By Patricia H. Kushlis
I spent Wednesday afternoon at the Wilson Center at “Dialogue, Defense and Media Messaging: US-Russian Citizen Diplomacy Past and Present,“ a Kennan Institute program devoted to US-Russian relations from the standpoint of the people, the media, the desire to avoid nuclear holocaust and the signing of the New START. A substantial portion of the two and one-half hour event consisted of retelling and revisiting the past, a past that is, that began in 1985 with an all but forgotten “Citizen’s Summit” called a “Spacebridge.
This electronic bridge linked, by satellite, audiences in Seattle and what was then Leningrad and consisted of two separate Q and A sessions jointly moderated by larger than life American journalist and former NBC television host Phil Donahue and Soviet counterpart Vladimir Pozner.
Donahue was at the Wilson Center event on Wednesday and in excellent form. Pozner was supposed to have been there too – but the Icelandic volcanic eruption not the long disappeared Iron Curtain– kept him home in Moscow. To compensate, he participated live on camera – in a kind of contemporary give and take version of the Spacebridge.
Much as it would have been nice to have seen him there in the flesh, the Skype-kind of dialogue did work – and especially so for a back-to-the-future event rife with historical comparison, archival clips and an exploration of its meaning in context of the times. The event itself was conceived of by Ellen Messinger, producer of Global Pulse at Link TV in San Francisco. The timing could not have been better.
The almost forgotten Spacebridge
To tell the truth, I had almost forgotten about the Spacebridge – an early form of US-Soviet citizen-to-citizen diplomacy brought about through the very latest technology then available. It signaled the beginning of the Gorbachev era policy of glasnost (transparency) in Soviet politics and occurred before another kind of person-to-person bridge - the Reagan-Gorbachev Summit in Reykjavik in September 1986. In fact, according to Pozner, had Gorbachev not personally sanctioned the Spacebridge, it would not have happened and certainly would never have aired on Soviet national television as it did.
The Spacebridge - although dropped by NBC because it did not command the Neilsen ratings needed to keep it on the air (Donahue wryly characterized American interest in their Soviet counterparts as tepid) - nevertheless performed a useful function in breaking down national stereotypes, misperceptions and lowering heated Cold War era barriers between the two countries and peoples.
The atmosphere at the time had become particularly acrid as a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979, the ensuing intermediate nuclear weapons build-up in Europe and the Reagan “Evil Empire” sound-bite populist rhetoric in the US that so appealed to the American right wing and so appalled the rest of us.
Since 1985, of course, millions of millions of gallons of water have gone under various bridges in Seattle, St. Petersburg and elsewhere. Panelists David Hoffman, contributing editor of the Washington Post and former Moscow correspondent, and Heather Hurlburt, Executive Director of the National Security Network (NSN), joined Donahue, Pozner and moderator and Kennan Institute head Blair Ruble to explore the events that led up to and beyond Putin’s election as President of the Russian Federation in 2000, the eight year wilderness in just about everything including US-Russian relations under the George W. Bush administration and the restart of the Russian-American dialog under Barack Obama as a part of his long term vision of a world without nuclear weapons.
After the Cold War's End
It’s clear that much of the post Cold War period is still sorting itself out, but the lack of a Marshall Plan to help put this huge country back on its feet combined with the continued bargain basement price for oil and gas - Russia’s primary exports - and America’s “triumphalism” in the ensuing years helped lead to Putin’s rise and his continued popularity. It could have gone differently according to Pozner and clearly he would have been happier if it had.
Yet as Hoffman pointed out, the Nunn-Lugar program that helped the Russians secure “loose nukes,” and keep nuclear scientists employed at home was perhaps the most useful single thing the US did. Other programs - whether driven by the US government or smaller ones under the private Soros Foundation - were often good, but the scale was miniscule.
The times, it should go almost without saying, were already dramatically changing by the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The new information technologies ushered in by the Internet just a couple of years later and ongoing advances in satellite communications were, and will, continue to reshape how peoples and governments communicate with one another.
This is all well and good - or not depending upon how you approach the information highway - but as useful adjuncts and aids as they are, long distance communication, chat rooms, and other forms of social media still do not equal the impact of Edward R. Murrow’s last three feet - or person-to-person face time.
A New Iron Curtain?
Ironically, the greatest impediment to improving the US-Russian dialog, in Pozner‘s view, today is now on the American side. Here’s the rub: Russians can and do now freely travel abroad and would love to visit the US - but they can’t get visas. The latest version of the Iron Curtain?