The Constant Diplomat: Robert Ford in Moscow 9780773576049

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the constant diplomat

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The Constant Diplomat Robert Ford in Moscow c ha rles a . ruud

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston · London · Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2009 isbn-978-0-7735-3585-5 Legal deposit third quarter 2009 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the J.B. Smallman Publication Fund, Faculty of Social Science, the University of Western Ontario. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Ruud, Charles A., 1933The constant diplomat: Robert Ford in Moscow/Charles A. Ruud. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-3585-5 1. Ford, R. A. D., 1915-1998. 2. Canada – Foreign relations – Soviet Union. 3. Soviet Union – Foreign relations – Canada. 4. Soviet Union – History – 1953-1985. 5. Ambassadors – Canada – Biography. i. Title. fc626.f66r88 2009

327.710092

Typeset in New Baskerville 10.5/13 by Infoscan Collette, Quebec City

c2009-901994-9

Contents

Preface

vii

Acknowledgments xii Illustrations xiii Map: Soviet Sites Visited by Robert Ford xix 1 The Ambassador in Training

3

2 Thereza and Encounters with Russia 17 3 Politics under Khrushchev

35

4 Brezhnev, the Flawed Leader

54

5 The Soviets under Threat 77 6 Trudeau’s Opening

94

7 Trudeau in Moscow 109 8 Trudeau after the Peak 124 9 Soviet Meetings 141 10 The Decline of the ussr

155

11 The Soviet Embassy, Ottawa 12 Final Things

187

13 A Retrospective Look

207

173

vi

Contents

appendices a A Soviet Province 213 b Early Travels with Ford, 1952–1953 c Travels with Ford, 1954–1972

219

235

d Travels with the Ambassador, 1978–1979 Notes

267

Bibliography 295 Index

299

253

Preface

Some background will explain the origins of this book. Ambassador Robert Ford had long intended to write a history of the Soviet Union from the perspective of a diplomat who had spent two decades in Moscow, mainly during the years of Leonid Brezhnev. Other projects occupied him following his retirement from the Department of External Affairs, but he reached an agreement with historian Robert Bothwell in the mid-1980s to publish a collection of his diplomatic dispatches to the department. When Bothwell turned instead to appraising Canadian foreign policy during the Trudeau years with Jack Granatstein (their work is listed in this book’s bibliography), Ford wrote in March 1989 to the president of the University of Western Ontario, George Pedersen, to ask if anyone on the faculty might undertake the project. As a man primed to explore opportunities, Ford sensibly approached the head of a university he had attended in the city where he grew up as the son of the editor/publisher of the local newspaper. Among his continuing ties to London, Ontario, he had donated several paintings to its Regional Art Gallery. When word of Ford’s query reached me, a professor of history specializing in Russia, I examined Ford’s dispatches and saw a book different from the one he had in mind. Although the observations and recommendations he had dispatched to Ottawa on a regular basis over many years served to further Canadian diplomacy and foreign policy, his overall assessment was that the Soviet Union – even when it appeared its most powerful – was in political, social, and moral decline. This prescient assessment bore on world history. Here was my theme.

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A man of sharp and clear-headed judgments, Ford expressed this position from the beginning of his involvement with Russia, though experts elsewhere saw the ussr as a world power with growing capability and the will to spread Communism and its authority far beyond its borders. In Ford’s view, on the contrary, only the Soviet military had managed to achieve effective organizational success, and much of that was expended on cowing the Soviet peoples and suppressing client states. He told Ottawa that the Soviet regime would never attain world dominance. He showed how, even at times of seeming advances, the Soviets made decisions that vitiated what they had achieved. Cumulatively, over his twenty years in Moscow, Ford accurately summed up the ussr as a prime historical example of a “failed state.” He showed why Soviet leaders could not see, let alone solve, burgeoning domestic problems. On one occasion he cited approvingly the views of Peter Chaadaev, the Russian intellectual of the first half of the nineteenth century, who scandalized government and society by describing Russia as a physical giant but a cultural and spiritual dwarf who had failed to contribute a single new idea to humanity. Although the Soviets appeared a fearsome force to many, especially during their military buildup of the 1970s, Ford held that the reasons for this buildup were never in support of an effort to impose Communism on the world. Powerful forces constrained them in the use of their armaments. He saw in the behaviour of the leadership poor judgment, rooted in Russian psychology and Marxist ideology, and the distortions and misunderstandings of thinking because of isolation from the rest of the world. The ussr, according to Ford, could not exist without lying and self-deception. The melding of Russian nationalism and Marxist ideology had created a lethal blend that would never win the support of its own people, much less other peoples. By direct contact with Russians and a close study of Russian and Soviet history, Ford was able to explain Soviet actions that often seemed baffling to the West. To him, the nation behind the “Iron Curtain” was not a “riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma.”1 The fact that history has proved Ford correct is the main point of this book. Because his judgments directly influenced Canadian foreign policy toward the Soviet Union while he was ambassador, Canada, as a member of the Western Alliance, formulated and practised a wise policy toward the ussr even as it pursued two major

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objectives: wide recognition of a distinct Canadian national identity and grain sales to the Russians. But there is also the man behind the insightful dispatches, along with the woman behind the man. Ford first mastered the discipline of history as a student at the University of Western Ontario, and then as a graduate student at Cornell University, who admired the work of Carl Becker and wrote an ma thesis under his supervision. His own gift for words engaged him in poetry from his early years on through his professional ones. Because he learned languages easily, he spoke fluent French on leaving high school, studied German extensively at the same time and Russian at Cornell – after which, while on diplomatic assignment, he added Portugese, a good deal of Serbo-Croatian, and Spanish. He made close friendships with many Russians, including poets and writers. He travelled widely in the ussr and entered deeply into its culture. He was able to demystify the Russians because he knew them so well. His wide experience in Russia was largely because his wife, Maria Thereza Gomes Ford, believed that his affliction with a progressively debilitating illness made it essential that he go outside the embassy to take the pulse of others, rather than taking his own pulse. She was right, and Robert Ford lived long and productively, mainly because of her. To pursue what became my historical-biographical subject, I read diplomatic dispatches made available to me in the Historical Section of the Department of External Affairs and the National Archives of Canada (now Library and Archives Canada) plus, on the Soviet side, documents by staff members in the Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Archive of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the ussr, both in Moscow. I talked to Russians in Moscow who knew Ford there. Andrei Voznesensky and his wife Zoya Boguslavskaya shared their reminiscences, as did Yevgeny Yevtushenko, V. Katanyan, G. Arbatov, and General Mil’shtein. I read the memoir in manuscript by Thereza Ford that is now in Library and Archives Canada. I had two meetings with Ford at his home LaPoivrière in France, just outside Vichy, the first in May 1990 and the second in late May/early June 1994. At the first meeting, Ford was still in his wheelchair and came to the table for lunch. When I saw him again in 1994, a stroke had left him able to move only three fingers of his left hand, and he could not leave his bed without assistance. The backs of all books were torn off for him so that after reading a page

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he could flick it onto the floor. His speech was somewhat slurred and a little slower than the first time I saw him, but I put questions to him and recorded several hours of interviews over four days. These interviews proved to be among the most valuable of my sources. Ford spent a total of twenty years in Moscow – the longest, sixteen years, as ambassador (1964–80), from the last months of Khrushchev’s rule to almost the end of the Brezhnev era. His perspective on the ussr was extraordinarily broad; he approached the subject of the Russians as both a generalist and a specialist. The difference between Ford’s approach to assessing the ussr and that of specialized scholars was recognized by William Bundy, the editor of Foreign Affairs, who found Ford’s assessments of developments in the Soviet Union a necessary antidote to the narrowly focused conventional academic studies. The breadth of Ford’s political views was his most outstanding characteristic as an expert on Russia. Ford himself long campaigned for a different level of political analysis in the Department of External Affairs. He wrote in 1967 to J.H. Taylor, under-secretary of state for external affairs, “I have been disturbed, as I am sure you have, at the extent to which management skills have been supplanting expertise in foreign affairs and original thinking as major qualifications for advancement in the Foreign Service.”2 If Ford’s recommendations had been followed, there would be more poets and humanists – all widely read – among the diplomats in Ottawa. In writing about Ford, I wanted to preserve his “voice,” his style of analysis and commentary, and I therefore quote extensively from his dispatches, the essays that supplemented them, and my interviews with him. In reporting to External, Ford kept his formal and informal reports distinct, but they complement one another. The first deal with political issues – “official” documents – and the second were often impressionistic and dealt with Soviet life, the arts, and personal contacts. There are, in addition, sixteen accounts of the travels of Robert and Thereza Ford, mainly around the Soviet Union but also while travelling in and out of the country to and from Europe and the Far East. I have arranged them in chronological order and quoted segments from each of them to give the reader a sample from the writings of a keen-eyed travel writer who enhanced his ability to serve as an effective ambassador by going on the road in a country where the roads were often very bad. The travel accounts appear in three of the appendices at the close of my account.

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In lightly editing Ford’s dispatches to Ottawa, I have made some changes without drawing them to the reader’s attention. Ford in his diplomatic dispatches often abbreviated words, left out articles, and used the word “not” twice to make certain that the reader knew it was there. I have eliminated these idiosyncracies. I have also used a standard form of transliteration from the Russian rather than Ford’s older form. A final note: the typescripts and tapes of my interviews with Robert Ford are on deposit at the Archive and Research Collections Centre, Weldon Library, University of Western Ontario.

Acknowledgments

I wish to recognize the financial assistance for this project granted from the research funds of the Faculty of Social Science, University of Western Ontario. I thank the administration, faculty, and staff of Willamette University. They provided a congenial place to work on campus in the Mark O. Hatfield Library during the 2004–05 year. I would like to single out for special thanks Dr M. Lee Pelton, president of Willamette University, and Dr Bill Duvall, chair, Department of History. Special thanks for help and encouragement also go to John Hilliker, Hector MacKenzie, and Carole Jerome. The photographs were provided through the courtesy of the Robert A.D. Ford Archive at South Secondary School, London, Ontario, and its curator Pete Telford.

Robert and his sister May. He remembered their ages as ten and twelve but did not recall where the photo was taken (courtesy of South Secondary School, London, Ontario [sss])

At Port Bruce circa 1929, Robert Ford and friends on holiday: (left to right, back row) Jim Finlayson, Robert Ford, Jim Taylor, Jack Cochrane; (front row) Sammy Jones, Ron O’Keel (sss)

There are no identifying notes or dates on this photo of young Robert Ford (sss)

The Ford family home in London, Ontario, not far from South Secondary School, where Ford graduated (sss)

Ford and Thereza receive the “Freedom of the City” award from Mayor Gordon Stronach of London, Ontario, in 1965 (sss)

Ford, meeting with gallery director Nancy Poole in 1982, when he donated part of his private collection of Russian paintings to the London Regional Art Gallery (sss)

Visiting Ford in France in April 1992 were University of Western Ontario Chancellor and Mrs Claude Penza (sss)

The twelfth-century chateau near Vichy, France, where the Fords retired after leaving the ussr in 1980 (photo by Nora Egener, sss)

The carriage house at La Poivrière where Ford spent his last years (sss)

Robert Ford in 1994, confined to bed, at the time of his interviews with the author (sss)

Soviet Sites Visited by Robert Ford

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1 The Ambassador in Training

robert ford served in the Canadian diplomatic service, including an unusual sixteen-year period as ambassador to the Soviet Union that matched closely the years of power of Leonid Brezhnev (1964– 82). Ford assumed the Moscow ambassadorship in 1964 and retired in 1980. Although increasingly disabled physically because of a rare disease, he became an outstanding diplomat in a difficult part of the world. Ford was born in Ottawa on 8 January 1915 and died at the age of eighty-three on 12 April 1998 at his retirement home in St SylvestrePragolin near Vichy, France, in a carriage house near the chateau where he had lived with his wife Thereza until her death in 1982. Ford moved into the carriage house because it could be remodelled to accommodate the muscular disease that had afflicted him while a university student. During the last years of his life, immobilized and suffering the effects of a stroke, he was cared for by a Portugese family, the Estevés. Ford understood that he would never be able to endure the rigours of the Canadian winter and that as time passed, he would be unable to travel to his native country. The salubrious climate of central France appealed to him. And he determined to spend much of his time reading poetry. Ford was the third son of Arthur Ford, a newspaperman who became editor of the London Free Press. Ford hardly knew his mother, Lavinia Scott Ford, an American, who died at thirty-four of influenza in 1917, just after the birth of his sister, when he was only two. She was descended from General Winfield Scott, a hero of the revolutionary war against England. Her father was an army officer, Captain Winfield Scott. Ford recalled, “Suddenly he was converted to saving

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the world, so he became a chaplain in the army and was posted to Minnesota. And after a few years of that, he became so devoted to spreading the gospel, that he left the army and became a circuit rider. And my mother was born in Minnesota.” Lavinia Scott had a fine voice and attended the conservatory in Winnipeg, where she met Ford’s father. Ford said later that he knew nothing about his American relatives. After his mother died, his father cut off all contact with her family, “for whatever reason I could never figure out.” Ford would not say more, but it seems almost certain that he had some idea of the reasons for this family estrangement. On his father’s side, Ford was descended from English stock and was a sixth-generation Canadian. His great-great-grandfather was Joseph Ford, born in England in 1808, who emigrated to Peterborough in 1832, where for a time he operated a ferry that crossed the Otonabee River until it was replaced by a bridge. Joseph Ford was, according to the Peterborough Review, a devoted churchman and a member of the Conservative Party. He also steadfastly stood for “temperance” at a time “when it meant something and cost something to be a temperance advocate.”1 Ford recalled, “My father’s family on my paternal grandfather’s side came to Canada at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. He was a lieutenant in Wellington’s army and was given about 10,000 acres, which seemed like a huge amount of land, for a little country like England, and it was in Peterborough County, and when he reached it, it turned out to be mostly rock and forest. He ended up being one of the founders of Peterborough … His successors moved to western Ontario and settled in Goderich. My maternal grandmother’s side were United Empire Loyalists and they came from Princeton, New Jersey, which was a monarchist stronghold. And they were simply forced to flee with no more than they could carry. They settled in Port Colborne, Ontario, and eventually they spread out around Ontario.”2 Ford’s father, Arthur R., was the son of a United Church minister, the Rev. James E. Ford. After earning a ba from the University of Toronto, he worked for the Stratford Beacon Herald, then with the Ottawa Journal and a financial paper in New York, followed by the Winnipeg Telegram and the Winnipeg Tribune. He then reported from the press gallery of Parliament for ten years, sending dispatches to the Telegram, the Toronto News, and the Times of London.3 Arthur R. Ford was working in Ottawa at the time of his wife’s death and moved to London, Ontario, in the fall of 1920 with his

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four children to raise. Robert and his sister May were much younger than their two elder brothers, Gordon and Kenneth, and his father put them into the care of governesses while he concentrated on editing the Free Press, the daily newspaper in London. Ford recalled later, “My contact with my father was rather remote.” He explained, “We spent as much time as possible with my grandparents in Goderich … They were marvellous and filled that gap in affection.” He became “extremely fond” of Goderich and reflected his feelings later in his poetry.4 Although mainly absent, his father exhorted his children to read: “He had a very large library for that time and he insisted on our reading the classics. And when I refused to read Nicholas Nickleby and instead started to read some modern thing, he became very angry. That I remember very clearly.”5 Arthur R. Ford, as editor of the local daily, quickly became one of London’s prominent citizens and engaged in a wide variety of public, political, and philanthropic activities. He headed the Ontario Cancer Treatment and Research Foundation and the London branch of the United Nations – only one indication of his intense interest in international affairs. He himself went to the inauguration of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945 and reported back to the Free Press on the launching of the international body. In the meantime, he rose to leadership positions in the Western Fair Association of London and was a key figure in the fair’s recovery from the Second World War. He first appears in the records as an associate member of the fair’s board in 1932 as an ex officio representative from the Canadian Club. He was not yet an invited member of a board that generally kept its own counsel and invited into its ranks influential, congenial, and well-off citizens from the community, but within several years Ford had become a full member. Young Robert grew up in a household where newspaper work, public affairs, community service, Conservative politics, and reading were dominant interests. The family could not have been described as warm, but it gave him a window on a wider world of ideas and politics as realms worthy of limitless attention. Robert Ford’s personal austerity, reserve, studiousness, and interest in public affairs developed in a motherless home where there was a busy and absent father who, when present, talked of public affairs and checked on the reading of his children. Robert was also encouraged to develop the artistic legacy of his mother: “I have an honorable mention from the Conservatory of Music for piano playing. I started writing poetry

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at a young age. I was fascinated by literature, but it was history that really gripped me.”6 Once through Tecumseh Primary School, Ford attended South Secondary School in London, Ontario: “I went to South … and studied French and Latin my first year as was required from everybody. Then, you had a choice of a third language, either Greek or German. Both my elder brothers had taken Greek and I refused, to the great irritation of my father. I said it was not absolutely necessary. I couldn’t see the point of it. Latin, yes, it is the basis of our language, but German I thought would be useful and I was attracted to the challenge of learning it. And I had four years of German in high school and four years in university, and when I went to take them, the German exams were pie for me.” Ford entered the University of Western Ontario, and at the age of nineteen he learned that he had contracted a rare and incurable muscular disease: “My second year at university I was in the cotc [Canadian Officers’ Training Corps], and I realized suddenly that I was having difficulty getting into a line position and lifting a rifle. The doctors gave me a year to live … So I was taken out of university and went to live on the farm of one of my aunts whose husband had been in the war and was badly shell-shocked and could really do nothing more than farm, on the old family farm near Goderich. So I spent a year there, and as soon as I reached the farm the progression of the illness stopped.” He later described his illness in this way: “I had an attack of an extremely rare form of muscular atrophy. The name in French is something like amyotrophie progressive musculaire de l’épine (type Cugurman Wassermann). All the specialists were absolutely fascinated by me because I was still alive after I had been given a year to live. I was supposed to have died at twenty and nothing happened. It had progressed for a while and then stopped.”7 In fact, the progress of the disease was very slow, and Ford lived with it for the rest of his life. His friend the publisher William Heine described the illness in this way: “The condition unexpectedly stabilized and turned into a form of muscular spinal atrophy, which is not fatal but affects nearly all the muscles.”8 The disease became a drag on Ford’s physical being, but it also stimulated his mental and psychological powers. He said later that his postings in Colombia, Yugoslavia, and Egypt (where he served during his forties) “were challenging and often dangerous”: “I think that the challenge gave me impetus to write. That’s why I wrote the

