A ‘New Wave’ Diplomat : Russia Sends a Wisecracking, Cunning Ambassador to the U.S.

Had he the courage, says Vladimir P. Lukin, Russia’s new ambassador to the United States, he would have been a full-fledged dissident in the 1960s and 1970s like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn.

Had he the talent, Lukin continues, he would have liked to compose poetry and write great works of philosophy like his friends among Russia’s intelligentsia.

And had he the time, the money and, most of all, the energy, Lukin says, he would still like to live up to his reputation as a bon vivant, “a lover of wine, women and song,” as a Moscow newspaper once described him.

Looking every bit the academic in a tweed jacket and thick glasses, he pauses, chuckling over another Russian paper’s description of him as “a playboy”:

“To want to live well is not a bad thing, I think.”

Already, the 54-year-old think-tank analyst has been dubbed one of the “new wave” diplomats Russia is sending to major capitals as President Boris N. Yeltsin moves to place the country on the world’s geopolitical map as something other than a successor to the Soviet Union.

Lukin, one leading Russian political scientist marvels, is “completely, utterly and even dramatically untraditional.”

“He’s a Russian Bob Strauss,” agrees a State Department official, likening Lukin to the United States’ outspoken, unconventional but supremely plugged-in envoy in Moscow.

For himself, Lukin envisions his role as that of a “Russian Benjamin Franklin”--the envoy of a new democracy to a nation whose political and economic systems helped inspire the revolution in Moscow last year.

“When Franklin went to Paris, France was not a democracy, of course, but the ideas there helped bring the American Revolution, and French aid ensured its success,” Lukin says.

“I see Russia and the United States--which was the modern world’s first democracy--developing a very special relationship, and I hope I can play a role for my country in Washington like that Franklin played for his in Paris. For Russian democracy to succeed, we need help.”

All in all, it is an odd self-portrait for a new ambassador, lacking a diplomat’s gravitas . But it reflects Lukin’s ever-present sense of irony and his delight in whimsy, even to the point of self-deprecation.

“For so, so long we were stuffed full of our own self-importance,” he explains. “This meant we never looked critically at what we were doing and thus did not see it was not working--almost none of it. And we never realized how we appeared, threatening and silly at the same time, to the rest of the world.”

Yet Lukin’s sketch of himself is in fact a caricature, compensating perhaps for his lack of street charisma, but also camouflaging his sharply competitive political instincts.

“Lukin likes to look the part of a woolly-headed academic, barely able to remember what day it is or what is on the agenda for the meeting,” says one senior Russian diplomat. “Actually, he has developed the cunning of a political predator--a couple of snaps, and you’ve become lunch.”

Adds former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze: “Don’t let Lukin deceive you with his bookish manner. There is a real mind there, and a tough one.”

Even before Lukin transferred that toughness to his post in Washington last month, he made clear that his embassy would operate quite differently from the old Soviet mission there.

“If our countries are to be open to one another, our embassies should be open too,” he said then in amused expectation of the changes he would work in the Washington embassy. “One of the first things I might do, as soon as the weather permits, is open the embassy’s windows. It would be a little symbol and a signal of a new era.”

Indeed, during Lukin’s five weeks in Washington, the gray steel shutters that once covered the embassy’s tall paned windows have been rolled up. More to the point, Lukin has welcomed a flood of visitors into the once-forbidding mansion, from members of Congress to businessmen, journalists and scholars, disarming them with wisecracks in fluent English and declaring fervently, “I love the United States.”

Says Yevgeny Ambartsumov, chairman of the Russian parliament’s foreign affairs committee: “If Yeltsin wanted to tell Americans that in Russia they are dealing with a different country from the old Soviet Union, he has picked the right ambassador.”

Lukin, in fact, is a principal architect of Russia’s new foreign policy under Yeltsin. He was foreign affairs committee chairman for 1 1/2 years before Ambartsumov’s appointment and sought to promote a bold rethinking of all the positions inherited from the Soviet Union, even those staked out by former President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Russia must define its own policies, putting its interests first as it emerges from the Soviet Union, Lukin has argued. His position pits him against those who believe Russia’s policies should offer continuity with those of the Soviet government, or that Russia should sacrifice its needs to those of the other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States.

