The Foreign Service Journal, May 2023

46 MAY 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL agencies regarding howmuch latitude the guides should be given to criticize U.S. policy or events—in particular, the VietnamWar and, later, the Watergate scandal. Over time, the experience gained with each new exhibit made it obvious that giving Soviet visitors a chance to see true “free speech” in action was muchmore valuable than trying to “script” the guides, which would have been difficult to accomplish in any case. After our group assembled inWashington, D.C., in the spring of 1977, we began an intensive month of training designed by USIA to prepare us for what lay ahead. We were givenmaterial in Russian to help us describe in detail the photographic equipment or processes we were demonstrat- ing, but the scripts we studied were technical in nature, never political. We also spent time studying lists of typical questions that visitors would be asking, so that we could personalize our responses in describing our educational and family back- grounds, the size and layout of our houses, what we paid for basic goods and services, andmany other aspects of daily life back home. This proved an absolutely essential part of our training because, thoughmany visitors wanted to know the concrete details of how people did photography in America, they were overwhelmingly interested in asking about us . For the vast majority of Soviet citizens, who often stood in line for an hour or more to get into the exhibit, this was the first (and for most the only) chance they would have to speak to a real live breathing American who, as a bonus, spoke some approxima- tion of Russian. We used to joke that USIA could design an exhibit called “Paper Clips USA”—and as long as there were Russian-speaking Americans staffing it, huge crowds were assured. My experiences on the exhibit, although I didn’t realize it at the time, amounted tomy earliest training as a diplomat. The keys to being effective as a guide on the stand or as an FSOmaking a demarche are basically two, I think. First, youmust be a master of the subject matter: inside and out, backward and forward, until you can speak at length, in detail, and with self-confidence about any aspect of what is at issue. And second, you need to be able to understand the motivations of and demonstrate some empathy toward your interlocutor. As a guide, I found that a bit of humility and humor always helped “humanize” me in the eyes of the crowd (and there was almost always a big crowd, sometimes up to 30-40 people, surrounding us). Although our pre-departure training inWashington was comprehensive, nothing could prepare us for the stark reality of the job, standing on the floor of the exhibit trying to engage intelligently with the ceaseless streamof visitors, up to 15,000 per day. Inmy early weeks out on the stand as a guide, it quickly became evident that I was seeing a vast cross-section of Soviet people. Many of the visitors were highly educated, but others clearly were not. Their outlooks ranged from sophisticated or even worldly to naive and crudely provincial. Most interestingly, on the political spectrum, I was engaging every day with both the truest of true believers in the Soviet system, as well as people who were essentially “closet dis- sidents.”These opposite types sometimes came into prickly contact with each other, right in front of us. One typical day I was out on the stand trying not to be drawn into an ugly argument with someone who kept loudly insisting on his ill-informed views about the many faults of U.S. society. He was, of course, only repeating (and embel- lishing on) the propaganda that everyone was being fed by the Soviet press; my job was to marshal some facts and A typical crowd at the Photography USA exhibit, inside the dome in Novosibirsk, June 1977. COURTESYOFJOHNBEYRLE