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poem called ‘The Wound and the Bow’ which is after the thesis of Philoctetes. That is, you have to be wounded to release the internal energy that you have. If you live comfortably, without any challenge, without any need to get out and fight, the tendency is just to sit there and reflect. And to reflect on what?”9 Unquestionably, Ford saw his illness as a spur to act. After a year on the farm, Ford returned to his classes and in 1938 earned an honours degree in English and history. His academic performance was stellar. He maintained first-class standing in his final year at Western in two English and four history courses.10 Ford recalled that he received a fine classical education at Western: “I got my ma at Cornell very quickly, in one year, in fact I was the only one in about ten years who got an ma in one year. And that was because, quite frankly, I had such a good preparation at Western.” Planning to focus on the history of France, he had proceeded to Cornell to work under Carl Becker. Ford considered Becker’s The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers to be “one of the classics” and Becker himself “one of the most eloquent of American historians.” He wrote an ma dissertation under Becker’s supervision, “AntiMilitarism in France from Sedan to the Dreyfus Case: A Study in the Psychology of an Era,” and received his ma degree in history in 1940. Ford was already intrigued by a major Becker thesis that ascribed to unanalyzed “climates of opinion” of the past enormous influence on current human affairs. Later, he applied this idea effectively to his assessments of Soviet political developments. Before commencing his ma work at Cornell, Ford had spent four months as a reporter for the Montreal Gazette, a position for which he qualified because of his fluent French. He had learned the language at his father’s urging and spent two summers at the University of Western Ontario’s French-language immersion school at TroisPistoles, Quebec. As a reporter, Ford learned another lesson that held him in good stead as a diplomat: “I quickly understood that the basic thing was to get the core of the story in the first paragraph and then develop it later on. And this I applied to the writing of [diplomatic] telegrams. People simply did not have time to read a ten-page telegram to find out what the conclusions were.”11 At Cornell, while working on his ma, Ford met an instructor, Philip Mosely, an expert on the Soviet Union, who told him that he was “wasting his time” with French history and that Russian studies held great promise for a future career. Ford shifted direction, studied

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Russian for a year at Cornell, “got hooked,” as he put it, and his interests turned to Russia, the Soviet Union, and diplomatic work. He abandoned his doctoral studies, having qualified for the Department of External Affairs by doing well on the qualifying examinations.12 His father had suggested the career move. He was offered an appointment in 1940. “They said they needed me and that I was the only person outside of [George] Ignatieff,13 who could not be sent to Russia, of course, who knew Russian. And as far as I could make out, I was the only English Canadian who knew French that I could think of.”14 External was just beginning to recruit future diplomats who knew French and were broadly educated. Ford found it amusing that this enticement to enter External did not lead him directly to Moscow at all; he was sent to Windsor, Ontario, to head the passport office and issue passports to Canadians who were crossing the border to work in Detroit. But the posting had other advantages. An aunt living in Windsor took him across the river to Detroit. “My first exposure to great music was the Detroit Symphony at that time. I recall one concert with Rubinstein really thrilled me. She took me backstage to introduce me to Rubinstein and she said I spoke Russian. And he said, ‘Well, that is not my language, it is Polish. But unfortunately I left Poland because the Russians were there and naturally I had to learn some Russian, and so my Russian was very primitive.’ But he was quite amused by this and said to keep it up, but don’t forget Poland as well.”15 Windsor, Ford said, was his only preparation for his diplomatic career. External never provided any preparation at all, not even much later when Ford was sent to Russia. And when in the early 1960s he went to Egypt and was also credited to Sudan, he found he had to prepare himself for the post. “I was going to be accredited to the Sudan – the first Canadian ambassador. Every time an ambassador departed, he is given a country book, which gives the basic facts and our interest in the country and what the ambassador’s relationship should be. When I went to Egypt, I said, ‘I’ve got the Egypt book but I haven’t received any country book about the Sudan.’ The answer came back: ‘You are the only Canadian who ever mentioned the Sudan, so you write your own country book.’” He also learned, when External appointed him ambassador to Moscow in 1964, that he had a great deal of leeway in fulfilling the duties: “It was much the same thing. They said, ‘Forget about a country book. You know

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what our aims are. You will get instructions from time to time. But also tell us what you think we should be doing.’”16 His posting after Windsor was an extended four-year stint in Brazil (1940–44), where he learned fluent Portugese and “acceptable” Spanish. He remarked that he had already studied Russian, had eight years of German, “and of course I was sent to Brazil, which is the kind of bureaucratic logic that takes place everywhere in the world.” While deep in the Brazilian interior, Ford learned that he had been appointed to the wartime embassy in Kuibishev, the temporary capital of the ussr, but his ambassador refused him permission to accept the appointment. Brazil, meanwhile, likely eased the way for the reserved Ford to propose marriage later to a Brazilian: “I was overwhelmed by its exuberance and the gaiety of Rio, and in fact the whole country.” He especially admired the “open-heartedness” of the Brazilians, “who are very different from the Spanish Americans – who are very introverted in many ways. The latter are a murderous kind of people … but the Brazilians were very different. I was constantly in love. Needless to say, at a young age. And that helped me to learn the language.”17 Finally, after completing his assignment in Brazil, Ford thought that he was on his way to Russia: “After coming from Brazil and getting ready to go to Moscow, I thought it was to be my next posting in 1945. I just had one day with my elder brother, who had just been demobilized. He was a lieutenant commander in the navy and second officer on the destroyer Iroquois. He said to me, ‘You think that you will be the first one to Russia, but I was there several times before you.’ I said, ‘Oh, yes, you must have been a member of the convoy group that escorted supply ships to Murmansk.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s true, and I will never go back to Russia. We had to contend with the sea and with the German submarines coming out of the Norwegian fjords. We found the Russians, and because we had many wounded we asked if they were able to take care of them. And they said that they would. But they would not let us land at Murmansk, which is a considerable port, because, they said, it was forbidden to foreigners. And so they put us ashore at a little place called Bulyano, where the Canadians, some of them quite badly wounded, were treated practically like German spies. They were given a minimum of treatment and no welcome whatsoever. And I will never go back to that place again.’”18

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Ford was delayed in getting to the restored Soviet capital because of cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko defected from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa with documents revealing the existence of a Soviet spy ring in Canada to steal atomic secrets. External, fearing retaliation against Canadian diplomatic personnel, instead sent Ford to London in January 1946 to attend the first General Assembly of the United Nations, and he “stayed on in the Canadian High Commission while waiting to see whether relations with the Soviet Union would be severed.”19 In London, Ford found his old friend and political mentor Paul Martin (senior) from Windsor, who immediately put him to work. “He said that I should be assigned to his committee, which is not what I would have preferred. It was the social affairs and health affairs committee. However, as a good trooper, I did my best. Paul Martin spent half his time on the telephone … mending his political fences back in Canada. I remember him saying to me one day, ‘I have to give a speech in a cinema in Glasgow next Sunday. Write me a speech.’ I said, ‘A speech in a cinema? On a Sunday?’ He said, ‘Yes, the cinema houses are closed on Sundays, but they have educational programs there.’ I said ‘What should I write about?’ ‘Anything.’”20 The enforced delay in Ford’s posting had one great compensation: “At the opening reception in the House of Lords given by Clement Attlee to the delegates to the General Assembly, I overheard an attractive member of the Brazilian delegation making amusing remarks about the Canadians. I could not resist the temptation of turning and saying in Portuguese that the latter was not a secret language. This led inevitably to marriage.”21 They were married within months in New York and went together to Moscow in December 1946. Maria Thereza Gomes Ford resigned from the Brazilian diplomatic service and became a Canadian citizen. Ford and his wife were to spend all but a few years of their married life in Moscow. As their Moscow friend Zoya Boguslavskaya, the writer, later pointed out, Russia was the only “country they had in common.”22 His first assignment to Moscow began in December 1946 as second secretary but ended about a year later in 1947 because relations remained poor. Ford recalled that “the councillor had been withdrawn. I had been promoted to first secretary … there were only two of us left: myself and the military attaché. And suddenly I became, at a very junior age, chargé d’affaires. I was really too junior to occupy the post. So after a year I was brought back to London.”23 Ford was

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back in Moscow from 1951 to 1954 as chargé d’affaires. Then followed his ambassadorships to Colombia, 1957–58; Yugoslavia, 1959–61 (where he learned “passable” Serbo-Croatian); Egypt, 1961–63; and Moscow, 1964–80. After leaving Russia, he was special adviser on East-West relations to the Government of Canada, 1980– 85, and was a member of the Independent Commission on Security and Disarmament, established by Olof Palme, the prime minister of Sweden. The work on the Palme Commission was Ford’s last official contact with Soviet representatives. Illness was a constant in Ford’s career; he could never escape from it. In July 1962, when Ford was ambassador to Cairo, Norman Robertson24 of the Department of External Affairs proposed his return to Ottawa as an assistant under-secretary, but Ford was unwilling: “I explained to him at that time how very difficult it would be for me because of the condition of my legs.” Ford’s illness and his growing expertise were to keep him in Moscow when the normal ambassadorial rotation would have moved him elsewhere. After he had been in Moscow for a couple of years, there were again attempts by Ford’s supervisors at External to find another posting for him, one being a return to Ottawa in “an area of responsibility which would draw on your knowledge, experience, and perspective.” Ford fended off such efforts, typically responding, as in 1965, that it would be “physically too hard for me and I could not serve the Department as fully and usefully as in Moscow.” Sometime, he reflected, he might want to consider leaving Moscow just to get out of a frustrating milieu. He considered the Rome post in 1968, but “Marcel Cadieux and I decided against Rome,” though he would have liked London if that post opened up, as seemed possible.25 He wrote External in 1970 that he could not see himself “in a nonpolitical or semi-political post or one so far removed from the mainstream that my long experience in European affairs could not be fully exploited.” He said, “My ambition has always been to go to Paris as the first English-Canadian ambassador to France.” But Ford was in no hurry to move: “I should stress that I am in no way desperate, although at times dealing with the Byzantine mentality of these people drives one halfway up the wall.” He had already decided that his physical disability ruled out a return to Canada. As he regretfully wrote, “Ottawa has always attracted me, but I simply cannot cope unaided with the difficulties of the Ottawa winters.” At the same time, he kept in mind that Moscow did not require a

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demanding social schedule: “I know my limitations and must conform to them.” The subject of a move came up again in early 1971. Ford had by then concluded, perhaps because of his advancing illness, that “even in the improbable event that I was chosen for London, I could make a less useful contribution to the Department there than in Moscow. I can see that there is a very heavy ceremonial and social component in the London job which would weigh heavily on me.”26 External informed him in February that there was “no disposition whatever to move you before you want to go” or “to send you anywhere you feel would be unsuitable.”27 He now felt that Paris would be a burden, “should it ever become available.” He preferred to stay in Moscow, “and if ever a change becomes imperative,” he told External, “I could always let you know and work out some solution which might not necessarily mean the most important posts.”28 He could never set aside his physical disability and the restrictions that it imposed. In Moscow, Ford’s illness again became active. He recalled, “It started again, which was curious. I used a cane, and it was getting a little worse because of age as well.”29 In 1973 he wrote to his friend the playwright Lillian Hellman that there had been “several rumors … about a transfer for me but I continue to be here and am happy enough.” The Fords had just “acquired an apartment in Paris to get out of here from time to time.”30 Ford had received a letter from External pointing out that he had been in Moscow ten years and should consider a return to Ottawa: “The next place where you will be needed most is right here in the Under-Secretarial row with an area of responsibility which would draw on your knowledge, experience and perspective.” A.E. Ritchie, an under-secretary, said the new Pearson Building for the Department (opening in 1973) would erase physical problems for Ford, who replied, “I went through an agonizing time in 1965 when Marcel wished me to come back to the Under-Secretary row. We both came to the conclusion that it would “be physically too hard and frustrating for me.” He pointed out that both the Swedish ambassador Gunnar Jarring and the Italian ambassador Frederico Sensi had also been in Moscow since 1964. He concluded, “I am flattered that, in spite of my handicap, you invited me to join with you, but believe me I know it would not work.31 He turned down a unesco posting in 1976 and wrote to External, “The timing would be wrong for me … Some six months ago I started a new treatment developed by Soviet medical specialists

The Ambassador in Training

13

which appears to be doing me a lot of good. To be effective, it must go on over a period of about two years. I would really be most reluctant to have to forgo it, and I hope it will be possible to leave me in Moscow until the completion of the treatment which, so far as I know, is at present unavailable anyplace else. This would mean a few months longer in Moscow than we earlier tentatively agreed on.”32 External was quick to approve Ford’s request, as the undersecretary of state Basil Robinson wrote in February: “I was delighted to learn that you have found a new and effective medical treatment in Moscow. In the circumstances, I have no difficulty in acceding to your request that we drop the idea of your leaving Moscow this coming summer.” Robinson underscored that “when you are available for reassignment in 1977 the mission to unesco will not be open” but understood that Ford had no interest in it.33 Without question, his physical limitations had figured into Ford’s extended stay in the ussr, where he could more readily set his own pace in an out-of-the-way capital not known for its social whirl or tourist appeal. But there is also no question that Ford stayed so long in place mainly because he proved so effective and well suited for Moscow as an ambassador. In its 1977–78 appraisal, External wrote of Ford: “Knowledge and abilities: exceptional: he is by far the most experienced and knowledgeable Canadian, inside or outside the government, in Soviet affairs … is by common consent one of the leading Western experts in the field.”34 He had come to hold a “unique place … among the Western experts on Soviet affairs.” External praised Ford for his “managerial effectiveness” and said that the “flow of reporting, analysis, comment and advice from Moscow is impressive year in and year out.” At the same time, the report noted that the embassy had in the course of the year the “worst instance of Soviet espionage in Canada in a generation.” The Foreign Service Officer Appraisal Report of 1978–79 stated, “Ambassador Ford is a world authority on Soviet affairs … His advice on Soviet-Canadian relations is taken at the highest levels of government.”35 The report took into account the special problems of the Moscow post: “Managing the Embassy is of course complicated by Soviet-made difficulties and restrictions. Morale is forever a problem … where everything including trade is part of policy.” It commented: “Ambassador Ford has taken great pains to ensure proper level of coordination of program activities and developed a highly centralized information flow system.” Within the embassy, 15 officers of

14

The Constant Diplomat

four departments reported directly to Ford: External Affairs (7); Industry, Trade and Commerce (4); National Defence (3); and ceic (1) [intelligence]. In addition, there were 30 Canadian employees and 32 locally hired support staff. Finally, a performance appraisal by External dated 21 December 1979, on the eve of Ford’s retirement, included especially warm words: “Your performance was clearly and consistently superior and exceeded the standards normally expected of our heads of posts.”36 Ford’s ability to deal with his illness made a profound impression among the intelligentsia in Moscow. Soviet intellectuals accepted him not because he was a diplomat but because he was a poet. Ford says, “I had already in 1956 published my first book of poetry. I had published quite a few poems in American and Canadian poetry magazines already, but this one was my first book, A Window on the North. It also contained a number of translations of Esenin, who I liked very much. He reminded me of a Russian Robert Frost. Then a few of the first poems that had appeared in Znamia (Banner) by Pasternak, the poems of Dr. Zhivago. I think I was the first person to translate them, certainly. This served as an entrée, to start with, in Russia, because when I attempted to get in touch with the literati, the Russians realized that I wasn’t just being curious and trying to use them as a source of political information, that I had a genuine interest in Russian poetry.” Another Ford characteristic appealed deeply to Russian writers: his suffering. Andrei Voznesensky, the Russian writer and friend of Ford’s, recalls of that era, “It seemed to all of us that we lived very badly and, at the same time, we saw this man with an ailment that was progressing inevitably, which he treated as irrelevant, as his Christian duty. And there in the midst of us was this quiet, steadfast man.”37 Ford’s perspective on developments in the ussr, which won him widespread respect, was made keener by his extensive connections with the Soviet intelligentsia and, through them, access to news and opinion from inside Russian society. These contacts were an innovation in the practice of diplomacy. He said later, “The cultural field … was not official at all. I always told the Department about all the contacts with the artists and so on to give them an idea of what life outside the political sphere was like. And also it was closely interrelated to the persecution of dissidents and human rights and everything else in which Ottawa was very interested.”38

The Ambassador in Training

15

Ford gained a reputation for his insights into the politics and culture of the ussr among other diplomats as well. Thomas Watson, Jr, the former chairman of ibm, who became US ambassador to Moscow, talked with Ford often as a fellow diplomat, and they became good friends. Other US ambassadors in Moscow whom Ford knew well were George Kennan, Tommy Thompson, and Foy Kohler. Another American, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a State Department specialist on the ussr, arranged an invitation to Washington because, he said, he knew no one “who knows more and thinks more about the ussr.” Ford went to the State Department in Washington to brief George Shultz, the US secretary of state, on 10 September 1982.39 Others at the meeting were Kenneth Dan, Lawrence Eagleburger, and Walter Stoessel. Ford reported that Shultz told him “he had not read all of my paper but had gone through it and, by his questions, showed he had retained the main points.” Ford concluded that the secretary of state was mainly interested in information, “and if anything he would incline to a somewhat less rigid attitude than that of the White House staff. But he certainly was not giving anything away.”40 At the core of Ford’s ability to analyze developments in Russia were his sharp assessments of Russian character. He frequently reminded his political masters in Ottawa, along with the Americans, of a powerful force behind Soviet diplomacy: “the almost psychopathic feeling of inferiority of Russians” and their readiness to hear insults even when none were intended.41 Another Russian characteristic seemed to be related to the first, and by grasping it Ford (and Thereza) lived more productively in Moscow. “The Russians,” he said, “secretly admire someone who stands up to them. For example [Canadian] ministers or others were appalled by the fact that I simply said ‘no’ to the Russians … They admired me and my wife for being tough. Many diplomats thought they had to play along with the Russians. They pretended to sympathize with them and were afraid of offending them. This was not the way to handle the Russians. I very quickly realized that.”42 Some of these more forthright and undiplomatic judgments he developed only in conversations and correspondence with friends and colleagues, but all of his views were expressed with a literary economy that made them readable. Ford attributed to his poetic side much of his capacity to make political assessments. “I have found throughout my career that the

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The Constant Diplomat

arts in general, and poetry in particular, have been a considerable help in this task, especially in overcoming the obstacle of language. By combining poetry with the practical art of diplomacy, which is what I have tried to do, the task of communicating successfully is half won.” Further, “poetry has helped to sharpen my political perceptions.” This self-appraisal comes from a rationalist scholar in the Becker tradition who saw words as keys to the psychology of the speaker and to the climate of opinion that had influenced it.43 Ford had always read poetry, and he began to publish his own works during his diplomatic career. Altogether he published seven books of poems and translations of poems from the Russian. As well, “he liked to talk about poetry,” Boguslavskaya recalled. She added, “When Ford first turned to Soviet poetry it was very important because at that time very few Soviet poets were known and translated abroad.” Voznesensky appraised Ford’s own poetry as a genuine reflection of the man himself: “His poems were very strict in form, as austere as he was himself, classical. They were neither modernist nor avant-garde, but classical stanzas, very similar to him, which is important to a poet – that is, that his verse expresses his personality.”44 The scholar Ann Munton later observed a similar characteristic in Ford’s poetry and linked it to his diplomacy: “Ford’s poetry is full of conceits and obscure almost impersonal metaphors. It is controlled, formal, detached.” Ford himself, she said, was “hidden” in the “folds” of his poetry, and the “sterility” of his verses suggests the displaced person, the emigrant, forever separated from his native land but never forgetting it, wandering in foreign places, using foreign languages. Munton notes another impersonal characteristic of Ford’s poems: “There are no poems … which deal directly with the loss of his wife who shared his life’s adventures.”45 Still, the “indirection” in Ford’s poems – for instance, his view of the frozen Canadian North evoking the vast frozen steppes of Russia – poetically reveals his view of life and the human condition. Ford the diplomat and Ford the poet were one and the same person.

