bout de papier, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1988) — Spring 1988 // Printemps 1988, pp. 39–40
Moscow Despatches “Inside Cold War
Russia”, by John Watkins. Edited with an
Introduction by Dean Beeby and William
Kaplan — Published by J. Lorimer & Co.,
Toronto 1987.
Reviewed by Geoffrey Pearson
John Watkins was a diplomat/intellectual, as many of his colleagues in External Affairs were also. He was more intellectual than diplomat, a master of several languages and deeply versed in the cultures and history of Northern Europe. He was also the best kind of intellectual — open-minded, attentive to the views of others, scrupulous in his recording of events. His friends, of whom there were many, greatly valued his company and benefited from this generosity. His dispatches from Moscow, where he twice served, first as Chargé and then as Ambassador in the period 1948-56, were justly admired by his colleagues. The editors of this collection therefore deserve congratulations for their initiative in bringing some of them to the attention of a wider public.
The editors imply that they gained access to all of Watkins’ despatches and letters from Moscow, which they say were in the hundreds. They here reprint extracts from about fifty of them, some no more than a paragraph. While they do not explain the criteria of selections used, this reader has to assume that, in part, they sought examples of material that would throw light on the revelation, long after Watkins’ death in 1964, that he had been subject to blackmail by the KGB for homosexual activities. Thus about a third of the material relates to conversations with Soviet acquaintances and friends, some of whom later came to be identified (presumably by defectors) as KGB officers, or who, in retrospect, might be regarded as suspicious characters. One wonders whether a different approach, focussed for example on the nature of the USSR after Stalin’s death, would not have led to a better appreciation both of the country and the diplomat.
Nevertheless, there is enough here to give the reader, especially one who has lived in that infuriating and fascinating environment, a sense of the enduring realities beneath the rubbish of cold war clichés. Watkins did more than speak Russian. He actually liked to speak to Russians, and he was a keen observer. Here he is trying to order a meal:
“The … courtyard had a wide gravel walk all around it. A smaller square in the centre was filled with trees and shrubs …. tables were set under the trees and … three or four rather slatternly Russian girls were serving meals in the courtyard from a makeshift kitchen. What would I like to eat, one of them finally got around to enquiring without much interest. Something light, I said, perhaps sliced tomatoes. They had no tomatoes. An omelette perhaps? They had no omelette. What had they? They had only lamb ragout. Then, of course, I would like some ragout and beer. They had no beer. Just tea then. They had no tea. How about coffee? They had no coffee. Well, what had they? They had only lemon sok (a sweetish soft drink flavoured with lemon)”.
Watkins had total recall of conversations, an extremely valuable skill for a diplomat. Indeed, he must have spent hours writing his despatches, some of which took almost as long to read. I doubt if there exists anywhere a more complete portrait of life in the Soviet Union in the mid-fifties. He travelled widely, often alone, and the account here of a trip to Central Asia is of special interest. For one who travelled there 25 years later, it is astonishing how much freedom he was apparently given to mix with the locals. So much for the closed society!
Watkins was also a shrewd judge of the Soviet scene. This is a comment from his last despatch (unfortunately cut to a page by the editors):
…One senses in the Russia of the 20th Congress a consciousness that the Soviet Union is emerging from a long, hard period of struggle and is now realized that a more objective (in the Western sense) approach had to be introduced, and this could hardly be done without dismantling a large part of the intellectual scaffolding erected by Stalin. The degree of objectivity must have been, and must still be, a delicate question for the party leaders to resolve. To appear genuinely objective the attack on Stalin himself must be kept within bounds, and not become a personal vendetta as irrational as the myth itself…”. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!
But this book, and especially the long introduction and the editorial comments which introduce the despatches, is not really about the USSR seen through the eyes of a cultivated observer. It is about what appears in retrospect to be an elaborate attempt by the KGB to enmesh Watkins in a net of blackmail, or, as the editors put it, the despatches “chronicle Watkins’ deepening involvement with two secret police operatives who eventually tried to blackmail him” Their purpose was “to bring him to the Soviet side” “, and “to ensure that Canadian policy accommodated Soviet goals”. ’. The editors quote at length the despatches which re-count Watkins’ meetings with the “two secret police operatives” who, at the time, presented themselves as professors at the Institute of History, but who clearly also had high-level connections, a fact of which Watkins took advantage in making arrange-facing up to the resultant responsibilities as well as opportunities. Amongst the responsibilities is the very real problem of dealing, for the first time in Russian history, with a largely literate population and an increasingly important elite in the bureaucracy, universities, institutes, research organizations and so on who could hardly be expected to pay more than cynical lip-service in the long run to the more obvious distortions and omissions of the official version of the Soviet history. To retain their respect and loyalty the Party no doubt ments for the visit of the Canadian Secretary of State for External Affairs in 1955.
The real identity of the two “professors” was apparently revealed in the early sixties by Soviet defectors to the United States, thus leading to the RCMP interrogation of Watkins in 1964 after his retirement (the editors say that they were not allowed access to “the bulk” of the record of this interrogation and had to rely on the account in John Sawatsky’s book “For Services Rendered”. published in 1982, which they say “has withstood numerous tests of accuracy”, although based on unidentified sources).
They accept what they believe to be the conclusions of the police enquiry: (a) that Watkins was in fact subject to blackmail (although nothing in the despatches they quote provides strong evidence for this conclusion), but (b) that he was never disloyal.
No one need doubt that diplomats in the USSR are often subject to pressures, open or concealed, real or apparent, that can be turned to political advantage. Not all of these, perhaps not even most of them, are due to plots and conspiracies, whatever the spy thrillers may suggest. It is difficult and often impossible in these matters to distinguish between chance and purpose. We shall almost certainly never know for sure what happened to Watkins in Moscow. What we do know is that his reporting on the Soviet scene gave the Canadian government a penetrating insight into events at a critical time there, an accomplishment which his colleagues acknowledged and which will now, one hopes, achieve much wider recognition.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1988) — Spring 1988 // Printemps 1988, pp. 39–40. Read the rest of this issue →
