ambassador rudolf v. perina - Association for Diplomatic Studies and ...

attention than human rights agreements within the UN and elsewhere. But then suddenly,
all of these Helsinki monitoring groups began appearing in the Soviet Union and Eastern
bloc countries, much to the surprise of the governments. In fact, Western governments
were also surprised by this; no one expected such a reaction. Partly, the timing worked
well with the advent of Jimmy Carter’s presidency and his emphasis on human rights, but
it also showed a much higher level of frustration in Eastern bloc countries than many
realized, and also a higher level of readiness by dissidents to challenge authority and vent
this frustration. I found the developments fascinating, and, of course, they did play into
my interests from academia and my dissertation. So I latched onto CSCE and stayed with
it, on and off, for the next 25 years.
Q: For a relatively new officer this frankly must have been a hell of a lot of fun.
PERINA: It was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed that assignment. Ironically, it was the only
State Department assignment that I had for about the next 20 years. My subsequent
Department of State assignment was as Senior Deputy Assistant Secretary in 1996
because I spent so much of my career overseas and then in Washington in the NSC
(National Security Council) or just on training assignments. But I made a lot of good
contacts in that first State Department job. I found out rather quickly that contacts are key
to a career in the State Department, that indeed it is a little bit like what Dick Holbrooke
jokingly said in later years in a commencement address: “Remember that what is
important in life is not who you know, it's whom you know.” I made contacts in that first
Washington job that got me through at least the next 20 years of my career.
Q: So what happens next in 1978?
PERINA: In 1978 I left RPM and went into a year of Russian training because I was
assigned to Moscow, to the political section in Embassy Moscow.
Q: I imagine this came from your European Bureau contacts because Moscow was a
hard club to get into.
PERINA: Yes. It was going to the center of the action at that time. China was just
emerging, it was becoming a desirable assignment, but Moscow was still the place to go.
Ironically, I didn't know Russian. I had a lot of other languages but I didn't have Russian
so I had to go into a year of Russian training. Then in the summer of ‘79 I went out to
Moscow to work in what was called at the time the External Political Section which
followed Soviet foreign policy.
Q: With your Czech and your German, how did Russian go?
PERINA: With my Czech I had an advantage in Russian. At the beginning it's a little
confusing. If you're weak in one Slavic language it can really confuse you to learn
another Slavic language. But my Czech was strong enough that I was able to keep them
separate, and there are a lot of cognates. I did well in the language training and had pretty
good Russian by the time I went to Moscow.
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