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

Quartet, from St. Petersburg. They were very funny, and somehow joyously light hearted,
very good musicians. They were very popular during the perestroika period.
So it was a time of great possibility, openness and humanity. It was the fact that the
dissidents of the time – not initially refuseniks, but dissidents, like Sakharov, the respect
and position that was given to him and his group, whereas in the past they were reviled
and put in the gulag. It was a remarkable transformation of character, national character,
of free individual expression and a wonderful atmosphere to live in.
Q: How did you find the KGB apparatus type, and I assume there wasn’t a DeJournis
(ph) or whoever, the people who are kind of the block fuehrer or whatever it is, the whole
apparatus. How was that responding?
MILLER: Well, the KGB as a repressive force had disintegrated, and they were under
very severe restraint and the units of the KGB that were known for their brutality, and
used force, were kept to insure the new idea of law and order. The bugging of telephones,
no one cared. No one was afraid. They would point the ceiling they’d start cursing at the
ceiling, and then go on, without any fear, because many of them who in the past were the
listeners or informers were part of the new group. Getting rid of these symbols of soviet
expression, pulling down the Dzerzhinsky statue, and putting up a memorial to the
gulagis instead and right next door to the entrance to lyubyanka was a sign of how
changed things were. They pulled down the idols of the past and put them in Tretyakov
Park knowing that the statues in the future would be important museum pieces. They
didn’t destroy them, they just put them aside.
It was a remarkable, remarkable time of possibility, and the result, was a peaceful process
that was bloodless, for the most part. The transition to the integration into the world
economy and international structures has been extraordinarily difficult because there was
such a difference between the world that the Soviets had constructed over 70 years and
what had been happening in the rest of the world, particularly in the West. The integration
into radically different systems has proven to be difficult, and unfortunately brutal,
criminal, inequitable, and largely unsuccessful. But as a huge national system, as a
continental system, Russia is taking its place as one of the G-8, simply because of the
size, not yet because of performance, but rather because of the abundance of resources
and its obvious economic potential. They can’t be ignored, even with all of their
deficiencies. They’re there. “Here we are, what are you going to do with us?”
So in those years, I was in Moscow and I was fortunate to be allowed to be a part of their
group, particularly by those who were working on the structure of the new law, new
systems of government and international issues. I was welcomed.
Q: Who were some of the key players on the Bush side and on the Soviet side?
MILLER: The key players in the Yeltsin group, the new Russia; in St. Petersburg it was
Sobchak, and Putin was one of his lesser lieutenants. In Moscow, first it was Yeltsin as
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