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

Q: I mean, to – in a way, you are interfering, because here you are acting as a gray
eminence or an open eminence on Gorbachev and the ruling party.
MILLER: Yes, it was remarkable. That’s all you can say. It normally would not have
happened. I’ll go further. The kinds of things that I was able to do, I mean, I wasn’t alone
but I was one of the few. I helped write the rules of the Supreme Soviet, and I did that by
bringing Congressional manuals for all of our legislative practice. The manuals were used
and adapted for the Russian condition.
Q: It’s probably about four inches thick.
MILLER: The rules of procedure, basically, Jefferson’s rules, I gave the manuals to the
person we had brought here to the United States as a young legislator, Konstantin
Lubenchenko, who became speaker of the Parliament – of the last Supreme Soviet. He
used the manuals, and he gave them to another deputy, Eugeniy Velikhov, vice president
of the Academy of Sciences, who was also on the board of the foundation. Velikhov held
the manual up before all the deputies in the Supreme Soviet and up before the Parliament
and said, “These are our new rules.” So, yes, I was a party to that kind of interference.
Some time later, I interviewed all of the justices that were appointed to the new Soviet
constitutional court. I brought a number of Justices here to Washington to meet with our
Justices from our Supreme Court. I saw the Ministers of Justice frequently, along with
lawyers and judges I brought from the United States, from the American Bar Association.
After Russia and the Soviet Union split, the first Minister of Justice of Russia, Nikolai
Federov, was one of the people I brought here. He wanted help in the form of legal
technical assistance. I provided it for him. He was a very close friend, and still is. He’s
now president of Chuvashia, one of the Tatar republics on the Volga River.
Wile discussing possible nuclear arms limitation proposals, I went to a number of secret
nuclear installations and was shown their weaponry. Everything was open, and the same
was true of the church and every corner of the Academy, every corner of the Supreme
Soviet, the Moscow Duma, every corner of any ministry, including ministry of defense.
The battle for the survival of the Soviet Union was personified in the rivalry between
Gorbachev and Yeltsin. I was there, in the Kremlin, in the Great Hall, when Gorbachev
came back from the coup attempt in August. Yeltsin received him on the stage with such
visible great contempt, at the swearing-in of Yeltsin as president of Russia. I was present
at the trial of the Communist party, which was held in the former offices of the Central
Committee, which was then being transformed into the offices of the constitutional court.
And I was present at committee meetings of the Supreme Soviet on human rights and
arms control. A number of my American and European colleagues testified at those
committee meetings.
Q: Did you find – what was your impression of our embassy, but also of our White
134