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

House. This was Reagan – up to ’89 was the president. Were you seeing …
MILLER: Matlock’s a good friend.
Q: Was there a good response, were events getting past?
MILLER: Jim Collins was an example of our very best officers. He was well aware of
what was going on. Collins had the knowledge, respect and empathy for the post. Jim
Collins, for example, was DCM and I would see him frequently. I saw the ambassador, of
course, and they welcomed the information and were glad to meet with us. I think
Moscow of the time was such an expanded world. They had – those in the embassy – had
an enormous amount of work to do because their traditional mandates and possibilities
had suddenly expanded so remarkably. They could barely keep up with the pace of
traditional reporting. Then there was this revolutionary systemic change that was going
on, which they could not handle. They could observe, they could read all the papers, the
mushrooming numbers of suddenly independent papers, and they could formally have
many more meetings with Soviet officials, but they were still under constraint of
diplomatic practice. The political situation had gone way beyond formal discourse, and
except for a few junior officers of the embassy who did circulate with their now
revolutionary counterparts, their contemporaries, I would say that the embassy had a full
plate that was much fuller than it had ever had during the previous 70 years. The
appreciation of other parts of the new society – getting involved in other parts of the
rapidly changing Soviet/Russian society – was a new but crucially important job.
Q: What about – what was the role of nongovernmental committees and all – committees
or other manifestations, of, say, the British and the French? Were they in there?
MILLER: NGOs came in to Moscow in abundance starting after the last Central
Committee Congress, in 1988, during which Gorbachev gave his landmark speech
admitting “there were white spots in history” and that “it was possible to have different
views than that of the party”, - an admission and permission that began the end of the
party. Groups started coming in from the West, of every conceivable nature. Russian
religious groups were openly proselytizing, missionaries were coming from Salt Lake,
Jehovah’s Witnesses, the missionaries of all sorts. Every conceivable nongovernmental
interest group started to arrive, and they multiplied almost like a plague of locusts. Their
Russian hosts began to resist when the numbers grew so large as to be unmanageable.
Q: I would think there would be a problem of – here you were, a serious organization
with deep roots within both systems, and then all of these other ones coming in, who
would both be jealous of you or going off on their own tack – I would think that they
would be swamping the Soviet/Russian system.
MILLER: The multiplication of nongovernmental organizations roughly paralleled the
multiplication of indigenous nongovernmental organizations in Russia, and throughout
the former Soviet Union; it was messy and contradictory and difficult, but all of it was a
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