Tchaikovsky 19, A Diplomatic Life Behind the Iron Curtain

About the Book

"Readers will discover the failures of Kissinger´s policy of detente in the early 1970s, the mistaken departure from Carter´s balanced policy toward China and the USSR, and the near-collapse of the embassy due to intelligence failures"-Foreign Service Journal. "Ober´s book recounts it all, along with the personalities and events of the time now mostly forgotten: dissidents and refuseniks, Victor and Jennifer Louis, Nina and Ed Stevens, U.S.-Soviet summits, microwaves, bugged buildings and typewriters, fires, spy dust and spy mania . . . It´s all there, the pageant of U.S. Embassy Moscow 1970-90, a place so unlike today´s walled air-conditioned, high-rise embassy fortress a block away as to beggar the imagination."-Richard Gilbert, AmericanDiplomacy.org "You have wonderfully captured the way things were in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and ´80s. I don´t know anyone who has done it better."-Donald Connery, former Time-Life correspondent, Moscow. "Together with much wisdom about American diplomacy, this rich memoir provides keen insight into Russian thinking and behavior"-George Feifer, "The Girl from Petrovka".

About the Author

Robert F. Ober Jr. concentrated on Communist affairs in a 26-year diplomatic career that included three assignments in Moscow. He also served in Athens, Delhi, Hamburg, Warsaw and Washington; negotiated with Russians in Kabul and Prague; and was a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Mr. Ober describes the policies he advanced; the ambassadors and officials with whom he served; and the friends he and his wife Liz made behind the Iron Curtain. He discusses Nixon and Kissinger’s “détente”; their neglect of U.S. families divided by Soviet restrictions; Brezhnev’s era of stagnation; and Gorbachev’s reforms.