stories

‘Professional deformity’ Young Russian diplomats talk about foreign service and how it reshapes Russia’s Foreign Ministry insiders

Source: Meduza

Until the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia’s Foreign Ministry had a reputation for being perhaps the country’s most forward and progressive government agency. During the Medvedev presidency, the ministry pursued goals like “rebooting” Russian-U.S. relations and expanding cooperation with European countries. In the context of post-annexation Russia, though, Russia’s foreign relations became increasingly defined by hardline tropes resembling the Cold War rhetoric, interspersed with spokeswoman Maria Zakharova’s openly offensive and provocative statements, apparently calculated to alienate the West. Meduza has spoken with several former and current diplomats about life inside the Foreign Ministry and how its culture conditions the staff’s attitudes and personal views. (The following remarks have been abridged and edited for clarity.)

Update: While this article was being translated, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova responded to Meduza’s reporting, describing it as an “informational UAV” that had been successfully “shot down” by a certain group of young diplomats who sent a collective refutation to Meduza’s editor-in-chief, Ivan Kolpakov.

There’s got to be someone who believes

Yekaterina (name changed at her own request), staff member, Foreign Ministry headquarters

I landed in the Foreign Ministry by chance. I had an internship there, and they offered me a permanent job right away. I had no other options at the time, so I decided to give it a go.

I wasn’t thrilled to be there. I can remember looking at some of my colleagues and being terrified that, with time, I might become just like them. Some of them seemed paranoid: they were visibly afraid to say the wrong thing; they looked askance at smartphones; and they had horror in their eyes when talking about social media. Later, I realized that you meet all kinds of people in government service, and it’s really best to be careful, though it had seemed crazy at first. But I didn’t have a very lucky start. There are some open and talented people working in the foreign service. I met quite a few of them.

Being a woman in the Foreign Ministry is tough. Although there are more women there now, the situation hasn’t changed all that much. When I got my job [sometime before 2020], the HR manager told me I should find some young diplomat, marry him, and settle down. The idea was that I should make him borscht and keep him comfortable while he’s hard at work. He believed that was the whole reason I was there in the first place.

In general, women in the foreign service are treated as the “fair sex.” Maybe it’s not such a bad thing, but when all the department workhorses happen to be young women, hearing your boss go on about how we “beautify the workplace” and “inspire the men to work” is kind of hurtful.

But these are just the details, though they do say something. The way I see it, the Foreign Ministry is a chauvinistic structure. It’s part of its organizational culture, and I would even say it’s part of the diplomats’ worldview, especially the older generation. And it shows up first when you look at the division of labor. It’s the women who have to do all the administrative work, regardless of their intelligence, experience, or skills. They make the copies, they scan, they print, they bring things over and take them back. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a man being asked to do any of these things, given there was a choice. Women are treated condescendingly, just like in the crusty old jokes about female drivers. I’m not even sure there’s any ill will about it: it’s just how these people were brought up.

In terms of career growth, your surname travels ahead of you. Being “so-and-so’s son” or “such-and-such’s daughter” is what guarantees that you won’t get picked on, criticized needlessly, or God forbid yelled at. They let out the steam on people without connections. Sometimes, you also see a person getting ready for dispatch to a “good country,” but at the last moment somebody’s son gets to go there instead. But I’ve met managers who don’t care about these things, and just want the staff to do a good job. Thank goodness, there’re people like that too.

Since the start of the war, people have split into two groups. One group is brazen, vocal, and proactive in their foaming-at-the-mouth support of the invasion. They invent new arguments for it, denounce the Ukrainians, and predict Russia’s quick victory. And then there’re those who don’t touch the subject, and just nod and keep quiet.

When I listen to people from the first group, I wonder to myself: Are they really such opportunists? Maybe they’re afraid? Or maybe they really believe what they’re saying? It seems to me, opportunism is more common among those who are senior enough to get transferred to other government offices, closer to the Kremlin. It’s an auspicious moment for making a career just by saying the right words. As for the others, I don’t rule out they might believe what they say. They spend years of their lives in a very particular information bubble — and this cannot but shape their worldview.

Sergey Lavrov, I think, is still viewed positively by the staff. Judging by my few personal encounters with him, he is very friendly. He is often the first to say hello if you bump into him in the hallway. But all work-related contacts with Lavrov are channeled through a stable bureaucratic hierarchy of assistants and support staff.

I cannot tell whether Lavrov is a “hawk” or not. I don’t know what’s inside his head; I never had any soul-searching discussions with him. Maybe he’s just doing his job; who would let him resign in the midst of all this? Maybe he really believes in our “cause.” There’s got to be someone who must believe in it.

