The Foreign Service Journal, December 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2016 27 This tour d’horizon from the fall of the Soviet Union to today—including hopes, disappointments and missed opportunities—puts U.S.-Russia relations into perspective. THE RISE OF THE NEW RUSSIA BY LOU I S D. SE L L During a 27-year career with the State Department, retired FSO Louis Sell served for many years in the former Soviet Union, Russia and Yugoslavia. He was also U.S. represen- tative to the Joint Consultative Group in Vienna, director of the Office of Russian and Eurasian Analysis, and executive secretary of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks. From 1995 to 1996, he served as political adviser to Carl Bildt, the first High Representative for Bosnian Peace Implementation. In 2000 he served as Kosovo Director of the International Crisis Group. As executive director of the American University in Kosovo Foundation from 2003 to 2008, he helped found the American University in Kosovo. He is the author of FromWashington to Moscow: U.S.-Soviet Relations and the Collapse of the USSR (Duke University Press, 2016) and S lobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Duke University Press, 2002). Mr. Sell is now an adjunct professor at the University of Maine at Farmington and lives on a farm in Whitefield, Maine. V ladimir Putin famously described the collapse of the USSR as “the biggest geopolitical tragedy of the [20th] century”—quite a claim when one considers the competition: two world wars and the Holocaust, for starters. But the Russian president’s remark illustrates why it is impossible to understand Putin and the country he leads without also understanding how Russians view the collapse of the USSR and its aftermath. ON RUSSIA FOCUS