Witness to a Collapsing Empire
As diplomats, perhaps one last pilgrimage to the Kremlin or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would have been more appropriate. But we chose to say good-bye to Russia in St. Petersburg at the Piscariovskaya Memorial to the victims of the 900-day siege…
Pictures from a Soviet Exhibition
by Geoffrey Pearson
Alan McLaine
bout de papier is honoured to print below the text of the speaking notes for Mr. Blair Seaborn’s oral eulogy on that sad occasion. Editor
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…
La Pérestroïka : « une affaire canadienne »
C’est ainsi qu’Alexandre Nicholaevitch Iakovlev caractérisait le grand mouvement de révolution tranquille qui a balayé l’Europe de l’Est et l’URSS à la fin des années 80. En effet celui qu’on appelle souvent le « père de la Pérestroïka » s’est trouvé sur…
A Slow Waltz with Madame Gromyko
The music stopped. I was to dance with the woman before me. We fumbled for a moment. One of us would have to be the man! To the strain of sweet violins, I swept her into my arms for a slow waltz.…
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…
The Arctic: Choices for Peace & Security, A Public Inquiry
On occasion, books written on current topics are redundant by the time they arrive on the shelf. Sadly, this is one case where the subject continues to be of major importance in the long term, but the arguments seem quite dated because…
Ralph Edgar Collins
Ralph Collins was born in China. He joined the Department in 1940. An acknowledged expert in Asian affairs, he was a contributing participant in what is often referred to as the golden age of Canadian diplomacy. He served abroad in Chungking, Washington,…
The Howling Cats of Moscow
(Editor’s Note: This article is a chapter from Sidney Freifeld’s book Undiplomatic Notes: Tales from the Canadian Foreign Service, with illustrations by Susan Macartney, published by Hounslow Press, Toronto which has gone into a second printing.)
