14 Nov 2021 10:00 30 years ago

USSR, United States to start discussing strategic stability next week

This news story first came out 30 years ago to the day, and we are publishing it today as part of Interfax's project, "Timeline of the Last Days of USSR. This Day 30 Years Ago." The project's goal is to reconstruct as fully as possible the timeline of the last few months of 1991 and to give everyone interested in understanding the historical processes of that period the opportunity to study and analyze the events that led to and accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the new Russian state. The complete timeline can be found in Russian.


MOSCOW. Nov 14 (Interfax) – Washington will host the first strategic stability consultations in the history of Soviet-U.S. relations on November 20-21.

The Soviet delegation will be led by Alexander Yakovlev, a member of the political consultative council under the president of the USSR. The delegation will also include Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Petrovsky, member of the political consultative council Yury Ryzhkov, Central Intelligence Service Director Yevgeny Primakov, the Soviet president's state advisor Sergei Stankevich, and Izvestia newspaper political observer Alexander Bovin.

The notion of stability today extends beyond the purely strategic and military framework, Petrovsky said in an exclusive interview with Interfax. It also includes economic, social, political and ethnic elements. This is a multidimensional concept that should become a key element of the new forming world order.

U.S. Secretary of State James Baker came up with the idea of holding such consultations in October 1990, when he spoke in favor of creating a joint Soviet-U.S. working group for deterrence, guarantees and stability. "We backed this proposal strongly and are now starting to discuss strategic stability," Petrovsky said.

These will be game-changing negotiations, "as they concern the most sensitive and delicate topics in relations between the countries," he said. "The main thing is that we learn to speak frankly," Petrovsky said. He thinks that decisions made at the consultations could be important not only for the USSR and U.S. but also the whole international community.