Love That Tests the Limits of <i> Glasnost</i>

“Are you two crazy ?” asked the nonplussed Moscow journalist.

That simple question summed up world reaction to the Feb. 9 marriage between a granddaughter of a Cold War President and a top Soviet space scientist who advises Kremlin leaders.

Five weeks after the ceremony, sitting in the suburban Washington, D.C., office they share, newlyweds Susan Eisenhower and Roald Sagdeyev can recall that interview and laugh out loud. But they also vividly remember that it wasn’t a laughing matter at the time.

“Here we are about to go down the aisle the next day,” the 38-year-old Eisenhower says, “and this reporter from (the liberal newspaper) Moscow News is telling us, ‘Don’t you know that they send people into internal exile for this? Or, even worse, to the gulag permanently?’ ”

In fact, that specter had been haunting the pair for months. While many Soviet-American romances have encountered official disapproval--or worse--over the years, never before had such a prominent East-West couple had so much to lose by falling in love.

“It was a very painful road just to get here,” says Eisenhower, an international businesswoman and philanthropist. “It all looks very easy now. But we were both all too familiar with how discouraging the track record was. . . . The big question was: How substantial has the change of attitude been? It’s never been tested really.”

She didn’t feel as if she’d received the answer even when President George Bush and former President Richard Nixon both called to offer their congratulations. Or even when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, through Politburo members, gave tacit approval of the union. Or even when one of their wedding presents was a chunk of the Berlin Wall.

No, not until their wedding announcement ended up on the society pages of U.S. newspapers, instead of in news bulletins, did Eisenhower begin to believe that the phrase “and they lived happily ever after” might apply to them.

“A year ago, I would have thought of it as science fiction,” says the 57-year-old Sagdeyev, a lifelong Communist Party member and former director of the Soviet Union’s Space Research Institute. “But it is, after all, a scientist’s job to work toward reality.”

And the reality is that the Eisenhower-Sagdeyev union is a remarkable symbol of the new warmth in East-West relations today, and living proof of Dwight Eisenhower’s belief in the power of personal diplomacy to develop better understanding between the two superpowers.

They’re The Glasnost Couple. But say that to their faces, and, suddenly, they grow shy.

They are sitting side by side. Their eyes lock on each other.

“It feels like just us to us,” the wife says softly.

The husband nods.

Dmitri Simes, Soviet emigre and senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, agrees the Eisenhower-Sagdeyev union--the third marriage for her, the second for him--is “clearly an affair of the heart.”

“By standing the heat from both the U.S. and Soviets,” he says, “their marriage has already passed the test of fire.”

Until the mid-1980s, love across the Iron Curtain was as painful as getting smacked in the face with a sheet of steel. Since the onset of the Cold War, the Kremlin has blatantly violated international human rights accords by subjecting certain Soviet citizens whose only crime was marrying Americans to state-imposed separation from their spouses.

Most often, the official reason given was that the Soviet spouses had some special knowledge of national security matters. All too often, the sheer act of marrying an American would cause the Soviets to lose their jobs. In one case, a computer programmer was demoted to amusement park guard; in another, a biologist became a menial laborer. Other spouses felt compelled to give up their professional positions in the hope it might improve their chances of getting permission to leave the Soviet Union.

In 1985, however, the policy finally began to ease, thanks to some pre-summit maneuvering in November before President Reagan and Soviet leader Gorbachev met in Geneva.

But until the day they were married, Eisenhower and Sagdeyev had to consider the “worst-case scenario,” she says. “After all, they used to have pretty swift solutions. And Roald’s a nuclear scientist. He’s not a theater director.”

Both Eisenhower and Sagdeyev were well aware that, in the past, people in their position usually had only two options: defecting or becoming refuseniks. Sagdeyev states firmly that he “never” considered defecting. (“And I just wouldn’t even let it come up for discussion,” notes Eisenhower.) Within the realm of remaining possibilities was that this widely respected member of the Congress of People’s Deputies and Academy of Sciences could be stripped of his positions, refused travel privileges, even scorned by his countrymen.

Eisenhower didn’t know whether marrying a Soviet would subject her to negative public opinion, that she was somehow disgracing the Eisenhower name.

