MOSCOW — Georgi A. Arbatov, who was the senior “Amerikanist” in the Soviet Communist Party in the final decades of the cold war and served as the Kremlin’s voice for a generation of television viewers in the United States, died here on Friday. He was 87. Mr. Arbatov was an adviser to five Communist Party general secretaries and was involved in negotiating arms control and other agreements between the Soviet Union and the United States. But he attained prominence by acting as a bridge between the superpowers at a time when they were divided by suspicion, misunderstanding and outright hostility.He was one of the first Soviet officials to reach out to government, industry and academia in the United States, using his fluent English to try to explain the thinking of an insular Soviet leadership that often seemed to have no idea how to sway American opinion. He was regularly interviewed on American television and was a fixture on programs like “Nightline.”
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