1 The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign ...

The board was very attractive to me because of their varied experience. George Kennan
convinced me that my lack of knowledge of the Soviet Union at the present time was not
a drawback, but possibly an advantage, and that what was needed was intense activity in
the Soviet Union to describe what was happening and to learn from that immediate
experience.
Q: You got into this in '86. What was the attitude? This was sort of still the early
Gorbachev period, wasn't it?
MILLER: Just the beginning of Gorbachev.
Q: Was there the feeling that things really – both the generational thing, but was this
going to be a different Soviet Union?
MILLER: Yes. Most of the board thought that it was going to be a very different Soviet
Union, and that reform and involvement in the world community in a less hostile way
was the direction that the Soviet Union was going under Gorbachev. The reasoning for
that was that Yuri Andropov had begun the process with a set of reforms that were aimed
at temporarily picking up of the pieces of the fundamental reforms begun from
Khrushchev after the long, deadening regime of Brezhnev, particular the end of
Brezhnev's life, when he was a vegetable.
Andropov's previous job as head of the KGB was to know what was happening inside the
country, looking out for subversive activity, as well as knowing what was happening
throughout the world. A lot of the interesting people that emerged from the Andropov
period were experts on the United States. I'd say Arbatov's institute, George Arbatov
himself, Fyodor Burlatsky, who was the editor of Iturnaya Gazeta, the leading Soviet
literary magazine and one of the Soviet’s leading intellectuals, Posner, the Kremlin
spokesman with a Western sounding voice, who came from Brooklyn were typical of the
Andropov political intellectual cadre. The awareness of having to engage with the United
States in a more civilized way was evident in Andropov’s attempts to soften the hostile
rhetoric. Andropov died after a year and then came the deading leadership of a Siberian,
Anatoly Chernenko, the octogenarian, who lasted two years before his death. The
Politburo and the Central Committee decided it was necessary to bring in a younger
generation after the experience of the last years of Brezhnev and the two successors when
the Soviet Union seemed increasingly adrift.
Q: You're talking about Andropov.
MILLER: After Andropov, and Chernenko. The battle in the Central Committee and
within the Politburo for leadership was between the major factions. Gorbachev had been
promoted by the reformers who had been brought along by Andropov, and the hard-line
faction, you might say, the more orthodox group, the rogues whose views were more in
the direction of Marxist-Leninist ideological positions. The leading contender of that
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