A group of Russian Duma members arrived in the United States on March 26 for a two-day visit to New York and Washington.
Led by the grandson of Stalin’s notorious foreign policy chief and continent-divider, Vyacheslav Molotov, this was far from a private trip; it was blessed at senior levels of the US government.
Several members of the delegation could only enter the country thanks to the temporary suspension of US sanctions. The visit is led by Molotov scion Vyacheslav Nikonov, the deputy chairman of the Duma foreign relations committee and a widely sanctioned individual. A communist-turned-liberal-turned-ultra-nationalist, Nikonov and his group will meet members of the US Congress and the US federal government during a two-day trip to Washington, according to Russian media.
The initiative was organized by Republican Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna and was trumpeted by Russian officials as a sign of normalization between the two countries. It came a day after President Zelenskyy said the US had offered Ukraine security guarantees if it would surrender its eastern region of Donbas to Russia.
Those arguing for the trip and similar engagement with the Kremlin argue that four years after Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, some form of dialogue with Moscow is necessary for very practical reasons.
Reopening channels of communication with the Kremlin could, at least in theory, make an adversary as aggressive as Russia somewhat more predictable. And even if it does not, the pro-engagement faction says it must be attempted to encourage the Kremlin to act more rationally.
More than a century of hostility between Russia and the West has provided the two main adversaries with a wide range of tools and platforms for engagement. Some of these date back to the Cold War.
The Russian think tank IMEMO (the Institute of World Economy and International Relations), founded in 1956, has long been seen as a platform where Soviets and Americans could meet, talk, and even work together. In the second half of the 1980s, Condoleezza Rice — later US national security adviser under George W. Bush — was a fellow at IMEMO in Moscow, while the institute was led by Yevgeny Primakov, who would go on to head Russian foreign intelligence and serve as prime minister under Boris Yeltsin.
These time-tested tools were not limited to institutions; in a rigid Soviet/Russian political system, it was also about people, in some cases — families spanning two or three generations. IMEMO’s offshoot, the Institute of the US and Canada — a think tank tasked by the Kremlin with shaping Soviet policy toward the United States — was built and led for decades by Georgy Arbatov.
His son, Alexey Arbatov, has been in charge of the Center for International Security at IMEMO since 2003. He previously also led a program at the Moscow Carnegie Center — a platform created in the 1990s without direct Cold War precedent, apart from figures like Arbatov himself, who came to be seen as an institution in his own right.
Of course, there were other institutions where top-level Russians could meet and talk, which emerged in the post-Soviet period. Some of them are held in Russia, such as the Valdai Club.
Others were deliberately set outside Russia, far away from the Western capitals, so as to provide more privacy to the participants. Cybersecurity officials from the two countries (later joined by the Chinese) gathered every spring in a small hotel in the ski resort town of Garmisch in the German Alps; the Elbe Group of former Russian and American intelligence mandarins met regularly in Reykjavik, Iceland; there were, of course, many other conferences and meetings — from oligarchs’ parties to government officials’ visits — usually held in quiet resort towns and in fashionable hotels.
Most of those contacts were severed after 2022, and the conferences were put on hold.
So why reopen these channels of communication now?
There are, in theory, two main reasons why one would take the trouble to go somewhere to rub shoulders with Russian officials and experts close to the Kremlin — it is either about influence, i.e., gaining access to decision-makers, or about information, i.e., gaining access to those in-the-know.
Since February 2022, Putin has made the Russian decision-making system much more primitive and brutal than it was before the full-scale invasion.
In this new wartime system, where diplomats and experts are no longer trusted to provide guidance to Putin, many traditional institutions have lost their influence.
What remains is a circle of people who have direct access to Putin or have been chosen by him to contact the Americans — figures like the ex-Goldman Sachs banker Kirill Dmitriev; the security services and the military, because they have the biggest stake in the war and they have the guns; and oligarchs, who may lost influence but can still offer some insight, since many of them have become an integral part of the Russian war machine via military contracts.
The very lowest rung of this Kremlin influence ladder is represented by members of the Duma.
Unlike the US Congressmen and women, Russian parliamentarians do not control government funding and thus have no real influence. In the most sensitive cases, bills and laws are drafted by the government and its agencies, with the Duma acting merely as a rubber stamp. Thus, the Duma has little access to meaningful insight either.
So it is clear that the Duma visit will contribute very little to achieving any American goals.
But it would certainly help the Kremlin achieve its own — something Moscow clearly understands when it chose Nikonov to lead the delegation.
Nikonov, a scion of the notorious Soviet elite family and the grandson of Stalin’s foreign minister, notorious for signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany, learned the rules of the Kremlin game from childhood. His family was always willing to serve dictators, even at great personal cost.
In the late 1940s, Molotov’s wife and Nikonov’s grandmother Polina, was dispatched to the Gulag, where she spent several years, simply because she was Jewish. Even as she was imprisoned, Molotov continued working for Stalin as first deputy prime minister. For her part, Polina, despite her ordeal, remained a passionate admirer of Stalin even after his death and her release.
Nikonov, now 69, learned this lesson of absolute obedience from the older generations, an approach that secured the family a place in the Kremlin hierarchy. After graduating as a historian from Moscow State University, he became head of the Communist Party committee at the history department. He appeared headed for a great party career, but the times changed, the Soviet Union collapsed, along with the Communist Party.
That neither confused Nikonov nor stopped his career — he sided with Yeltsin and supported liberal reforms. And when Putin came to power, Nikonov enthusiastically joined Putin’s United Russia party, and in 2007 was appointed by the president to lead the Russkiy Mir Foundation, which oversees the Kremlin’s soft-power operations abroad and has been linked to Russian intelligence activities. That moral plasticity told him to stay within the Kremlin hierarchy, no matter what.
But while his loyalty to the regime has granted him the position as head of the Russian delegation to the US, it does not indicate any influence on Putin or his security elite, the siloviki.
In other words, the members of the delegation are not a channel to the Kremlin — it is a conversation with people who neither shape its decisions nor have meaningful access to them. Instead, it serves the Kremlin’s propaganda purposes as a signal of acceptance back into the world’s polite society and the hope that its behavior in Ukraine will be forgotten.
Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). They are Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities. Their book Our Dear Friends in Moscow, The Inside Story of a Broken Generation, was published in June.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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