John Brown's Notes and Essays: July 2017

Monday, July 31, 2017

Putin says the U.S. Mission in Russia needs to cut 755 employees. What do all these people do?

By Andrew Roth July 31 at 5:01 AM

Play Video 2:20

The Post's Andrew Roth explains a statement the Russian Foreign Ministry issued July 28, seizing U.S. diplomatic properties and demanding the State Department reduce its staff in Russia. (Andrew Roth, Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)

MOSCOW — When Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Sunday that the U.S. Embassy and consulates in Russia would have to cut 755 diplomatic and technical staff, many people MOSCOW — When Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Sunday that the U.S. Embassy and consulates in Russia would have to cut 755 diplomatic and technical staff, many people had the same first thought: we have 755 diplomats in Russia for Putin to expel? Doesn't that seem like a lot?

The answer is yes, that does seem like a lot. Because no, we don't have 755 diplomats in Russia.

So what is Putin talking about? Altogether, the U.S. government employs more than an estimated 1,200 people in Russia. The majority are hired by the Department of State, charged with running the U.S. Embassy and consulates, visa processing and handling other diplomatic tasks. But it also includes employees of dozens of governmental agencies and departments, like the Department of Defense, Department of Agriculture, NASA, and even the Library of Congress. Collectively, we will call this U.S. Mission Russia or just Mission Russia.

I write that Mission Russia employs an "estimated" 1,200 people because the U.S. Embassy in Russia and State Department have not responded to our requests for data about how many people are employed in Mission Russia.

Luckily, the blog Diplopundit had a helpful post yesterday, breaking down the numbers using earlier reports: "In 2013, US Mission Russia (embassy and consulates general) employed 1,279 staff. This included 301 U.S. direct-hire positions and 934 locally employed (LE) staff positions from 35 U.S. Government agencies."

Those statistics came from a 2013 report put together by the State Department's Office of Inspector General, which inspects the "approximately 260 embassies, diplomatic posts, and international broadcasting installations throughout the world" to see whether resources are properly allocated to achieve American policy goals.

The full 2013 report contains a wealth of information about who works for U.S. Mission Russia, including a breakdown of how many U.S. and foreign staff work for each government department and agency. I have included a few thoughts below. There is also a report from 2007 available, which we'll use for comparison. One note: the 2013 report gives nationality and department data for only 1,200 of Mission Russia's 1,279 employees.

The majority of U.S. Mission Russia employees are not Americans, and won't be expelled: Of 1,200 people employed in 2013 in Mission Russia, 333 were U.S. citizens and 867 were Foreign National Staff, most of whom were likely Russian nationals. Using the 2013 numbers, if the U.S. Mission is forced to let go of 755 people, a majority of them would not be U.S. citizens, and likely would not be expelled from the country.

Putin said he is seeking parity, and wants U.S. Mission Russia to employ the same number of people as Russia does in the United States (455 people). But the sheer number of employees that Mission Russia will have to cut means this will likely be seen as an escalation, requiring its own response from Washington.

This will hurt Russians: The largest single departmental employer in U.S. Mission Russia is the International Cooperative Administrative Support Services, or ICASS, employing 652 people in 2013 (that was a majority of the staff in U.S. Mission Russia). Of those 652 people, 603 were "Foreign National Staff," likely Russians, considering the location.

What do they do? Mostly administrative services. The ICASS website has a helpful rundown: "... motor pool operations and vehicle maintenance, travel services, reproduction services, mail and messenger services, information management, reception and telephone system services, purchasing and contracting, human resources services, cashiering, vouchering, accounting, budget preparation, non-residential security guard services, and building operations."

Drivers, IT workers, accountants, handymen, secretaries.

Putin's decision implies that many of them will lose their jobs as the State Department goes through a painful triage process before the Sept. 1 deadline.

