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

foundation was created; and I was asked to be the president of the American part of the
foundation.
Q: This is the one in Moscow?
MILLER: Moscow and Washington. It was formally called the International Foundation
For the Survival and Development of Humanity. That long name, that large concept, was
insisted upon by Andrei Sakharov, who was a founding board member and whose return
to Moscow after exile in Gorky was partially a result of pressure from the International
Foundation Board. We asked Gorbachev to release him, and that we wanted to make him
a board member. Gorbachev agreed to that. He was released, and the founding meeting of
the foundation, in 1998, took place after a conference, a very Soviet-like conference on
world environmental problems and what should be done about it. It was one of these
super-extravaganzas where there would be lectures on the nuclear danger and poetry
readings by Yevgeny Yevtushenko discussed in his velvet suit reading from his poetry
and gala presentations of folk dancing and ballet pas de deux, of course, and opera arias.
Everything at these stupendous affairs, was spectacular, as the Russians would say.
Shortly after the conference, Gorbachev convened a meeting in the Kremlin with the
newly formed foundation board and the just-returned Sakharov. It was decided that there
would be a foundation, that Gorbachev would support it and he would meet with them
several times a year on the subject of arms control, the environment and better political
and economic relations between the Soviet Union and the United States and the west, and
economic development. The name for the foundation that Sakharov insisted upon was
really the correct one.
Q: Well, it gave you a fairly broad hunting license.
MILLER: Yes, and the importance of this group was very clear to me from the meeting
between Sakharov and Gorbachev, which I may have described to you.
Q: No, you haven't.
MILLER: Gorbachev and Sakharov had not met each other since Sakharov and Elena
Bonner’s return from exile in Gorky. Gorbachev had telephoned Sakharov in Gorky and
said, "You're free to come back," and Sakharov came back. Our board meeting took place
in an elegant, very elegant room in the inner recesses of the Kremlin. It is called the
malachite room. Indeed, the whole room was made out of malachite, the green mineral
from the Urals that is so characteristic of Russian taste. It was one of the favorite inner
meeting rooms of Kremlin leaders and the Czars before the Soviets.
The perestroika group of Gorbachev was there, which included the great historian Dmitri
Likhachev, a Leningrad academician, from St. Petersburg, really. He's a historian of
ancient Russia who had been exiled early in the '20s to the north to the Solovetsky
monastery because of his anti-Soviet interest in Russian history and religion. He had
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