The Foreign Service Journal, May 2023

34 MAY 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL We set up the exhibit in a snowstorm and opened in early November, just in time for the Nov. 7 Revolution Day celebration. Of course, we got the day off and were offered the chance to sit in a grandstand with local dignitaries to watch the parade. It was cold and snowing hard, so I opted instead to roam along the parade route, knowing that I could escape inside if it got too unbearable. At some point, I was standing on top of a snowbank watching the parade go by when a group of World War II veterans holding signs of Politburo members hove into sight. When they got to my snowbank, one of them, holding a por- trait of Leonid Brezhnev, signaled to the others. “ Khvatit uzhe [Enough already],” he said, and shoved Leonid headfirst into the snowbank. The others followed suit with their placards, and then they clambered over the snow and headed off into the storm. I can’t swear that they pulled out a bottle of vodka on their way, but I wouldn’t be surprised. That is the day I realized that the Soviet Union was not so sturdy and homogenous as I had been led to believe during my studies back in the United States. When Kazakhstan exploded in student riots in December 1986, among the first as the USSR began to melt down, I was not surprised. I remembered that snowbank 10 years earlier and heard in my mind the old man say, “Khvatit uzhe . ” Rose Gottemoeller is the Steven C. Házy Lecturer at the Freeman- Spogli Institute of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. Before joining Stanford, Gottemoeller was the Deputy Secretary General of NATO from 2016 to 2019. Before NATO, she served for nearly five years as the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security at the State Department. While Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance in 2009 and 2010, she was the chief U.S. negotia- tor of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with the Russian Federation. She is the author of Negotiating the New START Treaty (Cambria Press, 2021), winner of the American Academy of Diplomacy’s Douglas Dillon Book Award for a Book of Distinction on the Practice of American Diplomacy. A typical crowd at the Photography USA exhibit. Inside the dome in Novosibirsk, June 1977. COURTESYOFJOHNBEYRLE