Cold War

Ambassador Matlock recalls witnessing the removal of Stalin’s statue from Victory Park in Yerevan during Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in the early 1960s.

Matlock contrasts Reagan’s respectful Cold War diplomacy with contemporary Western leaders’ public insults toward foreign counterparts, arguing the shift undermines conflict resolution.

Ambassador Matlock argues that internal Soviet weaknesses, not Western military or economic pressure, caused the USSR’s collapse, and that the Cold War had already ended before the Union broke apart.

In this episode of Conversations on Groong, we speak with Ambassador Jack Matlock, the last US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, about whether the West missed a historic opportunity to integrate Russia into Western security architecture after the Cold War. We discuss the internal collapse of the Soviet Union, Reagan-Gorbachev diplomacy, NATO expansion and Russian backlash, and how Cold War-era decisions shape Armenia’s geopolitical choices today, including Matlock’s firsthand observations of Soviet Armenia during glasnost and the Nagorno Karabakh movement.