212 Louis Sell Served As a Foreign Service Officer (Fso)

212 BOOK REVIEWS Louis Sell, From Washington to Moscow: us-Soviet Relations and the Collapse of the ussr (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 408 pp. $27.95 (pb), 9780822361954. Louis Sell served as a Foreign Service Officer (fso) for 27 years. Beginning his career around the time of u.s-Soviet détente, he later headed the political sec- tion of the u.s Embassy in Moscow while the Soviet Union entered its death throes, before wrapping up his tenure in the Balkans amid the fallout from the Yugoslav collapse. His history, in other words, mirrors that of the United States in its European engagement during the final decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, it is hard to imagine having a better vantage point to witness the evolution of American strategy in Europe—particularly the United States’ relationship with the Soviet Union—than from inside the belly of the State Department itself. The privileged insight Sell enjoyed from his State Department perch is on apt display in his excellent From Washington to Moscow: u.s.-Soviet Relations and the Collapse of the ussr. A combination of analytic history and personal narrative, Sell’s book deserves to take its place on any “must read” list of mono- graphs discussing the u.s.-Soviet relationship in the Cold War’s final decades. Not only has Sell integrated a wide swatch of existing research into a lucid discussion, but personal anecdotes drawn from his career ground the history with a sense of the ‘ground level’ experience. With the possible exception of Jack Matlock’s Reagan and Gorbachev, there is no other volume quite like it among the existing literature.1 As befitting a former fso with experience in Moscow, Sell’s volume adopts a gently American-centric perspective while pairing it with a rich review of the Soviet experience. Indeed, the volume begins with a useful overview of the Soviet scene in the early- and mid-Brezhnev years, touching upon Leonid Brezhnev’s domestic initiatives, international ambitions, and the emergence of the Soviet dissident movement. From there, the project covers u.s.-Soviet relations during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations, paying particular attention to the military and economic aspects of détente and the influence of American and Soviet domestic politics on foreign policy. These are years infrequently or only briefly included in many analyses of the Cold War’s end and Soviet collapse.2 As Sell rightly suggests, however, only by understanding 1 Jack Matlock, Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended (New York: Random House, 2004). Still, and as the title suggests, Matlock is more narrowly focused on the interpersonal dynamics to which he was witness in the 1980s and early 1990s. 2 For illustration, see James Graham Wilson, The Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev’s Adaptability, Reagan’s Engagement, and the End of the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014); Raymond Garthoff, The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/18763324-20181355 BOOK REVIEWS 213 the waxing and waning of détente, the political atrophy and economic decline of the Soviet Union, and the United States’ own strategic soul searching after the Vietnam War can scholars make sense of the “core period” surrounding the Cold War’s end in the 1980s and early 1990s. After all, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, George Shultz, Brent Scowcroft, and George H.W. Bush were not only trying to put their own stamp on history—they were also reacting to issues they inherited, and trying to avoid problems that bedeviled their predecessors. With this overview in hand, From Washington to Moscow moves briskly along in discussing the u.s.-Soviet relationship as the Cold War begins to wrap up. Yuri Andropov fails to tighten the Soviet Union’s belt during his brief rule; Reagan haltingly seeks diplomatic engagement with a Soviet Union even as he mobilizes American power to coerce Soviet leaders; Gorbachev’s ascendance produces a revolution in the Soviet domestic order yet catalyzes a striking u.s.- Soviet rapprochement; Bush peacefully navigates the turmoil of the Eastern European Revolutions of 1989, German Reunification, and the Soviet breakup itself in 1991. All the standard stories are included, even as Sell highlights the often-fraught internal deliberations (including deep in the Soviet and American policymaking bureaucracies) over what u.s. and Soviet policy should entail. If anything, the chapters aptly underline the vast array of forces—ranging from senior policymakers seeking to shape history, to changing economic patterns economic and individuals marching on the streets of Moscow and Berlin—at play. Ultimately, systemic forces, domestic politics, leaders, and the person on the street all interacted to shape the flow of history. As the preceding implies, Sell generally avoids sweeping declarations as to what caused the Soviet collapse in favor of an ecumenical discussion of events. Still, he attempts to diagnose in his final chapter, posing the question “what caused the once mighty Soviet Union to collapse almost overnight?” (322) Eschewing monocausality, Sell usefully delineates between structural, individual, and systemic factors. At home, the Soviet Union was undercut by economic stagnation, a deeply problematic military burden, and—although Sell avoids the term—an illiberal political system that hindered Soviet leaders in recognizing or addressing these problems. This, in turn, incentivized Soviet leaders—particularly Gorbachev—to take steps deemed necessary to fix the system, even as these changes were themselves colored by leaders’ views and attitudes. Systematically, meanwhile, the resurgence of American of the Cold War (Washington: Brookings, 1994); Richard K. Hermann and Richard Ned Lebow, Ending the Cold War: Interpretations, Causation, and the Study of International Relations (New York: Palgrave, 2004). The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 47 (2020) 205–254.

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