From Washington to Moscow: US-Soviet Relations and the Collapse of the USSR

Louis Sell is a retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer whose 27-year career included an extraordinary series of assignments that allowed him to witness the final decades of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. From the prelude of a student visit to Moscow in 1967, to State Department work on the U.S.-Soviet summit of May 1972, to the “dissident beat” at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in the late 1970s, to strategic arms negotiations in Geneva in the early 1980s, to chief of the bilateral relations section of the State Department's Soviet desk in mid-decade, to chief political reporting officer first in Belgrade and then in Moscow during the final years, up to the collapse of 1991: Sell was present at a dozen key junctures of the waning Cold War. His Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, also published by Duke (in 2002), harvests his years in the Balkans. Here...