In any case, the reasons for Lavrov’s pro-war position would be quite ordinary: it’s likely just a “professional deformity.” The only information going around the ministry is all about how wonderful we are and how nasty the West is — where they just dream of crushing and destroying us. Some of this information is for internal use, some comes from the outside, but deviating from this “party line” is out of the question. Even in our own internal documents, we’re always presented as the good guys, and the bad guys are the West. If you tried to say something else, even over coffee, no one would appreciate the point. It isn’t all that surprising if people who live their whole lives inside this bubble begin to believe the messages they’re saturated with daily.

When it comes to [spokesperson Maria] Zakharova, it’s a different story. Very few people I know, at different levels of seniority, like what she does. Everyone has pretty much the same reaction, facepalming every time she comes out with one of her schticks and tricks. There’s definitely a consensus there, and not just among the younger staffers. People say the top leadership likes her approach better.

When the war broke out, I was in shock. Not because no one saw it coming, but because it was so unbelievable. My first reaction was that I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. But it’s not the best idea to make decisions in a panic. Reality is more complicated than we’d like it to be.

Why don’t employees quit? Well, first of all, lots of them have families and children. Moving, leaving a job, emigrating is much easier if you don’t have dependents. When it’s more than just yourself, you have to consider everyone that your decision will affect.

Second, the Foreign Ministry is a hierarchical structure, where responsibility is distributed vertically in such a way that the little cogs at the bottom of this machine hardly control anything at all. In the most peaceful of times, the most neutral memos, down to the boilerplate request to fix a chair, would be revised and corrected by the higher-ups to the point of becoming completely unrecognizable. Never mind what happens when it’s something important.

Third, there’re lots of different directions in the foreign service, and far from all of them involve Ukraine. People who work in the Asian and African departments, for example, may not feel complicit in what’s happening. Still, lots of the younger staff have left. I don’t know what percentage this was, and many of them wanted to leave anyway, but some have resigned without having a new job lined up, declaring “ideological reasons.” I don’t know what happened to them afterwards, but I very much hope they’re doing okay.

The Foreign Ministry isn’t going anywhere; it’ll simply adapt to our new condition of global isolation. Some diplomats had to leave Europe, and more jobs were created at the headquarters in response. Some people are leaving for Asia, the CIS countries, or Africa, which they say is a promising new direction. Different people feel differently about this, but sometimes you see some seriously disappointed people, in our European departments. Imagine someone who speaks an uncommon European language like Hungarian, Finnish, or Norwegian. He spent six years learning it in school, used it all his career, loves that country, knows it well, has been networking and building relationships there. And all of a sudden, he can’t go there, there’s zero cooperation with that country, and we’re treating it as an adversary. This isn’t a great professional or even personal situation. And very few people can say in these circumstances, “To hell with it, I’ll just go to Sri Lanka.” It’s not about wanting to eat croissants and drink your favorite wine. A change this big turns your whole life upside down.

‘Once you serve in the army, you don’t laugh at the circus’

Igor (name changed at his request), former European attaché

I came to the embassy after passing my graduation exam [at the Moscow Institute of International Relations, “MGIMO”]. I did well on the exam, and even before I heard about my score, a diplomat who was then about to take a new post reached out to me. Earlier, I had an embassy internship in a remote country, and they were actively recruiting me to come back. The Foreign Ministry is always eager to place new employees in far-away countries like the one where I had worked, because it’s easy to get diplomats to go to Europe, but not everyone is open to “exotic” destinations. But I got lucky and went where I wanted to.

There isn’t any nepotism in foreign-service recruitment. The only thing is, they do consider whether an applicant’s parents were diplomats or not. Ambassadors often prefer to hire people from diplomatic families because they think they will fit in better, since they already understand the foreign-service culture, and if anything comes up their parents can help them out.

I was paid $4,000 a month. I heard that an attaché gets paid 40 percent of the ambassador’s salary, but I don’t know this for a fact. In 2018, my contract expired, and I chose not to renew it.

As an attaché, I accompanied the delegations, translated, queried organizations, and forwarded foreign queries to Moscow. I would keep the ambassador informed, like that time when someone proposed to organize a film festival… I had to organize the return of cultural and art objects, get a museum worker to come to the country and assess whether the antiques in question were Russian, and figure out how to return them. I cannot name specific projects, and I don’t even like to reminisce about this period of my life. Our recurrent problem, though, was that we needed money to do anything at all, and the embassy could not provide it easily. It has to scrape it together, talking to the accountants first. And so, people would show up saying, let’s do this cool project, but we need some money. And the embassy wouldn’t have any money, so we’d turn them away.

The staff’s political views boiled down to cynical indifference. My boss’s favorite proverb was: “Once you serve in the army, you don’t laugh at the circus.” This was his view of the work we did. We didn’t have any ultra-patriots in our midst, but those in the opposition had to keep their opinions to themselves. There were lots of xenophobic little jokes with this bigoted attitude about migrants.

