In the Cold War’s depths, a glimmer of light

In 1963 my wife and I and our three small children – the oldest was 6 – completed our first year at the American Embassy in Moscow. I was a career diplomat, a political officer tasked with observing and reporting on what I could learn of the secretive Soviet scene.  

It was the middle of the Cold War, the nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. Eastern Europe had been subjected to the USSR, and the West had formed NATO in response. Tensions were high. Weeks after our arrival the previous year, Soviet attempts to base nuclear-capable missiles in Cuba had brought the world too close to nuclear war.

There were signs of hope, too, including cultural exchanges with the West. Among them, a half-dozen American graduate students, several with spouses, were spending an academic year at MGU, Moscow State University.

Our public affairs officer gave a party for the students. My wife, Mary Jane, asked one of the couples how they found life in MGU’s skyscraper building. Not too bad, they said. The main problem was the scarcity of laundry facilities. Ah, said my wife, you are welcome to use our washer and dryer. 

When they returned later, bearing dirty clothes, they often stayed for lunch or dinner.

Soon the couple, Philip and Nancy Stewart from Ohio State University, reciprocated by inviting us to a get-together at the university. No doubt the KGB, the chief Soviet state security apparatus, would not have wanted anyone from the U.S. Embassy to attend, but we got in.

The party took place in a university meeting room. It was packed. There was lots to eat and drink, and the noise level rose high. No doubt there were microphones hidden in the walls, but so much noise made them useless to anyone trying to listen in. 

Two young men approached me. From my dress, it was clear I was the foreign diplomat they had heard was coming. They introduced themselves as students in the Faculty of Law.

What, I asked them, are your plans for a profession?

We are going to join the Prokuratura, they said.

I said I was sorry to hear that. I knew about the Prokuratura, a powerful arm of the Soviet police state. It combined what in the U.S. were functions of the attorney general, congressional committees, grand juries, and public prosecutors. Andrei Vyshinsky, procurator general in the 1930s, had overseen Stalin’s horrendous purges of millions of ordinary citizens – plus most of the members of the Communist Party Central Committee and top Soviet generals. Now, in 1963, the procurator general was Roman Rudenko, who (I learned years later) had commanded a camp in which 12,000 people died of starvation and disease.

One of the young Russians said that they were going to change things. His comrade said they aimed to make the Prokuratura better, more humane.

I was very skeptical. You and your families will suffer if you get out of line, I said. No, they replied, we will work carefully and slowly – and there are others who think as we do.

We ended our conversation quickly. It was unwise for them to be seen talking with a Western diplomat. I wished them well.

Until then, I’d been pessimistic about the prospects for change in the USSR. Liberals and even rebels did exist there. I knew a young rebel, in fact: Andrei Amalrik, who was later sent to Siberia.

My two law students had made clear they were not rebels; they wanted change without violence. I went back to the embassy pondering that encounter.

I do not know what happened to them. I learned years later that they’d had a predecessor in the Faculty of Law named Mikhail Gorbachev, who changed things mightily. It was he who, as head of both the Soviet government and the Communist Party in the 1980s, pushed for glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). His policies undermined the Soviet Union, which came apart in 1991. I could never have imagined a Gorbachev, but I never forgot the two students. They gave me hope for the Russians, a strong, talented, and long-oppressed people.