As I noted in an earlier piece, the Kremlin often denies access to its own market, whether to supermarket consumers or adoptable children, in order to strike back at the West. So limiting access to its labor market for the U.S. Embassy is not a total surprise. In fact, the Soviet Union imposed a total ban on its citizens working for the U.S. embassy in 1986, forcing embassy staff to moonlight as chauffeurs and mechanics. (There were questions about third country staff, like an Italian chef: "I see the pizza is as good as before," said a Soviet official ominously at a reception in 1986. "Not everything is yet clear.")

This will further hurt Russians: This will also likely force the U.S. Embassy and consulates to cut consular staff, including employees who process visa requests. The result of a further drawdown, former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul predicted via tweet, was a slowdown in visa turnaround.

It can already take weeks, or months, just to get an interview date for the visa process.

Interestingly, U.S. Mission Russia used to be far larger. According to the 2007 report, it employed at least 1,779 people, including 1,251 Foreign National Staff. ("The Ambassador is determined to streamline a mission that has grown too large," the 2007 report reads). Apparently, he was successful. Hundreds of the additional foreign employees worked in Diplomatic and Consular Programs and in Consular Affairs, the departments that handle visas, among other tasks. USAID, which employed 99 people in 2007, was expelled by the Russian government in 2013.

Many employees don't work for the State Department: U.S. Mission Russia represents 35 agencies, or at least it did in 2013.

While the Department of State employed 1,043 of the 1,279 U.S. Mission Russia employees, and will likely suffer most from the cuts, other departments would be expected to take a hit, too.

They include:

The Department of Defense, which had 26 employees working for the Defense Intelligence Agency and another 10 working for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which combats nuclear proliferation and other threats from weapons of mass destruction.
Trade representatives includes 17 employees from the Department of Agriculture and 31 employees of the Department of Commerce.
Representatives from U.S. law enforcement agencies (four F.B.I. employees and six D.E.A. employees).
NASA has 12 employees, likely including support staff for astronauts on the International Space Station or those hitching a ride on Russian Soyuz rockets.
Three employees were tasked to the Sochi Olympics, and are likely gone.
The Library of Congress has two American and two foreign staff, and the Department of Transportation has one American and one foreign staff.

It doesn't look like many of these 1,200 employees are construction workers: The U.S. Embassy in Moscow is building a $280 million annex to "replace inadequate consular facilities," according to the 2013 report. In background discussions with the Washington Post, some U.S. officials have suggested that the large number of Mission Russia employees may be contractors and other workers tied to that construction, and that the employment cut could be an attempt to scuttle the construction.

That doesn't appear to be the case. The State Department has two U.S. citizens and eight foreign nationals working for the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations, likely linked to the annex's construction. But otherwise, the amount of staff at Mission Russia has remained stable for the last five years, and declined considerably since 2007 (from 1,779 in 2007 to 1,279 in 2013). More data would confirm this, but if U.S. Mission Russia employed about 1,200 people in 2013 before construction began, and employs about 1,200 people now, it would not seem many are tied to the embassy expansion.

Saturday, July 29, 2017

The Idiot by Elif Batuman review

A young woman discovers the difference between life and literature in a warm, funny portrayal of university life in the 90s

Image from article, with caption: An alternative world lived through books … Elif Batuman.

Lara Feigel, The Guardian

Do events matter more when witnessed in real life than in books? Does language necessarily render experience second-hand? In her first book, The Possessed, New Yorker journalist Elif Batuman complained that as an incipient novelist she was always being told to eschew books and focus on life. Literature since Don Quixote had been seen as false and sterile; disconnected from lived experience. After years as a graduate student of Russian literature, she decided to challenge this by writing an account of her own haphazard attempt to live with and through books. Now she’s continued this project in a long and enjoyably literary novel, The Idiot.

At the start of the book, the autobiographical heroine Selin has just arrived as an undergraduate at Harvard and is worrying about how to live. How does she make friends? How does she fall in love? How does she come to understand the relationship between art and life, words and world? Taking a linguistics class, she disagrees with her teacher, who believes that people think in the same way whatever language they think in. Selin is sure that she’s formed by her languages – English and Turkish.