Little has changed since the start of the war. Some guys resigned, but mostly because they’d wanted to leave anyway. The rest are holding onto their paychecks. The security measures are tighter. It used to be, if you wanted to leave your consular district or your city, you just had to get the ambassador’s or the security deputy’s permission, and they’d give it to you. Now, the standing recommendation is not even to leave the embassy building, and definitely not to leave the city. There’s probably less work, since the delegations have stopped and correspondence has fizzled down. I’m sure it would be a huge problem for lots of people to go home and try to come back, because it’s hard to get to Russia now.

It’s become harder to get a job too. Usually, you begin with a trip to the country of your contractual assignment. The first contract will be for a year, then they renew it for another three, and then for six months apiece, until they let you go or else you howl at the Moon because you’ve had it. Then you go back to Russia and try to get a job at headquarters. Since February 24, [2022,] Russian diplomats have been expelled from lots of places, and the ministry is now trying to place them all at headquarters.

The Foreign Ministry has long ceased to have any initiative of its own. It literally does what they tell it to do as another arm of the executive branch. I’m certain they didn’t take any part in starting the war. As for the ministry’s manner of communicating with the outside world, Maria Zakharova’s rudeness and so on, I don’t think it’s their own preferred style. If you see an official spouting nonsense while on duty, it’s because some official narrative prescribes this.

The Foreign Ministry has its own particular verbiage as to how you must speak about certain things. So, if some white paper brings up the term “Anglo-Saxons,” soon the whole Foreign Ministry will be talking about the “Anglo-Saxons,” because that’s the way we talk from now on. Everyone simply repeats after Zakharova. When talking to the press, personal initiative is completely out of the question. Keeping to Zakharova’s style is a must. The best practice is not even to paraphrase and be rude yourself, but to cite a rude briefing with such-and-such a date: “As we have stated earlier,” etc. Any independent statement has to be pre-approved. This is why even the ambassadors try to speak in the same vein as the spokesperson. Because it’s safer.

As for Zakharova herself, she talks like this because some PR person invented this strategy for her in the first place. Or maybe it’s her own invention, I don’t know.

‘The weakest link’

Oksana, former attaché for political matters, Russian embassy in Indonesia

I wanted to be a journalist, not a diplomat. I graduated cum laude from the history department of the Asia and Africa Institute (“ISAA”). As a qualified Indonesianist, I went to Jakarta on an exchange program. I also applied for a Fulbright Scholarship, which I won, so I was going to go the University of Missouri to study journalism after finishing my master’s at the Moscow Institute of International Relations.

But in 2015, my husband left me, and I needed something to distract me from my drama. Around that time, I won the Potanin fellowship and decided that, before going to the U.S., I’d take this opportunity to go to Indonesia. My internship was in the Foreign Ministry’s Asia department and at the Jakarta embassy. After I completed it, I got an invitation to join the embassy as a press-attaché.

I had pretty orthodox views and wasn’t at all critical of our country’s political agenda. Besides, I specialized narrowly in Indonesia and didn’t know much about Russian politics. I spent a long time thinking about this and decided that I didn’t want to write anti-Russian articles in the U.S.: I wanted to serve my own country, even if this meant not getting to be a journalist after all. I cried very often around that time, but ultimately I chose duty to my country. Now I realize this had been a false dilemma: with an American diploma, I could have been doing honest journalism, and it wouldn’t have been “anti-Russian.”

In the end, I got an embassy job, but not the job I had been qualified for. Instead, I was placed in the same consular department where I interned earlier. Under those circumstances, insisting on anything else would have been impossible. I had a tense relationship with my boss. When negotiating my job, I insisted on getting an attaché’s position, for which I was eligible because of my cum laude diploma from the Moscow Institute of International Relations (“MGIMO”). They wanted to give me a secretarial position, but I told them I had two “red diplomas,” and they made me an attaché but treated me very badly afterwards.

While working in that department, I asked for permission to continue my graduate studies. I had an academic advisor at MGIMO, and she was ready to work with me, but my boss didn’t sign my request for graduate study. As far as I know, they usually grant requests like this, especially if the applicant is a man. My foreign-service boss made clear to me that my job was to bring the tea. As for the “red diplomas,” my excellent test scores, and my language skills — none of it counted. They saw me as a woman, and that was that.

Around that time, a tragedy happened. A former high-ranking diplomat from the Russian embassy in Indonesia committed suicide. I became even more alert to feeling like the job was driving me nuts.

I had always liked Lavrov. Then I met him in person, at his annual meeting for new staff members, and he made an appalling impression on me, I cannot say why.

I grew up in a provincial town, and from there diplomats seemed like demigods who must only talk about lofty things. MGIMO had that kind of lofty atmosphere. Then I came to the Foreign Ministry and all my preconceptions just crumbled. I was now a “diplomat” doing totally menial work. What upset me most was that I had joined the embassy with completely idealistic, patriotic motives. Since I had a relevant degree and they hired me, I thought it was my duty to serve my country. I was convinced that I was doing the right thing, and that all my troubles there would be resolved over time. I didn’t like my job that much, but I kept thinking that everything would work out — with a little patience.

