Wisdom Was Power

Missing Now in Dealing with Putin's Russia. A Public Affairs Press Extra

Marshall Shulman, the founding director of the W. Averell Harriman Institute for the Advanced Study of the Soviet Union at Columbia University

The link below is to a group of essays about the late Marshall Shulman, just published by the Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum at Columbia University. The authors were specialists in what a half century ago was the USSR and is now Russia, a nuclear-armed autocracy as menacing as it was then, perhaps more so. After the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, Russia was deemed less central to global order until Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Compared to the expertise reflected in these writings, current official U.S. policy and understanding of Russia is a dangerous mess.

https://issforum.org/ISSF/PDF/JervisForum-Tribute-Shulman.pdf

Here is my contribution:

Marshall Shulman entered our lives on a rainy night in Moscow in early fall of 1974. We had recently arrived. I was the Washington Post correspondent with a three-year assignment. By then, my wife Susan and I already realized that because so little was available from official Soviet sources and the very circumspect US diplomats working at the embassy, even the most esteemed American visitors wanted to be in touch with journalists representing the major US newspapers and magazines as providers of information and insight. They also welcomed the modicum of hospitality we could provide, including dollops of black-market caviar.

Our apartment was in a foreigners’ compound on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, where militia at the entrance monitored the arriving guests. The clear understanding was that visitors and residents like us would have to accept the KGB reporting the American connection, perhaps for retribution. On that night, Marshall was waved through routinely by the militia. But in the process he was soaked, head to toe, in the torrential downpour. So it was that our first session with an enduring friend, whom we considered among the wisest American experts on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was conducted with him wearing a bathrobe that barely covered his knees.

US-Soviet relations in the 1970s, which in hindsight marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War that culminated in 1991 with the final implosion of the USSR, were a composite of intermittent forays at détente, navigating hardline American animus and the Kremlin’s defensive suspicions. There were many major issues: how to take advantage of the Sino-Soviet split, competition for influence around the developing world, the reality of enmity in the Indochina conflicts, and negotiations to restrain nuclear weapons, which everyone understood was essential to preserving civilization.

And what were broadly termed Human Rights. The movement in support of Jewish emigration was especially well organized. After the 1967 Arab-Israel war, a substantial portion of Jews in the Soviet republics sought the goal of a more enriching life, in every sense of the term, in Israel and the United States.

The emigration issue served purposes in both Moscow and Washington. Antisemitism had deep roots in Russia, and using exit visas to portray Jewish apostasy was cynically satisfying to the Kremlin. And, with the issue being led by Sen. Henry Jackson (D-Wash) and a fiercely anti-Soviet US political mainstream, measuring exit visas became a valuable asset in setting parameters for the relationship, particularly on trade benefits.

The Helsinki Accords in 1975 codified human rights as an area for East-West disputes and negotiation. With celebrated writers and scientists at the forefront, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, the dissident movement was an asset for demanding changes in the USSR and an excuse by the KGB to crack down on critics and criticism.

What was exceptional about Marshall, and unusual among other American scholars and officials who were monitoring the USSR, was that he understood the complexities of ideology and competition which framed the way superpowers maneuvered for dominance.

Everybody had to be placed in the categories of that time: Anti-Soviet, soft on communism, socialist leaning, liberal, conservative, leftist, rightist, hawk, dove. Marshall recognized that the autocracy of Leonid Brezhnev and his Politburo was flailing in many respects, especially economic policy and chronologically geriatric.

That the USSR was a formidable military adversary with the capacity to encourage global tensions and wage unspeakable destruction was undeniable. But Shulman had aligned himself with George Kennan’s view that exaggerating the Soviet threat tended to serve US political interests by providing the reasoning for defense expenditure and a sprawling intelligence apparatus.

In the 1980s, when the head of the USA and Canada Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York that in Perestroika and Glasnost that the Soviets were “doing the worst thing we could do to you Americans, denying you an enemy,” I heard truth in his sly appraisal.

After Jimmy Carter’s election as president in 1976 and his appointment of Cyrus Vance as Secretary of State, the realpolitik of Henry Kissinger’s years was replaced by the split between Vance and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, which was marked by differences in personality as well as strategy. Carter’s emphasis on human rights, combined with Brzezinski’s deep anti-Russian animus, was a contrast to Vance’s more traditionally diplomatic approach. As a senior adviser to Vance on the Soviets, Shulman was on that side of the divide.

And here is a personal explanation for why Marshall’s assessment of US-Soviet relations resonated with me as it did: I admired and wrote about the dissidents and the repressive policies of the Kremlin. But I also sensed that focusing so heavily on those issues meant underestimating equally important aspects of Soviet reality. While the West tended to call the Soviet empire “Russia,” it was in fact an uneasy composite of nationalities and their histories that made Kremlin control less complete than it seemed.

In the twenty-first century, the war with Ukraine is the most striking example of the impact of the breakup of the USSR. From the Baltics to the Caucasus and Central Asia, Russia is no longer master of its once massive domain. In dealing with the Soviet Union as an indomitable and eternal entity, an imperial power that was comparable to Rome and Britain at their pinnacles, the US missed underlying weaknesses. The USSR did not work. It had an ersatz economy, its projection of unity was essentially superficial, and its leadership was sclerotic.

Shulman believed that engaging with Soviet society, within the broader context of the much-disputed term détente, served a positive purpose for the United States. He held that the US would gain much more than it could lose in that approach to the relationship.

An aside about the Kremlin’s cockeyed sense of wpower in that era: in the early years after the Soviet collapse, Central Committee archives were open to researchers. A friend found a Top-Secret Central Committee document signed by then KGB head Yuri Andropov about a 1977 Politburo meeting where the debate was about “Korrespondent Osnos,” Joseph Presel, who was a young diplomat at the American Embassy, and Natan Sharansky, a dissident who played a role in advocacy for democracy and emigration.

I was assailed in the Soviet media as a CIA agent but not expelled; Presel had a lengthy State Department career in the former Soviet republics; and Sharansky spent nine years in the Gulag after a trial for anti-Soviet activities before being released and moving to Israel. That the Kremlin’s most senior officials would devote so much attention to three young men with no discernible power, I concluded, reflected their profound insecurity and declining confidence.

Calling attention to the Kremlin’s weakness was less welcome in official circles than warning of the Soviet Union’s encroaching power. Preeminence in Washington is associated with ambition and an affinity for the limelight. Marshall was by nature soft-spoken and, from what we observed, genial. He was content to be a lodger at Averell Harriman’s Georgetown homestead, which made him ancillary to the capital’s elite. Combined with his sophisticated assessment of Soviet power rather than the reductive commitment to the Cold War that was then in fashion, Marshall’s influence was never great.

When Shulman became the first director of Columbia’s W. Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union, Susan and I continued to enjoy the company of Marshall and his beloved and formidable wife, Collette. We would discuss in depth what was happening in the USSR, but we were now observing this absorbing, infuriating country and no longer directly in the competitive fray for attention or impact.

Who knows what Marshall Shulman’s role might have been in managing President Vladimir Putin’s dangerously uncontrollable Russia? I am certain he would have advice and judgment that would be well worth taking seriously.