Volume 49, Number 12 · July 18, 2002
Giving the Russians Their Spinach
By Christian Caryl
The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy
by Strobe Talbott
Random House, 478 pp., $29.95
Strobe Talbott is a former diplomat who needs no ghostwriters. For most of his professional life, he was, in fact, a working journalist. As a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in the late 1960s, his interest in Russian language and politics, which he'd studied at Yale, landed him a job as the translator of Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs. Because Khrushchev's book strongly implied criticism of his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, Talbott's involvement in the project earned him the official anger of the Soviet leadership, and he was subsequently banned from travel to the USSR for many years. (Like many of America's leading Russian experts, he has never lived in the country.) None-theless he made use of his interest in the region, and in foreign policy in general, during his twenty years as a commentator on international affairs for Time magazine.
Review, 3931 words
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