The Foreign Service Journal, December 2021

52 DECEMBER 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Leaving Jurkans, I walked to the offices of the Latvian Cabinet of Ministers, where I found Prime Minister Ivars Godmanis on the phone with his Estonian counterpart, Edgar Savisaar. As Godmanis motioned me into his office, I could hear Savisaar’s loud voice: Soviet tanks are on their way to Tallinn. As they hung up, a Soviet military helicopter flew low over the nearby statue of Lenin and drew level with the prime minister’s office. I sug- gested we should get away from the windows. After a hasty chat with Godmanis, I walked across town to the Latvian parliament building, arriving just in time to wit- ness the deputies rapidly pass a resolution declaring Latvia’s full independence before they hastily fled the building. Outside, I encountered Deputy Chairman of the Parliament Andrejs Krastins urging a gaggle of people outside the barricade to go home and take cover. Seeing a line of armored personnel carri- ers advancing, firing shots in the air, I suggested we return to the parliament building. Inside, a strange scene appeared. A large buffet was laid out, perhaps intended to celebrate Latvia’s renewed freedom. Most of the deputies had fled, but not the parliament’s senior leaders and the stalwart cafeteria workers, who were all women. As Prime Minister Godmanis joined the group, Parliament Chair- man Anatoliy Gorbunovs, reflecting the dark humor I frequently encountered in the Baltics, urged all present: “Eat while we are still free; it might be our last good meal!” After we toasted Latvia’s independence, however short-lived that might be, we waited for the bang on the door from Soviet security forces. My hosts thanked me for being there with them. At that moment, I real- ized what it meant to truly represent my country: To them, I was not George Krol, a young American diplomat from New Jersey, I was America; and America was standing with them in their darkest hour. I share these vignettes not to chronicle my exploits as a Foreign Service officer during that historic time (those stories are being collected through the dedicated efforts of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training’s oral history program). Rather, I use them to highlight some of the lessons I learned as an FSO, not only in the Baltics but also in Russia and elsewhere in the former USSR, where I served almost continuously for the rest of my career. These experiences not only helped me become a better diplomat; they helped me comprehend today’s Russia and the other states that emerged from the Soviet Union. Lesson One: Use the Language. First and foremost, I cannot overemphasize the importance of learning and using the language. My only Russian language training had been a year at the Foreign Service Institute before arriving in Leningrad. It was clearly inadequate at first, but certainly provided a firm base on which to expand. The sheer number of conversations and interactions with Russian speakers initially overwhelmed me, but over time greatly improved my grasp and fluency in the language. Most importantly, I lost the fear of speaking Russian and learned how to communicate and, even better, how to listen. Using the language is not only vital for a diplomat to comprehend people and culture but also affords access and insight—and it can, and should, be fun. Lesson Two: Adapt. Adjust. Be Flexible. Be Creative. Prior to my arrival in Leningrad, reforms in the USSR under Gorbachev had already caused a sea change in our consulate’s work. The years of being confined to a 20-mile radius of the city—of reporting from Soviet newspapers and conversations with other diplomats and a few harassed dissidents—had ended. While we still had to file notes with the local Ministry of Foreign Affairs office if we wanted to travel beyond that perimeter, the MFA rarely denied travel. Although my predecessor Doug Wake and our deputy principal officer Jon Purnell had been ejected from the Baltics in March 1990 after Lithuania had declared its full independence, when I sought to venture back into the region in the late summer of that same year, along with our previously expelled DPO, the Soviet MFA did not object and never subse- quently denied or even harassed any U.S. diplomat traveling to the Baltics. As events heated up in the Baltics throughout 1991, I traveled there practically weekly, and mostly alone, without incident. At the consulate, we had no local hires aside from some contract Americans and a few Finnish nationals. We had to do most of the administrative work ourselves, which included mak- ing travel arrangements. Under these circumstances we became largely self-reliant and independent of Embassy Moscow. Despite embassy security regulations that would have required us to travel in pairs—and if by train, in a compartment by our- I felt firsthand the reality of the collapse of the Soviet system for Russians at all levels. For a few, it was exhilarating. For many more, it was a nightmare of uncertainty and instability.