Anatoly Dobrynin, who negotiated arms treaties, helped settle the Cuban missile crisis and was the dean of Washington’s international diplomatic corps during his 24 years as Soviet ambassador to the United States, died April 6 in Russia at the age of 90. The Russian government did not release the place or cause of death.

Dobrynin, the chief representative of the Soviet Union in the United States throughout the Cold War, helped pull the two superpowers back from the brink of war in the 1962 missile crisis, and his mastery of secretive “back-channel” diplomacy led to a new era of detente and the end of the nuclear arms race in the 1970s.

“A major statesman, and a brilliant diplomat, Anatoly Fyodorovich Dobrynin personified a whole epoch” in the country’s foreign policy, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin wrote in a telegram Wednesday to Dobrynin’s family. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev described Dobrynin as a “legend of Russian diplomacy.”

Skillful diplomacy

Few diplomats from the Soviet era understood the United States as well as the affable, English-speaking Dobrynin, who first came to Washington in 1952 for a three-year stint at the Soviet embassy. Equally committed to his Communist ideals and to a belief that the two international adversaries could coexist in peace, he cultivated a wide network that included presidents, congressmen and journalists. He and U.S. envoy Henry Kissinger had an especially close and sometimes fruitful diplomatic friendship.

“Subtle and disciplined, warm in his demeanor while wary in his conduct,” Kissinger once wrote, “Dobrynin moved through the upper echelons of Washington with consummate skill.”

Dobrynin’s office at the Soviet embassy had no windows and was surrounded by a magnetic field to prevent electronic eavesdropping. Seven months after he presented his credentials as Soviet ambassador to President John F. Kennedy, U.S. spy planes detected Soviet missiles in Cuba in October 1962. As Soviet ships moved toward Cuba, Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of the island nation situated 90 miles from U.S. shores, and a tense, 13-day standoff almost led to a nuclear showdown.

Negotiating directly with Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Dobrynin suggested that the United States remove its missiles from Turkey in return for a Soviet withdrawal from Cuba.

The aging U.S. missiles in Turkey had little strategic value, but Dobrynin knew that the agreement would be seen as a face-saving move in the Kremlin. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev relented, Soviet ships and submarines turned around, and an armed confrontation was narrowly averted.

For the next quarter century, Dobrynin’s presence was felt in almost every diplomatic maneuver of the Cold War, including Vietnam, the Middle East, summit meetings and Soviet incursions into Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. He had a parking space at the State Department’s underground garage and a secret hotline to Kissinger, who was then President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser. The telephone, Dobrynin revealed in his 1995 memoir, “required no dialing and was not dependent on the ordinary telephone network.”

His private meetings with Kissinger — often at the White House’s Map Room — led to the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty, which essentially ended the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race.

Dobrynin had entered the Soviet diplomatic service in 1944, when Josef Stalin was the Soviet premier, and left his ambassador’s post in Washington in 1986, during the glasnost era of Mikhail Gorbachev. He worked closely with six U.S. presidents, from Kennedy to Ronald Reagan.

“If someday there should come about the genuine relaxation of tensions and dangers which our period demands,” Kissinger wrote in the 1980s, “Anatoly Dobrynin will have made a central contribution to it.”

‘A Soviet ideologue’

Anatoly Fyodorovich Dobrynin was born Nov. 16, 1919, near Moscow and was the son of a plumber. He was educated at a Moscow aviation institute and helped design fighter planes before he was chosen for the diplomatic service.

In the 1950s, he was assigned to the Soviet embassy in Washington and to the United Nations in New York and easily adapted to American ways. He and his wife, Irina Nikolaevna, traveled around the United States by bus and car. His wife of 68 years survives, along with a daughter and granddaughter, whom the Dobrynins adopted and raised in northern Virginia. Dobrynin sometimes rode his bicycle to McDonald’s with his granddaughter.

Dobrynin occasionally played chess with President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who once called the Soviet ambassador “the most delightful foreign adversary of my four years, a charming host and a skillfully evasive negotiator.”

Indeed, his gregarious manner and westernized ways led some to think Dobrynin might have been a crypto-liberal or even an American supporter. But Malcolm Toon, U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union during the Carter administration, said in 1986, “At no time was he a friend of ours. He’s a Soviet ideologue.”