Conducted and introduced by Vadim Grishin
Conversation with Ambassador Tatiana Gfoeller
June 15, 2026
Today, amid the war in Ukraine, the ongoing reshaping of the international system, and the turn toward increasingly transactional diplomacy, many earlier assumptions about the post-Soviet era are being reconsidered. In retrospect, the 1990s appear not merely as a transition from one political-economic model to another, but as a foundational period whose unresolved tensions continue to drive events across the post-Soviet space and well beyond it.
Against this historical backdrop, the reflections of practitioners who directly witnessed and influenced this transformative era carry particular weight. Ambassador Tatiana Gfoeller belongs to a generation of American diplomats whose professional experience spans critical moments in post-Soviet and Eurasian history, including service in Moscow and senior diplomatic assignments throughout the region. Her observations offer not only firsthand insight into U.S.-Russia dynamics during periods of dramatic change but also a wider perspective on diplomacy, political leadership, and historical memory.
The conversation below moves between history and contemporary geopolitics. It touches on the late Soviet period, the Yeltsin years, the rise of Vladimir Putin, the evolution of the Washington-Moscow relationship, the diverging trajectories of the post-Soviet states, and the changing nature of global order itself. At the same time, it raises a larger question that increasingly confronts both policymakers and scholars: whether modern Russian history is best understood as a recurring cycle of rupture, reform, consolidation, and restoration, and what that pattern implies for the present moment.
This interview is part of a broader research project examining cycles of revolution and counterrevolution in modern Russian history and their implications for contemporary international politics. Beyond analytical frameworks, what follows is also an exchange of memories, interpretations, and personal experiences shaped by decades of direct engagement with Russia and the former Soviet bloc during an extraordinary period of historical transformation.
First Encounters with the Soviet World
Vadim Grishin (VG): Let me begin here: when you first encountered the Soviet world directly, in person, what surprised you most? Was the reality you found consistent with prevailing Western assumptions, or did something catch you off guard? Had you already been prepared for that alternative reality, and looking back, do you think Western observers were asking the right questions about the Soviet Union?
Ambassador Gfoeller (AG): I am not sure I would call it a surprise, but I remember my colleagues often speaking about how fantastic the Soviet metro was – how much cleaner it was than Western metro systems, how much more artistic, and how every station had its own name and décor. Some had chandeliers. My colleagues usually attributed this to the power of communism: that such a proletarian institution as a metro system could be so beautiful. They would say this was an indictment of capitalism, where ordinary things for ordinary people were not made beautiful.
I began thinking about this and did some research on the Moscow metro system. It began in the 1930s. Obviously, it was not designed by teenagers. The people who made it so beautiful had actually been educated under the old system. There was an aftershock, or after-wave, of pre-revolutionary culture. You could not kill all the architects. Some of them were killed, especially the more vocal ones, but others kept their heads down, survived, and were employed.
As one moves farther and farther out through the Moscow metro system, as the stations become more contemporary, one sees a real decline in artistic quality and, frankly, in overall quality. By the time one reaches stations built in the 1950s, 1960s, and especially the 1970s, they look horrible, no better – sometimes worse – than Western metro stations.
So, my observation was that in the West, we tend to glorify communism and attribute wonderful achievements to it. But when one digs deeper, it was actually the older Russian and Europeanized culture (czarist culture, if you will) that allowed that artistic and architectural flourishing. Once graduates of art and architecture were formed under communism, the quality of their work declined dramatically.
VG: That is an important point. Of course, there is also the question of who actually built it. Much of the physical infrastructure of the Stalin era was constructed, in whole or in part, by GULAG prisoners. That is the darker side of the story: the immense human suffering and the terrible human costs that accompanied Soviet industrialization and state-building.
AG: For sure. I think it is well documented that Stalin was a monster. But I use this observation in my talks with students. I call it my “Moscow Metro system theory”: after a shock, a system can continue running on autopilot for a while. Then its energy peters out. Much of that earlier culture was Western- and French-influenced. But once it petered out, one was left with basically communism, and with that went art, creativity, and quality. It is hard to imagine any system less encouraging of creativity than communism.
Poland, Human Rights, and Spiritual Resistance to Communism
VG: Poland was your first sustained experience of the communist world. While working in Warsaw, did you already sense that the socialist bloc was entering a systemic crisis? And did you notice how significant the differences between Polish and Soviet societies appeared politically even then? Did Poland feel like a different kind of communist country, or a different kind of country altogether?
AG: At the time, my professional life focused on human rights, so my perspective was specific. In Poland, my first encounter with a communist totalitarian society, I immediately intuited that only belief in God could truly oppose such a system. I was fortunate to serve as a conduit to the Roman Catholic Church, and I realized that the real opposition to Polish communism was anti-materialism – belief in God. In the Polish context, this meant the Polish Catholic Church, greatly aided by the election of John Paul II as Pope.
With all due respect to Lech Wałęsa, whom I knew well and deeply respected, he could not have done what he did without the power of the Church and faith. I saw parallels in the Soviet Union. Faith, belief in God, is what can sustain people under a radical onslaught such as communist totalitarianism. Whether it was Russian Orthodoxy in Russia, Catholicism and Protestantism in the Baltic states, or Islam in Central Asia, faith was the resistance. Sometimes it was quiet resistance; sometimes it was more vocal.
