Two of us went from Bureau of Intelligence. I actually don’t remember how I even got on the big international delegation with Europeans and Japanese. In the Ukraine, we have the naval base in the Crimea. And you have tension in the Baltics, with Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania questioning whether the Russians can still keep their big naval bases there or their troops. There’s a lot of problems on just how this new arrangement is all going to work out and what the Russians are up to in these republics along their border. Belarussia and a few others are still in what they call the Commonwealth, which I’m about to go see firsthand. Chechnya declared independence in 1991, for example. All of these places are unsolved problems. “It’s getting sappy, everyone’s toasting to their Russian comrades”ĬROCKER: we have Abkhazia, we have Ossetia, we have, Chechnya, we have Ingushetia, and we have Tajikistan. You can read other Moments on Russia and the USSR as well as these more sobering pieces on Protocol and alcoholism in the Foreign Service. He was interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy beginning in March 2012. As is not the custom, Crocker made a rather pointed joke, which fortunately, did not lead to an international incident. Gary Crocker worked in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) when he was part of a high-level international delegation with European and Japanese parliamentarians who were visiting Russia in 1994, not long after the collapse of the USSR. At more formal, high-ranking affairs, the toasts are often scripted in advance, laden as they are with political meaning. These can be something simple and heartfelt, such as to friendship, or more grandiose and significant, such as to good neighborly relations between our two countries. Russian banquets (and, of course, Russian drinking) are legendary, as tradition dictates that every drink be accompanied by a toast (or “ tost” in Russian).
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