Philippe Étienne loves Russia. When I was first introduced to the French ambassador, at an event organized by unofficial D.C. mayor (and recent Semafor hire) Steve Clemons, Étienne began to speak to me in Russian. It was soft and wrapped in a thick, charming French accent, but it was still quite good after 20 years, the time that had passed since Étienne worked as a cultural attaché in the French embassy in Moscow. 

Étienne arrived in Moscow when it was still the capital of the Soviet Union, in September 1991, just three months before he watched, along with the rest of the astonished world, the red Soviet flag come down over the Kremlin. With it fell the totalitarian regime that had terrorized and silenced its own people for generations. Overnight, Étienne became the cultural ambassador to Russia, a new country that was finally opening to the West—and to itself. “It was a very special time,” he told me later, when we had lunch in one of the many painfully elegant rooms in the French ambassador’s residence in Washington, D.C. “This was an incredible, incredible time.”