Because I was working on human rights, I focused on this. Belief in an alternate reality is what saves people from totalitarianism. The essence of totalitarianism is telling people what to believe, what to think, and who they are. Totalitarianism is not only control of the body; it is control of the mind and, to a certain degree, the soul. The only antidote to that is faith in another universe, another reality.
Yes, I saw strong parallels between Poland and the USSR. Of course, the USSR was multi-religious, while Poland was largely homogeneous. Yet even in Poland, there were exceptions. The entire Białystok region, historically connected to Belarus, was Polish Orthodox. I spoke with some of their religious leaders. There was also a small Jewish minority, with whom I had close contacts, and they, too, were part of the resistance.
VG: I absolutely agree that faith and religious institutions were important in both Poland and the Soviet Union as safe havens against totalitarian indoctrination. At the same time, Poland had other sources of social autonomy that the Soviet system had largely eliminated. The private sector remains substantially larger in Poland, especially in agriculture, where collectivization was never completed to the extent it was in the USSR. The labor organization was far more developed. Solidarity was the most dramatic expression of that strength in the shipyards, the mining industry, and other sectors. In the Soviet Union, by contrast, trade unions existed in name only and were effectively subordinated to the Communist Party. They functioned as instruments of mobilization and control rather than as independent vehicles for social or political pressure. In that sense, Poland preserved a broader social space outside the state, better positioned to generate organized resistance when the moment came.
AG: I remember vividly when it was still the Soviet Union and, for the first time, they allowed a religious procession outside a church in Moscow. It was amazing. Public religious observance of that kind had not been permitted since the Bolsheviks took power. And suddenly there it was: bikers with tattoos, babushki, and children – a real cross-section of society, people who had no obvious connection to one another except that they had all come.
VG: That resonates with what I remember from my student years in Moscow. Attending church ceremonies became genuinely popular among students at the time. Not always out of deep religious conviction, but as a form of cultural rediscovery, perhaps even a quiet act of independence. What stayed with me, though, was how visible the control remained even then. The services were monitored. Police were stationed inside and outside the church, and everyone present was aware of it. The space had opened, but it had not been freed.
AG: Across the street from the U.S. embassy in Moscow was a church. I believe it was called the Church of the Seven Martyrs. Ironically, it had been turned into a KGB torture chamber. The story was that seven skeletons were suspended in iron cages, the remains of people who had been tortured to death there.
At the embassy, we used to call it “Our Lady of Telemetry” because we were convinced the KGB had listening stations in that former church. We joked that if Our Lady of Telemetry ever became a functioning church again, we would believe there had been true reform. When I returned for my next tour, in 1994–1996, Our Lady of Telemetry had once again become a church.
VG: That is a fascinating example of how symbolic change could reveal deeper political transformation. A building that moved from a sacred space to an instrument of terror and back again, and that those inside the embassy had quietly come to see as a gauge of political reality.
Let me return briefly to Poland: by the 1980s, did you already have a sense that Polish society and perhaps the Polish state itself were in structural crisis, not merely entering a period of pressure or instability, but approaching a point of fundamental rupture?
AG: It is hard to say because I did not have the full picture. I focused specifically on the human rights sector. The ambassador or chargé d’affaires would presumably have had the broader view. I looked at Poland through my work with various human rights groups, especially the Roman Catholic Church.
My belief was that, in the long term, Poland would be Poland. I did not know how long it would take. If Gorbachev had not come to power, if Andropov had not died, or if Andropov and Chernenko had been succeeded by someone like Stalin, the inevitable could certainly have been delayed.
I attended pro-Solidarity demonstrations where the Polish state deployed policemen on horseback with whips. Whether they were happy to do it or not, they were effective in dispersing demonstrators. So, I cannot say that I saw the dissolution of that regime as imminent. I simply thought it was a foreign, aberrant construct imposed on the Polish people, and that eventually they would get rid of it. But I did not know how long it would take.
The election of Pope John Paul II was a huge push in that direction, because it internationalized the human rights situation in Poland. The world was watching.
Gorbachev, Russian Cycles, and the Desire to Be Liked by the West
VG: In the Polish case, we can identify a constellation of reinforcing internal and external factors: the diaspora abroad, the Vatican, the Church's deep roots in Polish national identity, and the shifts underway in Moscow. Together, they help explain how a society under authoritarian pressure maintained the organizational capacity to resist and eventually prevail. But when we turn to the Soviet Union and to Gorbachev himself, the explanatory framework becomes much harder to construct. There was no Church of comparable political weight, no private sector of similar scale, no Solidarity. And yet from within a gerontocratic system that seemed designed to reproduce caution and conformity, a leader emerged who was willing to put the entire edifice at risk. There is a vast literature on Gorbachev, but I find that it rarely produces a fully satisfying answer to the most basic question: why him, and why then?
AG: Earlier, you were talking about cycles, and I also believe in cycles in Russian history. The classic cycle is between Westernizers and Slavophiles. There is a recurring pattern in Russian history in which Russia seeks to become more integrated with the West. Russia is at its weakest when it not only borrows from the West, as Peter the Great did very effectively to create a more lethal Russian state, but also seeks to be liked and accepted by the West.
