Middle Power and Super Power at Mid-Century
In a recent issue of bout de papier, we reprinted correspondence from Lester B. Pearson about the response to a speech that he delivered in April 1951. In that talk, Pearson had predicted that “the days of relatively easy and automatic relations…
A Canadian Visitor in Moscow, 1952
he death of Pierre Elliott Trudeau — and subsequent recollections of his life and times – reminds us that he was a bold and inquisitive traveller long before his tenure as a national and international statesman. Some veterans of the foreign service…
Presenting Credentials in Moscow
Geoffrey Pearson served as Canada’s Ambassador to Moscow from 1980 to 1983. Following is the text of his reporting telegram to Ottawa on his presentation of letters of credential ceremony, and Landon Pearson’s letter home on the post-credentials reception. Viewed through the…
We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History
Two years ago, John Lewis Gaddis spoke about the impact of the release of Russian and East European records on our understanding of the Cold War in a seminar at the Lester B. Pearson Building which was arranged in collaboration with the…
Canada in the New World Disorder
While my subject is a bit less difficult than the examination question that asked candidates to describe the universe and give three examples, it has its problems. I shall try to be highly selective, but not, I hope, incoherent. I want to…
A Moscow Literary Memoir: Among the Great Artists of Russia from 1946 to 1980
Robert Ford is a distinguished poet and a Russian scholar. He is also a legend in the foreign service, in part because he spent so many years in the Soviet Union, the last sixteen of them as Ambassador. When my husband, Geoffrey,…
Pearson and Canada’s Role in Nuclear Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations, 1945-1957
Commentators on postwar Canadian diplomacy have frequently explored their subject through interpretative syntheses that cut broad swaths through the events of the late 1940s and the 1950s. Designed as contributions to the perpetual national debate on Canada’s place in the international system…
The Changing Soviet Union: Implications for Canada and the World; Soviet Economic Policy Under Perestroika; The Soviet High Command 1967-1989: Personalities and Politics; The Rise of Nations in the Soviet Union: American Foreign Policy and the Disintegration of the USSR; The Changing Western Analysis of the Soviet Threat
Writing in The New York Review of Books last November, Peter Reddaway suggested that works of Sovietology published before the failed August coup would now invariably be judged by how far they pointed to, or least allowed for, perestroika’s abrupt dénouement in…
Lester Pearson and the UN Secretary Generalship, 1953
The inclusion of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s name on the official list of candidates to succeed former United Nations Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar during last fall’s Security Council deliberations was not the first time that a Canadian had been formally…
Children of Glasnost: Growing Up Soviet
Recent years have seen a massive outpouring of works that have attempted to describe and account for the revolution that Mikhail Gorbachev unwittingly launched in 1985. Few have successfully met the dizzying challenge of Soviet change. Events there have been moving so…
