A Thumbs-Up Mood as Reagans Throw a Party at Spaso House

Hidden away on a side street, overshadowed by the onion-domed churches and sterile skyscrapers nearby, is a yellow mansion known as Spaso House, which for 55 years has been an American oasis in the middle of Moscow.

Yet it’s hard to imagine a time when this U.S. ambassador’s residence resonated with more lightheartedness and laughter than during President and Nancy Reagan’s summit dinner for the Gorbachevs Tuesday night.

“The atmosphere is terrific,” exulted Selwa (Lucky) Roosevelt, the U.S. Chief of Protocol as she watched Washington arms negotiators mixing with Bolshoi ballerinas and U.S. Senate leaders chatting with Moscow poets.

Even formerly exiled dissidents Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner, who told reporters they were “well” and described the summit as “very important,” seemed to exchange words with some Soviet officials during cocktails. And Sakharov was warmly welcomed by Secretary of State George P. Shultz.

Shultz, in fact, was so jovial during the relaxed reception that he winked at White House reporters, raised his glass in an informal toast to them and exclaimed with a broad smile, “Vodka!”

But U.S. officials were bewildered, and maybe even a little miffed, that the Gorbachevs’ 30-year-old daughter, Irina, a physician, had accepted an invitation to the dinner and then didn’t show.

“I don’t know if the Soviets have a different style socially,” said Elaine Crispen, the First Lady’s press secretary, who declined to call it a snub. “I can’t say that because I don’t know if there was an illness or a logistical problem.”

One other protocol problem surfaced during the dinner when President Reagan turned to his left and found the wrong person. Instead of Alexander Yakovlev, a Politburo member who is secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee, the seat was filled by Yegor Yakovlev, editor of the weekly Moscow News. Apparently, a name card said only Mr. Yakovlev, creating the confusion. Worried Crispen: “I hope somebody was able to tell the President.”

No Black Ties

While invitations for the evening did not call for black tie, Raisa Gorbachev arrived in her short-dress best. Wearing a shimmering gold tunic with a ruffled neck and nipped-in waist over a black satin skirt, the Soviet first lady succeeded in overshadowing Mrs. Reagan’s simple gray Galanos.

The dinner--like most Spaso House events--was a chance to display in the Soviet capital the best that America has to offer, from the meal featuring lobster bisque, truffled chicken, to the music of the Dave Brubeck Quartet, whose jazz is hotter than anything performed by the Soviets.

Sen. Bob Dole (R.-Kan.) summed up not only the mood of the evening but also its possible effect on the guests by flashing the thumbs-up signal.

Planning for the elegant evening took months. The State Department airlifted a special supply of china and silver. The White House sent food. And just to make sure that the Reagans’ four-room home-away-from-home was comfortable, the suite was refurbished, the hallways were redecorated, and special curtains were installed to confound any would-be sniper. Also flown in was Nancy Reagan’s hair stylist, Julius Beng Bengtsson from Los Angeles.

‘Very Quiet Guests’

So had Rebecca Matlock, wife of current U.S. Ambassador Jack F. Matlock, seen the President in his bathrobe? “No, and I haven’t gone looking for that either,” she said diplomatically, calling the First Couple “very quiet house guests.”

As the symbol of American diplomatic life here since the start of U.S.-Soviet diplomatic relations in 1933, Spaso House has always reflected the good and the bad times in the two countries’ ability to get along. It has withstood frolicking seals and KGB spying, overcome dissident harassment and structural deterioration, housed a bomb shelter and a Marine sex scandal.

A bright-yellow villa with a broad veranda across the front, stately columns and a low, skylit dome over the grand foyer, Spaso House is oddly reminiscent of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello but with distinctly Russian overtones.

Tucked discreetly away on a narrow side street off Moscow’s busy ring road, about a 10-minute walk from the American Embassy, Spaso House takes its name from the small garden square it faces and a tiny, 18th-Century Russian Orthodox church nearby with the poetic name of the Church of the Salvation on the Sands-- Tserkov Spasa-na-Peskakh.

A wealthy Moscow merchant, Nikolai Alexandrovich Vtorov, built Spaso House as his private villa in 1914, and thus had little time to enjoy it. With the revolution three years later, the Bolsheviks appropriated Spaso House for official entertaining.

When the United States established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1933, the Kremlin made it available as an embassy--but not before wiring it for sound.

The best-remembered guest in Spaso House, if not the most illustrious, was the trained bear U.S. Ambassador William C. Bullitt imported for a Christmas party in 1934. Legend has it that Karl Radek, a leading Bolshevik theoretician who was soon to perish in Stalin’s murderous purges, induced the bear to drink champagne from a baby bottle.

Radek’s stunt turned out badly, though, when the tipsy bear fell ill and soiled the full-dress uniform of a Soviet general.

The anguished general is said to have bellowed what has since become the unofficial motto of Spaso House: “Is this an embassy or a circus?”

Espionage looms even larger in the history of Spaso House than tales of entertainment. George Kennan, in Moscow as a young diplomat in the ‘30s, tells in his memoirs of nights spent lying in the sand-filled attic and lurking in the billiard room in the vain hope of nabbing the technicians who tended a primitive electronic listening system.

By the time Kennan had risen to ambassador in the 1950s, Soviet listening devices were not so primitive. U.S. counterintelligence experts, after a frustrating chase for an elusive bug, found it buried in a plaque bearing the Great Seal of the United States. A gift from the Soviets, Kennan had obligingly hung it on his study wall.

Powered by high-frequency radio waves beamed from neighboring buildings, the little bug was copied and used by American and British intelligence for years after, according to a book Britain tried to ban, “Spycatcher,” by Peter Wright.

In 1987, the Spaso House ballroom was also the scene of a now-infamous party for the embassy’s Marine guards where Cpl. Clayton Lonetree brought Violeta, the young Soviet woman who ensnared him for the KGB.

Kermit the Frog once performed here. Pianist Vladimir Horowitz practiced on the grand piano before his triumphal concert in 1986.