Fiona Hill

They always worked for somebody else.

And it had quite a distortion on the way that people looked at the world.

I do, yeah.

Do you speak Russian?

Yeah, of course.

Yeah, it would be a big mystery for everybody.

You have an advantage on me because it's your native language as well.

Well, that was absolutely fascinating in that period, because it's the period that's just around the time of the peak of Perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev's role as president.

Well, he wasn't quite president at that point.

He was Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, trying to transform the whole place.

So I arrived there in September of 1987, just as Gorbachev and Reagan sign the INF Treaty.

I was just within, you know, kind of weeks of them about to sign that, which really ends that whole period that had shaped my entire teenage years of the end of the Euromissile Crisis by finally having agreement on, you know, basically the reduction and constraints on intermediate nuclear forces.

And also, at this point, Gorbachev is opening the Soviet Union up.

So we've got all kinds of opportunities to travel in ways that we wouldn't have done before.

Not just, you know, in Moscow, which is where I was studying at the Transnistria Institute, but to the Caucasus, to Central Asia, went all the way to Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East.

all the way around, you know, kind of Moscow.

And there was, at this point, it was also the Kreshenia Rus', which has become very important now.

This is the anniversary, the thousandth anniversary of the Christianization of Russia, which, of course, has become a massive obsession of Vladimir Putin's, but, you know, 988.

Because I was there 87 to 88.

And at this point, the Russian Orthodox Church is undergoing a revival from being repressed during the Soviet period.