Through Dark Days and White Nights: Four Decades Observing a Changing Russia. Naomi F. Collins

and important story, Naomi has drawn from diaries, journals, letters, and travel notes written over the years to produce a remarkable book that appears at a time when Russia should be much more at the forefront of American’s attention than is now the case. It deserves an influential and respectful readership.

      Introduction by Ambassador James F. Collins

      For much of its history, the land and people of Russia have seemed an intriguing, closed and shrouded mystery. Glimpses by travelers beyond barriers created by Russian princes, tsars, and communist general secretaries have been avidly consumed by Western publics wanting to fathom what lay beyond the reaches of most western experience. In turn, there has almost always been something that prompts the traveler into Russia to want to explain and describe: explain what the place is about; how it works; what it looks like; how it behaves. For centuries this urge has impelled visitors to write, paint, photograph, record; to speak, argue, analyze, and describe; to attempt to convey the essence of a land poorly known or understood by outsiders and the feel and spirit of a place that has seemed usually different, often enigmatic, and sometimes forbidding.

      Through Dark Days and White Nights makes a rich and unique addition to this long and worthwhile tradition. Combining observation, impression and insight about Russian life over four decades, this is the work of an inquisitive writer who had the opportunity to see Russia over a period of great change and transformation. The result is not the usual history or political analysis of Russian events and developments, or of its leaders and their political maneuvering. It is rather a highly readable and informative work of description that illuminates the daily life, personalities, and scenes that have characterized Russia as it evolved from a self-isolated communist empire to an emerging new nation opened to the world community.

      The book itself was prompted by encouragement from the author’s family and friends to use the notes, diaries, and correspondence she had shared with some of them over nearly four decades to add missing color and texture to the usual media and academic treatment of Russia. The result is a volume recounting a rich and varied journey in space and time to two very different Russias and through events that dramatically divided one from the other. It provides an image of these Russias from very different perspectives, beginning through the eyes of a student living a student’s life and ending with thoughts and impressions of an American ambassador’s wife in the capital of a new Russia.

      The book begins with Russia and Russian life in Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union in the decade from the mid 1960s until the mid 1970s. This period encompassed the height of Cold War confrontation between the Soviet Union and the U.S. and its allies, even as it brought a countervailing trend toward more stable relations with the West. Russians’ daily life took place in a society isolated with determined efficiency from the outside world. Nearly impenetrable barriers prevented significant or sustained contact between the Russian people and the outside, yet somehow also enhanced interest in that other world to the point of giving it almost mythical status. But this period also concludes with the first steps toward détente and the historic signing of the Helsinki Final Act, a step that was to expose the Soviet system to new pressures against the totalitarian model and provide new avenues for the outside to get in.

      The narrative begins in the fall of 1965 when my wife and I set out to spend an academic year at Moscow State University. I had been chosen along with a small group of colleagues (about a dozen and a half total) to participate in the U.S.-USSR exchange of graduate students and young faculty and to spend a year in the USSR conducting research and study. I had convinced a reluctant Naomi, whose academic interests and energies lay outside Russia, nevertheless to accompany me and share what for both of us would be not only a first trip beyond the United States but also a unique chance to live in a country that few had had the chance to see.

      For the next academic year we shared dormitory and student life in 1965 Moscow. It was an immersion in Soviet life at the personal level few Americans ever had the chance to experience, what it meant to shop, eat, live, travel, study, enjoy and, survive the vicissitudes of daily life as a regular (though foreign and privileged) graduate student in mid-sixties Moscow.

      We returned to Moscow in 1973, a much-changed family entering the USSR in a very different capacity. On this occasion Naomi accompanied me as mother of two young boys and wife of a junior diplomat posted to the American Embassy in Moscow. We arrived at a time of improved U.S.-Russia relations one year after President Nixon’s visit to Moscow had ushered in the era of détente. New programs of cooperation in areas ranging from space to health were the order of the day, and not long after I arrived, the 1973 Yom Kippur War ushered in a time of intense diplomacy involving US-Russian efforts to halt the fighting in the Middle East and work toward Arab-Israeli peace. As my responsibilities at the Embassy were concentrated on the Soviet Union’s activities in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, this meant close involvement with much of the diplomacy that dominated the headlines of the day.

      Naomi had, in the interim, earned her Ph.D. in history, and the return to our student environs again prompted her to write. Through correspondence with family and friends she rapidly acquired a supportive audience hungry for information beyond the routine fare provided in the print and electronic media. This stay brought new impressions as she recounted the challenges of daily life for a diplomat’s wife in the Soviet capital and for Russians. She also kept readers abreast of the life and experiences of our two young sons and their encounters with Russia, and the vagaries of her own work in the cultural section of the American Embassy.

      The new life also offered opportunities to know people from a broader variety of Russian communities. Russian artists, officials, dissidents, party members, and a community of foreign diplomats frequented our Moscow world, and we came to understand the life of the Soviet elite through immersion in its world. On the American side we made new and lasting friendships among a small (the total was probably never more than 300-400 people) American community of diplomats, journalists, and businessmen. And as members of Congress, the Secretary of State and other cabinet members, two Presidents, and countless other visitors came to the Soviet Union we also came to know a widening circle of American political and governmental figures, colleagues and friends whose shared Soviet experience kept us in touch over the following years.

      We left the USSR in the summer of 1975, and I did not return to Moscow for nearly fifteen years. In the fall of 1990, after two years on the staff of the Secretary of State, I took up the position as the Ambassador’s deputy (Deputy Chief of Mission in State Department parlance) at an Embassy I knew well, but in a country that was strangely unfamiliar. Although I had traveled with Secretary of State James Baker to Moscow occasionally in the late 1980s and had seen elements of the changes that were transforming the USSR under Mikhail Gorbachev’s dual programs of perestroika and glasnost, I was not prepared for the scope of change that was to come. This time, with one son in college and the other just graduated from college, and Naomi well established in a career in Washington, she commuted between Washington and Moscow. Her frequent visits gave her unique insights into the changes occurring all around us that were often missed or overlooked by those who lived with them day in and day out.

      The failure by hard-line communists to oust President Gorbachev and seize power in Moscow in August 1991 brought on events that were made for the eyes, ears and mind of an historian. The abortive coup unleashed forces that were to transform both the former Soviet Union and the relations between the Russian people and the West. It marked the end of communist control over the Soviet Union, the beginning of the death throes of the Union itself, and the emergence of a little known Russian leader who would lead a new Russia following the end of the Soviet Union on Christmas day in 1991.

      For the next two years Russia’s upheaval and revolution transformed the shape of European and Eurasian politics. Rapid and astonishing change uprooted an old order and re-opened Russia to the rest of the world as the country and people sought new self- definition among the democracies and capitalist economies from which it had isolated itself for nearly three quarters of a century. It was a period of great trial and turmoil for Russia’s people as they coped with a world turned upside down.

      My time as Ambassador’s deputy and chargé d’ affaires came to an end in late 1993, and I returned to join the Clinton administration’s Russia-Eurasia team at the State Department where I would serve