ambassador rudolf v. perina - Association for Diplomatic Studies and ...

word that he was going to come to apply for a visa. Somebody from the AFL/CIO tipped
us off that this was going to happen. I was the junior officer and my boss was a more
experienced consular officer so we sat down and we thought about this for a minute.
Right away we realized that he would need a waiver for Communist Party membership,
which applied to anyone who had ever been in the Communist Party, as Solzhenitsyn had
been in his youth. We thought, well, this is Solzhenitsyn, a renowned writer and dissident
and very much of a hero to the Western world. We phoned Washington to ask if we could
get around the waiver requirement in some way, and the answer was no. We had to go
through the whole process of him filling out all the applications, sending these to
Washington, and getting approval for the visa issuance.
I remember my boss was very worried about how Solzhenitsyn would take this.
Solzhenitsyn had a reputation of standing up to bureaucrats, and we could imagine him
getting fed up with the forms, walking out of the Embassy and denouncing American
bureaucrats as no better than Soviet ones. Well, Solzhenitsyn came in with his wife
Marina, who was his second wife, and was very polite and friendly. I did most of the
talking with him even though I didn't know Russian at the time but I did know German.
He spoke German quite well, and that is how we communicated. I explained to him that
he had to fill out these forms, and his reaction was the opposite of what my boss had
feared. Solzhenitsyn took the process more seriously than almost any other applicant I
had processed. He sat down with these forms and began filling them out meticulously.
There was one standard question asking for a list of all places where the applicant had
lived for more than six months since the age of 18. He started filling this out and then he
turned to me and said, “Do I have to fill in all the labor camps?” And I said, “No, you
don't have to. Just cover the period. You don't have to fill in all the labor camps.” He was
immensely conscientious about the entire process. I thought about it afterwards and
concluded that his behavior actually made a lot of sense, given his experiences. If you
spend your life fighting a bureaucracy, your first thought is not to make a mistake in an
official document that the bureaucracy can use against you. So he took the matter very
seriously. We obtained the waiver from Washington overnight, and he came back the
next day to pick up the visas. I know the exact date, which was May 21, 1975, because he
also autographed and dated a first edition, in Russian, of the Gulag Archipelago for me.
That was the date of his first visa to the United States, although he subsequently came
many times.
Q: He eventually settled in Vermont, I think.
PERINA: Yes. He eventually settled there but then returned to Moscow after the collapse
of the Soviet Union.
Q: In that period of the ‘70s and during our involvement in Vietnam there were a
significant number of young Americans males who entered Canada to avoid the draft.
Did that affect you at all?
PERINA: Not in general, but there was this amazing coincidence where I met a classmate
from the University of Chicago on the street in Ottawa. He was in Canada because he had
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