Trust but Verify: Reagan, Russia, and Me by Suzanne Massie (review)

The year 1983 was a tense one in U.S.-Soviet relations, perhaps the most frightening since the Cuban missile crisis two decades earlier. In the 1970s the Soviet Union had begun deploying mobile SS-20 intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) that gave it the capability of obliterating a great deal of Western Europe. In response, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization began stationing mobile Pershing II IRBMs in West Germany in late 1983 along with ground-launched cruise missiles capable of hitting military targets in Soviet home territory. President Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” speech of 8 March 1983, combined with his announcement two weeks later of a program to develop and deploy a space-based Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), stimulated war rhetoric within the Soviet military. The situation worsened further on 1 September 1983 when the Soviet air force shot down a South Korean passenger airliner.

The administration of Yurii Andropov had been talking privately and openly about the dangers of a U.S.-Soviet war. These warnings, spread by Soviet media, caused unease throughout the Soviet Union. As a correspondent based in Moscow for U.S. News and World Report at that time, I followed these reports but sensed that they were exaggerated. I did not believe the two superpowers were really on the brink of war. Indeed, Soviet Defense Minister Dmitrii Ustinov eventually acknowledged that the situation, though serious, was less dangerous than at the start of World War II.

Enter Suzanne Massie, an expert on Russian culture and religion, who visited Moscow during that troubled autumn. Massie was not an academic by training, but she knew a vast amount about Russia, had lectured at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and in 1980 had published a much-acclaimed and widely read survey of Russian culture, Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia. She and her first husband, Robert Massie, had co-authored the best-selling Nicholas and Alexandra: An Intimate Account of the Last of the Romanovs and the Fall of Imperial Russia (New York: Atheneum, 1967) about the life and assassination of the last Russian imperial family, which was made into a Hollywood film, and she co-authored Journey, an account of her son Robert’s hemophilia, which was as severe as the hemophilia of Aleksei, the son of the last Tsar. She had many friends among Russian priests living abroad and believed that despite the Stalinist terror and the militant atheism under both Iosif Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev, religious faith had not been extinguished among the Russian people.

Returning home from her disquieting trip to Moscow in October 1983, Massie recalls that she was struck by the thought that the two superpowers were indeed moving toward war and that she had to warn someone in authority in Washington. “Bureaucrats wouldn’t do,” she writes. “I had to go to the top, to President Reagan himself. I had no idea where this incongruous thought came from. Yet there it was asserting itself. But how to do this?” In the end, she did get to the top with initial help from Senator William Cohen, a Republican from Maine, who put her in touch with Reagan’s national security adviser, Robert McFarlane.

Although highly nervous before her first meeting with President Reagan, Massie quickly struck it off with him. Thus began an unusual relationship between a U.S. president and a private citizen that extended over the next five years and involved at least seventeen meetings by her account. The key to their relationship, I deduce from her memoir, is that she intrigued Reagan with her description of the Russians as people and the rich nature of Russian culture. This seemed to interest him more than the strategic power calculations of his experts in the Department of State and Department of Defense. She persuaded him, consistent with messages also coming from British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, to soften his hard line and seek negotiated compromises with Mikhail Gorbachev, who came to power...