From Washington to Moscow: US-Soviet Relations and the Collapse of the USSR by Louis Sell (review)

Louis Sell is a retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer whose 27-year career included an extraordinary series of assignments that allowed him to witness the final decades of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. From the prelude of a student visit to Moscow in 1967, to State Department work on the U.S.-Soviet summit of May 1972, to the "dissident beat" at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in the late 1970s, to strategic arms negotiations in Geneva in the early 1980s, to chief of the bilateral relations section of the State Department's Soviet desk in mid-decade, to chief political reporting officer first in Belgrade and then in Moscow during the final years, up to the collapse of 1991: Sell was present at a dozen key junctures of the waning Cold War. His Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, also published by Duke (in 2002), harvests his years in the Balkans. Here he draws on his rich Soviet experiences to fashion a judicious and accessible one-volume account of the USSR's last decades and where U.S.-Soviet relations fit in, both at the time and in history's rearview mirror.

Yet it is more than a memoir, even if Sell's own recollections provide one of its threads. They make the story vivid and often poignant. Anyone who has raised American children behind the Iron Curtain will instantly recognize Sell's three-year-son, in Louisville on a visit, trying to eat a banana without removing the peel, because he had never seen one before (p. 376). But the recollections are only one thread in a multilayered book. The backbone is an engaging, detailed narrative of Soviet developments and U.S.-Soviet relations that draws principally on a highly impressive range of memoir and documentary sources, especially Soviet and many unavailable in English, that have appeared since 1991. Full disclosure: he and I were Foreign Service colleagues working the same Soviet and Balkan beats, and our careers intersected often during these years; I, too, have retired to academic analysis and writing. By the same token, I can testify to the meticulous care with which he has constructed his narrative, and to how successfully it weaves together data from those sources and his own lived experience. It is this tapestry of the personal and the analytical that gives the book its charm and its value.

Sell's narrative is comprehensive. Prefaced by useful general background on the Soviet Union, it then treats every important development in Soviet life and politics and the superpower relationship over his two decades. From Able Archer 83 to Gennadii Zakharov via Vladimir Bukovskiy and Nicholas Daniloff, alarms and expulsions, "spy dust" and the rest of espionage diplomacy, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, East-West arms control in all its avatars—they are all here ably, chronologically, and coherently recounted. The only sequence that is hard to follow covers the years 1985–1986, the first two years under Mikhail Gorbachev. In this section, domestic events (Chernobyl, Andrei Sakharov) and foreign affairs (Geneva and Reykjavík in U.S.-Soviet relations) chase each other into something of a jumble. The reader who follows the story to 1991, however, will understand what happened, wie es eigentlich gewesen, in this large and critical segment of modern history.

Sell's own sensible judgments of historical cause and effect benefit from this careful sequencing. For the period through the demise of the USSR, he avoids swooping macro-judgments and instead carefully shows how specific and how contingent developments actually were.

I might have judged certain factors somewhat differently. Although Sell acknowledges that the dissident movement was successfully repressed, he insists, in line with Yurii Andropov (who served as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party from November 1982 to February 1984 after having been director of the KGB state security apparatus for more than fifteen years...