The Foreign Service Journal, May 2023

32 MAY 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL I was a U.S. Information Agency guide on the Photography USA exhibit from June to December 1976. The first city we opened in was Kiev (now Kyiv, capital of independent Ukraine). I was terri- fied. Although I had studied Russian at Georgetown University and could handle dialogue in the classroom, I had rarely encountered native Russian speakers “in the wild.” I didn’t know how well I would perform speak- ing with hundreds of them every day, in the exhibit hall and on the streets. However, as anyone knows who studies a foreign lan- guage, the best way to get good at it is to speak with hun- Naturally that also included undermining the adversar- ies of the Soviet Union and the messages stemming from those adversaries (the U.S. was adversary number one). While most visitors to an exhibit were simply interested Soviet citizens—and their thirst for unvarnished informa- tion about the U.S. was attested by the long lines to get in—government agents were in the crowd to monitor the conversation and at times to ask questions meant to embar- rass the U.S. When guides proved persuasive passing information to the crowds, the Soviets were quick to act. On one occasion in Leningrad, my visitors called into question the veracity of American media. I responded that since their information came from state-controlled media, they were not in a posi- tion to make informed judgments. I asked if they knew that during Stalin’s time, the Soviet Union suffered from a cult of personality. When they responded affirmatively, I said that, of course, during the cult of personality, the Soviet media did not reveal it, but in fact contributed to it. They agreed. What, I asked, had changed in their media to prevent dis- semination of bad information today? This prompted a pro- test from the Soviet side of the exhibit that I was spreading anti-Soviet propaganda. My future wife, Nadya, provoked more rigorous coun- termeasures from government agents. She was one of two native speakers of Russian in our group, and she had a background that contradicted Soviet narratives about the dismal lot of poor people in the United States. Her grand- parents had fled Bolshevik Russia, and her parents moved to the U.S. shortly after World War II. Her father died when she was young; and she, her mother, and two siblings lived in straitened circumstances. But, as she explained to the crowd, she went to college on a full scholarship. In Minsk, our minders decided that they could distract her by approaching in groups and shouting hostile questions. When we noticed this, we began to pay attention to her stand, and guides who were not on duty would come to help her when she was besieged with questions. Working the exhibit only increased my interest in the U.S. Foreign Service. I started grad school the year I came back from the Soviet Union, took the Foreign Service exam my second year at Fletcher, and joined the Foreign Service 18 months later. At that time, the Foreign Service did not encourage new officers to take their first assignment in a familiar location. So my first assignment was to Saudi Arabia, followed by a stint on the Israeli desk. I made it to the Soviet Union on assignment three, working in Embassy Moscow’s political section. Things worked out. John Herbst is the senior director of the Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council. A career Foreign Service officer, he served as U.S. ambassador in Ukraine and Uzbekistan and as consul general in Jerusalem during a 31-year diplomatic career. Getting to Know the Real USSR Rose Gottemoeller Photography USA / Kiev, Alma-Ata / 1976 dreds of native speakers every day, or to get a lover. I never got a lover—we weren’t supposed to go that far in our cultural exchange—but I did speak Russian for hours every day at the exhibit and far into the evening. During that period, young people were very curious about our small band of Americans, and they wanted to meet with us after hours, to walk in the park, to sit by the river drinking beer, to take us to one of the few nightspots then operating in Kiev. Some of them even cooked me dinner—I remember one young man who had remarkable eyes, one blue and one green. He cooked me a pan of fried potatoes served up with shots of vodka. It took me a while to realize that meal was probably all he had.