2 Thereza and Encounters with Russia

on 10 ja n u a r y 1964 Robert Ford presented his credentials as Canadian ambassador to the Soviet Union. It was just two days after his forty-ninth birthday. Ford and Thereza had about four years’ experience in Moscow from his two earlier postings, and they were to remain there for another sixteen years. Ford says almost nothing about his wife in his political memoirs, strangely titled Our Man in Moscow: A Diplomat’s Reflections on the Soviet Union. In a book of 356 pages, the reader learns little about Thereza Ford except the reference to their meeting in London and how she looked in a few pictures. Now, with archival documents and interviews to supplement the printed record, Thereza steps forward as an influence on Ford and even on the practice of Canadian diplomacy with the Soviets. Living with a serious disability within what External called “Sovietmade difficulties and restrictions” increased the usual problems arising from working in an alien culture; Ford all the same turned in a superior performance. This would not have been possible without the Brazilian he married in New York in 1946. She accompanied him for each posting in Moscow until his retirement and then moved with him to France. Although preserving his diplomatic bearing and discretion, Ford, because of Thereza, lived more resonantly and intimately within Russian culture and life.1 The Fords resolved to elevate the diplomatic importance of Canada in the ussr and the importance of the ussr to Canadians. They deliberately sought to widen the contacts of the embassy among Soviet officials and at the same time to transform Moscow into a major diplomatic post. Thereza, with her energetic personality, overcame the drawbacks of her husband’s disease and propelled him and Canadian foreign policy into a larger role in East-West relations.

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Thereza did not have the same diplomatic stage as, say, Sondra Gotlieb, in Washington, dc. As the wife of Allan Gotlieb, the Canadian ambassador, Sondra became a public figure in her own right and had a meteoric career as a Washington hostess and newspaper columnist. In Moscow, Thereza was hardly noticed by the Canadian press, much less by the world’s, and it goes without saying, not at all by the Soviet press. Gotlieb’s memoirs, because of their author’s celebrity, attracted wide attention, but Thereza’s memoir of her life in Moscow, written in the author’s third language – English – never found a publisher, and the manuscript remains at Library and Archives Canada. (The reader will find references to it in this volume.) Gotlieb’s memoirs hardly touched political or historical questions. Thereza had a lot to say about both but lacked the talent for political writing. But she did have a talent for sprightly political conversation and loved to take on Soviet officials face to face. And she plunged into Russian life in a permanent inquiry to find out what made Russians tick. Without a doubt, Ford, too, plunged into Russian life because Thereza urged him on and planned ahead to overcome difficulties that were likely to appear because of his disability. She enlarged Ford’s capacity to serve as Canadian ambassador. Zoya Boguslavskaya, the Russian writer and poet who knew both Thereza and Ford very well, understood Thereza’s importance for Ford in Moscow and recognized that her influence went beyond organizing social events, a typical and important responsibility of the diplomatic wife. The Fords, recalled Boguslavskaya, “complemented each other. In some families a wife starts to resemble her husband after many years spent together. It unites them. Some couples represent opposites, the ‘plus’ and the ‘minus’ which leads to ‘harmony.’” The Fords were “a happy couple because they were so different.” Thereza, said Boguslavskaya, “was very cheerful, active, always full of optimism and bubbling with life.” But “Ford was very ill. Either he himself or Thereza told me that in the whole world there were only eleven or twelve people afflicted with the same disease and most of them were dead by that time. The only survivors were Ford and some other man. I thought that Thereza deserved all the praise for that. She could instill into him her energy and cheerfulness, and we never felt that he was so seriously ill.”2 “Thereza never let him feel ill. They had all sorts of plans, and he was always treated as a healthy man. She liked festivity. Their house

Thereza and Encounters with Russia

19

was always full; she wanted to surround him with people he took an interest in.” She also anticipated the physical demands on Ford of visits outside the embassy. “They visited us in Peredelkino,” recalled Boguslavskaya. “The only thing Thereza asked before they came was how many steps our staircase had. The steps were the main obstacle for him. Had we been on the second floor, he wouldn’t have made it. Thereza also asked if we had a chair that could be fixed in a certain position; we didn’t have one, so they had to bring a special chair for him to sit on.” Even the simple act of rising reminded everyone of Ford’s illness. His hostess recalled, “I’ll always remember how sorry I felt each time when he had to stand up. Why should such a fine man suffer from this terrible disease? It was unfair.”3 Boguslavskaya observed that Ford’s wife helped him to master his illness: “I have to say that Thereza was so important not only because he was an invalid (I can’t put it any other way); it was her character, her outlook and disposition that counted. Ford had chosen this volcanic woman, always charged with energy, and this energy charged him.” Andrei Voznesensky, the poet, playwright, and Boguslavskaya’s husband, whom Ford described as his “best friend” in Moscow, also found that Thereza contributed to the “full and cheerful life” that the Fords lived in Moscow. He recalled that Thereza used to say such things as “Today I flirted with Polyansky” (a top Soviet official).” She had the reputation of a mad woman, not only in the circle of her friends, but also among intellectuals and politicians, so she often dared to ask questions that Ford would never ask. I can’t remember the whole story, but we had a good laugh when she told us how she had sat at Khrushchev’s side, asked naive and stupid questions, and spoke the truth to his face.”4 Thereza’s liking for things Russian endeared her to the Moscow intelligentsia. Voznesensky recalled, “Thereza was not only passionate about Russia, but she, for example, was in love with Alexander I [Russian tsar, 1801–25]. I remember we took her on one occasion to a building to see a portrait of Alexander I. Everything about him excited her. It was something of a physical infatuation through the centuries. We teased her by taking advantage of her soft spot and telling her things about Alexander I.” Thereza’s character, says Voznesensky, had an influence on Ford’s. “His character I believe – indeed, I would say – was a symbiosis, a synthesis of Thereza and Ford that was something closer to the

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Russian character. In the Russian character there exists a northern coldness – the Nordic traits in Ford’s character; at the same time there is the southern part of Russia – the Cossacks were debauched and wild. The fiery part was Thereza, the spirit of the Cossacks, the hooligans and brawlers from the south of Russia. Joined together these two poles could understand the Russian character. Naturally, there were many jokes between them concerning the banality of the so-called ‘inscrutable Russian soul.’ I would say that by himself Ford would not have been able to understand us, but together they did understand.” In his assessment of the Fords, Voznesensky understood that they both liked Russians and deeply disliked the Communist system, but that as ambassador Ford lived under limitations on what he could say. “A characteristic trait in him was that you could never detect his emotions in his face. There were severe political restrictions on him. But as a Canadian citizen he did not have to worry about the spittle falling on him, but on us. Never, in his residence or in our home, did he speak about matters which would not redound against him but which might harm us.” But Thereza had no such inhibitions: she “deeply loved the Russian character and resented all restrictions. She often criticized and spoke about how awful everything was: the police were spying and eavesdropping on them. Ford never said a word, but once in a while we could read in his face that he knew that the room was bugged.” Thoroughly despising the Communist ideology and the political conditions that existed in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s, the Fords found the people attractive, even to be admired, especially their artistic creativity and warm sociability. They threw themselves into Moscow life – not by making an occasional appearance at a play or concert, but by entering Russian cultural circles. Ford consequently forged close relationships with Russian artists and intellectuals as a poet and intellectual in his own right. Ford’s presence at events struck others as unusual. The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko spoke of Ford as “an exceptional ambassador because he was part of our Russian cultural life. I don’t remember,” Yevtushenko said, “any important play or premiere when I didn’t see him. He was everywhere, even at hockey matches. Not because he was trying to pretend he was a so-called lover of the Russian people [but because] … he was a real aristocrat of the spirit.”5 Claiming himself to be a “little bit of an anarchist” and thus, a little bit, to

Thereza and Encounters with Russia

21

hate all politicians, Yevtushenko went on to argue that “the distant future must be decided not by professional politicians (because most of them are crooks) but by so-called amateurs like, for instance, Václav Havel,6 who is an author and not a professional politician, but he’s a distinguished man. And, in my opinion, Mr. Ford was one of these ‘amateurs.’” Boguslavskaya believed that Ford loved Russia: “As he told us himself, it was his Motherland; he spent his best years here. As soon as he married Thereza they came to Russia; it was their only country in common.” She added that “the sixteen years or so that he spent here were his happiness, his family, his country” in large part because of his “rich” command of the language at a time when “very few ambassadors could speak Russian.” When Thereza had arrived in the Soviet Union with Ford on his first assignment in 1946–47, she had sympathies for the Russians developed at a distance, without contact with Russian reality, and curiosity about the distortions of the system: “I was weighed down by the baggage I had come with – the favorable prejudices of literature and brotherhood in war, and the little point of mistrust that had accompanied the slow realization of the abuses of power in the name of a system twisted out of shape.” At the time of that early meeting with Russia, she recalled, “I badly wanted to find a justification for the bloody upheavals, the political trials, the unnecessary sacrifices, the destruction of the kulaks, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. If I could.”7 In seeking answers to these questions, Thereza had no intention of living a cloistered life in the embassy. She was determined to mix with Russians, and she and Ford embarked on ventures together that neither would have done alone. Moscow two years after the war still showed signs of belt-tightening. “Rations were meager” and awarded according to criteria set by the state. On the streets were old women, one trying to sell “four precious cubes of sugar, or another holding … a lonely sardine.” In 1946 there were few foreigners in Moscow, even representatives of other governments, and the diplomats’ wives worked in embassies to cut costs for their home governments. Diplomatic families shared bathrooms and kitchens, and “life was hard and dull even [for] … the privileged.”8 Many diplomats and their families squeezed into the Hotel National in the centre of Moscow not far from the walls of the Kremlin. The government allotted each embassy two rooms and a bathroom, and the bathroom doubled as a kitchen, with a

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refrigerator, portable stove, and stores of tinned food. The large houses and palaces that governments later acquired for their embassies were still filled with wartime refugees. At the Canadian Embassy, which did have its own building, the overcrowding affected the young second secretary and his wife. Theresa wrote, “We arrive here, fresh and christened by London difficulties – Honestly, not blaming anyone in particular, we were subjected to a war of nerves – The whole atmosphere was so tense you could snap it all around by holding a pin in the air – We gave in … poor Robert did same, you can’t blame us, we had to ‘cooperate’ – well, until last week when I stamped my paws down and rearranged the furniture against even the typists’ will … and divided the blasted flat into two, being very generous to avoid complaints – give the hell to the other people, as long as I can have two rooms for ourselves: closed doors.”9 Ottawa brought Ford back to London after a little more than a year in the Soviet Union. He spent the time studying the ussr and the Russians. In March 1951 he was in Moscow again. This time the Fords travelled by train from Paris via Prague, and they found conditions much the same as on their first trip. In contrast to Western Europe, the ussr had made little progress. While passing through Brest-Litovsk on the Polish-Soviet border in a single railway car hooked onto a military train for the few visiting civilians, the Fords encountered soldiers travelling west to assignments in the peoples’ democracies of Eastern Europe. The soldiers were awaiting the change of undercarriages on their train for travel west, just as the Fords endured the six-hour wait for change to the Russian gauge for travel to the east.10 It was an early encounter with conditions in the ussr. The Red Army struck Thereza as unimpressive. Some soldiers “ate unappetizing chow in dented aluminum plates or makeshift bowls fashioned out of food tins, and … they were uniformly exhausted and very untidy. The war was over for a few years but perspiring, unshaven, dirty, those soldiers could have just stepped out of the trenches.”11 These are some of the impressions that cemented in the minds of the Fords the belief that the Soviet system offered no challenge to Western societies as a mode of life. Soviet officers, in contrast, exuded their privileged status: “The Soviet brass in loud, striped pajamas, a status symbol in those days of scarcity, were a big splash on the platforms at the many stops and a weird sight they were, fat men in their underwear, as if a hotel had

Thereza and Encounters with Russia

23

caught fire during the middle of the night and they were escapees from disaster. Even in full dress the officers were an odd lot, clanking rows of medals, smelling of rose water, their unpolished boots protected in all weather by low, shiny black rubber galoches.”12 Such sharp class distinctions, as recorded by Thereza, constantly struck the Fords and drove home repeatedly the hypocritical character of the Communist system. With no illusions about the Communist system but ready to mix with the intimidated Russians in any way possible, the Fords, once in Moscow, took themselves off to the public baths, either to the Tsentralnaya [Central] or the more opulent Sandunovskaya, left over from the tsarist period. With the Russian bathers, they removed clothes in a common room, hung them on pegs, and left shoes and valuables, unlocked, in a box below. No thefts occurred. Once undressed, the slim Thereza stood out from the crowd of Russian women, who had achieved the “standards of bosomy beauty of the nineteenth century merchant classes.” An attendant advised her to put on weight and to overcome her obvious physical deficiencies. The Fords proceeded to the shower room where “old, misshapen women washed and rubbed down the customers and threw warm water over them with enamel pails. In between ablutions, the bathers retired to the steam room, a small and primitive arrangement provided with an ancient rusty iron stove, and obligingly beat each other with green twigs.”13 This was a genuine Russian experience, but without Thereza, Ford would certainly have stayed home in the ambassador’s residence for his more dignified and private bath. The Canadian Embassy, occupying a compound on Old Stables Lane in the Arbat district of Moscow, provided work and housing space for diplomats, Canadian staff, and also Russian employees. Two merchant brothers had built the mansion in the late nineteenth century, with the usual Russian emphasis on the public rather than living rooms. In 1964, when Ford assumed the post of ambassador, he had his office on the top floor and an apartment on the ground floor, which he and Thereza shared with the third secretary and his wife. The chancery was on the ground floor as well, and the military attaché and sergeant and the clerical staff occupied a building in the courtyard. A few Soviets had special permission to be housed in the compound. “Curiously,” recalled Thereza, “with the many difficulties to overcome constantly no one talked of ‘tensions’ or ‘pressures’ or even

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The Constant Diplomat

permitted themselves the luxury of a nervous breakdown; we could not afford one.” But there were frequent domestic crises, usually solved in a Russian manner. The rash that appeared on the legs and feet of the ambassador initially baffled both Thereza and Ford. But the embassy’s Tartar cook immediately understood the cause: bedbugs in the ambassadorial bed. The bugs had dropped off when fuel was carried in for the wood-burning water heater in the bathroom. Russian advice was taken and remedies were used to dispatch the unwelcome creatures.14 The Fords’ easy ways with their local embassy employees quickly erased any cultural barriers between them. Ford’s Russian was fluent, and Thereza had started learning the language during their first posting in Moscow. In addition to her native Portugese, she spoke English and French well and had that special talent for languages found among the uninhibited. She was soon making herself understood without an interpreter’s assistance by all the Russian workers at the embassy and was the go-between with the staff. Despite Ottawa’s instructions to keep the embassy clear of visitors, the Fords soon permitted visiting relatives of embassy workers to stay over in the basement rooms. It is difficult to imagine Ford on his own in Moscow permitting the embassy to fill up with Russians in defiance of official instructions, and certainly he makes no reference in his memoirs to running a boarding house for Russians in the Canadian Embassy. But Thereza would have no problem ignoring regulations. She recalled, “For lack of living space the [Soviet] Government permitted not only the employees with foreign passports … but also a few Soviet citizens to inhabit our compound, but our crowd was not limited to the working members. Cousins of cousins of the many dwellers would park there for a day to stay months or years. Our ideas of hygiene had to give way to compassion, as some of the relatives that appeared, bundle in hand, simply had no place to go.”15 While developing an affection for the Russian people, Thereza (and Ford) found the leadership crude and uncultivated. At the first diplomatic party in Moscow – in November 1953, eight months after the death of Stalin – Ford, whose rank was chargé d’affaires, and his wife sat at a table with several top Soviet leaders and ambassadors from Western countries. What Thereza saw at the table was a clumsy attempt to shed personality features ingrained during the Stalinist era: “The new Bosses had decided on a different approach

Thereza and Encounters with Russia

25

and were giving notice to the world by coming out from behind the screen of secrecy that had conferred upon them such sinister connotations. So they goaded each other, were cruel in their irony, gross in jokes and language. The result was a cross between an undergraduates’ picnic and a businessmen’s convention.”16 The Soviet leadership was largely “plodding, heavy … clumsy … but the old Bolsheviks had a certain degree of force which was lacking in the younger generation … We were going to see that in practice, later, in the ousting of Malenkov who had not the ruthlessness necessary for survival.” So the Fords took special note when a Soviet leader, Dmitry Polyansky, a notable contrast to his colleagues, emerged in the Kremlin. Ford coupled critical rationalism in the mode of Carl Becker to a study of Russian culture and history well before he encountered the realties of Marxism and before he became ambassador to the Soviet Union. He aimed to drain all emotionalism from his analysis of Soviet policies, and he did so by viewing the Soviet Union through the window of Russian history. His visceral distaste for the Soviet system remained hidden in his dealings with the Soviets, but his unblinking scrutiny of government and society in the ussr – expressed in his dispatches and supplemental essays – demystified Moscow’s actions and provided the West with ways to deal with Communist efforts to capture support throughout the world. Ford saw Marxism as artificially imposed on a Russia whose enduring psychology and culture were rooted deep in the preRevolution past. Ford – in contrast to Sovietologists of the 1950s – never viewed Marxism as a convincing explanation for Soviet actions, although he had no doubts that the Soviet leaders firmly believed in Marxist principles. Ford thought, however, that the international behaviour of the ussr would not have been appreciably different if the tsarist regime had survived after 1917. His immersion in Russian culture provided his angle of vision in the 1950s for an assessment of Soviet policies, both past and present, and it gave his opinions great authority both in External Affairs and among other Western diplomats. After three years in Moscow as chargé d’affaires, Ford returned to Ottawa in March 1954 to become head of the European Division of the Department of External Affairs, but before taking the position, he submitted a report on Soviet policies. Ford explains the origins of this report: “I was given six weeks [he completed the report