Although now those concerns appear groundless, “when they started out, they couldn’t be sure of that,” says Simes. “This is a man and woman who both took considerable chances and demonstrated considerable courage.”

Born in Moscow and raised in the mostly Moslem Tatar Autonomous Republic, where his father was a deputy prime minister, Roald Zinnurovich Sagdeyev studied physics at Moscow State University. After graduation, he began a five-year stint as a staff member of the Institute of Atomic Energy in Moscow, where he became good friends with fellow physicist Andrei Sakharov. In 1960, Sagdeyev was transferred to an “academic town” at Novosibirsk as part of a highly skilled Siberian community of scientists and academics Khrushchev had moved out Moscow.

By 1973, he had returned to Moscow to head the Space Research Institute; for the next 15 years, he was the international driving force for the Soviet space program, with projects involving Halley’s comet and Mars, among others. But Sagdeyev also gained fame as an independent liberal reformer. In the mid-1970s, he became one of the few Academy scientists who refused to denounce Sakharov for receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. And in 1987 he decried charges in the Soviet press that the AIDS virus had been artificially cultivated by the U.S. military.

His outspokenness didn’t seem to hurt his career. As an adviser to Gorbachev on arms control, he attended summits in Geneva and Washington, and in 1989 was one of four Soviet officials who testified before the U.S. House Armed Services Committee. (He will be UCLA’s keynote speaker at principal commencement ceremonies for the College of Letters and Sciences June 17.)

Since age 25, Sagdeyev has been one of those lucky Soviets allowed to travel abroad. He moved easily in the scientific global village because of his excellent English. It was during one of his many trips to the United States, in 1987, that he first met Eisenhower.

As one of four children of John S.D. Eisenhower and the product of elite private schools, Susan Elaine Eisenhower moved easily within America’s most powerful military, political and social circles. After making her debut at the International Debutante Ball and attending the American College in Paris, she married attorney Alexander Bradshaw, who came from a diplomatic background. When the seven-year marriage ended, she wed John F. Mahon, another attorney, whom she divorced in 1983.

After a stint as a journalist in Rochester, N.Y., she started her own public relations company, the Eisenhower Group, and helped found the Eisenhower World Affairs Institute to support domestic and foreign programs that deeply concerned her grandfather. In 1986, she moved back to Washington, D.C..

By the late 1980s, Eisenhower was a major international figure: Not only was she arranging commercial ventures abroad for a number of Fortune 500 companies, but she was also a frequent guest at White House state dinners honoring foreign dignitaries. She made her first trip to the Soviet Union in 1986 as co-chairwoman of a conference on American-Soviet relations aimed at citizen diplomacy, sponsored jointly by the Eisenhower Institute and the Chautauqua Institution. Sagdeyev was to have attended the forum but begged off at the last minute.

The next year, the forum took place in Chautauqua, N.Y., and he was there. So was Susan Eisenhower.

At the Chautauqua forum’s first dinner party, Sagdeyev introduced himself: “And from the very beginning we were engaged in serious communication.”

Serious, indeed. “His opening line to me was, ‘Do you think your grandfather was serious about the identification of the military-industrial complex?’ ” Eisenhower says with a laugh, referring to the famous speech her grandfather made Jan. 17, 1961, over nationwide TV.

“And I said, ‘Yes, I think he was perfectly serious about it. And we’re looking forward to having the Soviet Union recognize that they have one, too.’ ”

And then, Sagdeyev made newspaper headlines by taking a few turns around the dance floor with the granddaughter of Dwight Eisenhower.

From then on, the two seemed to run into each other everywhere--on this committee, at that conference, and, finally, in 1988 as allies on the same board of directors for the International Foundation for the Survival and Development of Humanity, a foundation to promote collaborative research on pollution, arms control and economic development.

When a friend asked Eisenhower to see if Sagdeyev would be willing to write his memoirs for the American audience, “I ended up helping him put the outline together,” says Eisenhower, who began collaborating on the book for Bantam with him in December 1988.

