The Foreign Service Journal, December 2011

32 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 1 The first three persons Mayor Popov named did, in fact, lead the junta that tried to take power on Aug. 19, 1991. Lukyanov seems to have supported their efforts, but tried to cover his tracks by not becoming a formal member of the junta. The Aug. 19 attempted coup failed in less than three days. The country was no longer the Soviet Union of old. Boris Yeltsin, the elected president of Russia, was able to rally Muscovites to come to Gorbachev’s protection, and key military units refused to attack him. I left Moscow a week before the coup attempt, having told American jour- nalists there, in reply to a direct question, that there could be an attempt to “reverse perestroika” — but, if so, I thought it would fail. To the best of my recollection, none of the several dozen journalists present reported my state- ment even though it was on the record. When the coup occurred, Deputy Chief of Mission (later Ambassador) James Collins was in charge of the em- bassy. Under his guidance, American diplomats kept con- stant contact with Yeltsin, who was barricaded in the Russian parliament building not far from our embassy. This access provided unique insight into the Yeltsin gov- ernment’s reaction to the spectacular events taking place outside that building, events that were well and thoroughly reported by Western journalists. My successor, Robert Strauss, arrived in Moscow just after the coup attempt failed. He inherited an experienced embassy staff that had successfully embedded itself in Moscow’s political and intellectual elite and had developed contacts throughout the vast empire. This proved to be an irreplaceable asset for the George H.W. Bush adminis- tration as it coped with the fallout from the disintegration of a previously hostile but by then friendly superpower. Everyday Work Increases So far in this account, the reader might infer that Em- bassy Moscow had little to do in the late Soviet period but report on the unprecedented and— for most specialists — unexpected developments in the USSR. Nothing could be further from the truth. Every section of the embassy was inundated with what seemed an exponential increase in its workload. For instance, scores of U.S.-Soviet negotiations were under way. At one point we counted 86 negotiations being conducted simultaneously, on topics ranging from strate- gic arms reductions to the safety of nuclear power plants, intellectual property rights, the sale of grain, civil airline routes, maritime boundaries in the Bering Sea and human rights abuses. Although many negotiations were con- ducted by special delegations, all had to be supported by the embassy. The work of the defense attaché’s office evolved from mainly intelligence collection to genuine liaison with the Soviet military and support of round-the-clock monitoring of Soviet missile facilities. The consular section faced a sudden flood of applications for visas of all types. Waiting lists for immigrant or refugee status reached a half million by late 1990. Within the space of a few months, the num- ber of visas issued, all of which had to be explicitly ap- proved by Washington, went from a few thousand a year to more than 100,000. The embassy was also involved in negotiating the final touches on the Soviet agreement to withdraw from Afghanistan and settlements regarding Cambodia, Nica- ragua and Angola, as well as German unification and the diplomacy that preceded the first Persian Gulf War. In that case, for the first time, the Soviet Union was per- suaded to vote in the United Nations Security Council to authorize military action against an erstwhile ally. With the opening of the Soviet media, embassy public affairs took on a new dimension: television appearances of Russian-speaking embassy officers and visiting Americans became almost a daily occurrence. By 1990, Spaso House, the ambassador’s residence, was the locus of some 12 to 16 official functions a week. Some days saw as many as four events: working breakfasts, lunches, a press conference or briefing, then an evening reception or seated dinner. In 1989 we initiated a series of “Spaso Seminars” in- volving American specialists discussing Soviet domestic is- sues ranging from demographic problems to the operation of the black market, to unanswered questions about Josef Stalin. Russian academic specialists and legislators were invited to lectures, followed by dinner and discussion. Condoleezza Rice, then a staffer at the National Security Council, gave a well-attended lecture in Russian on the Soviet military. When the Soviet legislature was considering a law on press freedoms, we had an American lawyer specializing in First Amendment rights speak to a group that included the members of the relevant Supreme Soviet committee. Subsequently, they used the arguments they had heard at Spaso House (without attribution, of course) to strengthen press freedoms in the Soviet law under consideration. The number of official and important unofficial dele- F OCUS