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The Constant Diplomat

in July 1954] to write a report on Western relations with the ussr, before I took over the operational direction of the European Division … This was the first time an effort had been made to assess the ussr and our interest in it, and I think it served as the basis for our [Canadian] relations for many years.”17 Lester Pearson, then foreign secretary, gave Ford the assignment and posed the issue succinctly: “How could we find a stable relationship with a hostile regime?” “Well,” commented Ford, “the first thing was the writing of this paper on how I saw the ussr developing and how we should handle it … He read the thing several times and he wrote on the margin to Mr St Laurent, who was our prime minister: ‘This is very important. I know you are very busy, but try to take time to read it.’ The other thing that he asked me to do was to set up an interdepartmental committee to find ways and means of encouraging the study of Russian in Canadian high schools and universities. On the basis of the idea, as he said, ‘to know your enemy.’ And that means know the language.” The second project had no results and Ford believed that the effort would have been better spent promoting the study of French.18 Six weeks’ reading and reflecting in Ottawa proved formative, not only for Canadian diplomacy toward the ussr – giving it a different cast than the American – but on how to go about preparing for a diplomatic assignment. Ford’s period of reading and writing following his first years in the ussr marked an unusual opportunity to get ready for his future Moscow assignment as ambassador.19 But the report did not lead him straight back to Moscow; he arrived there circuitously and over six years, via Colombia, Yugoslavia, and Egypt. These stints as ambassador to other countries, however, did not distract Ford from writing about Soviet affairs. He defended his major paper on the reassessment of the Soviet Union while in Bogota and pronounced on his differences on Soviet matters with the great American scholar and diplomat George Kennan while in Belgrade. His summary of the policies of the Stalinist totalitarian order was couched in the language of a critic of conventional thinking. He concluded that the Soviet Union was far less powerful than it appeared to the rest of the world and that its leadership, although seemingly presiding over a powerful dictatorial system and a submissive population, had many restraints on its actions. A major problem for the post-Stalinist rulers was the rigid and unyielding system of government and economic administration; no basic reforms were possible.

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The Soviet command economy – often vaunted as possessing great strengths – would therefore be unable to meet the needs of the people for a decent life, and the leaders could count less and less on wholehearted support, especially for foreign military activities. In the original paper, although not in the chapter intended for his book, Ford approvingly quoted Kennan (who had been US ambassador to Moscow in the early 1950s) that virtually all Soviet foreign policy actions were defensive measures and therefore not part of a grand Soviet advance into Western Europe. This was his view of the Czechoslovak coup d’état of 1948 when Communists forced an elected president from office and installed the Stalinist Klement Gottwald, who conducted purges of opponents and commenced to transform the country along Soviet lines. Similarly, the Berlin Blockade of 1948–49, with which the Soviets closed all except the air corridors into West Berlin, Ford believed was not part of a drive to the West. Soviet decision making also laboured under the myopic outlook of the leadership. Stalin himself had made fundamental errors in foreign affairs that had weakened the position of the country internationally. Long-established Russian traditions had continued to assert themselves and had vitiated all plans to introduce a system derived from Marxist principles. Stalin’s errors were often because of his ignorance of developments outside the ussr, especially in foreign affairs after the Second World War. Important among his mistakes were the Czech coup d’état and the Berlin Blockade. Although these actions were “primarily defensive and intended to tidy up a potentially dangerous situation for the Soviet position in Eastern Europe,” they had serious consequences for the ussr: “They resulted in alerting the West, and particularly the United States, to the nature of the Soviet regime, and the creation of an alliance which constituted a real military threat to the ussr.” (Ford had in mind the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949.) Not only had Stalin brought into the field formidable opponents against him, but in 1948 he had created a permanently defiant enemy within the Communist camp when the Yugoslav leader Tito had broken with him over his policy in the Balkans. Mistakenly, as well, Stalin misjudged the US economy and incorrectly betted on its growing weakness. He seriously underestimated the strength and independence of the Chinese Communists and did not anticipate the strong worldwide opposition to his

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launching, through surrogate North Korea, the attack on South Korea in 1950. This “greatest miscalculation” had resulted from the “overconfidence” engendered when the Chinese Communists under Mao Zedong seized control of their country. Ford believed that the Soviets understood that they had made an error when the US intervened on the Korean peninsula, and soon after the death of Stalin in March 1953, his successors took action to end the hostilities. Stalin’s heirs could not escape the Russian past. Even as they recognized that Stalin’s policies had created problems with the rest of the world and as they sought to lower tensions, the new leaders could not scale down the huge Soviet military establishment. This paradox troubled the rest of the world, but Ford offered a less threatening view of Soviet military power. The Russian tradition of a large standing army preceded the Revolution and was the concomitant of the foreign policy of a huge country. Then, postwar reconstruction projects “required a large standing army for internal reasons.” Because of two Germanies – East and West – the Soviets had to maintain enormous military power; until mid-1953 they might have solved this source of tension by agreeing to reunification, but only if all Allied troops had withdrawn from Germany. But events caused them to react in characteristic fashion. That summer’s revolt of East German workers (on 17 June) abruptly dashed the Soviets’ expectations that self-governing Germans would embrace Communism by choice. Ford believed that by failing to grasp this psychological barrier to understanding between East and West, the West made a mistake when it did not seek to “explore at the highest level the possibilities of lowering tension” over Germany. Such meetings, if deftly handled, could perhaps have overcome the psychological barriers to negotiations with the West. Ford’s perspective on Soviet politics was rooted in his reading of the history of Russia before the Revolution of 1917. He sought the permanent characteristics of the people as revealed in the actions of the political leadership. His essay opens by citing a statement from the French nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet, who wrote, “Russia as a race is mobile, fluid, uncertain, so much, in policy and diplomacy, it is fixed and perseverant.” Russian policy even under Stalin carried the weight of history. For the reason that “every major attack against Russia in the past” had come from bases in Eastern Europe, the Soviets were, following the defeat of the Germans, able to assure themselves, for the first time, of governments that

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were “sympathetic to Moscow.” Ford noted a second feature of postwar Soviet thinking that showed behaviour patterns from Russian history: the willingness to take calculated risks for national advantage. In the case of Eastern Europe, the Soviets drove Western influence out on the assumption that the West had never shown enough interest in Eastern Europe to mount any opposition to their plans. From Eastern Europe, the Soviet attempt to carry out additional expansion into Greece and Iran was “natural” because there seemed to be an opportunity. But when the Soviet Union encountered serious resistance and world opposition, it withdrew agents and forces, doing so in such a way that it could “save face.” Ford concluded that the leaders of the ussr, in exerting control over several countries of Eastern Europe, acted from understandable motives that were mainly defensive. Stalin, he believed, had no illusions about the readiness of the Eastern European peoples to accept Kremlin overlordship; only military force could maintain Soviet control. Ford returned repeatedly to a principle that he considered axiomatic to dealing with the Soviet leadership, and the documents show that this basic position was central in Canadian dealings with the ussr’s leaders during his tenure in Moscow: “They will not yield to pressure if they feel it starts them on a path to which they can see no ending.” This political position was fundamental to the Soviets – and Ford meant the Russians – because they were “constantly governed by an almost psychopathic feeling of inferiority vis-à-vis the Western world” – a feeling that had been evident for centuries. Ford doubted that “any single act of territorial expansion would have been different even if the Russian government were not Marxist.” Another consideration in assessing the foreign policy of the ussr in the postwar years was the increasing influence of the military General Staff on the policy of the government during the Khrushchev era and the view of the generals that the “two blocs may stumble into war.” Their belief intensified in response to persistent talk in the West that war with the Soviet Union was “inevitable.” The Soviet military would have to take such talk seriously and make its own ripostes. Ford, always alert to the effects of opinion on policy, argued that “if both sides become convinced that the clash is inevitable, then the very weight of their convictions would help to bring on the very thing they wished to avoid, and it thus becomes a factor in itself.” He believed that in world affairs people’s ideas, no matter

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how weakly supported by facts, can become driving forces that move armies into battle. Ford held that Russia was an “autocratic and antiquated state that by its very nature required a large standing army for internal reasons, and that it extended over a territory vastly greater than any other major power.” But no urge for conquest in Russia came from the officer corps, as it had in Japan and Germany. Tsarist Russia never had an officer corps with the inclination to solve international conflicts by military means. The same was true in the Soviet period, when generals saw themselves as servants of the Party and the state rather than loyal members of the officer corps. The historic Russian preoccupation with internal security, order, and defence of the borders remained unchanged. Marxist doctrine influenced Soviet attitudes toward war but not as an incitement to aggression: capitalist countries, the Soviets believed, fought wars as a natural functioning of the capitalist system, but the Soviet leaders justified involvement only in wars in support of a Communist movement in revolt from “capitalist slavery,” for instance, and only in circumstances that would likely lead to success and would not imperil the ussr. Maintaining the “citadel of communism” was essential to supporting the worldwide Communist movement. Several assumptions dominated Soviet relations with the world, wrote Ford. Believing that the United States dictated the policy of nato, the Soviets were convinced that the Americans must nonetheless take into consideration the views of their European allies, and the Europeans saw it as suicidal to fight the Soviet Union. The Soviets were also alert to the political power of the peace movement in the West and believed that it would inhibit a Western attack on them. Extending Communism to other countries was not in the interest of Soviet leaders. As practical men, they understood the difficulties involved in dominating foreign countries. Tito in Yugoslavia had quickly established his own party, along with military and secret service controls, making Yugoslavia a non-aligned state. To dominate the East Germans, it was necessary to have both an expensive Soviet military occupation and a powerful secret police, the Stasi. Consequently, the West should admit “that the constantly reiterated longterm aim which we ascribe to the Russians is misleading.” They would wish a Communist world only if they could control it, and their experiences showed that the foreign countries under their domination could remain that way only by the presence of Soviet troops.

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History, therefore, had been teaching the Soviets to view their own Russian Revolution in a new light, “as a unique and nonrecurring event,” and not as the first stage in an unfolding historical process (Lenin’s view of the Revolution). In Eastern Europe, the Russians had shown no interest in remaking occupied countries along socialist-revolutionary lines but had simply taken them over and put them in the hands of “reliable bureaucrats and party hacks,” who would run the countries as ordered from Moscow. The whole idea of rebuilding a modern society from the beginning after destroying it had no appeal to the leadership in Moscow. In other ways, too, Ford saw the diminution of Marxist ideology in Soviet thought and action. He believed that the territorial expansion following the Second World War could be explained not by Marxism but because it was the “policy that almost every previous Tsarist government secretly dreamed of accomplishing.” The main remaining Marxist idea of the Soviet leaders was the view that the capitalist system was “inherently aggressive.” And when this was combined with an inferiority complex and jealousy and fear of the West, especially of the United States, and almost complete ignorance of conditions in the West, the result was hardly one of a balanced and unemotional view of world problems. A stable relationship between the two camps was difficult but not impossible because the Soviet leaders, although influenced by Marxism, were practical men. But Russia, especially in alliance with China, “could still be a menace to the world if Marxism were to vanish completely.” Although concentrating on Soviet foreign policy, Ford had spent a lot of time observing and studying internal developments in the ussr. He concluded that they posed a permanent drag on the Soviet leadership’s freedom of action and further decreased the likelihood of Soviet aggression. The Soviet industrial expansion of the 1930s had produced a “lopsided” economy, promoting heavy industry and arms at the expense of agriculture, light industry, housing, and services. The Soviet Union had a very poor system of railways, and paved public highways were practically non-existent. These “paradoxes have been in existence for some time,” but only recently had the government begun to admit them and for no other reason than that the “whole structure would collapse if the food supply was not improved.” Several important groups resisted reform. Social conservatism was influencing a new upper-middle class that had benefited from the

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Revolution and wanted to hold on to and increase its gains. A new intelligentsia had emerged, “as well endowed as that in the West with the powers of speculation and original thought.” These new groups had acquired privileges, but the urban workers, and even more the peasants, lived poorly in comparison with the new privileged groups. No reforms had improved the economy or helped those who lived badly. The grievous problems in agriculture remained and were the long-neglected barrier to raising the standard of living. A main cause of the neglect to reform the country was political stagnation: a ruling group several decades in power had not made way for younger leaders. Ford viewed the coming generation of leaders as more proficient technically but lacking in “personal dynamism.” He anticipated rivalries ahead because strong leadership would be required to deal with likely crises, international or domestic, but so far the principal political result of Stalin’s passing from the scene had been the division of the leaders into various camps. Another constraint on international behaviour was the half of the Soviet population that consisted of a number of non-Russian peoples living along the western, northern, southern, and southeastern frontiers. These peoples often resented Russian attitudes toward them, and they would be unlikely to support aggressive military activity outside the ussr. As for the Russians, the general mood of the Soviet people by the mid-1950s, despite the arrival on the scene of the ebullient Nikita Khrushchev, was lethargic. Ford wrote that the people’s “collective enthusiasm is beginning to run down at a moment when their leadership is less dynamic than it was, and so far no substitute that can inspire the Russians to further tremendous personal sacrifices and outbursts of energy has been found.” The people opposed war; and so, Ford believed, the leadership would too. Nor would the state of public opinion in the East European “satellite” countries encourage the Soviets to start a war. Ford concluded that the Soviet leaders, although willing to “run risks,” would not step “off into the abyss” and launch a war unless they found themselves in a desperate situation. Rather, they preferred a “workable division” of the world as it was in the second half of the 1950s, but with a solution to the Berlin, Korean, and Austrian problems. Ford conceded that such a solution would not be entirely satisfactory for the West, because it would mean leaving Eastern Europe under Soviet control for the foreseeable future. But he

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anticipated that the international status quo would encourage the evolution of the Communist government toward the loosening of the Stalinist dictatorship and the appearance of “some form of effective communist government.” Ford advised that the Soviet Union was likely to continue the struggle against its capitalist adversaries without recourse to war and would be a formidable threat. The West, he concluded, must resist the Soviet Union by maintaining military and psychological strength and must be clear that any aggression in any part of the world would bring war with the Western powers. Ford conceded that Communism had conquered a “large portion of the world” and that the West was “abandoning the peoples of Eastern Europe to their fate” and granting the Soviets what they had been aiming to accomplish since Yalta. Here was the solution of the “realist” and one that would be unacceptable to many people, especially the East Europeans and the Balts and their compatriots in Europe, Canada, and the United States. The compensation would be that the Soviets would come to adopt “slightly more civilized attitudes in dealing with the West,” and the risk of war would diminish sharply. While back in Canada as head of the European Division, Ford continued to assess Soviet behaviour. He updated his thinking in the paper of 1954 within months, although his basic assessment of the ussr’s policies remained unchanged. He found evidence early in 1955 that his anticipation of Russian behaviour six months before had been borne out. In early 1955 the Soviets were making important changes in their foreign policy; they were seeking, on their own terms, accommodation with the West.20 Although the Soviets had signed the Warsaw Pact with their Eastern European allies and had imposed the “little blockade” against Berlin, they had made a number of concessions and gestures in the direction of the West and had done so without receiving any tangible concessions from the other side. Moscow had signed the State Treaty with the Austrians,21 had agreed in principle to a Big Four conference, had sought to heal the breach with Tito by admitting its own mistakes in dealings with him and then sending Khrushchev and Bulganin to Belgrade to concede that Yugoslav socialism was legitimately Marxist. The Soviets had also agreed to participate in an air show in Canada and had accepted a number of Western proposals on disarmament. The gesturing in the direction of Yugoslavia was, in Ford’s view, “an enormous ideological, political, and psychological readjustment” –

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and these changes had come about because the Soviets themselves had decided on them. They came only in early 1955 and because of a fundamental change in outlook in Moscow. The Soviets, with Khrushchev in the ascendancy, were now behaving “in the fashion we have always hoped they would. They have decided that it was necessary to negotiate with other governments.” Soviet foreign policy was reflecting the government’s wrestling with a series of problems, a number of them internal. The ussr had been unable to increase its supply of consumer goods and was returning to “Stalinist” methods of increasing food production. There was an unsettling problem of “collective leadership,” and the Chinese conflict was becoming more pressing. The Soviet leadership had evidently concluded that it could not provide the Chinese all the developmental assistance they wanted without hurting their own programs to improve the lives of their people. Another factor was the emergence of a revived, wealthy, and strong Germany. And the final element, perhaps, had been the possession of the h-bomb by the Western powers. The appearance of the h-bomb and the possibility of mutual annihilation had greatly unsettled the Soviet leaders and caused them to rethink their ideas about war and about relations with the West.