Adopting Western military technologies is one thing. Wanting to be liked is something else. Russia’s recurring weakness, in my view, is that it ultimately wants to be liked. That is when Russia is weakest. I do not, of course, know what was going on inside Gorbachev’s head. But as an outsider and a junior officer observing him, it seemed to me that he wanted to be liked. He did not want to be isolated.
For some people in leadership positions, power is enough. For others, perhaps because they are weaker or more sensitive, power is not enough; they also want to be liked, adulated, and accepted. For Russian leaders, this is especially fraught. For a French president, being accepted in the West is easy; he just has to show up. Russians have a chip on their shoulder. They are constantly trying to be accepted. Then comes the reaction: bitterness, the feeling that they have once again been rejected. Then you enter the Slavophile cycle, in which they say they do not care whether they are liked.
When I talk to mentees about the relationship between Russia and the West – and now, I think, between the West, Russia, and China – I often recall Pushkin's lines: 'All is mine,' said the gold. / 'All is mine,' said the blade. / 'I will buy all,' said the gold. / 'I will take all,' said the blade.
Russia is never fully accepted by the West, and so it inevitably turns to what it thinks it can do better than the West: endure suffering and inflict pain. To paraphrase Napoleon Bonaparte, who denigrated the United Kingdom as “a nation of shopkeepers,” a scorned Russia defaults to seeing the West (and now possibly China as well) as a gang of shopkeepers (the gold), whereas its justification is to see itself as the ultimate security power, the power of the blade.
This connects to religion, which is among the most powerful and combustible forces in politics. In the Christian world, one returns to the schism between Roman Catholicism and the Byzantine East. Russia sees itself as the heir of Byzantium. And there is an old, indelible contempt that the West has carried for Russia precisely because Russia is not part of the Roman Catholic world.
What amazes me as an observer of history is that the West itself is now more atheist than Russia, an extraordinary reversal – yet the contempt remains. Western atheists, one could say, rejected a higher form of falsehood than the Russians ever could, because the Russians began beneath contempt as Orthodox Christians. Even if they reject Orthodox Christianity, they are still less adept at rejecting it than the West, because the West rejected Catholicism, which, by definition, was seen as higher.
VG: There is a deep paradox at the heart of Putin's “civilizational project.” He presents himself as the defender of an authentic Russian identity against Western contamination. Yet that identity, at its very foundations, is inseparable from the West. Russian Orthodoxy traces its apostolic lineage to Byzantium, which was itself the custodian of the Greco-Roman and early Christian inheritance that shaped European civilization. You cannot simultaneously invoke Orthodox tradition and excise the European roots from which it grew.
AG: Russian Orthodox believers think Moscow is the Third Rome.
VG: Precisely, Rome, not Beijing. Yet Putin has now tied Russia so closely to Xi’s China that it irritates even some elite circles that currently benefit from the system. The asymmetry extends beyond the need for economic and military cooperation under sanctions. My reading is that this is fundamentally about regime survival: Putin appears to be positioning China as a guarantor of last resort, a power that will intervene to protect his rule, or that of his successors, in a moment of acute political crisis. That calculus explains why he has effectively become the leader of a pro-China faction within the Russian elite, which is historically striking. Earlier in his career, he was notably cautious about Chinese investment in strategically sensitive sectors of the Russian economy. That caution has been abandoned, and the price of that abandonment is not yet fully visible.
But returning to the end of the Soviet Union: when did you personally begin to believe that the Soviet system might actually disintegrate – not simply weaken, not merely reform, but genuinely cease to exist?
The Fall of the Soviet Union and Yeltsin’s Rise
AG: I remember standing in line on Novy Arbat to buy some dolls. In the Soviet Union, as you know, if a line formed outside a shop, you got into the line. You did not know what you were going to buy, but it did not matter. Either you could use it, someone you loved could use it, or you could give it to someone who could. So, I got in line, and it turned out they were selling matryoshka dolls. I did not need another matryoshka doll, but that was fine.
I overheard a group of babushki talking about Yeltsin and how he was being persecuted, almost as if he were a saint. They spoke in religious terms, describing him as Russia's salvation. That was when I thought: something serious is happening.
VG: Was that 1989, 1990, or 1991?
AG: It was the winter of 1991, perhaps January.
VG: At the time, did you view the Soviet collapse primarily as liberation, institutional breakdown, imperial retreat, or something else? Did that interpretation shift as the 1990s unfolded?
AG: I saw Boris Yeltsin as the leader of the second Russian Revolution. That was how it was often interpreted at the time. He was liberating Russia from this completely alien system, communism, just as communism was alien to the Polish people. In fact, I cannot think of any nation in the world for which communism is not alien. I think of it as a purely intellectual construct that should have stayed in the laboratory.
VG: That reading was widely shared in Washington, and it shaped policy in ways that proved consequential. My sense is that parts of the Clinton administration operated on an assumption not entirely unlike Solzhenitsyn’s: that communism had been a kind of surface deformation, and a violent overlay on a society that had preserved, beneath the terror and the ideology, its deeper cultural traditions, its civic instincts, and a capacity for self-organization. Remove the system, and that latent Russia would emerge. The people were fundamentally good; the system had been the problem. But was that perhaps too optimistic a reading or worse, a misreading of what seven decades of Soviet power had actually done to Russian society and its institutions? Did the collapse reveal something considerably more complicated?
