The Foreign Service Journal, December 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2021 53 selves—we regularly ignored those rules (with our local security officer’s tacit approval). Moreover, the train conductors would often put people into the empty berths in our compartments to earn a little extra money for themselves. Frankly, those compart- ment companions were a fount of knowledge and insight for our cables. We in the “grad” (Leningrad) were glad the “embassy tsar” was far away, and that we had a benevolent consul general, Dick Miles, who let us do our job and kept Embassy Moscow at bay. As a former Marine, Miles instinctively understood and supported the expeditionary nature of our work, recognizing that creativity and a certain amount of guile were required to get the job done. Lesson Three: Go Out and Discover. The collapse of the August 1991 coup and subsequent independence of the Baltic states freed me from the Baltic beat and enabled me to concentrate on covering developments in Leningrad (the name change came in September) and the huge territory of northwest Russia. I was able to travel throughout the region meeting people who had rarely seen an American. I quickly realized that not all Russians are alike, and those who live away from the big cities of St. Petersburg and Moscow have their own distinct cultures and languages. Our diplomatic tasks had also changed with the collapse of the USSR. No longer were we focused primarily on reporting on conditions in our district. Suddenly we became program officers for U.S. aid and assistance programs for which we had no prior experience, such as providing humanitarian aid to hospitals, orphanages and old age homes. We now saw sides of Russian life that Soviet authorities had long shut off from foreign purview. Most of our contacts in the Russian provinces spoke no English, and their Russian was of a type we Russian-language neophytes had never encountered. The experience was overwhelming for them and for us. But ironically, it allowed us to develop a deeper bond and, if we allowed ourselves, an emotional connection with the people. 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. I and many Russians knew precisely what Vladimir Putin meant when President of Russia Boris Yeltsin (holding flag) and his supporters in front of the Russian Parliament (the “White House”) in Moscow in the aftermath of the August 1991 coup attempt. ALAMY