During a press conference at Berlin's Tempelhof Airport on September 19, 1952, the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, George Kennan, remarked that his isolation in Moscow was worse than what he had endured as an interned diplomat in Nazi Germany following the onset of World War II. Two weeks later, Kennan was expelled from Moscow, becoming the first American Ambassador to be thrown out of Russia in the 230 years of diplomatic relations between the two countries.
Sixty years after that, in May 2012, Russian President Vladimir Putin told Barack Obama's national security advisor that Russian-American relations were on the road to ruin under America's Ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul. McFaul wouldn't have been wrong to have assumed that he might become the second U.S. Ambassador to be summarily ejected from Russia. Instead, McFaul underwent something worse: A ghastly and at times harrowing experience as America's top diplomat in Moscow, chronicled in his recent memoir, From Cold War to Hot Peace. Sharing Kennan's fate might have saved McFaul and his family more than a few sleepless nights.
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