She is told by a new friend that she’s unusual in having an aesthetic view of the world rather than a moral one, and knows too that she has a pronounced tendency to live her life as a narrative. But what happens once you try to put other people into your story? The chance to explore this comes through email, which enables Selin to conduct a writing project with the potential to spill into life. An interesting aspect of The Idiot is that it’s a gently historical novel, offering a defamiliarised account of the mid to late 1990s. The plot would be quite different if the characters had mobile phones instead of landlines, and if email were less new and strange.

At first, presented with a university email address, Selin doesn’t know what to use it for. However, she quickly discovers that she can create an email relationship more real than those she’s experiencing in the flesh. She writes to fellow student Ivan, an older boy in her Russian language class, putting them both in the personae of inhabitants of their Russian textbook. The characters in question are engaged in a doomed love affair, rendered peculiar by the limited beginner’s Russian available to them. In taking on these roles, Selin and Ivan are able to expose themselves to each other while hiding behind the barrier of fiction. Quickly, this relationship becomes more painfully affecting than any of Selin’s other friendships. She parses Ivan’s messages as she is learning to parse the texts in her classes, bemused by the enigmatic responses he offers her when she tries out tentative declarations of love. “The seduced atom has energies that seduce people,” he writes, perhaps speaking of her, “and these rarely get lost”.

What they have created seems to those around Selin both dangerous and unreal. But she remains a sincere enough reader to be convinced that the shared fantasy – the world brought into being by two minds – can have an existence of its own. Ivan is more ambivalent, or perhaps simply more fearful. “My love for you is for the person writing these letters,” he tells her, reminding her that he has a girlfriend already.

At every stage, he encourages her only to rebuff her, apparently too frightened to allow the world of print to take on living form. What Selin is discovering is that however real the world created by language may be, we can disown it at any moment. Confronted by the physical reality of his girlfriend and her day-to-day claims, she cannot compete.

A summary of this kind makes the novel sound like a treatise, which is exactly what it is not. The voice throughout is colloquial and humorous. And as a reading experience, it is enjoyable: a generously capacious book that creates an alternative world for the reader to inhabit in a manner comparable to the Russian novels that Batuman loves. Part of the pleasure is that many of the characters are unusually likable. Selin’s friends are consistently warm, curious and interesting, despite waking her up with their snoring or dismissing her love for Ivan. Even her interfering mother is generally sensible in her advice.

The likability tends to be confined to the female characters, however. In The Possessed Batuman describes herself at this age as guided by Isabel Archer’s observation in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady that “one should never regret a generous error”. In the novel, Isabel is thwarted by marrying a man capable neither of generosity nor of seeing himself at fault. Selin makes a similar mistake in her choice of Ivan. Though they both lead each other on without quite knowing what they are setting loose, Ivan’s fault is greater because there’s a sense that he is never prepared to relinquish control or risk any vulnerability.

We can allow words to shape our world and allow the books we read to guide us as we direct and interpret our lives. And, most importantly, we can make generous errors. The book’s epigraph is from Marcel Proust and it is brilliantly chosen. In Within a Budding Grove, the narrator remarks that there is hardly an action we perform in our youth that we don’t later long to annul. But what we ought to regret, he says, is not the actions of the past but the fact that we no longer possess the spontaneity that made us perform them. “Adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.”What is at stake here is whether Selin can continue to commit generous errors in the face of such humiliation; whether she can continue so earnestly in her attempt to learn how to live. The triumph of Batuman’s book is to make this period of youth matter. The narrator occasionally mocks the immaturity of the protagonist, and Selin knows that the stories she writes are bad and the experiences she has are provisional because she is so young. However, the questions she is asking about the world are questions to take seriously; the novel discourages us from dismissing them as youthful preoccupations.

Lara Feigel is the author of The Bitter Taste of Victory: Life, Love and Art in the Ruins of the Reich (Bloomsbury).

John Brown's Notes and Essays

Monday, July 31, 2017

Putin says the U.S. Mission in Russia needs to cut 755 employees. What do all these people do?

Saturday, July 29, 2017

The Idiot by Elif Batuman review

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