But nothing was working out. My boss at the consular department told other staffers that I was an idiot. People started to avoid me. I wasn’t allowed to take extra Indonesian language classes taught by a woman who worked at the Indonesian Culture Ministry. Everyone else was allowed to attend. I finally succeeded in getting permission, but my immediate boss constantly undermined my chances of attending.

Once I was on duty and took a call from the family of a young man who had an accident in Bali. They needed blood for a transfusion but couldn’t find any. I explained that I couldn’t help them in my diplomatic capacity, but then I personally called a blood bank in Jakarta and asked them if it was possible to place a private order for an emergency transfusion in Bali. They told me they could do it, and I gave their contact to the young man’s family. My boss later reprimanded me for this. But I decided for myself that if there’s something I can do to save another person, I’m ready to lose my job and do it.

One day, my boss said to me: “If you and I don’t get along, you’ll leave here as a criminal defendant.” I thought he was trying to draw me into a sexual relationship. There simply wasn’t any other explanation for his words and behavior that I could find. But nothing happened beyond those threats, and I never understood how I was supposed to “get along” with him, exactly.

An embassy is a closed community, a tough environment for people without families of their own. If you’re being bullied by the only people with whom you have contact, it becomes even harder. Once, I burst into tears when my boss was picking on me again. I decided I couldn’t work like this anymore and went straight to the ambassador. He said, “Have some tea, everything will be fine.” Very soon, I became a political attaché.

For a while, I was the only person at the embassy who actually knew the Indonesian language and understood current events in the country. During one of our press readings, one of the staffers kept referring to Indonesia’s Prime Minister Retno Marsudi as a “he.” Marsudi had been in office a long time, and it was odd that an embassy worker wouldn’t know who she was. That was pretty striking.

Local embassy staff weren’t even paid a living wage. They got $100–$200 a month, compared to a diplomat’s salary of $3,000. They complained, but it was useless. Because I was the only staff member who treated them as real people, they often came to me, asking me to talk to the ambassador on their behalf. I would go, say what they wanted me to say, and pass their letters to the ambassador, but no one paid any attention to them.

At the end of my tenure, the embassy gave me a bad recommendation: they wrote that, despite my good specialist education, I don’t develop good workplace relationships and don’t grow as a professional (even though I’d asked to pursue graduate study). In their official recommendation, they described me as “the weakest link.”

Groundhog Day

Alexandra (name changed at her request), former Russian embassy attaché

I decided to leave a long time ago. It had nothing to do with the “special military operation”; I just had enough of it. Let me tell you about just one incident. There were these two sisters who got adopted by a foreigner. Then he began to beat them. The authorities opened up a domestic-violence case and stripped him of parental rights. Another family then adopted the girls, and everything was fine. That’s when my boss came to me and said, “Let’s start a repatriation process to send them back to Russia.” I asked him why. They already had a hard life — why tear them away from their new family? Why mangle their lives by sending them to some orphanage? Who knows if they have a grandma or a grandpa back there. And my boss replied that it would look good in our paperwork.

The Foreign Ministry is a good place for lazy people, but it’s a swamp that holds people back. Once you make mid-level “counsellor,” it’s hard to keep growing. The staff is numerous, but the jobs are few. You go to work as if it’s Groundhog Day, and nothing ever changes.

It turned out that it’s very hard to quit without a scandal. When I tried to resign in 2021, I came to the ambassador and said I was going to look for a new job, and when I found one, I’d give two weeks’ notice. He said it was fine, but a week later, when I actually found a job, he said to me: “I’m going to find some legal loophole to make you stay.” He couldn’t find any loophole, of course, because our labor laws say you can leave with two weeks’ notice.

Then the ambassador summoned everyone he knew I liked in the office and said that if I leave, they would all lose their vacation time. All my coworkers said, “To hell with him, we can deal with it.” But I knew that some of those people had already worked for two years without a vacation. So, I decided not to be such a bitch… I only left when my contract ran out.

I don’t know a single person who is completely happy at the Foreign Ministry. Most of them stay there because they’re afraid of uncertainty. Men stay in their jobs because of the mobilization summons. Apart from the gendered side of things, people are afraid to leave because you don’t come back to the foreign service if you leave. You have to be very well-connected to get your job back.

After February 24, [2022,] the atmosphere at work became more tense, because people started protesting in front of the embassy. Once, someone threw a bottle at my coworker’s car while he was driving through the gate. But this makes you question yourself: we, the embassy staff, are trying to do diplomacy — and if the country is at war, we must be doing a bad job. As diplomats, we’ve proven to be incompetent.