Rudolf Vilem Perina () (January 3, 1945 – June 14, 2018) was an American diplomat who specialized for more than three decades in European East–West relations during and after the Cold War, and on the Dayton Accords following the dissolution of the Former Republic of Yugoslavia. This includes participating in the 1988 Moscow summit meeting between President Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, during the former's first visit to the USSR. He also served as ambassador to the Republic of Moldova, U.S. Special Negotiator for Eurasian Conflicts in the former Soviet Union (an ambassador-level position), Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Canadian Affairs in the State Department, director of European and Soviet Affairs for the U.S. National Security Council, and was on the policy planning staff of the State Department under Colin Powell before and after the invasion of Iraq.
Following his retirement from the foreign service, Perina served as chargé d’affaires at U.S. embassies, including those in Chisinau, Moldova (2006), Yerevan, Armenia (2007), Reykjavik (2010), Prague (2013), and Bratislava, Slovakia (2015).
Early life and family
Perina was born on January 3, 1945, in the town of Tábor in what is today the Czech Republic. His father's family owned a large lumbermill serving Central Europe. His mother's family was subject to Nazi reprisals during World War II, including the execution of his grandfather and great uncle on June 10, 1942. The family members were executed in a coordinated purge of Czech nationalists and public figures that culminated in the razing of the town of Lidice.
Perina and his parents fled Czechoslovakia following the 1948 Communist takeover of the government. Rudolf's mother paid a Croat border smuggler to transport her son in January 1950 to the border into Austria and eventually to Zurich, where his father had escaped. The family lived as refugees in Switzerland and Morocco before immigrating to the United States via Le Havre, France, in 1951.
He grew up speaking Czech at home. In 1955, the family moved to Cleveland, and Perina obtained US citizenship the following year.
Education
After the family moved to Seattle, Perina attended Franklin High School, where he graduated as the valedictorian in 1963. He chose the University of Chicago as it offered him full tuition with a stipend. He earned his B.A. degree in history there in 1967 and did his graduate studies at Columbia University, where he received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in European history, with the idea of going into academia. While studying in New York, he was hired by a film production company to consult and interpret for the filming of a documentary about the 1968 reform movement in Czechoslovakia known as the "Prague Spring". This led to the topic of his Ph.D dissertation: "Intellectuals and Political Change in Czechoslovakia: A History of Literarni noviny and its Contributors, 1952–1969." He had also earned a Foreign Area Fellowship to research his dissertation at the library of Radio Free Europe for two years.
Perina was at Columbia during the 1968 student protests. While supportive of the US civil rights movement and against the Vietnam War, he maintained a moderate political position, saying later "I became suspicious of all political extremism and radicalism, whether right-wing or left-wing. It is a position I have held all of my life."
Career
Returning from Europe to finish his dissertation, Perina found that there were few academic jobs available in the U.S. He saw an ad for the foreign service exam and encouraged by the example of foreign-born Henry Kissinger, he took it and passed. Delighted to find that it paid better than any academic job, he started in November 1974, his first posting at the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa, Canada, through 1976 during which time both of his daughters were born.
At this post, Perina gave Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn his first US visa, whereby he communicated to him in German. (Already fluent in Czech and French, Perina became fluent in Russian later.) He found that the author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and other works "took the process more seriously than almost any other applicant" he had processed up to that time. In reflecting on Solzhenitsyn's conscientiousness later, Perina concluded that "if you spend your life fighting a bureaucracy, your first thought is to not make a mistake in an official document that the bureaucracy can use against you."
At Ottawa, Perina also had responsibilities in the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) whose Helsinki Final Act was signed by the 35 participating states in the summer of 1975.