3 Politics under Khrushchev

f o r d ’ s a s s e s s m e n t of the ussr would provide a broad justification for a major development: a visit of Canada’s foreign minister, Lester Pearson, to talk with Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders in 1955. Pearson’s visit was a controversial undertaking. “Pearson had always been interested in Russia and in relations with Russia … As the first nato foreign minister to go there, he suddenly got too far ahead of the Allies … Pearson’s relationship with the ussr would have developed even further,” Ford held, “if the Soviets had not invaded Hungary. It was a shock to Pearson. He couldn’t believe that Khrushchev would do such a thing. But he reacted very quickly, and in the right way in the United Nations, and he was angrier than most of us, even when the French and English intervened in the Israeli adventure which spoiled the moral advantage we had over the Russians in condemning them for their invasion of Hungary.”1 Another issue that tempered Pearson’s view of the ussr was the possibility that the Soviets had suborned Canadian diplomats. Ford conceded that Pearson “was rather inclined in general to take a soft view of Russia … But one of the things that upset him very much was the Herbert Norman case and the fact that he [Norman] stood up and denied that he had been a member of the Communist Party.” Ford wrote “a long article about it” for the Montreal Gazette. The suicide of Herbert Norman in Cairo was a “hard blow” for Pearson, Ford explained, “and I think some doubt remains, I’m sure unfounded, about the real loyalties of Norman. I think he definitely tended to be extremely liberal, but he never had shared any Marxist views either when he got to Russia or in any social affairs. The other

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thing that upset him [Pearson] very much and made him pause, I think, with regard to Russia, were the revelations that they had recruited John Watkins by the kgb. And I got into a lot of criticism for having mentioned that in my book.”2 As head of the European Division at External, Ford “was the workhorse in the preparation of Pearson’s visit to Moscow in 1955.” He recalled, “I was rather against it. I thought the occasion was premature and that it was not up to Canada to jump the gun and to be the first nato high official to visit the Soviet regime, but I was overruled and I think that Pearson was probably right. At any rate, I had all the hard work behind the visit, in preparing the papers for the visit, the background papers. In the end, of course, I could not go, and he decided to take the risk of taking George Ignatieff, about which the Russians rather lifted their eyebrows, collectively, but accepted it in good grace.”3 Ignatieff wondered, when Pearson invited him, whether he should go on the trip, because his Russian origins and connections to the tsar through his family might be embarrassing to the mission. There might even be some risk, because he had been born in Russia and the Soviet government considered all such persons citizens. Pearson was unperturbed, “brushed aside” these objections, and said that if there was any trouble he would “simply dump” Ignatieff – a characteristic bit of Pearsonian humour. Pearson’s diplomatic gamble was a bold move onto the international stage for Canada, and the visit in the fall of 1955 turned out to be a success and set the stage for Ford’s diplomacy as ambassador and for the meetings and agreements that were to result from Ford’s work in Moscow. Not lost on Ford was the origin of the initiative for the visit; it came not from the Canadian side but from the Soviet, and in the person of the flintiest and most unyielding of the Soviet diplomats and Stalinist loyalists – the foreign minister Viacheslav Molotov. While attending a special meeting in San Francisco as the Canadian delegate to mark the tenth anniversary of the founding there of the United Nations, Pearson had been approached in a hallway by Molotov, who asked to speak to him and invited him to step into “a sort of tunnel.” “He explained,” wrote Pearson, “that he did not want to talk to me in public, then very formally and with a little bow invited me to pay an official visit to the Soviet Union in the autumn or as soon as I could get there.”4 The reasons for the invitation would become clearer in Moscow.

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Back in Ottawa, Pearson received approval for the visit from Prime Minister Louis St Laurent several days later, and on 30 September 1955 he left for Europe and the ussr. The Canadians found awaiting them a major welcome when their plane landed at Vnukovo airport outside Moscow on 5 October. Not only Molotov was standing on the tarmac but the Soviets had mustered the entire diplomatic corps. Here was a measure of the importance that the Soviets placed on the visit. Soviet official hospitality was on full display, and the Canadian delegation (which included Ignatieff, Mitchell Sharp, associate deputy minister of trade and commerce, John Holmes, assistant under-secretary of state, and from the Moscow embassy the ambassador, John Watkins) plunged into a full round of receptions, cultural events, and meetings with top Soviet leaders. The purpose of the trip, as Ignatieff saw it, was mainly exploratory, “essentially a voyage of reconnaissance” to the ussr, where no Canadian foreign minister had visited. A secondary purpose was to try to improve trade relations.5 At the first meeting on trade, the Soviets said that they were prepared to buy large amounts of wheat from Canada, but they wanted in return that Canada disconnect itself from nato restrictions on selling strategic materials to the ussr. The Canadians declined to break ranks with their nato allies, beginning what would become a standard pattern of talks with the Soviets; the Soviets would propose words and measures designed to weaken ties to nato, and the Canadians would decline to discuss the matter. Persistently, on this visit, the Soviets attempted to insinuate language in joint documents to support their efforts, but Ignatieff, with his excellent knowledge of Russian, repeatedly rejected such language. So far, the Soviets had made clear one of their objectives in arranging the visit. They wanted an advantageous trade treaty with Canada, and they were ready to initiate a new commercial tie with a major purchase of Canadian wheat. The Russians agreed to buy 300,000–500,00 tons of wheat annually for three to five years and were willing to continue talks about additional purchases in Ottawa. Molotov pressed Pearson to issue a joint communiqué on the visit with many Soviet “pet phrases,” but “we wanted them kept out,” recalled Pearson. He found that “when we take a strong stand, they are not unreasonable.”6 Pearson and his wife Maryon visited Leningrad, travelling to the city and back in an opulent railway car (which they had to themselves) from the era of the last Russian

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emperor, Tsar Nicholas II. Back in Moscow on 9 October, the Canadians prepared to fly to the Crimea two days later for the culminating political event, a meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, the first secretary of the Communist Party, and Nikolai Bulganin, the head of state.7 Both were vacationing in the south. One major issue was on Khrushchev’s mind, and in the first minutes of their meeting he let Pearson know that he viewed nato as a bellicose anti-Soviet military organization, and he aimed to break it up. He thought Canada should withdraw from it. His second principal issue was Germany, and he insisted that the ussr would never permit the unification of the two Germanies if it meant the addition to nato of another 17 million Germans. Pearson rejoined that nato was purely defensive, that the United States and its allies had no intention of aggressive actions against any country. He later explained that he had talked himself hoarse in Moscow trying to make this point. His plea that a united Germany should be able to decide, in democratic fashion, its own future seemed to carry little weight with the leader of Soviet Communism. From Pearson’s account, he had a vigorous exchange of views with Khrushchev, and the two parted in a friendly fashion although neither had yielded anything. Importantly, they agreed to continue the discussions between the two sides. The Soviet leader was not an easy interlocutor and often came back to issues, such as nato, after Pearson had addressed them. If one could infer any general political purpose behind the invitation to the Canadian foreign minister, it was to weaken nato, which the Soviets saw as threatening them militarily. In the Crimea over dinner, as Ignatieff recalls, the Soviets attempted to pour massive quantities of vodka into the Canadians in a deliberate and crude attempt to influence their thinking. Under Khrushchev, Soviet foreign policy posed greater challenges to the West than under Stalin; it was difficult to maintain a united front among the Allies. Ford consistently upheld Pearson’s approach to dealing with the Russians: to work on outstanding issues where cooperation could be managed but without giving in on major issues of principle. Various Russian efforts to gain advantages through talks, visits, and entertainments would be tolerated but firmly resisted. nato was the key to standing firm against the Russians. Its creation had been in response to moves by the Soviets, in particular the Czech coup d’état and Berlin Blockade, but as mentioned in the previous chapter, Ford did not believe that these actions foreshadowed a

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Soviet invasion of Western Europe. “The trouble was that there seemed to be a real danger of a Soviet military invasion of Western Europe and it therefore appeared to follow that the primary task was to provide a force to prevent this.”8 In Ford’s view, the primary Soviet threat was not military (for reasons that he had set out in his paper of 1954);9 it was one of “economic and political disintegration” from which “it was certainly saved by nato.” A “myth” had developed in the West that “what nato had actually done was to prevent a military invasion.” nato, wrote Ford, was now under attack because of the “peace offensive” of the Russians, and Ford had serious doubts about its survival. The departure of France from the nato military council suggested serious troubles ahead. The Soviets’ talk of peace would likely have a major effect on the populations of Great Britain and Germany, especially by announcing that they planned troop withdrawals from Eastern Europe and the unilateral cessation of atomic testing.10 Ford gave one of his most pessimistic assessments of the Western Alliance: “I wonder if the Russians would be seriously interested in a deal to unify Germany, since they must argue that all they have to do is sit back and wait for nato slowly to disintegrate by itself.” Another essay came from Ford’s pen a few years after the Pearson visit, when Ford was ambassador in Bogota. A critique of George Kennan’s well-known and influential Reith Lectures,11 it also dealt with the stance to take against the Russians. Ford knew Kennan from his time as chargé d’affaires in Moscow when Kennan was US ambassador to the ussr (1951–52). Ford wrote, “Mr. Kennan has one of the most brilliant and subtle intellects of anyone in public life today, yet it is counterbalanced by an emotionalism so extreme as, at times, to border on sickness.”12 Ford had seen dispatches written by Kennan in Moscow that were “masterpieces of involved logic” and “wildly wrong.” One instance came when Kennan interpreted the antiAmericanism in the Soviet press in 1952 as having the objective of isolating Kennan himself from Soviet intellectuals, among whom he counted many friends. Ford noted that “even in his best writings … there is a semi-religious, emotional element which must not be overlooked.” At the same time, Ford found it difficult to comment on Kennan’s Reith Lectures because he agreed with much of what was in them, especially “the historical estimate of the military threat to Western Europe, the analysis of developments inside the ussr,

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and the importance given to the question of German unity and the related problem of Eastern Europe.”13 Ford recognized that Kennan believed that the “containment theory” stressing military buildup was no longer adequate to deal with the Soviets because the West seemed to be incapable of “exerting the requisite pressure at the right moment and in the right place whenever any weak spot appears in the ussr.” It was time to try to negotiate, but Kennan was too pessimistic about “reaching a meeting of minds with the Russians” and about breaking through “the armor of self-deceit and genuine misconceptions of the present Soviet leaders.” Agreeing with Kennan that the Soviets had no intention of invading Western Europe in 1948 or later, Ford reminded his readers that nato was necessary for political and not military reasons: to provide a feeling of unity and security while Europe rebuilt its strength. But he faulted the West for constantly preparing for an imminent invasion from the East, thereby heightening tensions with the Russians. As for Kennan’s belief that a summit meeting with the Russians would hardly be useful because no agreement would be possible when the West could not know what the Russians wanted, Ford advocated a summit meeting and wanted imaginative new proposals designed to break the deadlock over Germany, to change the current “rigid” position, and to adopt more flexible policies aimed at pushing the Soviets out of East Berlin and the whole of Central and Eastern Europe. On the issue of disengagement, Ford found that Kennan was not persuasive. If the Russians agreed on a military disengagement, perhaps under agreements to remove their troops from East Germany and eventually from Eastern Europe, they would continue to fulfill “a skillfully worked out plan for political subversion,” and the West would have to be prepared to counter it. Ford then went on to take a bold position: the presence of US and Canadian troops in Europe was doing a disservice to the Europeans because they were not learning to stand on their own feet. He inserted a thesis of the historian A.J.P. Taylor into his discussion – that the intervention of the United States in Europe in 1917 gave Britain and France a mistaken sense of their own political importance. Ford believed that too much was being done for Europe, forcing Europeans into dependency on the Americans and, paradoxically, exaggerating their sense of their military strength. He advocated “neutralizing” Central and Eastern Europe and forcing

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the Europeans to create a new political association to hold their own in the world, perhaps assisting them with tactical nuclear weapons. He thought that the Russians might be prepared to withdraw their troops from Eastern Europe if the United States brought its forces home from Western Europe, especially if they concluded that Communism suddenly had a good chance of winning support in the West with the departure of the American military. Ford concluded that the West was reeling under Khrushchev’s political offensive and the best it could hope for was to maintain the solidarity of the alliance, to lower expectations of German unification and the liberation of the satellite countries, and then hope that the ussr would somehow develop in a less dynamic form. Contributing to Ford’s pessimism was his evaluation of the Soviet political offensive in the “non-committed” countries. He believed that aid should be removed from the area of international rivalry and funnelled to the less-developed countries through the organizations of the United Nations. The Western policy based on fear of Russian penetration of the Middle East should come to an end, because the Russians had already established strong influence there. It would be much better to work internationally, build up economies so that they could resist Communism, and provide a better market for Western goods. Ford thought that some kind of compromise with the Russians on key issues such as Germany would continue to provide them with political opportunities and that the erosion of Western influence in Europe, the Middle East, and among lessdeveloped countries would continue. In December 1958 External moved Ford from Bogota to Belgrade. Ford’s two years in Colombia had been rewarding, partly because he could use his Spanish and advance cultural contacts with Canada. On the whole, however, his interests were elsewhere. “I can’t say that I was crazy about Colombia, but it was a particularly useful experience for me, particularly because it was my first post as ambassador and I was only forty-one at the time. But I raised a number of eyebrows at External Affairs. First of all, I looked very young, but it was embarrassing, and I considered growing a moustache.” As ambassador in Bogota, Ford had taken on the role of “cultural as well as political ambassador,” one he later filled with special enthusiasm in Russia. “I also translated some of the Colombian poets who were quite good into English, and quite a few things I did [were] to make them aware that Canada was not an icebound country which had

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no interests whatsoever. I must say, it was more difficult to convince the Colombians than it was to convince the Canadians that we had any interests whatsoever in Latin America except for oil and gold.”14 Colombia had its attractions and was “enormously enriching,” but it “was and still is a crazy country … It’s at one and the same time one of the most civilized and literary countries in South America, and yet one of the most violent.” He thought the works of Gabriel García Márquez expressed the character of Colombia perfectly.15 The posting to Belgrade moved Ford a little closer to his true interests. Here was another Slavic country with a Cyrillic alphabet and a proclaimed Communist state. The Yugoslavs were well informed about developments in Moscow. Yugoslavia was an excellent place to make observations about Moscow from a new perspective as President Tito, its Communist leader, nonetheless founded the NonAligned Movement and sought to position his country between East and West. Ford recognized that Canada shared some interests with Yugoslavia in seeking middle positions on major international issues. He found that the Yugoslavs were “anxious to maintain contact with us on United Nations questions,” and he showed a John Holmes paper on the “usefulness of compromise resolutions” at the United Nations to Joza Brilej, the Yugoslav assistant under-secretary of state for external affairs.16 Ford agreed with Holmes that the United Nations was currently “in transition” and that sharp divisions of opinion on major issues should be avoided lest they weaken the international body. It seemed best “in the interest of Canada as well as the world community, to try to survive this period with the minimum of major clashes.” This stance would accord with “our traditional role as mediator.” There was always the danger, however, that “our reputation is beginning to suffer from continued association with compromise efforts which look shabby and futile.”17 By this time, Ford had developed his opinions on Soviet behaviour and had elaborated them in several papers sent to his colleagues in External. They were authoritative opinions, firmly rooted in a knowledge of Russian history, confidently expressed, and already buttressed by his own earlier experience in Moscow. He asserted the need for an intelligent political response to the Soviet diplomatic offensive undertaken by Khrushchev. Ford was inclined to think that Khrushchev remained a reasonably good negotiating partner and that “it is better to try to make an agreement with a Russian who recognizes a need for [détente] than

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to deal with someone like Stalin.”18 In a paper delivered in Paris on 27 October 1959, “Coexistence: The Communist Challenge,” Ford argued that the foreign policy of Khrushchev posed a threat to the unity of the Western Alliance.19 The Russians, he believed, wanted to expand the areas of Communist influence and undermine the alliance, not by force but by means of “ideological drives, trade, and aid” and by using a skilful diplomacy consisting of “peace, disarmament, and ‘normalcy,’ including the possibility of gradually breaking up the nato alliance.” Ford saw the perils for the West in Khrushchev’s policies but also great opportunities, both for the West and for Canada. Offsetting opportunities lay ahead for Western diplomacy because, Ford anticipated, there would be splits in the international Communist movement and increasing “signs of independence” among the satellite countries. He suggested that encouraging recent trends in Moscow would open up possibilities of “exploiting explicit advantages” in Eastern Europe but would also promote an evolution of Soviet society “with which it will be possible to coexist permanently.” In time, if international conflicts could be avoided, Soviet society would evolve and “modify the revolutionary aspects of Soviet concerns.” Yugoslavia provided a good example of a Communism that had been a fanatical regime and had evolved to one that was “relaxed, relatively tolerant, and preoccupied with the value of the individual.”20 While in Belgrade, Ford detected additional signs that Khrushchev and his policy of détente were in trouble in Moscow. The principal issue was Khrushchev’s calling off of the Summit with US President Dwight Eisenhower in May 1960 after the downing of the American u-2 plane piloted by Gary Powers. Why had Khrushchev reacted so sharply, reversing himself? Earlier, there had been the “fantastic” effort to picture the American people as not interested in war with the ussr; Khrushchev had maintained this position for months. Ford concluded that a hardening of the West’s position had already given Khrushchev reason to think that the summit would not be profitable for him. The ambassador’s main source of information about the position of the first secretary was the Yugoslavs. He made the point in a telegram on 7 March when he explained that Khrushchev’s “freedom of maneuver” appeared constrained; opposition to his policies had emerged from the East Germans, the Chinese, and from groups in Russia. Ford now himself had doubts that

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détente could be pursued with Khrushchev. The first secretary’s “emotional instability” and “the risks he seems prepared to take are characteristics likely to make for an increasingly difficult if not dangerous adversary.”21 While in Belgrade, Ford confirmed his misgiving about George Kennan. Kennan was appointed US ambassador to Yugoslavia as the new Kennedy administration in Washington sought to open channels to the Third World. Ford recalled, “None of his future staff knew him and they nervously sought my opinion of the great eccentric. I said he was one of the most brilliant men I knew but highly emotional. He would either love or detest Tito and this would be an important determinant in his attitude.”22 As it turned out, “Kennan was seduced by Tito but believed the reverse had also happened.” This was clear at the first summit meeting of the non-aligned powers in 1961 when Tito, contrary to Kennan’s expectations, did not take a stand of strict non-alignment but backed the Soviets on both nuclear testing and Germany. “Kennan was like a man whose mistress had deceived him. Tito’s line was indeed disappointing but it was hardly unexpected.” From Belgrade, in the spring of 1961 Ford became ambassador to the United Arab Republic, which in September returned to its earlier status as Egypt with the departure from the uar of Syria. External moved him to Cairo with simultaneous accreditation to Sudan. He wrote John Holmes, “I was frankly rather unhappy at first to leave Belgrade … the Yugoslavs were really very annoyed that both George Ignatieff and I should spend such a short time there.” The Yugoslavs had asked for the decision to be reversed, prompting Ford to remark, “I gather this is rather rare and was certainly flattering but of course the decision had already been taken.”23 As far as Ottawa was concerned Cairo and the activities of Nasser were of much greater interest and potentially more dangerous than anything Tito could do. The situation had been more or less calmed down between Tito and the Russians by that time, and anyway, Koca Popovich [Yugoslav vice president] got to Ottawa and at the first dinner given by Howard Green [foreign minister], he said that they would like to make an official request that I stay on in Belgrade because they got on well with me and I understood the Slav mind and so on and so forth. And by that time, I was able to speak in Serbo-Croat.

