Odd Man In

; For 24 years the affable, English-speaking Soviet Ambassador to the U.S., Anatoli Dobrynin, had served as an invaluable back channel for quiet negotiations between the two superpowers. When Dobrynin was tapped in March for higher duties as a Central Committee Secretary in the Kremlin, diplomatic circles speculated that the Kremlin would pick as his successor another Americanologist, perhaps one of the highly regarded new generation of experts from the Foreign Ministry. So it came as a shock last week when Moscow announced that its new envoy to Washington was Yuri V. Dubinin, 55, a West European specialist who speaks little English.

Only two months ago, Dubinin was named Moscow's Ambassador to the United Nations. Though that job gave him his first assignment on American shores, Dubinin was no diplomatic novice. Before going to the U.N., he served as the Soviet Ambassador to Spain for seven years, where he skillfully carried out the Kremlin's decision to restore good relations with the Spanish monarchy and Spain's Socialist political leaders. Still, he is regarded by some Western diplomats as conservative and cautious, an unsophisticated apparatchik who has a reputation for stonewalling at every turn. Some observers regard him as a throwback to the bad old days of Soviet diplomacy, close both personally and in style to Andrei Gromyko, the stolid and dour bureaucrat who presided over superpower relations for nearly three decades.

It seems certain that in the short run, at least, Dubinin will play a far smaller role in managing relations with the U.S. than did Dobrynin. Indeed, that may be precisely why he was chosen. Many observers see it as a bid by Dobrynin to keep the reins of U.S.-Soviet relations in his own hands back in Moscow. "It suggests that Dobrynin intends to remain in control of the American account," said one U.S. official, "because there would not be another indispensable Russian in Washington." Agrees Sovietologist Dimitri Simes of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: "Dobrynin did not want another Dobrynin." The bigger question, of course, is what Dubinin's appointment portends for U.S.-Soviet relations. As Washington and the Kremlin dicker over when--and whether--to hold another summit meeting between Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev and President Reagan, it cannot help that the old back channel to Moscow's Washington embassy has been shut down.