The story of an American, replacing the Soviet employees in the US Embassy in Moscow

In late July, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that 755 employees of US diplomatic facilities in Russia will be deprived of their work.. It is not clear what this means for long-term relations between the two countries. And what does this mean - at least in part - for the main team of American diplomats who will remain in Russia. And who will now answer phone calls, scrub floors, drive cars, work in a cafeteria and disassemble mail.

This may seem strange, but the US embassy in Moscow faced the same problems three decades ago, writes in its blog for The New York Times Lisa Dickey.

In the middle of 1980's, Clayton Longtree, a young marine from the security of the embassy in Moscow, made a mistake by falling in love with a seductive Russian woman named Violetta Seina who turned out to be a KGB spy.

Like the hero's passionate hero of the novel, Sergeant Lountri handed over to Mrs. Sein copies of classified material, and when it was discovered, he was put on trial and sentenced to 30-year imprisonment. The US government, concerned about this scandal, then fired many Soviet citizens working at the embassy, ​​and soon after that, the Soviet government deprived of the opportunity to work at the American embassy and all the rest.

And suddenly it turned out that there were no secretaries, cleaners, drivers and nurses. Who will fill these jobs? Who could be interested in doing such prosaic work for a small salary in the harsh climate of Moscow during the Cold War?

Well, for example, me. When I almost received a not very practical bachelor of arts degree in Russian language and literature, one of the professors told me that one family of diplomats needed a nanny for the duration of their business trip to Moscow. I sent a letter to this family, not forgetting to put my photo in it with a happy smile, like Mickey Mouse, and after a couple of months of correspondence, they offered me work to care for their one-year-old child. And in August 1988, I ended up in Moscow.

The United States Embassy then - as now - was a small town. It was built at the beginning of 1980's and has an underground floor with a grocery store, a bowling alley, a hairdresser, a gym and a swimming pool. Living spaces are located along two walls with a green lawn in the center. And on the one hand over the territory of the embassy towers - for Russian spies it was a very convenient place for observation - one of the Seven Sisters, that is one of the seven spectacular high-rise buildings in the Gothic style, built in different parts of Moscow in the Stalin era.

At the embassy, ​​I was surrounded by elegant young people, most of whom were hired by Pacific Architects and Engineers, winning the contract for the rapid filling of all vacancies. Among them was, for example, Josh, who at that moment was 20 with a little. He had just graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, and he came to Moscow to drive a truck to deliver goods. There was also Nancy, who spoke Russian fluently, and performed various kinds of small work — including secretarial work — at Spaso House, the ambassador’s residence. We were an enthusiastic group of Russophiles, we wanted to study Russia and improve our language skills. However, the security officers at the embassy had other ideas.

Shortly after my arrival, I had my first briefing with the State Department’s security team. It looked like a primer on the subject of “cold war paranoia” - the result of 1970’s serious diplomatic mistakes when the United States allowed Soviet workers to build the buildings of the United States embassy. Do not say anything if you do not want the Tips to know about it. Never meet alone with any of the citizens of the USSR. Write reports about the people you meet with, and include everything you talk to them about. Never enter into intimate relationships with someone from the USSR. And tell us immediately if you become aware that someone else at the embassy is doing this - and if you don’t, and we find out what you know about it, you will have as many problems as they do. From that moment on, I realized that our people would watch us and listen to us as carefully as the Soviets.

All this might have seemed redundant, but I quickly realized that it was not. During my work at the embassy, ​​a variety of strange things happened. Once on Saturday, when I was getting acquainted with the sights of Leningrad, some unfamiliar Russian approached me and quietly said: “Well, how are things at the embassy?” (This is a classic move of the KGB, then one diplomat told me , to “make you understand that you are being watched”). Another time, a new Russian friend, a pianist from the Moscow Conservatory, whom I met by chance on the subway, mentioned my plans for the coming weekend, although I hadn’t told him anything about it. Even more threatening was another story. Being slightly tipsy, I told an American that I had a very close friend at the university, and after that, a beautiful Russian woman began to appear at receptions at the embassy, ​​who talked to me coquettishly. Was she a KGB agent directed to seduce me, as Violetta Seyne did with Clayton Longtree? Or have I come up with all this? It was impossible to accurately answer these questions.

I spent seven great, exciting and very strange months in 1988 and in 1989 in Moscow, working in the US Embassy. Since then, almost 30 years have passed. I constantly come to Russia, I witnessed how the hostility of the cold war period gave way to cautious friendship in the middle of the 1990s, then some cooling in the 2000s followed, and today everything is back to some kind of cold 2.0 war. It is not yet clear whether President Putin will at some point allow new applicants to fill the vacancies that have recently opened. If he does, then it seems that people who will agree to this - whoever they are - will work in the atmosphere of the equally strange and sad paranoia that we then faced.

Translation of material prepared edition Inosmi.

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