IN MEMORY OF MIKHAIL STEPANOVICH KAPITSA (1921-1995)

A. S. ZAITSEV

Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Russian Federation, Candidate of Economic Sciences

I had a chance to communicate with M. S. Kapitsa for more than thirty years. The first acquaintance took place in June 1962. As a twenty - year-old student of the Institute of Oriental Languages at Moscow State University (since 1970-ISAA MSU), returning on the eve of state examinations from Vietnam, where I was practicing, I learned the latest news from my classmates: Kapitsa himself, ambassador, professor, doctor of historical Sciences, will be on the exam. He recently became the head of the department at our institute.

Entering a small classroom at 11 Mokhovaya Street for the first exam, I greeted the examiner and Mikhail Stepanovich, who was sitting a little further away. When he finished answering the ticket, the teacher who took the exam asked Kapitsa if he had any additional questions. To my great relief, he replied that he had no questions, adding something encouraging about me. As I later learned, he didn't have any questions for other students either, on the contrary, he often came to their aid.

A few months later, after receiving his diploma, he was assigned to work in the office of the Adviser on Economic Issues at the USSR Embassy in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Returning in 1964 with the materials collected there, he entered the postgraduate course of the Institute of Asian Peoples (later the Institute of Oriental Studies) of the Academy of Sciences. I saw Mikhail Stepanovich only at scientific meetings and dissertations. In the fall of 1966, after an internship at the Foreign Ministry, I went to work at our embassy in Hanoi.

Working under Mikhail Stepanovich's direct supervision in the South-East Asia Department of the Foreign Ministry three years after my return from Vietnam became a real school of diplomatic skill for me. For young diplomats, Mihstep (this abbreviation is forever fixed in our lexicon) was an unquestionable authority. We got food for thought in his office during our daily meetings, which we called "readings." The most interesting part was the "debriefing" - Mihstep's comments on messages from embassies, about certain events in the world and the region.

I communicated directly with the head of the department, translating and recording his conversations with foreign guests (however, Kapitsa often dictated reports himself). Once I had a chance to perform an unusual assignment. At that time, a long-standing Sino - Vietnamese border dispute over the ownership of several small islands in two archipelagos-the Paracel and Spratly-escalated. In order to understand in detail the origins of the border problem, I had to prepare a reference based on primary sources. I had to do a lot of work, digging through old French and other geographical maps that I managed to find in the Central Scientific Library of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Mikhstep liked the help.

Closer communication with Mihstep took place during frequent visits of Vietnamese delegations, with whom I worked as an interpreter. After we had conducted the head of the delegation to one of the guest mansions on Vorobyovy Gory after negotiations or other events, we stayed in the living room, which served as a cinema hall and billiard room, and for a long time fought in his favorite game, without letting the cigar out of his mouth.

The persistent cigar smell from Kapitsa's office permeated everywhere and usually served as a reliable indicator of the manager's presence at his workplace. Cigars were essential to his creative process, and at that time he often sat in his office in the evenings dictating chapters of his monograph China: Two Decades - Two Policies, published in 1969.

For Mikhail Stepanovich, no matter what countries and problems he had to deal with, the main business of his life remained China, the study of the problems of its recent history. In that prolonged period of Soviet-Chinese confrontation, Mikhail Stepanovich, unlike many of his colleagues - well-known experts on China, was in no hurry, for the sake of the momentary political situation, to join the chorus of sharp critics of Beijing's policy. This did not prevent him from fundamentally evaluating certain specific actions of the then leadership of the PRC (for example, during the Chinese aggression against Vietnam in 1979).

Therefore, as a logical step on the part of Mikhail Stepanovich, we perceived his transfer in 1970 to the 1st Far Eastern Department with simultaneous appointment as a member of the board of the Ministry. There, he got the opportunity to deal closely with the Chinese problem. For me, his new appointment played a significant role: changing his initial opinion, he gave in to my request to move to the Department of International Economic Organizations (after three consecutive business trips to Vietnam and defending my dissertation on economics, I wanted to move away from country studies for a while). Soon I was sent to Geneva to visit our permanent mission to the UN Office and other international organizations.

In 1977, after returning to Moscow, while working in the Minister's secretariat, I continued to closely monitor the development of the situation in South-East Asia, and attended negotiations between A. A. Gromyko and the Foreign Ministers of Vietnam, Indonesia, Kampuchea, and other countries of the Asia-Pacific region, with the participation of M. S. Kapitsa.

Mihstep was a favorite of the ministry's young diplomats, who always filled the assembly hall in the high-rise building of the Foreign Ministry to capacity at his lectures on the international situation. He often expressed his own opinion on rather sensitive topics, telling about interesting facts, episodes and events in which he was a participant in an imaginative and colorful language. I remember that in 1984, during one of his lectures, he got carried away and devoted almost entirely to the little - known, sometimes curious, details of his recent railway journey around the country-he accompanied Kim Il Sung during his visit to the USSR.

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As an international lecturer, Mikhail Stepanovich often spoke in the classrooms of the Ministry of Defense and the KGB. However, his bold remarks and independent judgments, which often went beyond what was allowed at that time, were not liked by everyone and from time to time became the subject of critical discussion in high instances.

