The Foreign Service Journal, March 2017

14 MARCH 2017 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL LETTERS-PLUS I had the honor to be the minister counselor for economic and commercial affairs at U.S. Embassy Moscow from 1988 to 1991. The December Foreign Service Journal and other coverage of the 25th anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union prompt me to write this letter. First of all, as head of the embassy’s Economic and Commercial Section (ECON), and having been on the ground during most of the final years of the Soviet Union, I must take issue with Mikhail Gorbachev’s recent scape- goating of the West’s failure to provide expected “vital aid” as a significant factor in the USSR’s downfall (in an interview with the Associated Press on Dec. 12.) Secondly, I feel obligated to make a few comments on reporting from Embassy Moscow during this critical period of history, as well as on the fire at the embassy in March 1991. Economic Reform Efforts Mr. Gorbachev’s conspiratorial assertions that we on the ground were gleefully rubbing our hands as the Soviet Union was unraveling are simply not true. At the U.S. embassy, we obvi- ously were against communism, but were ever mindful that we were dealing with the country possessing the most nuclear weapons in the world. Provoking uncontrollable instability would have been irratio- nal on our part, and dangerous to the United States. Furthermore, for many years there were sustained efforts by the United States, international financial institutions and many other entities to search for a viable reform path for Gorbachev’s perestroika (restructur- ing). U.S. Embassy Moscow was part of that economic reform effort, bringing in many top economic and financial experts to render advice. Ambassador Jack Matlock supported and encouraged our efforts. For example, I initiated the visit of then-Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan for that purpose, and also brought in John Phelan, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, who led a heavily attended seminar that essentially explained what a stock exchange is. My team and I spent countless hours with top Soviet economic figures such as Viktor Gerashenko, Leonid Abalkin, Oleg Bogomolov, Nikolai Petro- kov, Stanislav Shitalin, Yegor Gaidar, Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov and many others. Never once did we seek to undermine their reform programs, but instead ensured that Washington under- stood what was going on, conveyed their requests and provided them access to many of our top economic experts. During this period, however, it was the titanic, cumulative rot and the grotesque inefficiencies of the old Soviet command economy that were most important—and habitually understated in later chronicles. After all, the Soviet economic system was designed first and foremost as a primary instrument for political control—not as a blueprint for constructing, nurturing or modernizing an economy. Vladimir Lenin believed that it was necessary for the state to control the commanding heights of the economic Retired FSO John W. Blaney was appointed U.S. ambassador to Liberia in 2003, and received the Secretary’s Distinguished Service Award for his critical role in ending that country’s civil war. In addition to service in Moscow, he had previously served as chargé d’affaires in South Africa, director of the Office of Southern African Affairs at State and deputy U.S. representa- tive to the United Nations Economic and Social Council. He authored and was a negotiator of the U.S.-USSR Nuclear Risk Reduction Centers Agreement and worked on the START and INF agreements. He also served in the Bureau of Economic Affairs and at the U.S. Treasury Depart- ment, as well as on Capitol Hill. Since retiring from government service, he has worked as a Wall Street adviser and for Deloitte. He began his career as a U.S. Army officer. For the Record: On the 25th Anniversary of the Fall of the USSR BY JOHN W. BLANEY Please enjoy this brand-new feature, which we are calling “Letters-Plus,” a place for longer responses to articles or issues raised in the Journal . A submission will qualify to run in this department if it adds to overall knowledge and history of the subject. Here, for the first edition of Letters-Plus, is a response to the December focus on “The New Rus- sia at 25” from Ambassador (ret.) John W. Blaney.