TRAC
Interview Transcript

Joseph V. Montville   (cont)

It's a historical fact that it was the Esalen program that was asked to arrange the first visit to the United States of Yeltsin, when he was out of power.  That's a very significant request from a people, an entourage of a leader who came to be a very significant leader, and Abel Aganbegyan's description, I think, tribute to those positive qualities of Yeltsin was very moving, and very, very persuasive.  Well, the fact is that, this small band of happy Californians was the one selected by the people around this potential president of Russia to organize the first visit to the United States.  That's an enormously significant event, that to me clearly indicates the value of loyalty and caring and consistency.  And that's very good.

 And, the Esalen initiative spun off a large number of people-to-people citizen diplomacy initiatives.  It helped to legitimize the idea of individual American citizens taking the initiative to establish ties with their counterparts in different parts of the Soviet Union.  So the environmentalists set up vast networks with environmentalists, and then the physicians--all kinds of functional relationships.  My aunt from Southbridge, Massachusetts, a very small town, went over with a group of school kids to Minsk on a school exchange.  It was quite remarkable, this responsiveness to the human element in the relationship, and especially, of course, the great new hope of getting away from the nuclear threat that had been so dominant in our consciousness for decades-the change of relationship.

 In each exchange, in the citizen diplomacy or TRAC II diplomacy in its broadest sense allowed Russians and Americans to discover each other's humanity.  And one of the things that we worked on in one of the Esalen programs, the one I was responsible for, the annual workshops on the psychology of the U.S.-Soviet relationship, put a lot of scientific attention to this traditional phenomenon of enmity and the psychology of enmity.  Just how did the Soviet Union fulfill a group psychological need of the United States, and vice-versa.  Because this was an interactive relationship.  And by, in a sense deconstructing the psychology of enmity, it made the relationship more manageable and more understandable cognitively; we could understand it as a strange phenomenon that we needn't be manipulated by any longer.  It was like the result of any kind of psychotherapy; we discover the underlying motivations and causes for certain behaviors, and it gives us some cognitive choices as to whether we want to continue that behavior.

 And it was quite remarkable that the unique analysis in the psychology of enmity that was discussed by some very eminent psychoanalysts and Sovietologists in the big house at Esalen was transmitted very quickly to the Kremlin, to Moscow, because the theme started showing up in the speeches and remarks of Arbatov in the U.S.A./Canada Institute.  We have a colleague, Andre Melville, who came from that institute and became one of the great transmittal points of this concept of the psychology of enmity, and then Soviet officials and Gorbachev himself started giving speeches saying, we're not gonna be your enemy any more, we're not gonna play this game any more.  Literally almost to the point of saying, "if you want our rockets, take our rockets.  We're walking off the field and not playing this game any more."  Very disconcerting for our side.  But this was again, one of these cognitive contributions that allowed both countries to get a grip on the pathological side of the relationship.

 So these initiatives allowed a process of rehumanization that was critical for transforming relationships.  So, that's the context within which we can consider why it is we're still sitting here--let's see, it's 18 years after the first meeting in May of 1980, where Michael and Dulce convened friends from both coasts and probably some states in between, to give some direction to their instinct of reaching out to the Soviet people, which was certainly in the context of great fear about the potential of nuclear war, and why it's critically important to keep up this activity­to keep nourishing this love, this umbilicus, in a sense, between Russia and America.

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