“It’s difficult to know how to date this romance,” Eisenhower relates. “We started out as deeply close friends. But then the periods of time when we were separated actually became increasingly painful. So the issue was: How do we manage to be together?”

Roald says the couple began talking marriage when their phone bills reached $500 a month. “And as Russia was moving toward a market-controlled economy with cost efficiency,” he says mischievously, “I saw that this was not cost efficient.”

They never bothered to hide their romance. They talked openly in hotel rooms (that were probably bugged). They met in public (and may have been followed). They spoke freely on the telephone (where calls are usually monitored). But neither the CIA nor KGB came to visit them about their relationship, “which means that they knew from the beginning absolutely everything that was going on,” according to one insider.

Once they made the decision to marry, Eisenhower decided to tell only her sister Anne. “I picked up on it before she actually sat me down and said, ‘Hey, this is what’s going on,’ ” explains Anne Eisenhower, a New York designer.

When Eisenhower finally broke the news to her mother, the reaction was just as low-key. “She said, ‘Trust you to be first,’ ” Eisenhower recalls.

Then the couple decided to tell their respective governments. But they made it clear they were going to marry “whether anybody liked it or not,” Eisenhower says.

When she told various State Department officials, including U.S. ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock, the reaction was cool surprise that grew warmer with time. “Everyone I talked to didn’t see any reason why this wouldn’t be possible to pull off,” Eisenhower says.

Sagdeyev, meanwhile, told Yevgeny M. Primakov, a member of the ruling Communist Party Politburo and a close adviser to Gorbachev. In seconds, he saw Primakov’s expression change from total astonishment to joy. “ ‘Well, why not, if you’ve decided,’ he said.” But he also warned it “was not going to get a standing ovation, probably,” Sagdeyev says.

Eventually, government leaders by the dozen were asking Eisenhower, in the nicest tone, where she planned to live after the wedding, as if the choice were merely between Chevy Chase or Cleveland Park, and not Moscow or Washington. Then Bush hosted a private dinner at the White House in their honor. Attending was Soviet Ambassador Yuri V. Dubinin.

Eisenhower and Sagdeyev decided to marry in Moscow to demonstrate to their Soviet friends that they fully intend to remain part of the community there.

Their Soviet wedding at the Palace of Marriages, was, in a word, unusual. A Russian guest wore an authentic “I like Ike” political button. Music from “Cats” was played. And the crush of reporters and photographers pinned Anne Eisenhower against a wall.

A more elegant second wedding was held afterward at Spaso House, the official residence of the U.S. ambassador. The elegant ballroom was transformed into a flower-filled wedding chapel, where a Protestant service was conducted. The groom said his vows in Russian, the bride in English. One of Eisenhower’s three daughters served as flower girl. A Greek Orthodox choir provided the music. Even Secretary of State James Baker III gave up his right to a Spaso House bed so as not to disrupt the wedding preparations. (He missed the wedding, but his wife, Susan, attended.)

Among the 300 guests were Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady Gerasimov (a high school classmate’s of Sagdeyev), Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Sakharov’s widow Yelena Bonner and Occidental Petroleum Corp. Chairman Armand Hammer.

Since their return from a honeymoon in Budapest, the couple have retained their respective citizenships and will make their home in both capitals. They will spend the school years in Washington, where they share a home with Eisenhower’s three school-age children. “I really enjoy family life,” says Sagdeyev, who has two grown children and two grandchildren.

The rest of the time they will spend in Moscow, in what they hope will be a bigger apartment than the one Sagdeyev currently owns and in a dacha under construction in the bucolic countryside by the Moscow River.

Now that the initial hurdle of just getting married is behind them, they both intend to continue working for improved East-West relations. “This is one of the things we talk about before our second cup of coffee in the morning,” Eisenhower says with a laugh.

Their life together, says Simes, is “definitely a reflection of new times. Just several years ago they would not have an option of living in both capitals. Or of Sagdeyev keeping his academic and political connections to Moscow. Or of Susan being able to easily travel there. Now they can and neither of them has to sacrifice their basic loyalties and principals.”

Come to think of it, about the only thing worrying them right now is whether they’ll be able to get their dacha built on time and on budget.

Now that’s laughable in any country.