LESSONS FROM THE EDGE

A veteran Foreign Service officer tells all.

In this fine memoir, Yovanovitch (b. 1958) chronicles her career in the Foreign Service, where she has served in a variety of posts, with an emphasis on the Soviet and post-Soviet world. Her father left the Soviet Union as a child, and her mother survived World War II in Nazi Germany. As immigrants in Canada, they met and married in 1958, moved to the U.S. in 1962, and raised a family on the small salary of a boarding school teacher. As hardworking as her parents, Marie excelled in high school and, later, at Princeton. After graduation, a Russian-language program in Moscow cemented her fascination with world affairs, and she joined the Foreign Service in 1986. The author writes about the sexism she experienced in the service, noting how “pale, male, and Yale” was a popular profile of its employees. One of her first assignments was Somalia, an impoverished, corrupt, and often dangerous failed state, but she did well. Tours in Uzbekistan and Moscow in the 1990s and Ukraine in 2001 solidified her expertise on Russia and its former provinces after the Soviet Union’s collapse, and she rose to the top of her profession as ambassador to Kyrgyzstan in 2005, Armenia in 2008, and Ukraine in 2016. The author delivers captivating accounts of her ambassadorial duties, which included furthering American interests, discouraging and fighting corruption, and promoting capitalism, good government, human rights, and the rule of law. Although successful on many issues, Yovanovitch does not deny that the three ex-Soviet provinces where she served remain corrupt and ill-governed. She was ambassador to Ukraine in 2019 when then-President Donald Trump and his allies began pressuring its government to gather dirt on his rival, Joe Biden. Apparently, Yovanovitch showed insufficient enthusiasm for the job; after a nasty smear campaign, she was fired.

A compelling memoir of diplomatic service behind the old Iron Curtain.