The Foreign Service Journal, September 2008

dren will turn out, this book offers hope that your son (or daughter!) might also one day grow up to be an ambassador. Ted Wilkinson, a Foreign Service officer from 1961 to 1996, is the chair- man of the FSJ Editorial Board. Julie Gianelloni Connor, a mem- ber of the Senior Foreign Service, has served overseas nine times in her 27- year career. During her career, she has been on an unaccompanied tour, had a trailing spouse, been part of a tandem couple, and been a single mother with dependent — but never yet a dependent herself. She is a member of the FSJ Editorial Board. Decoding the Russian Enigma Living With Stalin’s Ghost: A Fulbright Memoir of Moscow and the New Russia Bruce C. Daniels, Connecticut Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2008, $10.00, paperback, 150 pages. R EVIEWED BY D ALE H ERSPRING This book was a welcome change from the weighty political science publications I normally find myself critiquing. At just 150 pages, it is an easy read, but is also very informative. Professor Bruce Daniels normally teaches 16th- and 17th-century histo- ry at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he is the Gilbert M. Denman Endowed Professor of American History. However, one day in 2006 he woke up to discover that he had been selected to spend six months at Moscow State University teaching some of Russia’s best and brightest on a Fulbright grant. The only problem was that he had only visited Russia once and did not even know the Cyrillic alphabet. But lest the reader get the wrong impres- sion, that is precisely what makes this account so interesting. Instead of looking at the city from the standpoint of an academic expert or an FSO back for a third tour, Daniels freely admits that he knew almost nothing about Russia, and certainly nothing about the trials and tribulations of living on the local economy. Contrary to the book’s title, Daniels does not focus on Stalin’s Russia — at least not in the formal sense. But as he astutely observes, the dictator’s “legacy haunts the new Russia and is shorthand for the Soviet legacy.” One of Daniels’ chapter headings makes a point I wish my students understood: “Russia Is a Hard Country to Know: Do Not Trust First Impressions.” To support that thesis, he cites a wealth of examples from daily life in Moscow. One of the fun- niest parts of this chapter is his account of getting his rather modest (but very expensive) apartment wired so he could get CNN. Then there was the time at the dry cleaner’s he spent an hour trying to explain to the clerk, mainly through gestures, that the purple tie she had handed him was not the sweater he had brought in to get cleaned. She was less than polite, and the people in the line behind him became aggravat- ed. He held his ground, and eventu- ally got his sweater. But the encounter left him absolutely con- vinced that Russian sales personnel are all trained to scowl at customers. Daniels was always able to find an English-speaking student to take him around Moscow, so he gives a helpful overview of the capital’s many sights. (He resisted the lure of the Arbat for a while, but eventually succumbed.) And his discussion of tipping etiquette demonstrates the generation gap in Russian society: older individuals seem to be against it, younger ones expect it. In short, this delightful book should be required reading for any- one living in Moscow or going there. Come to think of it, I think I will require my students to read it next year. It is a far cry from the articles and books they read on things like sys- tem maintenance, interest aggrega- tion or articulation, not to mention a hundred other conceptual frame- works. Even though some of my col- leagues would disown me for saying it, one cannot really hope to understand a country if one cannot make sense out of its cultural idiosyncracies. And as anyone who has dealt with Russia knows, it has a lot of them. n Dale Herspring, a Foreign Service officer from 1971 to 1991, served mainly in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, specializing in political- military affairs. A university distin- guished professor of political science at Kansas State University since 1993, he is the author or editor of 12 books and numerous articles. S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 83 B O O K S u This delightful book should be required reading for anyone living in Moscow or going there.