The Foreign Service Journal, November 2019

44 NOVEMBER 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Managing from Moscow Raymond F. Smith Moscow, USSR w orld-shaking events do not always occur on personally convenient timetables. If they had asked me, I’d have told the East Germans to pick a different week to tear down that damned wall. It greatly inconvenienced me. You see, I was unofficially in charge of the U.S. embassy in Moscow at the time. I say unoffi- cially because the ambassador was in the country, although on a visit to one of the Soviet Union’s far-flung republics. With the deputy chief of mission out of the country, I was filling in for both. But that was not the real inconvenience. Rather, my wife was out of the country, our nanny was not in Moscow and I was working out of the DCM’s office with my 10-week-old son strapped to my chest in a baby pouch. My plans for the weekend included heating the reserve supply of breast milk to the proper temperature, changing diapers and, probably, getting precious little sleep. Not the best setup for trying to get information from the Foreign Ministry about Soviet views on the rapidly unfolding developments. Of course, we were not going to get any immediate infor- mation out of the Foreign Ministry in any case, because on something like this no one would comment before Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev or Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze did. There are times, though, when as a diplomat you know what a country is going to do. You know it because you have been there for a while, and you have what I can only call a “feel” for things—a combination of facts, firsthand observations and intuition that is almost unattain- able from a distance. It is a resource that is, unfortunately, often undervalued at the political level. Many of Gorbachev’s foreign travels during the prior year had been to Eastern Europe, where he told the Communist Party leaderships that they needed to reform, that if their people rose up against them, the Red Army would no longer intervene on their behalf. He meant it. The “new thinking” that he and Shevardnadze had made the cornerstone of Soviet for- eign policy had as a principal tenet an end to what he called the enemy image of the West. This was not just a slogan. It was essential to Gorbachev’s domestic reform effort, the basis for major cuts in Soviet defense spending that would free resources for domestic needs, improve peoples’ lives and solidify support. None of that worked out in the long run, but there remained a lot of optimism for it in 1989. Intervention would have meant the end of the reform effort; he would not allow it as long as he remained in power. On the Monday after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the vast majority of East Germans who had crossed returned home to work. The Soviet leadership breathed a sigh of relief. Russians fear chaos, but the only explosions they had seen were of joy. The end of the wall was a fait accompli, the disintegration of the East German regime a probability. In the coming months, Gorbachev and Shevardnadze would seek to turn this situa- tion to their advantage by trying to negotiate an end to their no-longer-tenable position in Germany in return for aid and Western acceptance. The seeds of our current problems with Russia were planted in those negotiations, but that is a matter for a different discussion. Raymond F. Smith, who was in Moscow when the Berlin Wall fell, was a Foreign Service officer from 1969 to 1993. A longtime international negotiations consultant, he is the author of Negotiating with the Sovi- ets (1989) and The Craft of Political Analysis for Diplomats (2011). SHAWNDORMAN An American visitor chips away at the wall in an open Berlin, spring 1990.