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Howard Green said, “But this is a big promotion for him. Cairo is very important.” There was a deadly silence among the Canadians present … Howard Green was an awfully nice guy, but not very sensitive to the feelings of foreigners. Then he suddenly realized from the total silence that he had made a blunder, and he said, “But it’s a big promotion for Mr. Ford.”24 Cairo under Gamal Abdel Nasser, as a favored Third World country, received financial and technical help from the Soviets and asserted its own brand of “Arab socialism.” In Cairo, Ford wrote, “much of my time was spent in trying to determine what Soviet aid and influence meant in concrete terms for the West – grossly exaggerated as I thought then and ephemeral as it turned out in the long run.”25 After less than two years in Cairo, Ford was on his way to Moscow. The Soviets, in an unusual gesture, welcomed his appointment as Canadian ambassador to the Soviet Union by inviting him to a farewell dinner – the first such event – at their embassy in Cairo, a “black tie dinner for 30 persons which was modeled down to the last detail on similar dinners in Western Embassies.” The Soviet ambassador made clear his government’s growing interest in Canada because, asserted Ford, of its “realistic appreciation of the Soviet Union” and its relations with his country, and because of “the role of Canada as an interpreter of the Western world to Russia.”26 Ford’s conclusion that Khrushchev was in trouble proved correct. Taking up his post in Moscow in January 1964, Ford was on the scene to view the deposition of a powerful Communist leader. Khrushchev’s colleagues in the Party Presidium deposed him as first secretary on 12 October, and the Council of Ministers removed him as premier three days later. On the thirteenth he had contested the decision, but on 14 October, having encountered opposition from the majority of the Central Committee, he had lost the game. The Council of Ministers’ decision to replace him as premier was a formality. Ford had several conversations with Khrushchev even though his dismissal came within months of the ambassador’s arrival in Moscow in January. Khrushchev, he recalled, “was seemingly fascinated by Thereza and me, and he came to all sorts of receptions and he was very easy and agreeable. I had no trouble talking to him at receptions, and the fact that I could speak Russian facilitated it very much. He by that time was off on this crazy venture of dividing the

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Communist Party into the agricultural and industrial sections, which was really one of the reasons for his downfall.”27 Khrushchev’s curiosity about the Fords led him to remark at one of their encounters that the ambassador did not look like a Canadian; well, he reflected, “maybe a French Canadian.” Thereza, much to the amusement of the premier, chimed in that Ford, as shown by his black hair and moustache, was “really a Georgian.” Occasionally, the curtain parted during the time of Khrushchev to reveal a Russia completely hidden during Stalin’s era. Mrs Andrei Gromyko, wife of the ussr’s minister of foreign affairs, invited Mrs Ford to tea one afternoon at Spiridonovka Palace, used by the ministry for receptions and other public events. Mrs Gromyko seemed frank, but it was clear, too, that she was promoting the idea of a liberalizing ussr. A uniformed maid served them from very good china with vermeil silverware. The hostess started off the conversation by proposing a toast in muscatel wine to a “new approach to an old place.” She spoke a few phrases in English initially and then used Russian during the hour-long chat. Thereza said that what struck her about the ussr was the improvement in the general atmosphere, whereupon Mrs Gromyko responded, “If you think it is better for you diplomats, imagine what it must be like for us.” And in response to a disingenuous Thereza comment that the last view she had had of Stalin was at a Bolshoi concert with the members of the Party Presidium, and they seemed terribly serious, the minister’s wife said, “They weren’t serious; they were just frightened to death.” Mrs Gromyko asked Thereza her impression of her husband, the minister. Thereza said that she observed him to be serious to the point of bad humour – to which Gromyko’s wife replied, “Oh, no, the poor man! You see how he impresses people. On the contrary, I am always criticizing him on the grounds that he isn’t half serious enough for a man with his big responsibilities.”28 Voznesensky, the Fords’ friend, said that Khrushchev, who saw that Ford had trouble walking, had arranged to give him special access to a private lift to St George’s Hall in the Kremlin where the principal government receptions were held. Ford explained the matter this way. He said he did not know whether Khrushchev had arranged the access to the special elevator. “But this is what happened. You know this huge, tremendous stairway leading up to the St George’s Hall; very shortly after I had returned as ambassador, I

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called the chief of protocol and asked him if there was not some way I could avoid going up these steps because it was very difficult for me. He said, ‘I will check,’ very coolly. He phoned up the next day and said, ‘No.’ So, I went off to do it. The next reception came and halfway up, a general – I don’t know who it was – came up to me and said, ‘This is just dreadful. You should not be forced to do this long climb.’ I said, ‘I’m told there won’t be any effort … This is my job and I will do it.’ He said, ‘I will make arrangements through the top level for you to use the lift.’ So I presume the general would not have done that without permission. If not, he went to Khrushchev and got permission. There was only one proviso.” Ford said that he was required to be at the lift fifteen minutes before each reception so that he would be in the hall before the leaders used the elevator. Ford saw the limitations of Khrushchev, but he had a far higher regard for him than for his successor, Leonid Brezhnev. He explained: Khrushchev was a highly – well, this is hardly news – but a highly charismatic personality and if he had an education, he would have been a very astute person. But he knew nothing, really, of the outside world, or of foreign affairs, or economics. At the time he owed his position to the fact that all the senior members of the Communist Party were executed by Stalin. But he had no qualifications at all. He went to a Party school, so he knew his Marx and Lenin but that was about all. But he had an instinct which Brezhnev didn’t have, but like a good Russian he was impulsive as Gorbachev was later, as Brezhnev was not. Stalin wasn’t; Stalin knew what he was doing all the time, but he wasn’t a Russian. [Khrushchev took] actions without thinking through the results. But he was astute enough; for example, after his 1956 anti-Stalin speech, he achieved his purpose by showing what the past was and what he was trying do to. But when it started to get out of hand he had no hesitation in clamping down again. But he did it in a milder way. He didn’t arrest anyone – correct me if I am wrong on this, I wasn’t there. But during the time I was there under [Khrushchev] there were no political arrests of intellectuals or writers. But the Party line was being drawn very firmly, and as soon as Khrushchev disappeared, the old rules were reimposed.29

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Ford saw several reasons for the dismissal of Khrushchev, but he was puzzled why the premier’s colleagues had turned him out when most of his policies would have to be continued in the unfavourable circumstances that would follow his dismissal. Personal irritation because of increasingly arbitrary treatment of members of the Presidium played a role, but there was serious opposition to Khrushchev’s leadership, and it had developed rapidly. Ford believed Khrushchev’s hold on power at the beginning of 1964 had been “almost unassailable.”30 The members of the Presidium must have concluded that a change in leadership would offer an opportunity to deal with a number of serious domestic and foreign problems. But the change of a familiar and fairly successful reformist leader would raise questions throughout the world about the future course of the ussr, Ford reasoned. Inevitably, conclusions would follow that the ussr was returning to the practices and policies of the Stalinist era and would promote doubts about the intentions of the government. The dismissal of Khrushchev strengthened Ford’s view that the Soviet leadership sometimes acted in ways that were contrary to its own best interests and did so for reasons rooted in a defensive and ancient Russian psychology and a lack of understanding of how others viewed its actions. Khrushchev’s removal by a vote of his colleagues – because it was the first time such an event had taken place in the forty-seven years of the Soviet state – revealed facts about the inner workings of the Party and government, but much was still secret about what had transpired. Ford concluded that the Central Committee had emerged as a centre of political authority in the country: Khrushchev had promoted his own followers to the Central Committee and had found support there in 1956 to beat back the so-called anti-Party group. In so doing, he had created a “new party system” and a “source of legitimacy” that had “diffused” his own power. Now, his foes in the Presidium had lined up support for voting against Khrushchev in the very same committee, and its actions had proved decisive. Khrushchev’s successor would have to reckon with a Central Committee that had come to play a powerful role in political affairs, and to expect limitations on his exercise of power.31 Khrushchev had been forced out by his colleagues despite his successful domestic program. The 1964 harvest had been good; his agricultural policies were producing modest gains. The Soviet space program had registered several dazzling achievements; just days

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earlier, the premier had welcomed Soviet cosmonauts back to earth after a successful voyage to outer space. Another favourite of Khrushchev’s, the consumer goods program, had received primary emphasis in the newest budget, the first such development in Soviet history. Ford saw no indication that Khrushchev’s foes had anything better to offer; nor could they, because these hard-won achievements were what the country needed. Another curious development, thought Ford, was that Khrushchev’s Presidium opponents had acted against him with no replacement in mind for the man who had dominated Soviet life and politics since the death of Stalin. Ford was convinced that the announced “collective leadership” would not survive. It had not worked after Lenin’s death or Stalin’s, nor did “the nature of the Soviet system or the Russian people give much hope that a system of effective and stable government can be produced without the nearly absolute domination of one man.”32 He predicted a struggle for power during a period when no strong government would be possible. Khrushchev’s successor would then face the question of how to energize the country. The heroic attainments of the past had been possible under Stalin “by a combination of terror and fanatical revolutionary élan.” Terror was now out of the question, and “élan has evaporated and as yet no personal incentives have yet been substituted … to provide a new feeling of drive. Khrushchev was groping toward that but his work has been arrested.”33 As for a possible successor who might emerge from the power struggle, Ford singled out Leonid Brezhnev – a “vain and ambitious man” – as the Communist leader who had the best chance of assuming power. Besides its swiftness, another striking feature of Khrushchev’s departure was its murkiness. On the morning of 13 October, Khrushchev had met with the Polish and French ambassadors at his vacation retreat in the Crimea, and neither had detected any sign of political weakness in the Soviet leader. The Soviet government offered no explanation for Khrushchev’s departure at the time it occurred, only doing so several days later. Ford therefore reached his conclusions from a number of sources, none of them official. He consulted several colleagues, including the German, Polish, and French ambassadors, and charged embassy political officers to contact their sources. Perhaps these were among the “better informed colleagues” he referred to in one dispatch. He knew that Khrushchev had returned to Moscow ahead of schedule

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because “one of my officers saw him being driven to the Kremlin early that afternoon.” On the same day, 15 October, Ford also heard “word of important political developments that began to spread in Moscow from a leak by Italian Communist correspondents” between 4 and 5 pm.34 There were other portentous events: the newspaper Izvestiia had not appeared by 7 pm. Foreign newsmen circulated stories that Khrushchev had been dismissed. Various reports, however, did not clinch the matter for Ford. The most certain evidence, combined with other information, came at 8 pm when a huge picture of Khrushchev that had hung on the façade of the Hotel Moscow – almost at the gates of the Kremlin – since the return of the cosmonauts a few days before, suddenly and quickly came down. The Soviet people learned only on the morning of 16 October that the premier and first secretary had gone into “retirement” for reasons of “age and health.” Citizens were left to draw their own conclusions, and no one seemed to have accepted the belated official announcement. The view was widespread that Khrushchev had not departed voluntarily. Ford observed an unprecedented reaction of Muscovites. Taking into account that Soviets simply did not make their views known publicly about events taking place in the Kremlin, Ford appraised the mood of the people as one of “complete indifference”: “It was clear that they expected nothing from the change. Nor for the most part did they seem to have any sense of loss.” The Soviet public had changed in the course of the past several years. “The death of Stalin was kept a secret for several days while his successors prepared the populace for the news. At the time both regular army units and members of Beria’s secret police were moved into the city. When the news was announced, the average Russian received it with a combination of disbelief, sorrow, relief and disquiet.” The death of the man who “had become a kind of superman” had produced these effects.35 Khrushchev’s departure, in contrast, took place against the background of an unruffled city. No units of the army and Ministry of the Interior troops appeared in the streets. A widespread attitude of stoical indifference showed a quite different public opinion than that which had existed at the time of Stalin’s death. For its part, the Soviet leadership was facing a journey into uncharted territory: a Moscow public largely relieved of the weight of the Stalinist myth. Ford believed that this was a major legacy of Khrushchev. Something akin to a public opinion had appeared in the ussr.

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As the main reason for the dismissal, Ford placed Khrushchev’s failures in foreign affairs, especially with respect to the premier’s inability or unwillingness to heal relations with the Chinese Communists. His animosity toward Mao Zedong, deeply reciprocated, was no secret. Most galling of all to the Soviet leadership had been the loss of “undisputed leadership of [the] world communist movement, which was [a] heritage of Stalin, whittled away, with future prospects, if Khrushchev’s policies were to continue, equally bleak.”36 The Soviets had lost influence in Eastern Europe, in the international Communist movement, and among the non-aligned countries, some of which were seeing the ouster of the first secretary as a condemnation of his support for Third World countries. The psychological effects on the Soviet leadership of loss of prestige and influence were, in Ford’s view, the main reason for Khrushchev’s dismissal. He believed that Khrushchev’s ouster had been a political error and had weakened Soviet influence in the world even more. Ford’s assessment of the Khrushchev period in Soviet life, while drawing attention to the flaws in the system, included some broader observations. The ambassador concluded that Stalin had represented one era in Soviet life and Khrushchev another, and the latter’s era was now “well and truly over.” He explained, “Just as Stalin represented the period of ‘Sturm und Drang’ of modern Russia, Khrushchev represented to a remarkable degree the hopes, aspirations and failings of the Russian peasant come to power. But as Russia became a great country his image was dated and most Russians of the ruling class knew it … The men who engineered his fall are more sophisticated, more bourgeois, more anxious to appear part of the civilized Western world and their aim in my opinion will be to give a more scientific, rational approach to world problems.”37 One of the first decisions of the leadership was to reverse Khrushchev’s reorganization of the Party in November 1962 into industrial and agricultural sections. Khrushchev had taken this measure precisely to introduce expertise and “rationality” into the management of the economy. But enormous confusion in Party work had followed, and that had to be ended. The Soviet leaders wanted a return to a “restored and revitalized Party, groomed to assume its role at the heart of full communism … a safe defense against unacceptable ideas.”38 Ford was never entirely consistent on the “rationality” of the Soviet leadership and often explained the behaviour of the Soviet leaders as irrational and connected with emotional tendencies left over from

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Russia before the Revolution. His view that Khrushchev was somehow representative of the Russian peasants seems too sweeping. In fact, Khrushchev had been a peasant only in boyhood, then became an industrial worker, and then a Party functionary. The Russian peasant, had he been the dominant figure under Khrushchev, would likely have opposed Khrushchev’s extravagant and costly foreign policy programs to promote socialism in the Third World, as well as his frenetic reforms of the Party and unpredictable style of management. Moreover, the “rational” men of the post-Khrushchev era followed many of Khrushchev’s supposedly irrational policies. As for the Khrushchev era having replaced the Stalin era, it turned out that this judgment was premature, and Ford would later point to the many Stalinist features that predominated under Brezhnev. Ford doubted that the Soviets would greatly alter the broad domestic and foreign policies of Khrushchev, and he and other Western ambassadors were receiving assurances from those who had just ousted Khrushchev that this would be the case.39 Still, if Brezhnev emerged as Khrushchev’s replacement, he could be expected to try to restore the prestige and unity of the world Communist movement, although there were too many difficulties to permit healing relations with the Chinese. The foreign parties were showing “a startling degree of independence of mind and actions over questions of his removal.” Such independence was a legacy of Khrushchev’s regime. He “saw very clearly what had to be done both to the economy and to the monstrously distorted political legacy of Stalin.” In the economy, his experiments “were really the result of an empiric mind presented with problems which appeared insoluble by the traditional Marxist methods.” But the problems remained, and so would the “torment” that would accompany any attempts to solve them. This groping for change provided opportunities to Communists – both foreign and domestic – to test the “give” in Moscow’s controls. Khrushchev, moreover, had bequeathed to his heirs, the inherent dilemma of Soviet foreign policy: “a failure to resolve the contradiction between the desire and necessity to reach a form of normal interstate relations with Western countries and the pretension still to lead a revolutionary movement dedicated to their destruction.” Ford believed that Khrushchev had understood this dilemma and had tried to explain it to “his more backward colleagues and to the Chinese. It remains to be seen whether his successors can realize it,” he commented.40

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In his telegrams assessing the fall of Khrushchev, Ford examined the dilemmas of the Soviet leadership. He continued to expand on themes that he had advanced at the time of Stalin’s death: the leaders of the ussr faced a series of restrictions on their actions that made impossible the achievement of the Communist grand design. Another serious issue was that changes led not to improvements but to yet new unsolvable problems. Years later, Ford recalled the strangeness of Khrushchev’s demise, which occurred in 1971. “When he died, of course, he was a nonperson and only four or five days after his death there was an announcement in Pravda that Citizen Nikita Khrushchev died on such and such a day. That was all. So I, with my tongue in my cheek, phoned to the chief of protocol and I said that I was very sorry to have learned of the death of your former Party leader and prime minister, and I suppose as the dean of the diplomatic corps I should pay my respects. What is the protocol? There was absolute dead silence for at least a full minute, and you could almost hear him gulping and he said, ‘I will consult and let you know.’ Two days passed and I’m sure they went to the very top, and they finally said, ‘You should be guided by the notice in Pravda.’ I said, ‘Because I had a great deal of admiration for Khrushchev as a person and as a leader, I am sure you will have no objection, I presume, if I write to his widow.’ And he said, ‘No, you may do that.’ So I wrote a very nice, quite a long letter to Mrs Khrushchev to protocol, with the request that it be forwarded. About six weeks later I actually got a letter of about two or three paragraphs, saying that she didn’t know me very well, but that she knew that her husband appreciated me. She liked my wife and, above all, she was very happy with my letter of appreciation and signed it.”41

4 Brezhnev, the Flawed Leader

khrushc hev ’s fa l l had prompted widespread hopes that the Soviet regime would settle down into some kind of reasonable normality, ceasing threats to other countries, extravagant world revolutionary objectives, and bombastic political behaviour associated with the seven years of Stalin’s successor. Ford’s dispatches reported these expectations. Writers remembered that they had made gains under Khrushchev, but they retained the uneasy feeling resulting from virulent attacks launched against them beginning in June 1963 by the dictator’s chief of ideology, Leonid Ilychev, and they hoped to resume a relationship with the government similar to that at the time Khrushchev was in the midst of his de-Stalinization campaign. Liberals believed that Khrushchev had sufficiently eradicated Stalin from Soviet life that there would be no return to the dictatorship and terror, and that his fall gave some reason for optimism. Ford, accustomed to gauging political developments partly by the behaviour of intellectuals, who provided a kind of weather vane to detect shifts in Party thinking, found at a Moscow poetry reading on 30 November 1964 – just six weeks after Khrushchev’s fall – the first hint of deviation from Marxist orthodoxy and a welcome development. A poet, Julia Drunina, wrote of “honesty in life and love whatever the consequences may be.” These simple human sentiments were an expression of a world view completely at odds with the prescribed Party outlook, yet they produced no official retaliation.1 By early 1965, Ford was hedging his comments slightly but thought optimism was “not entirely uncalled for.” Easing controls on the arts paralleled other concessions: “Sops were passed out to the farmers and steps were taken to remove sources of discontent. Innovations