AG: I believed it was essentially right, and I still think that the instinct behind it was sound. At the time, when I spoke with Muscovites, especially in 1994–1996, when Russia was already Russia rather than the USSR, that was precisely the argument I would make. I would say: America is not trying to import something alien to you. Capitalism is not new to Russia; it is part of your own history, interrupted rather than absent. What we at the American embassy were trying to do was help you recover a history, which had been hijacked by people inspired, incidentally, by Marx and Engels, who were not Russians, by the way, but Germans.
So, if you wanted to be a good, true, patriotic Russian, returning to the system of the kupets, the merchant, was the best thing you could do. You were returning to your roots, to your history, to what made Russia great. In 1913, Russia’s economy was, according to historians, among the fastest growing in the world, perhaps the fastest in the Western world. Railways were being built at a higher rate than in America. World War I hurt Russia perhaps more than any other country, except possibly the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But even they did not have to endure communism.
So, I think the Clinton administration was completely right. I was there. I said those words, and I believed them. I still believe them.
VG: This raises the question of what has happened to Russia under Putin. Thane Gustafson, a prominent scholar of Russian energy and political economy, recently gave his farewell presentation. When I asked him whether he had changed his assumptions about Russia and the Russian people, he said yes and expressed deep frustration.
Does this suggest that Russian society itself changed over the past 30 or 40 years, or does it demonstrate the extraordinary power of the Putin system to reshape social attitudes and political imagination? There is a contrast between the belief that the 1990s marked liberation and a return to Russia’s roots and the later discovery that, at least outwardly, society largely supports Putin’s war against Ukraine.
AG: I left Russia in 1996, and then I served as Acting Consul General in St. Petersburg in 2000. That was 26 years ago. I cannot speculate too much. I left the Soviet space as ambassador to Kyrgyzstan in 2011. I can share what I observed during my time in Russia and the former Soviet Union, but beyond that, it is outside my experience.
What I can tell you is what I saw: the Russian people liberated themselves. I think there is now a misconception in the West that somehow the West liberated Russia from communism. I do not believe that is true. I believe Russians, under the leadership of Yeltsin, first as an activist, then as a future president, and then as president, liberated themselves. And by the way, they also liberated the rest of the Soviet Union. Countries like Kyrgyzstan or Lithuania could not have overturned communism on their own.
What I find sad is that nobody seems to give the Russian people due credit for that. Instead, everyone focuses on Putin's latest misdeed.
Central Asia, Nostalgia, and the Post-Soviet Space
VG: That is an important correction: the collapse of communism was not simply imposed on Russia from the outside but was a process in which Russian society itself played a decisive role in dismantling the system. At the same time, the post-Soviet legacy has evolved differently across the former Soviet space. This brings me to Central Asia, where memories of the Soviet period are sometimes more ambivalent and, in some quarters, more openly nostalgic.
I have heard that some current Central Asian leaders may be inclined to reconstruct elements of the Soviet system in one way or another. For me, this seems paradoxical because it would mean returning to Soviet-style dependence and losing sovereignty. Perhaps they want to use certain components of the Soviet totalitarian structure in the current context (the security apparatus, the mechanism of social control, the administrative architecture), rather than return to the Soviet Union itself.
AG: I do not think anyone wants to return to the totalitarian Bolshevik communist system: the gulags, the ideological surveillance, the institutional terror. But nostalgia is rarely that literal. I remember when I first went to Kyrgyzstan and spoke with a prominent Kyrgyz intellectual. He was very open with me. He said, “We used to be a first-world country. We used to be your opponents. The USSR was equal to the USA, and now we are just a small country.” Then he added a personal note. He said, “My daughter is a very able ballet dancer, and she was going to go to the Mariinsky school. Now there is no way a Kyrgyz girl can go to the Mariinsky school.”
These were two sides of the same phenomenon. Those two observations, geopolitical and personal, grand and intimate, were two facets of the same experience of loss. I do not think anyone wants to go back to the totalitarian USSR, but there are certainly echoes of nostalgia for belonging to something larger, for a world in which Bishkek was not peripheral.
VG: That distinction matters enormously, and I think it is often lost in discussions of Soviet nostalgia in Western policy circles. I have also met people from academia and political analytics in Central Asia who cannot explain exactly what it means when someone says leaders want to return to the Soviet Union. It sounds like a cliché and perhaps a biased interpretation of their intentions. Many leaders seem less interested in restoring the Soviet system than in building modern authoritarian regimes – more flexible, more durable, and more comfortable for themselves and their patronage networks. The nostalgia, where it exists, may be less programmatic than atmospheric. Perhaps, as you suggest, the attraction is cultural or symbolic, or stems from viewing the world through the lens of great-power status.
But let me return to Russia itself and to a figure central to our discussion. You met Boris Yeltsin in person. What was your impression of him?
Yeltsin: Charisma, Leadership, and Historical Role
AG: He was probably the most charismatic person I have ever met, man or woman.
VG: Did you see him as a revolutionary leader, a destroyer, or a reformer?
AG: I saw him as a very instinctual person, a very sincere person, perhaps too sincere to be a politician. He was someone who was literally seeking the truth, who was seeking what was best for his countrymen and countrywomen.
I think he had sincerely believed in communism because that was what he had been taught as a child. I read his two autobiographies. He then became sincerely disillusioned. Unlike many people, perhaps most, who would have become cynical and said, “I was hoodwinked, but I will make the best of it,” he wanted to do something about it. When he realized he had been lied to and cheated, his reaction was: “Let us rectify the situation.” That is very rare and a quality of leadership.
