World Focus: Resetting the clock with Russia

Lozansky’s father-in-law was one of the Soviet Union’s top generals. To avoid embarrassment, he arranged for Lozansky to leave the Soviet Union and become an exile. He promised that Tatiana, Lozansky’s wife, and their young daughter, would soon follow.

Instead, the general did everything in his power to prevent the reunion of the Lozansky family.

Lozansky settled in the United States and became a professor of nuclear physics at the University of Rochester. Lozansky, in America, and Tatiana, in Moscow, went on hunger strikes. They organized protests and wrote petitions to make the Soviet government relent and let Tatiana and her daughter leave the Soviet Union.

It was to no avail.

When Lozansky learned that during the 1980 Winter Olympic Games held in Lake Placid, New York, the Olympic People-for-People Program would be organizing the hosting of Soviet athletes in American homes, he came to Lake Placid to seek support for his quest to reunite with his wife and daughter.

Lozansky turned to me, as the organizer of the Olympic People-for-People Program, to secure the support of prominent officials and Olympic athletes.

The mayor of Lake Placid; the chairman of the Olympic Organizing Committee; speed skater Eric Heiden, who won five gold medals; and other individuals signed a petition and we sent it to Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev.

It wasn’t until Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union that Tatiana and her daughter were permitted to leave the country.

When communism collapsed and the Soviet Union was dissolved, Lozansky returned to Moscow and become the founder and president of the American University in Moscow. His aim was to build bridges between American and Russian educational and cultural institutions.

As part of his effort, he extended an invitation to Joel Levine, a veteran NASA space scientist who currently serves as an applied science professor at William & Mary, to give a Zoom lecture at Moscow State University.

Since the collapse of communism and the demise of the Soviet Union, Lozansky, who has dual citizenship and homes in Washington, D.C., and Moscow, has been working to make the relationship between the United States and Russia as friendly as can be.

Lozansky maintains that after the collapse of the USSR, American values, free enterprise and democracy enjoyed astounding prestige and popularity among Russians. Building ties with the U.S. was a top priority for the Russian leadership. Until 1993, Moscow harmoniously cooperated with Washington on almost the entire range of international issues, including arms control. It culminated in the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty II, or START II, which reduced the nuclear arsenal of the U.S. and Russia by 66%.

However, Lozansky pointed out, the Clinton administration’s “fatally flawed macroeconomic policy toward Russia came in August 1998, when Russia’s default on its debts and the ruble’s devaluation led to its complete economic collapse. By all accounts, the disaster was more serious than America’s economic collapse in 1929.”

Lozansky quotes veteran Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who wrote: “What makes the situation with Russia so sad is that the Clinton administration may have squandered one of the most valuable assets imaginable, namely the idealism and goodwill of the Russian people that emerged after 70 years of communist rule.”

Ever an optimist and a peacemaker, Lozansky advocates “resetting the clock with Russia.”

On March 6, 2009, in Geneva, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with a red button, accompanied with the Russian word “peregruzka” — reset. Indeed, between 2009 and 2012, a great deal of cooperation took place between the U.S. and Russia. In early March of 2014, however, Russia was censured by the United Nations over the annexation of Crimea and some Russian populated areas of Ukraine. The “reset” was over.

Now that the Trump administration is in charge and President Donald Trump has repeatedly declared that “the killing in Ukraine has to stop,” Lozansky believes it is “time to reset the clock with Russia again.”

Frank Shatz is a Williamsburg resident. He is the author of “Reports from a Distant Place,” the compilation of his selected columns. The book is available at the Bruton Parish Shop and Amazon.com.