A. A. Gromyko, devoting most of his time to relations with the United States and disarmament issues in those years, as far as I could observe as an assistant minister, highly appreciated Mikhail Stepanovich, a leading expert on China, who could reliably "cover" the Asian rear when an acute situation arose. The Minister repeatedly presented him for awarding government awards, promoted the proposal to appoint him as his deputy. Gromyko forgave the extravagant actions and statements of Mikhail Stepanovich, which from time to time reached him. I remember that in December 1982, when I was summoned to the minister's dacha on a Sunday evening, I found him approving a government decree that had just been received appointing two members of the board - M. S. Kapitsa and the head of the US Department, V. G. Komplektov-as deputy Foreign ministers. When I returned to the secretariat, I conveyed his congratulations to Kapitsa and Komplektov and asked Gromyko to call him. Then I found out that the calls took place, Sets spoke with Gromyko for 3 minutes, Kapitsa - 12.

Following the appointment of M. S. Kapitsa as Deputy Minister, there were changes at the department levels, and a vacancy opened for the head of the Southeast Asia department. Mikhail Stepanovich supported my appointment to this position.

M. S. Kapitsa initially accepted Gorbachev's perestroika with enthusiasm, which he never stopped charging the departments entrusted to him, trying to get us to speed up our work. I remember how enthusiastically he spoke about the return of Academician A. D. Sakharov from exile in Moscow, putting this step to the credit of the new general secretary and hoping that others would follow.

Demanding that we pay more attention to analytics and forecasting, Mikhail Stepanovich referred to his own experience. "When there were reports in the Western media that Mao Zedong had supposedly died,"he told us at department meetings," I could easily go on a business trip or vacation, knowing that I had a set of documents ready in my safe, including a note to the Central Committee with a draft telegram of condolence."

Mikhail Stepanovich took the appearance of the anti-alcohol decree in May 1985 with skepticism, openly predicting the imminent demise of the introduced taboos. It was not without his consistent efforts, which required great courage in those conditions, that the usual traditions were gradually restored at the protocol events held in the MFA mansion on Spiridonovka, despite all the prohibitions. At first, "at the request of guests", dry wine was served at receptions, then beer appeared, and finally, after a short time, strong drinks were served. Soon, everything returned to normal in the Foreign Ministry's foreign offices.

Tall and statuesque, always fashionably and even smartly dressed, as far as protocol allowed, Mikhail Stepanovich invariably attracted everyone's attention. A fascinating storyteller with an inexhaustible supply of funny stories and anecdotes, he was the soul of any company, whether it was protocol events with foreign guests or at meetings with colleagues. His nature is open and emotional, and even when dealing with people he didn't know much, he often did not hold back in his judgments and assessments, and he himself admitted that he was often a bully, although he added that he "tried to get rid of this character trait"*. His lack of restraint had turned against him more than once. (Just one example is his failed appointment as Ambassador to Thailand because, on the eve of the decision's release, he inadvertently announced it to invited guests at a banquet he hosted.)

The very next year after the arrival of the new Minister E. A. Shevardnadze in 1985, Mikhail Stepanovich's attitude to innovations in our ministry changed noticeably. An experienced diplomat, he could not help but see the negative consequences of the haphazard reform of the ministry. Aimed at squeezing out the "Gromykin cadres", it actually came down to a chaotic structural redrawing within the Foreign Ministry and an electoral campaign to combat nepotism.

It was obvious that M. S. Kapitsa, with his authority and independent position, which was also openly expressed, was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the new minister. This was evident in Shevardnadze's reaction to Mikhail Stepanovich's speeches and remarks during the board meetings. After working with the new minister for only a year and a half, he resigned from the Foreign Ministry in February 1987. In the same year, he became Director of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences (since 1991 - Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences), and was elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. At that time, many other high - ranking diplomats who did not accept the style and methods of the new leadership of the Ministry either left themselves, as an outstanding diplomat-first Deputy Minister G. M. Kornienko, or under various pretexts they left the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (as in the case of M. S. Kapitsa).

Mikhail Stepanovich took his departure from the ministry very hard. In the aforementioned book, published after his death, he recalled that "I did not want to move from the Foreign Ministry, where I worked for more than 40 years." This was also evident at the meeting with him in 1987 in Kuala Lumpur, where another joint colloquium of scientists from the two countries had just ended at a conference organized by the Institute of International and Strategic Studies of Malaysia. (Accustomed to being the center of attention, it was not easy for Kapitsa to get used to the fact that the owners paid more attention to his successor as deputy.the Minister of Foreign Affairs invited to this event as the main speaker.)

At the end of 1988, shortly before I left for another long business trip, a new work by Mikhail Stepanovich "Peaceful Choice of Asia" was published. The book he gave me with his autograph "...for a good memory of working together on the Asian path" I carefully keep in my home library.

Our next meeting took place in the summer of 1990 in his office on Rozhdestvenka Street. He asked me in detail about my African life, was keenly interested in the Foreign Ministry news, and asked me how the fate of our mutual acquaintances had developed.

The news of M. S. Kapitsa's death was unexpected for me. A lot of people gathered at the ritual building of the Central Design Bureau, mostly young employees from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Institute of Internal Affairs of the Russian Academy of Sciences, teachers and students of ISAA, editorial staff of the magazine "Asia and Africa Today", which he headed for a number of years (1989-1995).

* Kapitsa M. S. On different parallels. Notes of a Diplomat, Moscow, Kniga i Biznes JSC, 1996, p. 473.

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