In recent months, he urged Russia to get tough with neighboring Ukraine, its rival within the Commonwealth; to consider returning the Kuril Islands to Japan if the right terms can be found, and to reorder its foreign policy priorities so they serve Russia’s immediate political and economic needs.

He sees his mission in the United States as a broad undertaking, going beyond the improvement of bilateral relations and the resolution of problems left from the hostility of the Cold War.

Lukin’s first encounters with President Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III have been cordial but somewhat prickly, according to American and Russian diplomats. A Baker aide said the secretary of state has been impressed by Lukin’s closeness to Yeltsin. But in several meetings, Baker has pressed Lukin hard for faster progress on dismantling the Soviet nuclear arsenal, a major worry for the Bush Administration.

“Mr. Baker doesn’t waste any time getting down to business,” Lukin marveled, sounding a bit chagrined, after one such session.

Still, he has already begun opening new terrain. Finding himself at the same table with CIA Director Robert M. Gates at the Gridiron Club’s annual white-tie dinner last month, Lukin impulsively proposed that the two countries’ espionage agencies should agree on codes of conduct for their spies. Gates agreed to pursue the issue.

The job hasn’t been easy. Over lunch at the embassy last week, Lukin complained--gently--that he has been swamped with work and more than a bit homesick for the political hurly-burly of Moscow. He has also had to cope with a flood of invitations from Americans he doesn’t know; he abruptly canceled his appearance at an Oscar-night gala in Beverly Hills last week after the State Department warned him that one of the promoters had served time in federal prison for mail fraud.

“It turned out that to be an ambassador is not only pleasant but hard and cumbersome,” Lukin wrote in a letter to his idol, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, published here by the newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta. “It is inappropriate and even embarrassing to complain to you of my being preoccupied with work. But I am a typical Russian man, and that is why I am a little lazy at heart.”

For this “typical Russian man,” the 1968 “Prague spring,” probably more than anything else, changed his life, for he had to decide where he stood--and it was against the Soviet Communist Party and Marxism-Leninism as Moscow defined it.

Assigned by the Communists to work as an editor on the World Marxist Review in 1965 in Czechoslovakia, he fell in with the “Prague spring” movement, which advocated “socialism with a human face.” When it was crushed by the Soviet-led invasion in August, 1968, Lukin was deported.

He landed at the USA Institute, where Georgy A. Arbatov, his old teacher and the Soviet Union’s leading “Americanologist,” was director. But for more than a decade he was not allowed to travel abroad, even to Soviet satellites such as Mongolia, although his specialty was U.S. policy in Asia.

In 1987, Lukin moved from the USA Institute to the Soviet Foreign Ministry, where Shevardnadze was overhauling foreign policy in line with Gorbachev’s “new political thinking.” Two years later, he established an analysis group for the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature, so that deputies could assess government proposals and develop alternatives.

Lukin confesses to developing a passion for parliamentary politics at the Supreme Soviet, and he ran for a seat himself in the Russian parliament in 1990.

“I am really going to miss parliament, for we have done a lot here to strengthen our young democracy,” he says. “It is a brand-new institution for us, and helping to shape it has been very exciting, very frustrating and very rewarding.”

And he is happy that, even though appointed ambassador, he will retain his status as a deputy. Despite the press of engagements in Washington, he is back in Moscow for the Congress of People’s Deputies that opened Monday.

When Yeltsin was building his team, he asked for Lukin’s assistance in political analysis.

“I told Yeltsin, ‘I am ready to collaborate, but I have never been anyone’s yes man--on the contrary,’ ” Lukin says. “And I have been true to my word.” Even in Washington, he has continued to criticize the Russian president’s policies when he sees fit--an unheard-of act for a conventional ambassador.

Still, he was steadfast at Yeltsin’s side during the dark hours of the conservative coup last August. And Lukin’s fate, not unexpected after several missions as a Yeltsin special envoy, was Russia’s most prestigious embassy.

He has already pledged his loyalty to the Washington Redskins--”I’m a Red for the Redskins,” he proclaims--and is contemplating which basketball and hockey teams to root for.

Already imagining himself in a 50-yard-line box, eating hot dogs and drinking beer at the start of the football season next autumn, he muses, “There must be more to this job than arms negotiations, presidential visits and diplomatic receptions, don’t you think?”

Michael Parks reported from Moscow and Doyle McManus from Washington.