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were announced in the industrial sector. It was not unreasonably hoped that a similarly fresh and generous approach might be taken in the arts.”2 However, the leaders found less and less reason to be generous, and these early hopes did not materialize. Early in 1965, the Party had begun to sound warnings against nonconformity in the arts and reminded writers that they must adhere strictly to Communist principles. In attempting to determine the line between writers’ freedom and state controls, Ford concluded that the Party needed the intellectuals and although it would bluster from time to time against signs of deviation from the Party line, it would not risk alienating “much of the country’s creative talent.” Another dilemma confronted Soviet leaders and imposed limits on their dealings with writers. The Party’s leaders understood that “economic morale-building threatens to bring on what they can only regard as political demoralization.” Intangible rewards were therefore less risky than material rewards. Ford cited “the almost universal cynicism and apathy of the population” inherited from the Khrushchev era. To overcome it, the Party sought to enlarge democracy at the local level: to promote elections to the local Soviets, to reunite the Soviets that had been divided by Khrushchev and enlarge their powers, to enhance “inter-Party democracy,” and to take up constitutional revisions.3 Ford had pinpointed an ongoing dilemma of the Communist leadership: it could not meet the yearning of Soviet citizens for greater material goods without diverting the population from building Communism. But without greater access to goods there was no incentive to work, and without work Communism would remain a dead letter. Soviet elections, designed to boost popular dedication to building Communism, showed the mendacious character of Soviet public life. Although organized to yield predictable results, elections were conducted by officials and voters as though they represented the genuine will of the people. Under Brezhnev the idea was to demonstrate the existence of “greater democracy from below.” But newspaper reports on elections to the Councils of Deputies of the Russian Republic on 14 March 1965 contained enough information to show that “democracy” in Russia existed only as a façade. For instance, the published figures claimed a turn out of 99.9 percent of the vote, but Ford learned that local election officials could strike from the voters’ lists certain categories of people before calculating percentages of turnouts. Out of 1,059,255 candidates for all the

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councils, only 170 candidates failed to obtain the required number of votes. Ford concluded that officials had simply excluded certain persons who were thought to be unacceptable in order to increase the percentage of voters. Another unconvincing figure was the number published for spoiled ballots: 1,873 out of a total of 205,864,104.4 It was simply not to be believed that so few ballots had been spoiled. This election – a “dull affair” typical of Soviet elections – was “hardly mitigated by the regime’s artificial attempt to create an air of festivity and national solidarity on the occasion of elections.” Signs of increasing edginess on the part of the Soviet leadership persuaded Ford that Canada should not subject it to excessive pressure from the outside. He argued for moderate Canadian government responses to Soviet actions, even when those actions might have tempted him to advise otherwise and when others were urging stronger responses. Following the fall of Khrushchev in October 1964, an especially tense period in Canadian-Soviet relations began. A series of spying incidents aroused the Canadian public and Parliament, but Ford counselled a restrained response, and External agreed with him. By their practices the Soviets had sullied their relations with Canada and, typically, they urged the Canadians not to notice. Ford put the actions of the Soviets against Canadian personnel in the ussr as a feature of foreign policy more strongly influenced by the security organizations. Transparent kgb operations against Canadian military attachés took the form of provocative harassment in places distant from Moscow.5 The Russians were bent on answering what they believed were Canadian actions against them. Ford recommended a calibrated Canadian response and avoiding an unmanageable escalation of events. On 13 April 1965 the Soviets alleged that the embassy’s military attaché, Colonel C. Greenleaf, had become involved in an altercation in a restaurant in Tambov (observed by the three American military attachés who were at the same table) that had resulted in broken chinaware. The embassy received a bill for fifteen rubles and four copecks from updk (the Soviet organization responsible for looking after foreign embassies) with the demand of payment for the damages.6 The embassy declined to pay the bill. Three Russians and a Ukrainian – who had been drinking – at an adjoining table had struck up a conversation with the foreigners, and the Ukrainian, who had not been part of the

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conversation, abruptly accused Greenleaf of insulting him. He became increasingly belligerent and at one point swept the dishes from his table onto the floor. The four military attachés left the restaurant at that point, and Greenleaf reported the incident when he returned to Moscow. Ford initially had not thought the matter serious, but later had come to believe that it was a deliberate provocation with political overtones. He reported, “There may be no followup to this but it … looks suspicious. Another suspicious circumstance is that Col. Greenleaf and Hearn [another attaché] did not receive visas for a planned Mongolian trip on which the Mongolians would no doubt have consulted the Russians.” Actions against other military attachés, Captains Bovey and Madsen, later in the year prompted a response. The incident involving Madsen on 12 August, Ford concluded, “seems to me partly linked to kgb desire to retaliate for expulsion of Soviet officials from Canada, partly to our accusations against the chauffeur of the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa of reckless driving.” Ford believed that a sterner line was in order: the Soviets should be told that these “provocations” jeopardized the good relations that had been established between the ussr and Canada. This particular incident involved an attempt to implicate Madsen in a traffic accident on the streets of Moscow. Ford visited the acting head of the Second European Division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mrs Mironova, and told her that “the Soviet cars involved were well known to us since they were often stationed outside the Embassy. It therefore seemed unlikely that it could have been an accident.” He requested that the Soviet drivers be cautioned against “indulging in such provocation in the future.” The ambassador concluded his report to External on the matter by observing that he thought it useful to state that “we were aware of what was happening and also to place it squarely in the context of our otherwise good relations.”7 In November, Ford drew up a balance sheet on relations between the ussr and Canada and concluded that the tensions of the spring had given way to a more realistic understanding of concrete interests. The Russians, Ford believed, had to respond in some form to the “strong action against their embassy.” Since then, they had made several cordial gestures toward Canadians, including the reception of a parliamentary delegation, the huge wheat deal, and the decision to participate in Expo ’67 despite its financial burden. The most important reason was the “dismal failure of Soviet agriculture” and

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the necessity of buying wheat abroad. The Russians found doing business with the Canadian Wheat Board easier than with any other foreign supplier. Ford also concluded that they were coming to understand that they could acquire American technology by means of relations with Canada. On the larger political scene, Ford wrote that he doubted “if the Russians think there is the slightest chance of detaching us from nato or the alliance with the usa, but they may be looking at us in the same way that they see Norway, as a country which is basically Western but for various reasons wishes good relations with the ussr, and disagrees with some of the views of the dominant nato partner. Anything therefore which can encourage this trend Soviet authorities must find worth doing.”8 As for the reasons why Canada should maintain good relations with the ussr, Ford believed there were mainly two. The first was that an independent Canadian national identity developed best when international tensions diminished; the second was that the ussr had become a very good customer for Canadian wheat, and good political relations made good sales possible. He thought that the advantage might be temporary and would give way to the Soviets becoming a large purchaser of American goods when the tensions between the two powers eased. He pointed out that these two Canadian interests were in conflict: if Canada succeeded in easing the ussr into better relations with the Western powers, the result would probably be greater economic rivalry for sales to the ussr between the United States and Canada. He wrote, “There is no question in my mind that the first aim must take precedence over the second, and that at the heart of our policy should be the need to reconcile these two goals.”9 By the end of the year, a new series of Soviet attacks against Canada had commenced. On 29 December, Izvestiia made the Canadian public a “primary target” with an article that seemed to be retaliation against the Canadian treatment of Soviet Ambassador Ivan F. Shpedko. Ford believed that the Foreign Ministry had “had this kind of criticism in mind for some time”10 and saw in the article a more fundamental purpose. Again he detected the hand of the kgb, because it took aim at the rcmp; he thought that the kgb resented the successes of the rcmp in restricting its activities in Canada and, in an attempt to exploit anti-American sentiment, blamed the Americans for manipulating the rcmp. The Soviets, Ford believed, wanted to sway Canadian public opinion in their favour and bring

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about fewer restrictions on Soviet travel in Canada, open a permanent office in Montreal, and lessen restrictions on Soviets who would be visiting Canada for Expo ’67. An additional reason for the article came the next day when one of the embassy’s political officers, Harman, met with Safronchuk of the Second European Division at the ministry. The Soviet official insisted that Canadian attacks on them had intensified through September, October, and November 1964 in the form of “an increasingly bitter anti-Soviet campaign” in the Canadian press. Safronchuk produced a thick file of clippings to back up his point. He cited as specific examples the widespread coverage of the publication of the Penkovsky papers (O.V. Penkovsky was a Soviet military intelligence officer who had worked for British and American intelligence from 1960 to October 1962, when he was arrested and later executed by the Soviets) and renewed media interest in the defection of Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko.11 Safronchuk said that finally the Soviets had to respond or they might give the appearance of accepting the charges. Ford concluded that there were two options if Ottawa wished to respond to the Soviet charges. One would be to complain to Soviet authorities about the article in Izvestiia. The other way, which he preferred, would be “placing material for an article on harassment of Canadian personnel in Moscow with an agency such as The Canadian Press.” Ford wished to make a point but without involving the government in a retaliatory action. He cited the Soviet actions against Bovey, Greenleaf, and Madsen over the previous months as providing material for such an article.12 There were other instances: surveillance of a group of Canadian visitors, including children, on a visit to Lenin Hills; surveillance of Ford and other members of the embassy on a visit to the Lenin Library; heavy surveillance of military and civilian personnel on trips outside Moscow; tail cars following an Intourist bus carrying the Théatre du Rideau Vert troupe in Leningrad; audio surveillance in hotel rooms of embassy personnel travelling outside Moscow; surveillance of visiting Canadian officials, for instance the minister of northern affairs on visits to Norilsk and Syktyvkar in May–June. In addition, militia posted outside apartment buildings and in front of the embassy had impeded the movement of Canadians. Soviet militia had separated Canadians from Russians on Moscow River beaches and had broken up picnics. Ford viewed Soviet harassment and surveillance activity as deliberate retaliation

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against Canada for a press “campaign,” for demonstrations in front of the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, and for the expulsion of several Soviets for spying, but he believed that this harassment was not intended to affect overall relations. Despite the tension in Canadian-Soviet relations in 1965 and the evident feeling on both sides to respond publicly to actions by the other side, Ford separated these actions from overall Soviet policy. He argued that the larger relations had improved between June and July and that the Soviet need for Canadian wheat did much to explain the improvement. He held that much earlier a “political decision was taken at the highest level” in the Kremlin to improve relations with Canada, but this effort would continue to be paired with clandestine and harassing activities. The Soviet “double standard” in international relations was “unlikely to change,” he reported, and “subversive activities will simply be conducted more discreetly and cautiously during a period when good overt relations are dictated by Soviet self interest.”13 This incongruous state of affairs in mid-1965, when prolonged tension and improving relations went on simultaneously, taxed Ford’s diplomatic skills as he worked to persuade both Ottawa and Moscow that public posturing should not affect long-term relations. The Soviets showed no understanding of the effects of their actions on Canadian public opinion and believed that they could accomplish their ends by gestures designed to punish Canadians for alleged anti-Soviet actions. Ford’s general assessment of the Soviet leadership as it was emerging under Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksei Kosygin was that in the face of new problems it was falling back on traditional means and formulas. He emphasized one of his beliefs about the Soviet system: it had not produced leaders who had the capacity to deal with the country’s persistent problems. Much therefore remained obscure about the motives for Soviet actions. The “anti-Canadian” campaign that the Russians had mounted off and on during 1965– 66 caused Ford to write, “The question of why the Soviet attacks were launched at all still baffles me.”14 Pointing to new problems ahead for the Soviet leadership was Ford’s assessment of the ten-day twenty-third Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1966. This congress was so lacking in drama – in contrast to the dramatic congresses under Khrushchev – that in Moscow it was labelled “Ten Days That Did Not Shake the World,” a humorous reference to John Reed’s

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influential book about the Russian Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World. Ford shared the general assessment of foreign specialists that the congress was designed to project “stability and confidence on the part of the leadership.”15 It was a “temporizing” congress, which likely reflected the mood of the Soviet populace; there would be no return to the excesses of Stalinism or the erratic projects of Khrushchev. The businesslike tone of major reports was a welcome development. But although the leaders averred that they intended to address the grievous problems in the economy, especially agriculture, they said practically nothing about ways to rectify them. Generally, as Ford had anticipated, “the general tone and lines of post-Stalin policy developed by Khrushchev” were to remain. Two matters did, nonetheless, stand out. The first was the problem of élan among youth, and the second was maintaining discipline in the Communist Party. There were 12 million members of the Party, it was later revealed, and the great majority were less than forty years of age. In Ford’s mind, the congress avoided “the heart of the problem … Nothing was presented at the Congress which could even vaguely be considered a stirring call to the youth of the cp, or the country.” The ambassador concluded that the announced emphasis on technology to solve the economic problems would increasingly draw young people in the direction of new interests and careers and would diminish the importance of Party membership and activism. In effect, the Party’s solution to the problem of a lagging economy would be to deepen the alienation of young people from the Party. Alerted to the youth problem in the ussr by the congress, Ford shortly afterwards provided a round-up of incidents involving youth and numerous expressions of official concern.16 The embassy recorded increased incidents of “‘hooliganism’ or criminal activity,” two special high-level conferences dealing with youth and crime, and a “harsh and ham-handed” trial in Rostov broadcast on television, in which miscreant teenagers were subject to ridicule by the chairman of the panel of judges and the prosecutor. The cafés for young people which at one time had numbered two hundred in Moscow had dropped to one. These were to have provided places where young people could occupy themselves during their spare time. The Komsomol (Communist youth organization) had held a ten-day conference in May stressing the need for better ideological training for the young. None of the approaches offered any truly new ideas for meeting the problem. Ford and his colleagues

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concluded, “Middle aged Communist Party functionaries tend to see solutions in ideological formulas, correct education and collective work and study. They cannot appreciate the youth’s need for variety, novelty and intellectual and other stimulation.” Ford’s general assessment of the Soviet leadership as it was emerging under Brezhnev and Kosygin was that in the face of new problems, such as the condition of Soviet youth, it fell back on traditional means and formulas and lacked the capacity to deal with a pressing new problem. Brezhnev’s regime was beginning to reflect the person and interests of Brezhnev himself. Ford saw the new leader as fundamentally flawed: I had seen from the very beginning that he was a very evil person. And he was chosen over Podgorny, Andropov, Masurov, and Suslov and many of the others simply because he was not a very bright man. He played it very carefully, to reassure the Party, the people, who didn’t know him very well, that he was not returning to Stalinism and to the more unacceptable things that Khrushchev did. For example, one of this first acts was to pass a law that no member of the Politburo could occupy two posts at the same time as Stalin did and as Khrushchev did. Of course, when the time came, he ignored his own law and he chose to be president as well as leader of the Party because … I think he was really a lazy man … and he didn’t want the hard work involved with being prime minister. But, above all, he was extraordinarily vain and he hated the idea that when he went abroad he knew and everybody else knew that he was top man in Russia, but he had no official title except Secretary General of the Communist Party. So he chose to become president. And he went through all these endless protocol affairs connected with that, except the creating of ambassadors, which was left to the deputy chairman of the Supreme Soviet.17 One sign that the leadership was falling back on traditional means of rule came within a little more than a year, in January 1966, when evidence began to accumulate that the government had lost its tolerance for extending the “thaw” in the intellectual life of the ussr. The arrest of Soviet writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Iulii Daniel became public knowledge in a strange way – through a “vicious” article in the government paper Izvestiia titled “Turncoats” by a well-known

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pro-regime writer named Dmitry Yeromin. Within days, several “harsh” letters to the editor followed. Here was the official means for preparing public opinion for a forthcoming trial. Ford had no doubt that a Stalinist-type character assassination and criminal condemnation were taking place even before the judicial proceedings had begun. The article “contains all the epithets in the worst tradition of bygone eras and Sinyavsky and Daniel are built up into criminals of the worst sort. Not content with accusing them of hooliganism, provoking terror and high treason, Yeromin goes on in classic Soviet fashion to heap abuse of all sorts on the two in an attempt to blacken their characters.” Yeromin accused them of “pornography and utter amorality and the uninitiated might think that he is faced here by utterly depraved violators of human dignity.”18 Such was the extremism in the press that it became “tragic-comic.” Among the “crimes of high treason” of the two were uncomplimentary lines about the great Russian writer Chekhov and some lines about Lenin that were said to be so bad that they could not be reprinted. The accusation also included the writers’ publishing their works abroad. But the ambassador, sampling opinion from his friends among the intelligentsia, concluded that the attack on Sinyavsky and Daniel was an isolated episode and did not foreshadow a return to all-out Stalinism and an interruption in the “continuing relaxation” of controls over writers. The trial, however, would offer some indication of future developments in the ussr. One must bear in mind, noted Ford, “the depressing fact that the majority of the Soviet populace probably accept Yeromin’s statement at face value” and that conservatives closely allied with the regime would demand harsh treatment for the accused.19 Then came an act of courage, which Ford believed extended Sinyavsky’s sentence: before the court he did not recant, but in his own defence mounted a defiant, blistering condemnation of the prosecution’s case and a defence of freedom of literary expression. He condemned the illogic of the prosecution’s case in the following way, according to the transcript of the trial that made its way to Ford, even as a number of other versions circulated clandestinely in Moscow: “Ah, ah, not socialist; ah, ah, not realist; ah, ah, not Marxist; ah, ah, fantastic; ah, ah, idealist; and, above all, abroad; this one certainly is a counterrevolutionary.” Sinyavsky’s defence made no difference to the outcome of the trial; the court condemned both him and Daniel to sentences in penal labour camps. But, wrote Ford,