So, I do not know whether one can categorize him as a revolutionary. To a certain degree, yes. But I think of him as the aggrieved man in the street who realizes he has been sold a pack of goods and says, “Wait a minute. This was all a lie. I want my money back.” His famous statement that he wished communism had first been tried in a small country like Switzerland, so that everyone could see how it did not work, but on a smaller scale and with fewer disasters, was part of that sincerity. It was the sincerity of the man in the street.
In today’s United States, some popular politicians are, in a way, taking a leaf out of Yeltsin’s book: saying things that are not politically correct, things you would not expect from politicians, and doing so to some fanfare. I hear this particularly from my son and daughter-in-law, who listen to politicians on YouTube. Some say pretty crazy things. It reminds me of Yeltsin.
VG: One of the most debated legacies of the Clinton years is the extent to which American policy toward Russia became identified with Yeltsin personally, and what that personalization ultimately cost. The questions that accumulated around 1993, especially in the lead-up to the 1996 election, remain largely unresolved within the foreign policy community. Was it a mistake to support Yeltsin so heavily and so visibly? Did that support help stabilize a fragile democratic transition, or did it substitute a bet on one man for the harder, slower work of building institutions? Ambassador Pickering has spoken to me about his role and supportive efforts during that period. Some former embassy officials have since written quite critically about the American approach in 1996: the resources committed, the signals sent, and the precedents established. Looking back now, with the benefit of everything that followed, how do you read that moment? Was the personalization of policy around Yeltsin a defensible calculation given what was known at the time, or does it look, in retrospect, like a structural error, one that prioritized the stability of a single leader over the consolidation of the rules and institutions that might have outlasted him?
AG: By and large, I think the Clinton administration got it right. There were no institutions like American ones to lean on. If you recall, there was a coup against Yeltsin aimed at reinstituting the Soviet Union. It was a close-run thing, as the Duke of Wellington said about Waterloo.
If the United States had not backed Yeltsin, whom would we have backed? It was not as though there was a parliament with legitimacy waiting in the wings, or a Supreme Court. There was the communist apparat, and there was Yeltsin.
Hindsight is perfect. There will always be someone saying, “We could have done it better.” But I think the Clinton administration did the best it could. I was there, and I am proud of what we did. I think we stood with the Russian people and the other peoples of the former USSR. There was literally no alternative to Yeltsin. Were we supposed to side with the masked coup plotters again? Much of this later criticism – were they there? Maybe they were, and maybe they wish it had been perfect. But imperfection is the name of the game.
VG: Personally, I believe there were real risks of a communist revival – not rhetorical, not a convenient justification for policy choices already made on other grounds, but a genuine structural danger. If one accepts that premise, the case for supporting Yeltsin becomes considerably more defensible. At that moment, there were no credible alternatives that combined democratic legitimacy with the political weight to hold the field. The comparison with Poland is instructive but ultimately limited. Former Polish communists did return to power, but as pro-European social democrats who signed agreements supporting NATO integration and accepted the basic framework of the transition. Zyuganov and the forces behind him were categorically different: not post-communists adapting to a new reality, but a movement genuinely committed to reversing the 1991 settlement. Whether what followed under Putin was better than what a Zyuganov presidency might have produced is a question history cannot answer. But it is not an absurd question, and the people who supported Yeltsin in 1996 were not simply naive or self-serving in their calculations.
What I keep returning to, though, is less the strategic question than the human one. You met Yeltsin and observed him at close range during one of the most turbulent periods in modern Russian history. How would you describe him as a person and as a leader? And did you ever sense, watching him, that there was something almost tsarist about his psychology, a man who thought in terms of personal authority and loyalty rather than of institutions and rules?
AG: Yes, to a certain degree, I did. The tsar, in the iconic version – not the reality, which never fully corresponds to the ideal – is supposed to be the embodiment of the people. I use the word “iconic” deliberately because the Russian Orthodox Church is full of icons, and ideally, the tsar is an icon of the leader.
I think Yeltsin did embody the people. He really did. It was almost miraculous. What is also interesting is that he knew when to leave, which is very un-Russian. He could tell when his time was up.
I was in Armenia when he announced his retirement on television. I could not believe it. I thought: That is mature. That is a statesman who knows when he has done his most consequential work and then leaves – no revolution, no assassination, no civil war, just a quiet retirement. I was very impressed by that.
VG: But there was also no electoral transition. Yeltsin effectively appointed his successor. In retrospect, that may have been his greatest political mistake.
AG: He did, which is also very tsar-like. He had no son, only daughters. In the Russian patriarchal structure, he probably did not want to appoint a daughter. Though I remember a poll taken around 1996 asking who the best leader Russia had ever had, beginning with St. Vladimir. Catherine the Great won hands down. So, I thought perhaps he might appoint one of his daughters. It might have been a welcome respite from all these men in gray suits. But he chose not to. Still, he left peacefully, and that was huge.
