Soviet Career Diplomat New Envoy to U.S.

The Soviet Union on Tuesday named Yuri V. Dubinin, a career diplomat now assigned to the United Nations, as ambassador to the United States.

The 55-year-old Dubinin replaces Anatoly F. Dobrynin, who became a member of the Secretariat of the Communist Party Central Committee in March after serving an unprecedented 24 years in Washington. In that time, he became a close acquaintance of several U.S. presidents.

The appointment of Dubinin only two months after his accreditation as Moscow’s permanent representative to the United Nations caught his colleagues there by surprise, but they agreed almost unanimously that he has the qualifications for his new post.

“He is an able Soviet diplomat and articulate exponent of his country’s position,” said Vernon A. Walters, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who was in Washington when the appointment was announced. “He has lived in the West and understands the ways of the West.”

One of New Generation

Dubinin is considered by foreign observers to be a member of the new generation of Soviet diplomats and, therefore--like Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev--well-tailored and highly conscious of public relations.

Other Western diplomats at the United Nations, who spoke on condition that they not be identified, said that Dubinin was less popular than his predecessor at the U.N. post, Oleg A. Troyanovsky, who was reassigned to Peking earlier this year.

Among the comments made about him Tuesday: “A tough cookie,” who can be “fairly unpleasant” and a “Molotov with a pompadour,” a reference to Stalin’s foreign minister, Vyacheslav M. Molotov, who was known for his hostility to the West.

The diplomats said the Reagan Administration’s decision earlier this year to demand a cut in the size of the Soviet, Ukrainian and Byelorussian missions to the world organization by 38% had put Dubinin--who speaks little English--on the defensive. Consequently, the Cold War-style rhetoric in his initial speeches at the world organization made an unfavorable impression.

“We were disappointed by the first impression but are sure that he would have done better if he had stayed longer,” one European diplomat said.

Although he is described as one of the new breed of Soviet diplomats, Dubinin served nearly 30 years under Andrei A. Gromyko, longtime foreign minister and now president of the Soviet Union.

Amenable to Questions

Like the dour Gromyko, the new appointee is known as a tough bargainer. Unlike Gromyko, however, he was easily approachable during his brief tenure at the United Nations, willing to answer reporters’ questions with a smile on his way out of the Security Council, even after delivering harsh condemnations of the U.S. bombing raids on Libya last month.

Dubinin, after an assignment in Paris in the 1950s, served in Moscow’s Foreign Ministry in 1960-63. He returned to France, where he held senior positions in the Paris embassy for five years. From 1971 to 1978, he headed the Foreign Ministry’s first European Department and then spent eight years as ambassador to Spain.