The years I was stationed in Moscow were singularly devoid of any major crises in Soviet-American relations. It also was a time when the Nixon administration was so focused on ending the Vietnam war and opening a dialogue with China that Moscow seemed to be pushed aside on the priority list. President Johnson had hoped to visit Moscow in October 1968, in the waning months of his administration and start talks on limiting strategic weapons. But the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 forced a cancelation of that visit.It was finally agreed through the private talks between then National Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to start these arms control talks in Helsinki on November 17, 1969.

These negotiations, which were to continue until a treaty was signed by President Nixon and Leonid I. Brezhnev at a Moscow summit in May, 1972, were at the time an aberration in Soviet-American relations. The Czechoslovak invasion had seriously set back relations, so the start of a new round of talks was regarded at the time as a major international event. Marie-Jeanne and I flew up to Helsinki on the eve of talks, as did my close friend from the Washington bureau, John Finney, who was then the Pentagon reporter for The Times. From Washington came such luminaries as Chalmers Roberts, who was the Washington Post’s senior diplomatic correspondent. My wife and I stayed at the Hotel Marski, in the center of Helsinki, which was the designated press center for the negotiations. The two sides’ delegations arrived on the day before the start of the talks, Gerard Smith, the head of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and Vladimir S. Semyonov, a deputy foreign minister, and both men uttered the usual hopes for an accord. I was designated as the American correspondent in the press pool for the opening of the talks, and I remember standing at a podium giving as much color as I could to describe the start of the negotiations.

It soon became apparent that there really was no news to be gathered at this high level negotiation. Marie-Jeanne and I nevertheless enjoyed ourselves immensely in Helsinki, which was so startingly different from Moscow. Marie-Jeanne enjoyed shopping in Marimekko for clothing and modern glassware, some of which we still own. The restaurants were fun. In short it was a great break from Moscow’s drab appearance.

The Finnish foreign ministry, in a gesture to the few American correspondents still there on Thanksgiving Day, November 27, 1969, had invited us and a few Russian newsmen to a Thanksgiving dinner in the Hotel Marski’s restaurant. It was a nice gesture, but unfortunately, it lacked a real Thanksgiving spirit, and very little turkey to go around. The negotiations adjourned on December 22 and resumed in 1970 in Vienna.  Another seven rounds of negotiations were held over a period of thirty months until an accord was hammered out in time for a signing at the Moscow summit in May 1972. The talks were marred by the fact that the Kissinger-Dobrynin negotiations were initially kept secret from Smith and his team.

After we returned to Moscow in December, I was told by my office manager Boris that there was considerable excitement at the Bolshoi Ballet. Boris was a great ballet fan, and I was not, but I soon began to appreciate the great dancing offered by the Bolshoi and other dance companies, Boris told me that the new director of the Bolshoi, Yuri Grigorovich, was attempting to change the ending of Swan Lake. In the traditional Swan Lake, the ballet has a tragic ending, with the prince and his swan lover both plunging to their death in a lake, and their faces then appearing on the background. The Stalin censors insisted on a “happy ending,” and Boris had believed that Grigorovich was going to revert back to the old ending. But in fact he failed to do so, and the new production had some great dancing but the Soviet ending. My ballet story ended up on the front page the day after Christmas. I was most pleased, and I later learned that Anna Kisselgoff, who was then the deputy dance critic had come in to edit the story.