NATO, Partnership for Peace, and the Missed Possibility of Russia’s Inclusion
VG: Let me turn to what remains one of the most contested foreign policy questions of the post-Cold War era: NATO expansion. I want to be precise about what I am and am not asking. I am not questioning whether the countries of Central and Eastern Europe needed the security guarantee that NATO membership provided. Their desire for it was historically understandable, their sovereignty was real, and their integration into a unified Europe was the right outcome. The question I want to put to you is different and, in some ways, more uncomfortable: could the process have been managed differently? Could the timing have been more carefully calibrated, the staging more deliberate, and the sequencing designed to achieve the same strategic goals while reducing the damage to the relationship with Moscow? Or, and this is the more radical version of the question, was there a moment, however brief, when a fundamentally different architecture was possible: one that might have included Russia itself in a broader European security framework, rather than leaving it permanently on the outside looking in?
AG: It is interesting that you ask, because I was present at the creation of the Partnership for Peace. I was then Secretary General Manfred Wörner’s assistant and adviser (whatever one wants to call it) on the former Soviet Union. I was also a frequent lecturer at our school in Garmisch for NATO officers.
My position then is what it is now, and it has never changed: NATO expansion is an excellent idea, and the key country that needed to join NATO was Russia. I said it thirty years ago, and I say it today.
Partnership for Peace included Russia, and there was a NATO-Russia Council, which I actually opposed because it created a special status for Russia. I did not think that should be the case. I thought Russia should simply be a member, just as the United States is. There is no NATO-United States Special Council. By creating the NATO-Russia Council, one was already edging Russia out.
I was absolutely opposed to that, but I was a junior. To Manfred Wörner’s and NATO’s eternal credit, different voices were allowed to speak. I was one of those voices. I was given a podium at Garmisch, and my message was always the same: Russia had to be a pillar of NATO.
During the Yeltsin years, this was not a certainty but a real possibility. I was in the room when Boris Yeltsin told Manfred Wörner that Russia wanted to join NATO. I know this is disputed. There are people who, to this day, say it never happened. I am sorry; I was there. I do not apologize for being there. It is a fact. I think the great mistake was that Russia was not brought into NATO.
VG: But was it truly imaginable? Russia as a NATO member is an arresting idea, yet it immediately runs into serious structural objections. It was not only the smaller Central and Eastern European states, understandably wary of Russian power, that resisted the concept. Significant opposition also came from within Western Europe, including Germany, where the prospect of Russia inside NATO was seen as fundamentally altering the alliance's internal balance – its decision-making architecture, coherence, and strategic identity. A Russia in NATO would not have been NATO with one more member. It would have been a different kind of institution altogether. So, the question I want to press is this: was the idea of Russian inclusion ever a genuine policy option that was seriously considered and then rejected on its merits? Or was it always more of a thought experiment: intellectually interesting but politically impossible?
There is also direct evidence of what Moscow itself said on the matter. Putin stated publicly on multiple occasions in 2000, while Clinton was still in office, and again in the early Bush period, that Russia was open to considering NATO membership. But the fine print, when it emerged, was revealing. Condoleezza Rice later recalled a conversation with Sergei Ivanov, Putin's chief of staff at the time, in which Ivanov made the underlying logic explicit: Russia could not join NATO on the same terms as the Czech Republic or Hungary. What Moscow expected and apparently regarded as the only acceptable basis for membership was a position of rights and responsibilities comparable to those of the United States within the alliance. The Kremlin understood perfectly well, Rice noted, that this would never be offered. In that sense, the public openness to membership may have been less a genuine negotiating position than a way of demonstrating, for the record, that the door had been left open, while ensuring that the terms attached to walking through it made entry impossible. In that sense, membership was not a real option.
Was it possible in Yeltsin’s time? Perhaps. In Putin’s time, it seems it was not.
AG: I think it was possible. Ivanov talking to Condi Rice is not the same as Yeltsin talking to the head of NATO. With all due respect, when the heads speak, that is what matters. Everyone else can interpret things for their boss. Diplomats often frame issues through their own perspectives. The only thing one can really trust is what a nation's leader says.
Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia, and the Belavezha Accords
VG: Let us broaden the frame. We have largely been speaking about Russia itself, but the post-Soviet transformation unfolded very differently across the former Soviet space, and those differences reveal both the nature of the Soviet system and what its collapse set in motion. Without the changes in Moscow, without the weakening of the center's will and capacity to hold the periphery, liberation in the republics would not have been possible in the form it took. But the processes that followed diverged sharply, and I think that divergence tells us something important.
There was a vision, associated above all with Anatoly Chubais and parts of the liberal reformist camp in Moscow, that might be described as a "liberal empire" project: the idea that disintegration could be followed by voluntary reintegration on a new basis, with market reforms, economic interdependence, and modernized political relationships replacing the coercive architecture of the Soviet system. Russia would remain the gravitational center, but by attraction rather than compulsion. In retrospect, it was an ambitious and perhaps somewhat self-flattering vision – one that assumed the republics would view Moscow's continued centrality as an opportunity rather than a threat and that the memory of Soviet domination would yield relatively quickly to the logic of economic interest.
The reality, as you suggest, diverged significantly from that picture. Perceptions in the republics were shaped by experiences that reformers in Moscow often underestimated or misread: the depth of national grievance, the fragility of newly consolidated sovereignty, and the suspicion that economic integration on Russian terms would reproduce dependency in a new institutional form. How did that gap between Moscow's vision and the republics' experience look from where you were sitting? And looking across the former Soviet space, what determined which trajectories led toward genuine pluralism and which toward new forms of authoritarian consolidation?
