This biography of a living person needs additional citations for russian foreign minister andrei kozyrev. Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation under President Boris Yeltsin, in office from October 1991 until January 1996.

Kozyrev was born in Brussels in 1951, the son of a Soviet engineer temporarily working there. He was educated at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, a school for diplomats operated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Before beginning his studies there in 1969, he spent a year as a fitter in the Kommunar machine-building factory in Moscow. He completed his studies in 1974. Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a speech writer and researcher in the Department of International Organizations, which was responsible for issues concerning the United Nations and arms control, including biological and chemical warfare issues. Kozyrev’s career in the Foreign Ministry marked him as a promising young Soviet diplomat. He became an attaché in the Department of International Organizations in 1979 and third secretary the next year.

Seizing the opportunity opened by Gorbachev’s glasnost in summer 1989, Kozyrev wrote an article repudiating the Leninist concept of the “international class struggle,” the very essence of Leninism. In October 1990, a rebellious parliament of the Russian Federation voted to appoint Kozyrev the foreign minister. In December 1992, Kozyrev underlined his opposition to conservative, nationalistic forces in Russia with a dramatic and unprecedented diplomatic maneuver. In the December 1993 elections, Kozyrev ran for a seat in the lower house, the State Duma, as a candidate on the list of the liberal Russia’s Choice bloc and as a candidate in the Murmansk region. He took a seat as a representative from Murmansk when the State Duma met in January 1994, having won 60 percent of the vote in a field of 10.