The Foreign Service Journal, May 2023

80 MAY 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL with few cars on the streets, few goods in the shops, and shab- bily dressed people shuffling along unshoveled sidewalks. There was no advertising aside from Communist Party billboards and banners, and Soviet citizens remained wary of talking to foreigners. Smith also recalls the extensive bugging of West- ern embassies and residences, the strict control over local embassy employees enforced by the ubiquitous agency for foreign missions, UpDK, and the frequent harassment of Western diplomats by KGB agents on the street and in their homes. He tells the story of coming back to his apartment to find his belongings ransacked, a common occurrence to this day in Moscow. Other extensive efforts the KGB went to included compromising NATO and other diplomats and staff with “swallows” (female seductresses) and “Romeos” (male suitors). This is a tale of bureaucratic obstacles, mutual suspicion, frequent cultural clashes, and incomprehension that somehow—in significant part due to the efforts of Smith and his colleagues—cul- minated in the 1972 series of hockey matches that took place in both countries during the course of the year. The summit between Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin marked a hopeful start for Soviet-Canadian rela- tions, which involved a strong push by Trudeau to use the two countries’ shared love of hockey to make sports diplomacy literally (as reflected in the title of the documentary film based on this book) an ice breaker. Great players like Paul Henderson and Phil Esposito on the Canadian team and Vladislav Tretiak and Vladimir Petrov on the Soviet team clashed in a series of matches that resulted in a narrow Canadian victory in the final matchup, giving Canada the trophy and leading Kosygin and other top Soviet officials to complain of the Canadians’ rough play (nothing new there, then and now). The Canadian fans’ chant of “Da, Da Canada, Nyet, Nyet Soviet” was heard on Soviet TV, and prompted more diplo- matic protests. Despite all, the series was lauded in both countries as a major breakthrough, and energized Trudeau’s own brand of détente, which led to a series of key grain and trade deals that brought the two countries closer. What is most striking about this fascinating tale is the optimism about the future that clearly pervaded a still-tense and worrying time of superpower conflict across the globe. Official and people-to- people contacts continued to increase through the rest of the decade, until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the advent of more skeptical leaders—Ron- ald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and, in Canada’s case, Brian Mulroney. Today as we ponder the collapse of our relations with Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Russia’s brutal invasions of Ukraine and other former Soviet republics, there is more than a twinge of nostalgia for a time when, despite all the obstacles, controversies, and clashes, people on both sides believed that our relations could continue to improve, and that contacts between people on both sides of the Cold War could help to lessen the risks of war. n Ambassador Eric Rubin is the president of AFSA.