Hartman to Resign Post as Ambassador to Soviets

The State Department announced today that for “unexplained personal reasons,” Arthur A. Hartman, U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union for the last five years, is stepping down from the post.

No successor has been named by the White House, but a likely candidate is John Matlock, who has just been replaced as top Soviet expert on the National Security Council. He is also a former U.S. envoy to Bulgaria and is fluent in Russian.

Hartman, 60, a career Foreign Service officer who has also been ambassador to France and an assistant secretary of state, has not made any decision on his future, according to the State Department.

He will leave Moscow early next year, ending an unusually long tour of duty that began in September, 1981, and lasted more than five years, during which he dealt with four Soviet leaders.

It was the longest post-World War II tour for any U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. No specific reason was given for the timing of his announcement.

His tour of duty in Moscow was sometimes turbulent, involving the crisis over the shooting down of the Korean airliner and accusations that the Soviets were using possibly hazardous “spy dust” to trace the movements of U.S. diplomats.

The most recent crisis was the tit-for-tat series of diplomatic expulsions earlier this year, culminating in the Soviets withdrawing all their employees from the U.S. Embassy. This required a change in the usual embassy life style, with Hartman’s wife, Donna, pitching in with other embassy wives to do the cooking and dish washing for dinners and receptions.