AG: When I knew Yegor Gaidar, he was very focused on a mechanistic, economics-based idea of donor and recipient countries. We see this in the EU, where Germany often complains that it is the only donor country and everyone else is a taker. It is a psychological construct: givers and takers. In human relationships, too, there are people who give and people who receive.
Within the United States, some prosperous states complain that they give more to the federal government while poorer states receive more in return.
Gaidar was very much in that mindset. I remember him saying, essentially, that Russia was the most prosperous republic, followed by Ukraine, and asking why they should have hangers-on like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. He thought Russia should get rid of them and join Western Europe in prosperity.
Even at the time, with all due respect to Gaidar (and I am not an economist), I thought this was incredibly foolish and, frankly, immoral. If you grow up together as a family, you do not just throw the weaker child into the street. You do not discard people who fought together in the Great Patriotic War. But that was his view, and I think it did Russia a great disservice. It also did Ukraine a great disservice.
The Central Asian countries were essentially abandoned and had to fend for themselves. Depending on their geography and mineral wealth, some sank, and some floated. Some did well, others less so. I think it ricocheted against Russia in the end.
If many Russians could do it over, I think they would not have discarded those countries so unceremoniously. The Belavezha Accords gave Central Asian countries no real choice. It felt like being thrown out. This came after the Gorbachev referendum, when an overwhelming majority of the USSR voted to remain together. Then the three leaders (not coincidentally, three white old men) threw everyone else overboard.
I am a great admirer of President Yeltsin, but this is the one thing I think he would have done differently if he could. He was in such a hurry to get rid of communism that he was willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater. That was his impulsive side, which I saw a bit of. History will judge whether, in the end, it was necessary. But there were definitely broken eggs. No one is perfect. No one has a perfect record.
Marriage, Diplomacy, and Professional Partnership
VG: I would like to ask about something less often discussed in conversations about diplomacy: the human architecture behind the professional one. You and your husband, Ambassador Michael Gfoeller, are both career diplomats, which, by any measure, is an unusual situation. I am curious about the texture of that experience. Did sharing the profession deepen your mutual understanding in ways that might not have been possible otherwise? Did your judgments, instincts, and reading of situations converge over time, or did the different postings and contexts you each inhabited keep your perspectives productively distinct? And is there something specific to diplomacy, as opposed to other shared professions, that makes that kind of partnership particularly demanding or valuable?
AG: In marriage, the ideal is to be best friends. The bonus is that your best friend understands your challenges.
I am not a marriage counselor, but broadly speaking, there are two types of marriage. There is the yin-and-yang type, the traditional marriage in which the husband goes out, and the wife stays home, taking care of food, children, and creating a safe haven. He comes home and asks what is for dinner; she asks how his day was. They complement each other.
Then there is a more recent version of marriage, a marriage of equals, where you are best friends who help each other because you understand each other’s challenges. The traditional partner may not understand what their partner did at work or what their challenges were, but provide warmth and refuge. In a marriage of equals, you do not necessarily get the same warm escape because both people are still processing their professional challenges. But you do get understanding and useful advice: “I have been there. This is what worked for me.”
My husband and I took that path. After about a third of our careers, we could no longer serve in the same embassies, which was stressful, especially with a child. But we also had someone who understood and could offer advice. In a yin-and-yang situation, the man cannot tell his wife how to cook the soup, and she cannot tell him how to get promoted. In our case, we could help each other as colleagues and best friends. It worked for us. It might not work for every couple. Marriage is a mystery. A career is not necessarily a mystery, but it is still intricate. For us, it worked.
Fiction, Dostoevsky, and the Soul in Diplomacy
VG: You are also a novelist and fiction writer, the author of A Simple Love and Becoming Virginia. That fact seems worth dwelling on because it points to something policy analysis and diplomatic reporting, however sophisticated, cannot easily reach. Fiction operates in the register of memory, interiority, moral ambiguity, and the inner lives of characters under pressure, precisely the dimensions of human experience that shape political behavior yet rarely appear in cables or briefing papers. I am curious what drew you to that form. Was there something you felt compelled to express or explore that the nonfiction modes available to a diplomat simply could not accommodate? And I want to ask a question that might seem counterintuitive: Does fiction make a better diplomat? Not in any instrumental sense, but in the deeper sense that the novelist's habit of inhabiting other minds, of suspending judgment long enough to understand how the world looks from inside a very different life, might cultivate exactly the kind of imaginative empathy that diplomacy, at its best, requires. Where do you see the boundary, if there is one, between the novelist's craft and the diplomat's?
AG: My favorite novelist, and I think the greatest of all time, is Dostoevsky. Why? Because he zeroes in on the soul. He zeroes in on what matters: not economics, not production statistics, not how many metro stations were built in the 1930s, but the soul.
The best diplomacy also focuses on what matters most, the soul. The best diplomacy is about reaching out. President George W. Bush was ridiculed for saying he had looked into Putin’s soul. Maybe he did, maybe he did not. But I did not laugh at the idea that he at least imagined the possibility of seeing the soul of someone with whom he was in tense negotiations. That is serious.
Dostoevsky is the greatest writer because he focused on the most important aspect of the human condition: human beings have souls. I have always focused on that, and I think it helped me in my diplomatic work. I did not approach diplomacy simply as a quid pro quo. I tried to understand the person on the other side of the table – not necessarily to agree with, admire, or like them, but to recognize that they have a soul and that this is what they are after.
