Excerpts from the remarkable archive of The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR RUDOLF V. PERINA Q: So in 1974 you came into the Foreign Service? PERINA: Yes, November 1974. Q: You want to talk a little about your initial impression of your class and how you felt about the Foreign Service? PERINA: Well, I was very happy to come into the Foreign Service because in the first instance I was happy to have a job. My wife was pregnant, and the first thing we checked was if the medical benefits covered pre-existing pregnancy. They did so we were relieved. I was also very happy because writing my dissertation I had grown a little tired of academia...Then I started negotiating my first assignment. This was, of course, before open assignments existed, so it was like a poker game because one had to try to figure out first what was available and how often one could say no before the offers got worse rather than better. I learned very quickly how one has to watch out and negotiate in the assignments process. During my first assignment meeting, the counselor said, “Were going to make you a principal officer.” I could not believe that as a new officer I would be a principal officer. I said, “Where?” And he said, “Bukavu,” in the Congo, a consulate, a one man consulate and I would be principal officer. I looked at him and said, “Do you know I have a pregnant wife?” He said, “That’s why youre perfect. Theres no school problem.” So I learned very quickly to be careful of what assignment counselors try to sell. I held out and in the end was offered a rotational assignment in Ottawa, Canada. This wasn’t the most exotic place to go but I concluded that with a child on the way and still trying to finish a dissertation, it made a lot of practical sense. Certainly more so than Bukavu. The consequence was that in our first two years in the Foreign Service, the furthest we got from Washington was on home leave to California. But we were in fact very fortunate. Ottawa turned out to be a very interesting and pleasant place to live. And very significant in our lives because both of our daughters, Kaja or Katherine and Alexandra, were born there about 17 months apart. I even finished my dissertation. Q: Were you able to parlay your doctorate into anything? PERINA: No, I quickly found out that Ph.D.’s were neither rare nor particularly valued. Academic degrees were not really taken into account very much....What I did get credit for were the languages I knew. I tested and received step increases for Czech, German and French. That put me at the top of my pay grade so I started out at about $13,000 a year, which we were very happy with. I had the highest salary in my class. Q: Ten years before I started out at about $3,500. That wasnt bad. $10,000 was the top government salary. So you were in Ottawa from 1975 to 1977? PERINA:....It was the only consular work I have done in my career but it left memories of some very interesting experiences. Q: Do you recall any of them? PERINA: Well, I recall one in particular that was when I gave the first visa to the United States to Alexander Solzhenitsyn who had just been expelled from the Soviet Union a few months earlier. He was invited to Canada before he was invited to the United States. He came to Canada and while there he got an invitation from the AFL/CIO to speak in Washington at some convention they were holding. He decided to accept and we received word that he was going to come to apply for a visa. Somebody from the AFL/CIO tipped us off that this was going to happen. I was the junior officer and my boss was a more experienced consular officer so we sat down and we thought about this for a minute. Right away we realized that he would need a waiver for Communist Party membership, which applied to anyone who had ever been in the Communist Party, as Solzhenitsyn had been in his youth. We thought, well, this is Solzhenitsyn, a renowned writer and dissident and very much of a hero to the Western world. We phoned Washington to ask if we could get around the waiver requirement in some way, and the answer was no. We had to go through the whole process of him filling out all the applications, sending these to Washington, and getting approval for the visa issuance. I remember my boss was very worried about how Solzhenitsyn would take this. Solzhenitsyn had a reputation of standing up to bureaucrats, and we could imagine him getting fed up with the forms, walking out of the Embassy and denouncing American bureaucrats as no better than Soviet ones. Well, Solzhenitsyn came in with his wife Marina, who was his second wife, and was very polite and friendly. I did most of the talking with him even though I didnt know Russian at the time but I did know German. He spoke German quite well, and that is how we communicated. I explained to him that he had to fill out these forms, and his reaction was the opposite of what my boss had feared. Solzhenitsyn took the process more seriously than almost any other applicant I had processed. He sat down with these forms and began filling them out meticulously. There was one standard question asking for a list of all places where the applicant had lived for more than six months since the age of 18. He started filling this out and then he turned to me and said, “Do I have to fill in all the labor camps?” And I said, “No, you dont have to. Just cover the period. You dont have to fill in all the labor camps.” He was immensely conscientious about the entire process. I thought about it afterwards and concluded that his behavior actually made a lot of sense, given his experiences. If you spend your life fighting a bureaucracy, your first thought is not to make a mistake in an official document that the bureaucracy can use against you. So he took the matter very seriously. We obtained the waiver from Washington overnight, and he came back the next day to pick up the visas. I know the exact date, which was May 21, 1975, because he also autographed and dated a first edition, in Russian, of the Gulag Archipelago for me. That was the date of his first visa to the United States, although he subsequently came many times.
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 05:24:05 +0000
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