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

great essay for me, which I treasure greatly. This is one of the most important documents
leading to the end of the Cold War. The essay is the Russian intelligentsias’ appreciation
of the state the world at the end of the Soviet empire.
Q: How did you find – I hate to use the term – but the interface of I'll call it the Russian
intellectual community, which has always been – there has been a great stream of this
community and it appeals to the Russian soul or something, but with the apparatchiks,
the Gorbachevs and all who had risen?
MILLER: Gorbachev was different. Earlier, in the Leninist period in Khrushchev's time,
Brezhnev, these were revolutionaries, and later the nomenklatura. These were the people
who were fighting the Whites, who were passing out the tracts and killing their opponents
and sending them to the gulag (forced labor camp). Gorbachev is from the next
generation. He was a younger man, in his 50s. His father had fought in what the Soviets
called the Great Patriotic War. Gorbachev’s family were declared enemies of the people
in 1936. This is an extraordinary background for a party first secretary. He was a different
kind than the first two generations of Soviets.
All of the perestroika group were different from the earlier Soviet leaders. In a reuse, it
was the third generation challenging and fighting against the second generation. The
second generation were still revolutionaries. The third generation had not been
revolutionaries. They were sons of revolutionaries or they were sons of people who were
knowledgeable about the revolution. So there was a generational distinction. Gorbachev
didn't fight in the war, he was too young. His father did.
Sakharov was older. He was not a veteran of the wars, but he was certainly a veteran of
the scientific effort in the war as the inventor of the H-Bomb. He was a very young
scientist at that point. But Gorbachev himself was a giant of the world of the mind.
Gorbachev has a very interesting intellect, not of the world of the intelligentsia, in the
Russian sense, but he could have been a member of the intelligentsia were he born in the
fourth generation. But for a Soviet leader, he certainly had more education than his
predecessors, coming up from the roots. He was trained in the law, he had studied
comparative law, and had a good mind, was interested intellectually in a broad variety of
subjects and had respect for other intellects.
Q: Well, now, your group, committee, in this, what was the role of your group? Did you
set up these conferences?
MILLER: Yes, we did. We worked with Gorbachev's people, closely, to prepare these
meetings. We prepared for board meetings by going into the Kremlin to work out the
agenda. We discussed when Gorbachev would be available and when it would be
convenient to have meetings and they wanted to be the host. The Kremlin was the host. In
some ways, this was a strange group – can you imagine Father Hesburgh and Robert
McNamara and Metropolitan Pitirim meeting together in the Kremlin? The president of
Greenpeace, David McTaggart, was there, and a number of the world’s leading
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