bout de papier, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1989), pp. 41–42
Our Man in Moscow — A Diplomat’s
Reflections on the Soviet Union by Robert
A.D. Ford, University of Toronto Press,
1989, 356 pps. $29.95.
by Peter Roberts
If Edmund Spenser is the poet’s poet, Robert Ford must be the diplomat’s diplomat. Here is a book where those of us who have practised the trade at once recognize ourselves, our daily round, our problems with the local government — and with the one in Ottawa
– the weekend summons to the foreign ministry, the ministerial, and prime ministerial, and vice regal visits from Canada, advice accepted by the Department and advice rejected, good times and bad with journalists, the circus atmosphere of the diplomatic corps. For those who have served in communist countries, Robert Ford’s book is like drifting home. He has indeed held the mirror up to the nature of East-West diplomacy in our time.
What is best about this book is that it is not a mere piece of modern history, recounting what happened and analyzing the causes and the results. The account of what happened is illuminated, in most chapters, by Ford’s own thoughts, his recollections of conversations, of people’s behaviour at particular times, of what Russian friends and acquaintances told him about their view of things. The book is most interesting when the material is more or less balanced between the historical record and the author’s comment. That special quality becomes less evident when, as in the last section on Soviet-US relations, Ford was not usually a direct player and is therefore less able to leaven the dough with his own comment. Conversely, the chapters dealing with Canadian-Soviet relations, and the fascinating early chapters about Ford’s two short postings to Moscow in Stalin’s lifetime, are uniquely valuable. Nobody in our foreign service, at home or abroad, had the possibility of watching at first hand, and influencing directly, the slow and tortuous development of the bilateral relationship from the Gouzenko affair almost to the present day.
But not quite to the present day, and that is a problem for this book, though no fault of the author’s. This is a long book, full of detail about the end of the Khrushchev era and the whole of the Brezhnev one. Obviously Ford has been working on it a long time. He was able to add a short post-script about Gorbachev and the electrifying events of the past three years, but clearly did not have time to put his mind to these questions. That fact does not invalidate at all what Ford tells us about Gorbachev’s predecessors. But the extraordinary interest in Soviet matters which every Western newspaper and magazine and book store attests to, stems largely from what Gorbachev has so far done and what he says he would like to do. In a sense, therefore, the book has missed the market, and we can only hope that Ford will expand his postscript into a second book, in which he might reflect on his conclusion that nothing fundamental has changed and nothing is likely to.
Change there has certainly been, so much so that a reader might be forgiven for looking at the 30 years described by Ford as the history of some pre-revolutionary period. Of course it is not so. Ford is right to point out that Gorbachev did not come from outer space, but straight from the apparatus of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and that he brings that baggage with him. People who are still writing from Moscow tell this reviewer that they have not yet found a new heaven and a new earth in their dealings with the Soviet authorities. The 1988 affair of the local staff at our Embassy had a depressingly familiar ring about it. There are no signs of Soviet citizens casting up their caps when Gorbachev comes to see them. Viewed on television, they seem downright angry with him for not getting on with the job faster.
But in another sense, it is a new era we are dealing with. There has been nothing like it since the revolution. Even the years of the New Economic Policy, 1921-28, when there was relative freedom for the arts and for small business, were only years of waiting on the part of Lenin’s heirs, until whichever of them won the power struggle and was able to implement his policies and ideas. The winner happened to be Stalin, but there is no reason to think that life in the ’30’s would have been much more agreeable under Trotsky or even Bukharin. Nor is there any real parallel with the early years of Khrushchev. Khrushchev accomplished a lot: he closed the camps, ended the terror, and let a bit of light into cultural life. But by 1962, he was saying “enough!” in fairly clear tones. Ford describes Khrushche’s exchanges with Voznesensky and some of the other poets. He had even more vitriolic ones with the painters. History will remember him as much for his public humiliation of Pasternak as for his secret speech at the 20th party congress.
Now we have something totally new. What was once the world’s most mendacious newspaper, Pravda, today lives up to its name — to some degree — by containing quite large dollops of truth. Truth about what happened in history as well as about what is happening now. Soviet artists can and do visit the West, alone, and stay with English or Canadian friends in London or Montreal. Unthinkable books are published. Soviet cinematography has gone from being the world’s dreariest to one of the world’s best. The “filling in the blanks” of Soviet history, as the Head of the Moscow History and Archives Institute Yury Afanasiyer calls it, is supremely important, and may be irreversible. Above all, there is the character of the man who is making all this happen. This reviewer had two encounters with him in Moscow, once before he became General Secretary, once after. If you have spent a large part of your life dealing with communist officials, high and low, you think you have become an expert on the species. Inaccessible, ponderous, opaque, wrapped in layers of protective padding that have to be peeled off over months and years of contact. Not so Mikhail Sergeyevich. He is a modern man. Communication is immediate, direct and from the first word substantive. It is new, refreshing, and very promising.
Thus the world Robert Ford describes so well and with such a wealth of fascinating detail is a world which, in this reviewer’s opinion, has changed much and will change more. One of the aspects of it that probably has not however changed much is the relationship between the KGB and foreigners in the Soviet Union, especially foreigners working in embassies, and more especially those working in the embassies of NATO member countries. There is a perennial fascination with these essentially sordid matters, and it is doubtful if anyone writing about foreign experience in the Soviet Union should fail to mention them. And they can be serious. The KGB are unscrupulous in their dealings both with foreigners and their own compatriots; careers have been wrecked and lives ruined, including Canadian ones. Ford mentions by name only the case of John Watkins, who was Canadian ambassador in Moscow from 1954-57, his second tour of duty there. The story of his entrapment by the KGB in a homosexual affair is well known and Ford is right to include it in his account, if he is going to write at all about Canada and the KGB. However, he concludes that the KGB “enrolled him (Watkins) as an active collaborator” So far as this reviewer is aware, there is no evidence to support this very serious accusation. It is generally known that the police and security investigation into Watkins’ tragedy came to the opposite finding.
The KGB chapter (Chapter 7) has other deficiencies — indeed it is regrettable that it was from this chapter, rather than almost any other, that at least one national magazine chose its pre-publication excerpts. One must hope that Canadians now being posted to Moscow will not go there under the impression that the only bug the KGB ever managed to get into the Canadian Embassy was discovered and removed ten years or more ago, and that none has been put there since. One has only to consider that five or six years ago the United States Embassy in Moscow discovered – and Washington published the fact — that all the typewriters in the building had been bugged for an unknown number of years, and that the Russians had been reading every word typed on them. Other Embassies had the same experience. That is to say nothing of what the Americans discovered in their new embassy under construction, despite the presence of an army of security guards. A reasonable assumption, and certainly the only safe working assumption, is that the place is riddled with microphones, or with other means of obtaining what the KGB thinks it needs.
Those are only cautionary words about what is in the end a peripheral part of this book. The book as a whole is instructive, comprehensive, and eminently readable.
Ford’s calm, unhurried English is eminently well suited to this king of memoir. There is often a quiet irony which rings true in an account of a country where situations abound lending themselves to irony. Let us hope that Ford is hard at work on his next book.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1989), pp. 41–42. Read the rest of this issue →
