Stengel’s Meeting with Russian Federation’s Special Envoy for Cultural Cooperation Mikhail Shvidkoy
Your first meeting with Shvidkoy (Shh-vit-koy) is an opportunity to begin a strategic relationship with Russia’s most senior public diplomacy official. Your overarching objective is to establish a relationship that enables us to advance a more positive U.S.-Russia agenda through people-to-people relations with Russia.
The memo went on to talk about “key objectives” and then came the part of traditional State memos that I always liked best: “Watch Out For.” Here the memo said the Russians wanted to repatriate the remains of the Russian pianist Sergey Rachmaninoff and would float a proposal about Fort Ross in California.
I also got a bio of Shvidkoy. He sounded like he might be entertaining. He had written three books on the theater, and was the host of two television shows.
We met in a nondescript conference room off my office because he would be bringing a number of staff and therefore I would have to as well. At State, we always mirrored the number of aides that the foreign official had. He had three, and so did I.
Shvidkoy looked a lot like Nikita Khrushchev—short, stocky, bald. He was bumptious and impatient. After the perfunctory handshakes, our two teams took their seats on opposite sides of the long, rectangular table.
We got off on the wrong foot, not because of personality but because of policy. Just before the meeting, we had received word that our annual bilateral cultural meeting with the Russians—the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission Working Group for Education, Culture, Sports, and Media, which the Russians apparently loved—had been canceled by the White House because of Russia’s behavior in Ukraine. I thought it best not to sugarcoat this, and I announced it right at the top. Russian diplomats never show surprise. I could have announced that President Obama was inviting President Putin to be his partner on Dancing with the Stars, and they would have just nodded, expressionless. Shvidkoy barely acknowledged what I had said and did not bring it up again. Russians are from the “never apologize, never explain” school of diplomacy.
The primary issue they wanted to talk about was Fort Ross, which had been the one and only Russian colony in the contiguous United States. In 1812, a Russian American shipping company chartered by the czar built a settlement about 90 miles north of San Francisco. The settlers planted crops, bred livestock, and constructed a simple Russian Orthodox chapel. But by 1841, their plans changed, and they sold the fort. Decades later, California turned Fort Ross into a park. In 2009, California was considering closing the park, and the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak met with then California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and implored him to keep it open.1 Now Shvidkoy was advocating that it become part of the National Park Service, which would protect it. This was a pretty remote possibility, as either the President would have to issue a proclamation under the 1906 Antiquities Act, or Congress would have to pass a bill establishing it as a national monument. Right then, no one was looking to do the Russians any favors.
When I explained that this was very unlikely, Shvidkoy launched into a speech. He said Russia had “sovereignty” over Fort Ross because of “history” and certain “rights.” Mr. Shvidkoy was clearly unhappy with my answer and seemed to imply that Russia should just annex it. That didn’t seem like a good plan. I looked around the room, and all my State colleagues were stone-faced. Is that what diplomacy is? Listening to crazy stuff and not acknowledging it?
After his speech, Shvidkoy seemed to lose his energy and switched abruptly to the Rachmaninoff case. Rachmaninoff was a great Russian artist, he said, and his remains should be sent back to the homeland. When he finished, I said that the State Department didn’t have any jurisdiction over the remains of the pianist and that he would need to take it up with the Rachmaninoff estate. That seemed to be enough for Mr. Shvidkoy. He looked at his watch, glanced at his colleagues, stood up, shook my hand, and then they all filed out. If he was playing the part of the gruff, humorless unbending Russian apparatchik, it was a flawless performance.
Rethinking Rethinking
I must have gotten a dozen memos in the first few weeks about convening meetings to “reimagine PD” or “rethink PD” or create “PD for the 21st century.” I didn’t get any memos about diplomacy in general or policy or media or China or Russia or anything else. The way it works at the State Department is that foreign service officers each had a “cone,” kind of like a major in college—politics, economics, consular affairs, management, public diplomacy. They were an economics officer or a political officer or a public diplomacy officer. They received special training in these fields, and they mostly stayed in their cones for their entire career. In many ways, public diplomacy was the cone that, as the comedian Rodney Dangerfield used to say, “don’t get no respect.” PD officers had a bit of an inferiority complex. They were underrepresented in the ambassadorial ranks, the great goal of all foreign service officers. Politics and economic officers didn’t have to justify what they did. But public diplomacy was kind of nebulous.
I was thinking less about reimagining PD than defining it in the first place. I disliked the mushy language around public diplomacy and I absolutely hated the phrase, so often used to describe PD, “winning hearts and minds.” Everything we’ve learned in the last 50 years from social science and psychology suggests that changing someone’s mind is a nearly impossible task. The more you try to change an embedded view, the more likely people are to double down in their beliefs (i.e., the “backfire effect”). In the department, public diplomacy was described as people-to-people diplomacy, in contrast to state-to-state. Everyone also talked about “telling America’s story,” which was the earnest phrase used during the Cold War. In all my reading, I hadn’t seen a very good definition of PD. The one I liked best was also the briefest: Joe Nye’s phrase “soft power.”2 I generally felt that the more time we spent talking about PD rather than policy, the more we marginalized ourselves.
The other thing that irked me was all the discussion of the “golden age” of public diplomacy during the Cold War. Very often a Representative would say, We used to know how to counter the Russians. In fact, PD was seen as a success only after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Before then, PD practitioners were blamed for not getting our message across. The fabled United States Information Agency (USIA) never really had a seat at the table, and the sainted Edward Murrow famously complained about it (“If you don’t include us in the takeoff, we can’t help you on the crash landing”). Members of Congress had this naive idea that without USIA, the Berlin Wall would never have fallen and the Soviet Union would still exist. If anything, it was more Edward G. Robinson and Mr. Ed than Ed Murrow that led to the fall of communism. American popular culture was the secret weapon, not schmaltzy USIA documentaries about African American athletes and musicians.
On my first morning as Under Secretary, I sent out a message to all public diplomacy officers abroad that commended them for what they did, but said that we had to use the power of social media and mobile technology. For PD officers in the field, these missives from newly confirmed political appointees must be somewhere between forgettable and comical. For them, each new person has his or her priorities that tend to last for only as long as that person stays in the job, which in the case of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy had not been very long.
There was a lot of resistance and just plain lack of knowledge about digital and mobile. State officials were equipped with clunky old BlackBerrys, and plenty of officers didn’t even have that. People were resistant to social media. At that time, there were only a few dozen State Twitter accounts, and even the Secretary did not have one. Later, at a town hall meeting I had for our ambassadors, an ambassador to a small European country raised his hand and said that his problem with social media was that it’s too easy to make a mistake.
Getting more folks on digital platforms was a challenge. I had
