V. Kuznetsov; VP to 4 Soviet Presidents

Vasily V. Kuznetsov, who served as vice president to four Soviet presidents, died in Moscow this week at the age of 89, the official newspaper Pravda reported.

Kuznetsov, who died Tuesday, became Soviet vice president in 1977 under Leonid I. Brezhnev and retired from the post in 1986, when Andrei A. Gromyko was president. In between, he served under two leaders, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko.

During a 25-year diplomatic career, Kuznetsov was Soviet ambassador to China, served on the 1954 Geneva Conference that negotiated the cease-fire and the French withdrawal from Indochina, and in 1962 was part of the delegation that traveled to the United States to negotiate the withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and other member of the Communist Party’s Politburo signed Kuznetsov’s obituary, which appeared in Pravda on Thursday.

Kuznetsov, it said, was born to a peasant family on Feb. 13, 1901, in the village of Sofilovka near what is now the city of Gorky, 225 miles east of Moscow.

He joined the Red Army in 1920 during the Civil War that followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, then trained as a metallurgical engineer and worked in industry.

From 1931 to 1933, he studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, according to a biography released in 1981 by Radio Free Europe, the U.S.-funded station based in Munich, West Germany.

He rose to become deputy head of Gosplan, the state planning agency, then served as head of the national trade union organization while simultaneously acting as chairman of the Soviet of Nationalities, one of two houses of the Soviet parliament.

After the death of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1953, Kuznetsov lost his seat on the Politburo, then known as the Presidium, and became deputy minister of foreign affairs.