syria.
Moscow too has not had a Foreign Minister of Sergei Lavrov's stature - atleast not since
Andrei Gromyko.
He was nonetheless something of an anomaly, and it was no doubt partly to allay alarm among the septuagenarians in the hierarchy about the new kid on the block that
Andrei Gromyko, serving at the time as the ceremonial president, declared that there were teeth of steel behind the new general secretary's charming smile.
On July 20, on instructions from his government, Turkey's ambassador in Moscow Ilder Turkmen met the Soviet Union's foreign minister
Andrei Gromyko to inform him of Turkey's intentions.
One of the most noteworthy results of Ruggenthaler's efforts is the discovery that quite a large number of actors exercised influence on Moscow's foreign policy and took part in the process that led to the Stalin note: Andrei Vyshinskii, who had replaced Viacheslav Molotov as minister of foreign affairs in March 1949; Vyshinskii's deputies
Andrei Gromyko and Valerian Zorin; the Ministry of State Security (MGB); representatives of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SVAG); and the East German leadership, above all Walter Ulbricht.