Andrei Andreevich Gromyko (1909-1989) represented the Soviet Union for many years in major international conferences after World War II, first as minister of foreign affairs and then as president of the U.S.S.R..

Andrei Gromyko was born on July 18, 1909, in a village in Belorussia, then a province in the western region of the Russian Empire. His parents were peasant farmers. After the Revolution of 1917 the Communist state helped young people from working families to obtain a higher education and encouraged them to join the Communist Party. Gromyko took advantage of these opportunities.

Despite the hardships which the collectivization of agriculture imposed on the peasant population, he became a loyal supporter of Stalin's regime. He joined the Communist Party in 1931 and attended an agricultural technical school in his province, graduating in 1936. He then went to Moscow to work in the Institute of Economics of the Soviet Academy...