If you deny the soul’s existence, you are, in a way, denying the other person’s existence. You think only about what they want, what you can get from them, and what they can give you. Everything becomes transactional, which cripples diplomacy.
So yes, I think there is complementarity between writing novels — which are about relationships, love, and, to some degree, hate, which is the opposite of love but also a related feeling — and diplomacy. Of course, a diplomatic cable is a much more sterile environment. You cannot embroider or fantasize; it is just the facts. But the way one arrives at the facts can be empathetic. You can signal that you are a human being with a soul; now, let us talk.
VG: That is a remarkable observation, and it challenges one of the most persistent assumptions about diplomacy, namely that it is fundamentally an art of cynicism and transactionalism, of calculated interests and applied leverage. What you describe is almost the opposite: a practice grounded in the search for another person's interior life, and, by extension, another nation or civilization. The diplomat is not simply a manager of interests but also a reader of souls and human motivations.
It strikes me that this connects directly to what makes the great Russian novelists, Dostoevsky above all, so indispensable for anyone trying to understand Russia: they were doing something not entirely unlike what you describe, but applied to an entire culture's inner life. Do you think this capacity (perhaps what we might call empathetic imagination) is essential to diplomacy?
AG: My most challenging postings were in Saudi Arabia, twice. Finding the soul of a male Saudi official can be difficult for a woman diplomat. Most people do not even consider it. But I believe I was able to do it and to communicate with a very different civilization in a very different language. I speak Arabic, but it is not my native language, and it is very difficult. Expressing one’s soul in an extremely foreign language is even more difficult, but it is worthwhile attempting.
In Saudi Arabia, I had the ironic advantage of being able to talk to women, something my male counterparts could not. I learned a lot about Saudi Arabia from the women I spoke with. Frankly, with them it was easier to express one’s soul and to hear theirs. That too is part of diplomacy. You have to take a holistic approach to the country where you are stationed.
It is like standing in line with babushki, listening to them talk about Yeltsin. To me, that is as important as the throw weight of a nuclear device I know nothing about. That is real diplomacy: understanding the atmosphere and what people are feeling. Hopefully, your cable will eventually reach the President, as my babushkas’ cables did reach President George H.W. Bush. That is what he needs to know.
Lessons, Misunderstandings, and the Lost Chance to Recreate the West
VG: Looking across the arc from the 1980s through the 1990s and into the present, what lessons seem most important to you now? Were there significant misunderstandings, not necessarily direct mistakes, but misperceptions shaped by circumstances and time? Were there misunderstandings on the Russian side, the Western side, or both? If you could identify one moment in that entire period when a different choice, or a different quality of understanding, might have altered the trajectory in a fundamental way, what would it be?
AG: I think we had a real chance to recreate the West, including Russia. Such a chance comes perhaps once every two hundred years. I do not think we will have it again for a while. But we did have it, and we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
I can pinpoint the moment I think it happened. It was during the bombardment of Serbia, during Russian Orthodox Holy Week, the week before Easter. The Russian government, by then weak, demoralized, and essentially hostage to whatever the West wanted, made it clear: please stop the bombing on Easter Sunday. You can resume on Monday, but please stop on Easter Sunday. NATO decided not to.
At the time, I was Acting Consul General in St. Petersburg. The next day, as I was driving in my car, flying the American flag, as is customary for a chief of mission, the car was surrounded and attacked. My driver had to make evasive maneuvers to get me back to the consulate.
I thought to myself: That is the end. For want of a brief pause in bombing, for want of a little humanity and an understanding of the collateral consequences of failing to do the humane thing.
Again, diplomacy is about humanity. It is about being humane. It is about listening to someone who tells you, “Please stop for twenty-four hours,” and responding, “Yes, for twenty-four hours.” If, instead, you say, “No, that is not efficient,” you reap the whirlwind. Today, we have Putin. With just a little understanding, I think we might be in a different situation.
I do not believe there are global forces that inevitably pit blocs against each other. Conflict at that scale is a human choice; that is why diplomacy matters. If I were a Marxist, believing that everything is ultimately determined by economics and structural forces beyond human agency, I would never have become a diplomat.
VG: That is exactly the tension I am trying to navigate in this project: bringing together different schools of thought on revolution, counterrevolution, and historical cycles. Even in academia, we increasingly need to complement social and economic explanations with attention to behavior, psychology, identity, language, symbolism, faith, religion, and other dimensions. When insights from these approaches are combined and applied to both historical sequences and contemporary politics, the picture that emerges is considerably more nuanced and, I think, more honest than any single framework can produce.
That is also how I understand your point about the connection between diplomacy and fiction. Diplomacy is, of course, about interests, power, and negotiation. But at its best, it also requires something that cannot be reduced to the calculation of interests: judgment cultivated over time, empathy that is disciplined rather than sentimental, and the ability to understand situations in the world through human beings – their motives, memories, identities, fears, and moral choices.
Thank you very much for this extraordinary conversation. It has been deeply enriching and very helpful. Your reflections are exceptionally valuable – not only for the depth and breadth of your remarkable diplomatic experience but also for the intellectual honesty, humanity, and generosity with which you engage these questions in their full complexity.
