The Foreign Service Journal, May 2023

44 MAY 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL nonofficial Soviets toward Americans; sadly, that is no longer the case in today’s Russia. In one notable case I remember, the mediumwas easily as powerful as the message. Our sole Ukrainian-speaking guide in Kiev, as we called it then, made such a powerful impres- sion that Ukrainians flocked from hundreds of miles away to hear him speak their native tongue (the other guides all spoke Russian). The crowds were so intense that visitors daily implored this guide, Walter Lupan, to climb on top of our showpiece Ford pickup truck so that more could hear him. This was an early lesson to me of both Ukrainian nationalism and the intense Soviet neuralgia to it—the guide was declared persona non grata by Moscow. For someone like me, who later developed a specialty in arms control and nonproliferation, the exhibit also provided early lessons on how the Soviet government sought to instill its views on nuclear weapons in the popular sphere. Soviet “agitprop” (agitation and propaganda) seized on the “neu- tron bomb” (an enhanced radiation weapon reported to be under consideration by the U.S. for deployment in Europe), which I (and probably 99.99 percent of American or Soviet citizens) had never heard of before. The Soviet leader- ship began attacking it as a “capitalist weapon” (because it would rely more on lethal radiation and less on blast, which would theoretically minimize property damage). This heretofore obscure type of weapon was injected into the questions posed to us by Soviet visitors, although we knew that what they were really interested in were the perennial questions such as what did such and such cost in the U.S., and nyet neytronnoi bombe (no to the neutron bomb) became a familiar phrase that still rolls around my head 40 years later! This manufactured outrage (the Soviets themselves were developing these bombs) presaged the massive propaganda campaigns the USSR mounted in Europe in the early 1980s in an attempt to block U.S. inter- mediate range nuclear deployments. The nuclear issue leads me to one huge benefit of the exhibits program—the fact that it helped develop a talented cadre of Russian-speaking specialists in Russia and other areas of the former Soviet Union who gained direct experi- ence on both official and popular attitudes and how one could most productively engage or counter disinformation. Former guide Rose Gottemoeller, negotiator of the New START treaty and NATO Deputy Secretary General, springs immediately to mind. Guides later rose to prominence in a wide array of spe- cializations, ranging from literature professor and interna- tional gastronomy expert Darra Goldstein to CNN Moscow Bureau Chief Jill Dougherty, to U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Beyrle, and a number of other ambassadors and U.S. government officials. My own early guide experience in Central Asia led me toward a career-long interest in Central The dome that housed Photography USA also housed Agriculture USA in 1978 in Tselinograd. A small provincial town then, today it is Astana, the ultramodern capital of Kazakhstan. The small red, white, and blue structures are grain silos in which agricultural equipment and information were displayed. COURTESYOFLAURAKENNEDY  Agriculture USA exhibit guide work crew in Tselinograd in June 1978. Exhibit guides physically put up and took down the exhibits, which surprised many Soviet visitors. From left: Robin Seaman, Larry Sherwin, R.D. Zimmerman, Laura Kennedy, Lance Murty. JOHNBEYRLE