![]() ![]() During those consequential years, I had the privilege of working with Paul Goble, an intelligence community analyst who joined State in the late 1980s to oversee our outreach to the Baltic states, a region in which he was a true expert. I can confirm that the cliché is not true. It is a cliché that no one predicted the breakup of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. The human chains, the mass public singalongs and, ultimately, the outright rebellion of these three small countries brought me closer to the spirit of our own revolution. Watching their people stand up and insist on their dignity and their return to the democratic family of nations was probably the most inspiring thing I have ever witnessed. And then there were the Baltic states: Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. We also belatedly came to understand that several of the non-Russian republics-Ukraine and Georgia chief among them-were moving rapidly to a point of no return on remaining part of the Soviet Union. Starting out with a Gorbachev (and Moscow)-centric approach to U.S.-Soviet relations, we gradually came to recognize the significance of Boris Yeltsin and the Russian Republic’s bid for sovereignty. They wanted to end it, and move on to something more normal, more stable and more predictable. Gorbachev, together with Shevardnadze, historian and politician Aleksandr Yakovlev and other key advisers, truly believed that the Cold War was a crazy state of existence for the international community. The cost would have been catastrophic, and he understood that.īut as Shevardnadze writes in his memoirs, it was also a civilizational decision. The most important aspect of the Soviet reaction to the fall of the Berlin Wall, in my view, was the very clear decision of Gorbachev not to use force to preserve the Soviet empire. Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze seized on the momentous changes to accelerate negotiations on a long list of thorny, accumulated U.S.-Soviet disagreements. In November 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, the effect on U.S.-Soviet relations was mostly positive. Follow-on efforts to assist Soviet Ukraine and Belarus in the wake of the Chernobyl tragedy (after several years in which foreign assistance had been resolutely blocked) made a big difference, as well. The 1988 earthquake in Armenia led to a significant American assistance effort that was largely welcomed by Soviet officials, and gratefully received by the suffering population of Armenia. We had been through several moments that brought Americans and Soviets together in ways that opened the door to the cooperation that followed. This was shorthand for continuing President Ronald Reagan’s hybrid approach of outreach to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and his government coupled with continuing sanctions and pressure on arms control, Soviet Jews, Afghanistan and other key issues of contention. ![]() Bush took office in early 1989, his transition team seized on the mantra “status quo plus” as an approach for dealing with the USSR. Some analysts were aware of the magnitude of the ethnic and nationalist challenges facing the USSR as it entered its eighth decade but the notion that it could all fall apart so suddenly was certainly not on our minds. It’s hard to re-create the feeling of 1989 three decades later, but I can say with certainty that in February of that year no one had a sense of what was coming. Little did I or anyone else realize what this portfolio would entail just a few years down the road. But I also got the title of “internal politics and nationalities affairs officer.” At the time, that meant monitoring reporting on political developments in Moscow and in the 11 other republics we considered part of the Soviet Union (we treated the Baltic states separately and oversaw developments there from the Eastern Europe office). My portfolio on the Soviet Desk was fantastic: I handled all our visa applications for American diplomats going to the USSR, which was a bureaucratic slog and a constant test of patience. I knew I wanted to go to the Soviet Union as soon as possible, but for my first tour, I was sent to Honduras where I had the opportunity to learn Spanish. I was thrilled: I had studied Russian in high school in 1977 and continued through college. I was assigned to “bilat,” as we called it. It was the largest single-country office in the department by far, divided into three divisions: bilateral affairs, multilateral affairs and economic affairs. ![]() I quickly realized that I was joining a dream team. I joined the Soviet Desk in February 1989 after a year as a watch officer in the State Department Operations Center. ![]()
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