Rudolf Vilem Perina (; January 3, 1945 – June 14, 2018) was an American diplomat who specialized for more than three decades in European East–West relations during and after the Cold War, and on the Dayton Accords following the dissolution of the Former Republic of Yugoslavia. This includes participating in the 1988 Moscow summit meeting between President Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, during the former's first visit to the USSR. He also served as ambassador to the Republic of Moldova, U.S. Special Negotiator for Eurasian Conflicts in the former Soviet Union (an ambassador-level position), Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Canadian Affairs in the State Department, director of European and Soviet Affairs for the U.S. National Security Council, and was on the policy planning staff of the State Department under Colin Powell before and after the invasion of Iraq.
Following his retirement from the foreign service, Perina served as chargé d’affaires at U.S. embassies, including those in Chișinău, Moldova (2006), Yerevan, Armenia (2007), Reykjavík, Iceland (2010), Prague, Czech Republic (2013), and Bratislava, Slovakia (2015).
Early life and family Perina was born on January 3, 1945, in Tábor in what is today the Czech Republic. His father's family owned a large lumbermill serving Central Europe. His mother's family was subject to Nazi reprisals during World War II, including the execution of his grandfather and great uncle on June 10, 1942. The family members were executed in a coordinated purge of Czech nationalists and public figures that culminated in the razing of the village of Lidice.
Perina and his parents fled Czechoslovakia following the 1948 Communist takeover of the government. Rudolf's mother paid a Croat border smuggler to transport her son in January 1950 to the border into Austria and eventually to Zürich, where his father had escaped. The family lived as refugees in Switzerland and Morocco before immigrating to the United States via Le Havre, France, in 1951.
He grew up speaking Czech at home. In 1955, the family moved to Cleveland, and Perina obtained US citizenship the following year.
Education After the family moved to Seattle, Perina attended Franklin High School, where he graduated as the valedictorian in 1963. He chose the University of Chicago as it offered him full tuition with a stipend. He earned his B.A. degree in history there in 1967 and did his graduate studies at Columbia University, where he received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in European history, with the idea of going into academia. While studying in New York, he was hired by a film production company to consult and interpret for the filming of a documentary about the 1968 reform movement in Czechoslovakia known as the "Prague Spring". This led to the topic of his Ph.D dissertation: "Intellectuals and Political Change in Czechoslovakia: A History of Literarni noviny and its Contributors, 1952–1969." He had also earned a Foreign Area Fellowship to research his dissertation at the library of Radio Free Europe for two years.
Perina was at Columbia during the 1968 student protests. While supportive of the US civil rights movement and against the Vietnam War, he maintained a moderate political position, saying later "I became suspicious of all political extremism and radicalism, whether right-wing or left-wing. It is a position I have held all of my life."
Career Returning from Europe to finish his dissertation, Perina found that there were few academic jobs available in the U.S. He saw an ad for the foreign service exam and encouraged by the example of foreign-born Henry Kissinger, he took it and passed. Delighted to find that it paid better than any academic job, he started in November 1974, his first posting at the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa, Canada, through 1976 during which time both of his daughters were born.
At this post, Perina gave Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn his first US visa, whereby he communicated to him in German. (Already fluent in Czech and French, Perina became fluent in Russian later.) He found that the author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and other works "took the process more seriously than almost any other applicant" he had processed up to that time. In reflecting on Solzhenitsyn's conscientiousness later, Perina concluded that "if you spend your life fighting a bureaucracy, your first thought is to not make a mistake in an official document that the bureaucracy can use against you."
At Ottawa, Perina also had responsibilities in the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) whose Helsinki Final Act was signed by the 35 participating states in the summer of 1975.
Moscow He was then posted to Moscow, and was there during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Upon witnessing the confrontation with 1st Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Korniyenko, he said later he was "shown for the first time how unashamedly people can lie in diplomacy." The US response to the invasion was tough, and included suspending exchanges, diplomatic social events, wheat sales, and eventually boycotting the Moscow Olympics, bringing Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and part of Eastern Europe along as well. Of the time, Perina has said, "our relations with the Soviets there were very competitive. We were always watching what they did, and they watched us."
Although compared to the average Soviet citizen, he lived better, Perina has described that life in the Soviet capital "could be difficult". During the harsh winters, he had to remove his car battery each night to prevent its freezing. The Perinas also saw first hand the psychological warfare the KGB enacted on US embassy personnel, Perina describing his wife Ethel's coat disappearing for several months then reappearing in their closet.
