A Tribute on the Passing of One of Our Country’s Foremost Diplomats

The March 29 edition of the Washington Post carried the sad news of the passing of one of our country’s foremost cultural diplomats: Yale Richmond.  Yale’s geographic area specialization was Russia and Central Europe.  When he began working in the region, Russia was still the Soviet Union and the United States referred to anything west of the Soviet Union as Eastern Europe.  This deeply offended the Poles, for example, who pointed out that Warsaw was to be found some 1000 miles west of Moscow just about mid-way between Moscow and Paris.  The Poles would point out that they were central Europeans whose culture came from the west not from the influences of the barbarism found along their eastern border.

Yale quickly recognized that the Russian people and people of other ethnic origins living in the Soviet Union, and across central Europe, harbored no natural anti-American instincts and that they were highly receptive to opportunities that might allow them to learn English and perhaps even to visit or to study in our country.  And Yale saw that the Communist governments of the Soviet Union and of at least some Central European countries (Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia) were willing, if not anxious, to work on expanding educational and cultural relations with our country.

So both on assignments in the field in Moscow and Warsaw and while serving in Washington supervising educational and cultural operations in this region, he began to gather U.S. Government resources for such efforts.

Yale worked tirelessly to educate younger staff, such as myself, on the diplomacy needed for such activities:  language ability and a thorough knowledge of the history of these countries.  We were exhausted after his intense visits to us in the field.  He was indefatigable.

But perhaps the highest tribute that has been paid to Yale has come about most recently and in an very  perverse manner: while Soviet leadership was anxious to support educational and cultural exchanges because it believed that this demonstrated that it considered such activity part of how civilized nations carried on relations with one another, the Putin regime has now shut down all such activities declaring that young people who participate in such programs are  brainwashed while they are in the U.S. and return enemies of Russia.  The Soviets had the self-confidence to believe that their system could compete successfully with the outside world.  Putin has no such confidence.

Yale was right.  He supported language teaching and other efforts to expand academic and cultural contacts because he understood how deeply corrosive they were to totalitarian regimes.  And now the Putin regime certainly recognizes this.

Perhaps no other person contributed more over a lifetime to helping Americans to understand the world beyond our borders and those beyond our borders to understand us.

We mourn the passing of our one of our country’s foremost cultural diplomats.  But he leaves a superb road map for how we will need to rebuild our international relations in the future.