Inside the Soviet Alternate Universe

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Introduction

It may seem unusual that a book that is mostly analytical opens with several chapters that are mostly descriptive. This is the case because of the importance I attach to providing a real-world setting, a specific historical context for the analysis and policy recommendations in the second and third parts of the book. Before setting forth a theoretical framework for analyzing the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet empire, I want the reader to take part vicariously in the experiences and encounters I describe in this opening section and thus to develop some existential feel for the reality, and particularly for the psychological atmosphere, of Soviet communism as I came to know it. I want the reader to see that the analytical perspective I develop in Part 2 and use apply to current foreign issues in Part 3 is based upon the realities of the Soviet regime as I experienced them, above all from the mind-set, the concepts, and the categories with which the Soviet leadership construed the world.

Although I was trained in political science, the approach I use in Part 1 as well as in Part 2 resembles the methods characteristic of the school of cultural anthropology represented by Clifford Geertz. In his view, the proper study of other people’s culture involves discovering who they think they are, what they think they are doing, and to what end they think they are doing it. To accomplish this, Geertz contends, one must gain working familiarity with the frames of meaning within which other peoples live their lives. And the basic data in this effort “are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.”

Understanding foreign frames of reference is also one of the main concerns—or should be—of career diplomats, who, while interested in the thinking of all peoples in a given country, are most interested in that country’s leadership group and its frame of meaning. As an American diplomat dealing primarily with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, I developed my construction of the Soviet leadership’s outlook from specific observations during my eight years in the Soviet Union and Bulgaria—from trying to understand who Soviet and Bulgarian leaders thought they were, what they thought they were doing, and to what end they thought they were doing it.

My selection of observations in Part 1 and my subsequent generalizations from them in Part 2 certainly do not have the methodological rigor of anthropological fieldwork. As will become obvious in the first four chapters, most of my observations regarding leadership outlook were of necessity indirect—in those days, American diplomats had little personal contact with senior Communist leaders and had to rely on inference, imagination, and a fair bit of guesswork in attempting to understand their thinking. Still, as Geertz has nicely put it: “Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning.”

The reader of course may not agree with my view of the Soviet alternative universe and the analytical scheme I have derived from it—indeed, given the still-contentious nature of the substantive issues with which this book deals, it would be unrealistic to expect widespread consensus, particularly among Western specialists in Soviet affairs who have formed their own understanding of Soviet leadership motivations and reached their own conclusions about the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet empire. At least my inductive approach, proceeding from descriptive particulars to more generalized analysis and then to policy recommendations, will provide explicit grounds for the specialist as well as the general reader to judge the validity of my findings.

More generally, I hope my episodic account of diplomatic life and times behind the Iron Curtain will convey a sense of the texture and flavor of those times and illustrate U.S. diplomacy at the working level during the last phase of the Cold War, from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s. To this end, I have included descriptions of the routine of living and working inside the Soviet empire, along with selective accounts of experiences that illuminated the nature of that empire. I hope this will benefit younger readers, for many of whom America’s costly and sometimes dangerous preoccupation with the Soviet threat over the four decades following World War II doubtless seems a distant, closed chapter in American history.

Part 1 is not intended as a personal memoir, although the episodes are arranged in rough chronological order for the sake of clarity and are of necessity personal in nature. The episodes are described as accurately as memory allows, with the exception of my using pseudonyms and changing or omitting nonessential facts in a few instances, out of respect for the privacy of the specific individuals concerned and also with due deference to a few still sensitive matters pertaining to U.S. national security.

A word of explanation may be in order regarding my background and experience, to demonstrate the nature of my specialization and also to provide something of a road map for the four chapters that follow. I was one of a core group of U.S. Foreign Service Officers who specialized in Soviet and Eastern European affairs during the last three decades of the Cold War. My interest in communism and the Soviet Union had a somewhat unusual genesis: it was stimulated by my father, who was engaged professionally in such matters as chief counsel and chief investigator for the California Senate’s Committee on Un-American Activities from the early 1940s to the 1960s. Despite his extensive firsthand experience with American communism, he could never satisfy my curiosity as to why intelligent Americans would opt to dedicate their lives to the Soviet-led communist movement.

I pursued this interest as an undergraduate and graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, learning Russian at the Army Language School during a three-year stint in the military between my undergraduate and graduate studies. As a graduate student I specialized in Soviet affairs in Berkeley’s Department of Political Science, from which I received a doctorate in 1966. My dissertation dealt with the internal logic of Marxism-Leninism and the ways in which this doctrine appeared to shape Soviet policy-making. In working on the dissertation, I became convinced that despite what struck me as Marxism-Leninism’s overall falsity and pretentiousness, if one temporarily suspended disbelief and assumed its basic assumptions were valid, the doctrine had a seductive internal logic, was consistent over time, gave the true believer a sense of participating in a scientifically grounded just cause, and did in fact appear to play a major role in shaping Soviet policy.

I had many subsequent opportunities to test and refine these conclusions through direct exposure to the Soviet empire. I joined the foreign service in 1966 and was initially posted to the U.S. Legation in Sofia, Bulgaria, for two years. Next came a year of advanced Russian language training and Soviet area studies at the U.S. Army’s Russian Institute in Germany, after which I was assigned for two years (1969–71) to our Moscow embassy. Chapter 1 highlights my experiences in Bulgaria, at the Army Institute in Germany, and on an extensive, institute-sponsored tour of the Soviet Union. Chapter 2 describes the impressions I drew from these experiences as well as from my first assignment in the USSR.

My initial Moscow assignment was followed by a posting to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, where I served as the mission’s specialist on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (1971–73). My next assignment was to the State Department’s Office of Soviet Union Affairs (1973–75) and led to my return to Moscow for a four-year tour of duty at the embassy (1975–79). My experiences in the Soviet Union during those years are sketched in Chapter 3. I then went back to the State Department to work as one of two assistants to Marshall Shulman, who was Secretary of State Cyrus Vance’s Special Assistant for Soviet Affairs. Next came a second posting to the Office of Soviet Union Affairs, where I served as principal deputy director during the initial years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency (1980–83). Following that, I served for two years (1983–85) as director of the Office of Eastern European and Yugoslav Affairs. And in 1985 I returned to the USSR for my third Moscow assignment, this time as the embassy’s deputy chief of mission. Chapter 4 highlights those two years.

My departure from Moscow in the summer of 1987 marked the end of my foreign service assignments inside the Soviet empire. But three subsequent positions outside of the Department of State brought me back to the USSR and its successor states many times from 1988 through the late 1990s. The first position was head of Soviet and Eastern European affairs at the Congressional Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, on loan from the State Department (1988–89). The second, immediately following my retirement from the foreign service in 1989, was foreign affairs advisor to Senator Sam Nunn (1989–95), in his capacity as Chairman and later ranking Democratic member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and also as a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The third position was director of programs in the former Soviet Union and research professor at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies (1995–98), a component of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Chapter 4 also touches upon those experiences.

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