West Berlin He then started to work at the U.S. Mission in West Berlin in 1981. The US saw East Berlin differently from the GDR. Considered a Soviet zone, the Americans maintained another embassy in East Berlin, and the mission in West Berlin avoided dealing with the East Germans by going to the Soviets for things related to them. (The Soviets on the other hand respected the city as part of the GDR and the capital of East Germany.) Perina also described that in Berlin in 1981 it was so easy for the four occupying powers, which included the United Kingdom and France, plus East and West Germany, to spy on each other being in such close proximities that "the city with more espionage going on per square mile than any other city in Europe." He said that "There was a lot of eavesdropping."
As liaison with the Soviets on Russian matters, Perina said that "Nobody seriously thought there was going to be a World War III or an invasion of Berlin by the Warsaw Pact." The diplomat also never got the sense things were loosening up in the USSR. Although he personally did not know whether the Strategic Defense Initiative system (SDIs) would even work, he understood that the Soviets were threatened by the possibility: He said, "They realized their strength as a world power came from possession of nuclear weapons, and not from their GDP or anything else." (There was talk too in Germany about NATO deployment of immediate range nuclear missiles.)
Perina served as interpreter between ambassadors Arthur Burns and Piotr Abrassimov, then Vyacheslav Kochemasov during their twice yearly social lunches. There was bureaucratic protocol too that had to be observed whenever the West German president came to Berlin—the US, French, and British embassies had to greet him formally—which Perina described as a "real nuisance". He also witnessed the tensions in Poland: The country was moving toward martial law, and Perina describes that by the end of his time there, he and his colleagues were witnessing six or seven Polish plane hijackings to West Berlin a year. He also saw the rivalry between the two Germanys, but felt the real threat at the time was from radical groups like the Baader-Meinhof gang.
Brussels and the 1988 Moscow Summit Perina then worked at the U.S. Mission to NATO in Brussels from 1985, as political officer and deputy US representative to the organization's political committee. The group was handling three simultaneous negotiations, on Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), and SDIs for a number of visits by President Reagan to the North Atlantic Council, according to Perina, "the most comprehensive arms control discussion between the US and the Soviet Union." The diplomat's impression of NATO was that it was an American-run organization, with the allies all deferring to the US.
From 1987 to 1989, Perina was director for European and Soviet Affairs on the National Security Council staff: prior to his arrival there had been a purge from the Iran Contra scandal. He was brought in by Colin Powell, who had been hired by new National Security Council Advisor Frank Carlucci, who ran the department differently, and better, in Perina's opinion. Perina had the Soviet portfolio, which included working on Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" speech. Yet even with this, the Czech-American had no suspicion that the empire was on the verge of collapse, saying "it was not even part of any discussion.... We were all watching the top, the Kremlin .... [W]e did not pay enough attention to the internal situation and particularly to the nationality issues." In preparation for the 1988 meeting between the two world leaders, Perina asked the CIA to make a film for Reagan about the Moscow sites the president would be visiting and organized a lunch for him with Soviet experts in the US: It would be Reagan's first visit to the USSR.
Perina attended the 1988 Moscow summit meeting between Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev, the third of only four total people; he later described the tension between the two principals being rooted in different negotiating styles: The Soviet's being deductive and the American's inductive. And although he found the American president very gracious, Perina found the leader of the USSR the more important historical figure "among the most important of our time." He described the former Hollywood actor as having "good instincts" but that he "clearly did not have the grasp of substance that Gorbachev had." Perina believed the summit was significant symbolically, that it influenced Reagan, the Russian people's opinion on Reagan, and changed the dynamics of the US-Russia relationship.
Perina was also in charge of the NSC's Eastern European portfolio and visited Romania under Nikolai Ceausescu. He described it as a "desperate place" where there was no heat or electricity, and hardly any food in its stores. He said he could see clearly "the fear everyone so clearly had in their eyes," even those around the Rleader himself. Perina left the NSC in spring 1989 when President Bush and Brent Scowcroft instituted a complete shift in personnel for political reasons.
Vienna, Belgrade and the Dayton Accord From 1989 to 1992, Perina was deputy chairman of the U.S. Delegation to the Vienna negotiations on Confidence and Security Building Measures in Europe (CSBM), held under auspices of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
From 1993 to 1996, he was Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade, Serbia with the title of Charge d’Affaires and worked with a downsized staff. The country was under UN sanctions, and extreme inflation had forced the country to depend on the black market. Embassy matters were all handled on a cash basis: Perina describes having tens of thousands of dollars driven in from Budapest, Hungary in an unguarded car so as not to arouse suspicion from the gangs who then ruled the streets.