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“at the same time, he set an impressive and important precedent which the regime can hardly hope to erase.” The trial was “contrary to all the propaganda of the past four or five years on the ‘growing democratization’ and ‘rule of law’ in Soviet society.”20 Already at the time of Khrushchev, as the Soviet regime attempted to recover from the Stalinist era, Ford understood that the country faced insuperable problems associated with the chasm between policies and politics. Khrushchev, a charismatic figure with widespread public support and an understanding of necessary reforms, nonetheless was dismissed by his colleagues in the Politburo who would try to implement most of his ideas. But the personality and ambitions of Brezhnev, identified by Ford at an early stage of his rule, would frustrate essential changes. One of Ford’s responsibilities as ambassador was to study and report on the Soviet leadership and identify possible successors. He saw one younger leader as promising. Within months of taking over as ambassador, he had taken the measure of Dmitry Polyansky at a Kremlin reception on 23 March 1965 for Soviet cosmonauts, where the top leadership was in attendance, and found him an exception to the usual Soviet leaders. “Polyansky,” Ford reported to Ottawa, “was very much at his ease, showed a remarkably quick repartee, lacked the usual Soviet gaucherie in exchanging small talk with my wife, and in general demonstrated an attitude of ‘not caring less’ which is so different from that of most of those Soviet leaders engaged in the ‘dog-eat-dog’ struggle they carry on.”21 Ford did not say that he spoke personally to Polyansky, but we know that Thereza did, and his judgment passed on to Ottawa may well have been based on her direct observations. Ford continued to think that Polyansky was “one of the most likely contenders for the leadership, although he is still perhaps too young to be considered in the immediate future.” He saw in Polyansky an opening for Canadian diplomacy and engineered a diplomatic event that very likely played a role in diminishing the tensions of the Cold War: he persuaded Ottawa to invite Polyansky to Canada for crosscountry tours, one in 1966 and the second in 1967 to mark the opening of the Soviet pavilion at Expo ’67 – the international exhibition held in Montreal during the celebration of Canada’s centenary – and also to visit Ottawa and Quebec. The introduction of Polyansky to Canada became a major Ford undertaking, and he saw the trip in June–July 1966 as the first high point in the maturing

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Canadian-Soviet relationship. The member of the Politburo and first deputy prime minister was invited to spend ten days travelling the length and breadth of the country, and during the first leg of the trip he was to be accompanied by a delegation from the Supreme Soviet, or parliament. It was a major foreign policy initiative for Canada and turned out to be a success, though it could easily have turned into a failure, as Thereza recorded in her notes on the visit. Because of Polyansky’s high office, the Soviets were reluctant to send him because they feared he would wind up in the midst of anti-Soviet demonstrations. A series of events in Canada had given them second thoughts.22 These included the apprehension by the rcmp of a Soviet spy, Victor George Spencer, the Gerda Munsinger affair, which implicated the Soviet Embassy, and a new Commission on General Security. Ford invited Safronchuk of the Second European Division to have dinner in the embassy residence on 20 May 1966 to talk the matter through. The Soviet official said that he was having a difficult time persuading “Polyansky and other leading members of the government that the Canadian government did not have some responsibility for present developments.”23 Ford reported that “Safronchuk kept harping on the theme that every day articles came in from Canadian papers reviving stories about Soviet espionage in Canada and the Soviet leaders could not understand what was going on.” Ford said that the Canadian government could not control press coverage but could say that “there were no anti-Soviet motives involved in setting up the commission [to look into the matter of espionage] nor was there any anti-Soviet campaign inspired by the government or anyone else.” He pointed out that Canada was “hardly likely deliberately to offend one of our best customers.” He came to the conclusion that the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa was the source of reporting about Canadian developments. The second dispatch on 21 May was pessimistic in tone and proposed that a special message be sent to the Soviet government as “an expression of good will … [to] demonstrate our interest in visit taking place.” Ford reminded Ottawa that “we are dealing with people whose minds work within restricted frameworks and whose national sensibilities are more akin to those of a small Latin American country than to a great power.” Within three weeks the situation changed in the course of a single day. Ford had heard nothing positive on 13 June and thought, “There must be a good deal of pressure by the kgb to call off the

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visit, hence the exaggeration by the Soviet Embassy of every incident to build up a picture of an anti-Soviet campaign in Canada. At the same time, if Shpedko [the Soviet ambassador in Ottawa] recommends that the visit take place and something happens that can be interpreted by either kgb or Polyansky, or both, as prejudicial to Soviet prestige, Shpedko will be the first to have to take the blame. His predicament is in fact unenviable.”24 But then matters abruptly changed, and on the same day, 13 June, Ford visited V.M. Falin at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and all the tensions of the past between the two countries had vanished. Falin only said he hoped that the longshoremen’s strike at Canadian ports would not affect the shipments of purchased wheat, but he believed that the Canadians would solve the problem. Trade talks had also started in Moscow and, again, there was no reference by the Soviets “to any of the issues which the Russians have been claiming are affecting our relations.”25 Accusations that had been a staple of Soviet contacts with Ford abruptly ceased because of political decisions made at high levels to clear the way for Polyansky. That Polyansky came to Canada at all was confirmation of Ford’s belief that although he was a dedicated Communist, he was a politician of a different sort. Later, Ford learned from an official in the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs that some high officials had wanted the visit cancelled or at least postponed. The opponents of the trip cited an “anti-Soviet campaign” in Canada and “claimed that hostile demonstrations would damage Soviet prestige.” Polyansky replied that he knew how to handle demonstrations and argued that postponement would harm relations with Canada.26 Ford had persuaded Ottawa that such a visit would further advance economic relations – the Soviets had just purchased an enormous amount of grain – and would introduce promising Soviet leaders to the superiority of Canada’s agriculture, to the Canadian way of life, and to the system of government. That Canada, with conditions of a northern country similar to those of Russia, could produce food not only for its own consumption but for export was to receive special emphasis. Stress on the “northern connection” and similarities of climate, location, and northern neighbourliness began to figure prominently in the dialogue with Moscow. Polyansky’s duties as a member of the Politburo included supervision of agriculture. He was seeking answers to the nagging problems that confronted Soviets on the farm. Thereza echoed Ford’s

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view and wrote confidently about the purposes of the trip: “I’ve the impression he’s [Polyansky’s] playing a high game trying to get hold of a solution for the mess that agriculture is in – it has destroyed Khrushchev and several others on the side – at any rate he’s the youngest and most energetic possibly a future leader and we’re hoping to make a friend. After all, they’ve just bought 850 million dollars worth of wheat and this is virtually an untapped market of more than 200 million people.”27 The ambassador wrote to Prime Minister Pearson that Polyansky would try “to pick up useful ideas for the Soviet economy.” Further, he thought that the Soviet leader wanted “serious talks at the highest level on the whole subject of Canadian-Soviet relations, the world situation, and Canada’s role in world affairs.” Polyansky also, he noted, had the “propagandistic aim of creating the impression that there are no real problems between Canada and the Soviet Union, and, in general making a triumphal tour through our country.”28 The Fords joined the Soviet delegation on the official Ilyushin plane by invitation, flying from Moscow to Ottawa with a stop in Prestwick. The flight offered them their first extended informal look at top Party officials and their retainers under informal conditions. Thereza describes the plane ride. She quickly distinguished the bosses from those who attended them. There was Khomiakov, “in a blazing white silk pique shirt, Italian or French loafers, quite good, and smoking … packages of Philip Morris.” A second was Khrushcheva, “supposedly a chemist as well as many other things, dean of Rostov University.” Later, Thereza decided that the dean was “an ass. She knows much less than she should. Her questions are generally phrased complicatedly but not knowledgeably.” Then there was the maid on board the Ilyushin, “who is cute and a young 26 but she acts and looks a bona fide maid, helping the crew, feeding the boss, whatever special duties she may have besides … One man in a green suit is his [Polyansky’s] baboon, or one of them. He sports a gun and Pol drops his patronymic. He is simply ‘Yevgeny.’” Also on board, returning to Ottawa, were the wife and daughter of Soviet Ambassador Shpedko. They were “wilted flowers at journey’s end. Nobody paid them any heed. They are pale, uninteresting, good English, bad clothes.”29 Ottawa gave Polyansky an enthusiastic welcome when the plane arrived on 26 June. Canada was seeking to take a major step onto the international diplomatic stage and to demonstrate to the world

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a reasoned approach to the Soviets that would at the same time be a declaration of independence for Canadian foreign policy. Diplomatic risks surrounded the trip, but Ford had been confident that the Russians would be attentive guests. That the Soviets had an agenda of their own became obvious at a dinner at the Rideau Club in Ottawa on 28 June, two days after their arrival, even as Polyansky was still basking in the glow of the reception he had received on every hand from official Ottawa. Paul Martin Sr, the minister of external affairs, hosted the dinner, and parliamentarians and high officials were at the tables. Thereza wrote, “By 11 Rob not home – the sky fell in. The audience of 150 was cheerful and adoring him [Polyansky]. Then he got up and launched into a tirade against US with the bombing of Hanoi. One of those with blood and killing and how do we like our boys away being slaughtered. Some no! no! from some members of Parl. Paul [Martin] had to get up and replied in kind. Very ugly.” Thereza was appalled, as were Ford and others, including opposition leader John Diefenbaker. “Dief said it was what we should expect from them and I add those fellows. What boors! They just do not understand … I wonder if they deserve any consideration, if we should treat them like civilized people, which they aren’t obviously. I am sorry I ever got Rob. into that. He is spitting mad.”30 Thereza wondered why Ambassador Shpedko – who clearly knew about and even signalled the attack in advance – could not have held him back, for Polyansky in his harsh attack had gone beyond the criticism of the Americans’ Hanoi bombing expressed by both Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin and the Communist Chinese. Ford believed that Shpedko had not seen the actual text (written in Moscow) in advance.31 When Polyansky joined the Fords for breakfast the next day on the plane to the Yukon, he insisted that he had said nothing new at the Rideau Club dinner and that the Soviet position was well known. Thereza told him his speech was inexcusable. “I had to tell him our objections since out of politeness R. could not. He [Polyansky] had been wrong, guilty of bad manners, the wrong time and the wrong place, he had embarrassed the government. He couldn’t come to our house and talk badly about our best friends … He fought back. Arguments empty. I added another. Suppose Mr. Martin gets to Moscow at the Kremlin and because he is a Catholic he engages in a tirade against the Poles as assassins of

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Cardinal Vyshinsky [sic]. How embarrassed would he [Polyansky] be. It registered. He admitted that perhaps I was right and added, laughing, ‘I see I should have asked you, asked your advice before delivering the speech.’”32 Polyansky had taught Ford a lesson in Soviet diplomatic opportunism, and the ambassador had learned that the Soviets could be rough guests and would not be bowled over by the advantages of democracy. Polyansky provoked another crisis on 30 June, the fifth day of the trip. Abruptly, he was “talking of cutting his visit short and going home.” Ford had conveyed to him a message from the Prime Minister’s Office that Pearson would not be able to play host at an Ottawa banquet that was planned for the Soviets.33 In a Vancouver hotel on the evening of 30 June, a member of Polyansky’s group called Fords’ room, and minutes later Polyansky himself was at the door declaring that “he was a guest of the Can. Govt. – either Mr. Pearson gave him lunch or dinner or he’d go home and no visit,” recalled Thereza.” Rob. was in a mood. He tried to reason that they had changed the program at the last minute, that the pm was going to Newfoundland – the Caribbean pms’ conference.” Faced with an ultimatum, his temporizing a failure, Ford, tried to reach people in Ottawa by phone, but as his wife recounted, “only found Jim George – I don’t trust him – Too long a line to get to the top.” Thereza found the reaction from Ottawa lame, and doubtless Ford had the same opinion. This time she sided with Polyansky. “It’d be inconceivable,” she wrote, “that in 3 weeks the pm could not find a day to give the man a meal. After all he is his guest. Our pm tends to be casual.” The issue now was how to reach Pearson and then persuade him to restore to his calendar a meal with the visiting Russian. Thereza suggested approaching Paul Martin: “Rob. Shy to disturb him. I’d disturb the pm. What the devil? Convinced him. Had to get a little tough.” Ford, at his wife’s urging, called Paul Martin, and he resolved the matter. George phoned within hours to say that Pearson would give a dinner for Polyansky at his residence. Ford carried the news to Polyansky, who appeared “happy as a kid,” as Thereza noted, for “he would lose face, probably other members of the Politb. have seen the original program, how could he leave without having conversations with the pm?”34 Apparently, Thereza had intervened to forestall a potential crisis by persuading her husband to go to the top. But Ford’s memoirs give an entirely different account of the near collapse of the Polyansky

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trip, for whereas Thereza assigns blame to the Canadians, Ford blames the Russians. He writes: “The next near disaster came when Polyansky announced that he had to return to Moscow a day earlier, thus eliminating an official dinner organized by the Canadian government. When I told Polyansky this in Vancouver, he interpreted it as an insult. Arriving unexpectedly, (I was in my shirt sleeves and my wife was in the bath) at my hotel room with his entire entourage in tow, he announced that because of this affront he would go home immediately. I called Ottawa and after a painful night of negotiations, the prime minister agreed to give an informal dinner at his Sussex Drive residence on the last day of the visit. I informed Polyansky the next morning and honor was saved. The fault had been entirely Russian and the first temptation was to let them go home. But as so often in dealing with the Russians, it was essential to resist the obvious retort, be patient, be adjustable, and wait for the results.”35 A comparison of Thereza’s and Ford’s accounts of the Polyansky “crisis” shows striking differences. Thereza’s account is probably the more accurate because she made notes of the episode shortly after it had occurred. Thereza is likely the more credible witness when putting the blame for the near-disaster on the Prime Minister’s Office; Ford, ever the diplomat, would avoid any embarrassment for his political masters. Thereza’s indirect participation in diplomacy becomes even clearer because she was the main author of a confidential memorandum that Ford “wrote” on 25 July 1966 for the under-secretary external affairs. The memorandum is over Ford’s signature, but the quotations are vintage Thereza, and a comparison of texts shows that they were taken from her “Notebooks.” Ford begins by writing: “On one occasion during the Polyansky visit, I had an opportunity to sit with Mr. Daniyalov [the Communist boss of Dagestan] with whom I had a very frank discussion.” But it was Thereza, not Ford, who had the conversation with Daniyalov. She wrote her accounts daily, so the record in her notebooks precedes Ford’s version of the same conversation written by him about three weeks later. Relying on his wife’s account, Ford had presented it as his own. His borrowing from his wife was more than here and there; it was copious, and the essential observations of Thereza became the observations of the ambassador, although he smoothed out the prose and gave coherence to the account.

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Quotations from the texts of Thereza and Ford illustrate the point. In her “Notebooks,” following the conversation with Daniyalov, Thereza wrote: “He said people had to end grabbing and think more of the next fellow. I replied it was a contradiction in terms. How could he expect people to be given more and more, which in reality meant satisfying natural greed and still expect high collective spirit? He said if one is hungry and hunger is satisfied there is no need to eat. I said the hunger grows with eating and there’ll be one day when a Volkswagen isn’t enough – one wants a Cadillac.”36 Ford wrote: “Daniyalov, in defining the Communist system, said that people had to end grabbing things for themselves and think more of their neighbors and fellow-men. I said I thought this went too much against human nature. I asked him how he could expect people to acquire more and more, which was the whole nature of the new incentive system in the ussr and which in reality meant satisfying natural greed, and still expect high morale on a collective plane. He said that, if one is hungry and the hunger is satisfied, there is no need to eat any more. I replied that appetite increases with eating, and a day will come when even a Moskvich is not enough. Everyone will want a Chaika (the Soviet equivalent of a Cadillac).”37 Thereza: “He says his country is barely 25 yrs. old in terms of useful time – Revolution – then war – that we don’t have population problems (Mr. Simenov had expanded on the subject early this morning saying that no country in the world has ever been in our privileged position of hand-picked immigrants. I mentioned the refugees we’ve taken and the commonwealth negroes. He said our selection was extraordinary, we only took skilled labor).”38 Ford: “Daniyalov said that the ussr had really had little more than 25 years of peace and that we ought to realize the terrible problems they were faced with. He remarked on the fact that we had no population problems. He had previously had a conversation with Semenov, he told me, and had been amazed at the good luck of Canada in having been able to hand pick its immigrants. I mentioned the refugees that we had taken and the program for admitting Asians and negroes from Commonwealth countries, but he shrugged this off as being of minor importance. He commented again and again on the extremely intelligent selection of immigrants to Canada.”39 Thereza again: “He told me that every [Party] Congress has added ½ million of party members, they were already twelve million

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members and one day it’d be the whole population. I expressed doubt but countered with the notion that even if that were to happen at a traveling point x how about the time in between? Who was to tell me that the first car and a silk shirt would not prove too demoralizing for the young? He said rather hesitantly – No, he didn’t think so as though the possibility never occurred to him.”40 Ford: “He told me that every Communist Congress had added about half a million of Party members. There were already 12 million, and one day it would include the entire population. I expressed doubt, but countered with the notion that even if it were to happen, how about the time in between? I was sure that the first car and silk shirt would prove completely demoralizing for the young people. He replied rather hesitantly that he did not think so, but as though the possibility had never really occurred to him.”41 Ford signed letters and documents that others wrote for him. Presumably, he read or at least skimmed them. In the case of Thereza’s notebooks on the Polyansky trip, he represented himself as having participated in conversations when it was actually Thereza who was there. Similarly, the evidence of Thereza’s notes shows that Ford was not a participant in the conversation with Daniyalov. She alone had the talks with Daniyalov, and Ford used her notes as the text of his letter to Ottawa. Polyansky in the course of several conversations with Ford laid out a fairly comprehensive view of Canadian foreign policy and Canadian society.42 There were wide disagreements. He told Ford that Canada should take Gaullist positions on the Vietnam War and nato and become even more independent of the United States in world affairs. (Polyansky, of course, erred in citing the views of Charles de Gaulle who, on a visit to Canada the following year, alienated Canadian federalists when he pronounced “Vive le Québec libre” from a balcony in Montreal.) Ford countered that the government agreed with some of de Gaulle’s positions but not his methods, that Polyansky was not taking into account the viewpoint of Washington and the realities of Canadian-American relations. The Soviet said that if détente were to become a reality, nato and the Warsaw Pact would have to be dissolved. Ford and Polyansky also had long discussions on press freedom, and Ford attempted to persuade him that Canadians enjoyed it while the Soviets did not. Polyansky, although pleased on the whole with the reception given him by the press (he especially liked the

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reports of Bruce West in the Globe and Mail ), told Ford that the Canadian press was generally not interested in facts. By this he meant that reporters had not published in full the communiqué issued by the leaders at the end of the Ottawa visit; they had not published in full the Soviet position on the Jewish issue in the ussr. Ford answered that in Canada the press was independent and published what it wished to publish, using reader interest as one measure of coverage. Polyansky told Ford that he assumed that “as good friends the Canadians were trying to find some way for the United States out of its dilemmas.” Ford assured him that this was not the case: “I said that our motives in attempting new initiatives were partly based on our belief that the United States had become a bit too rigid, and we believed in many cases that what we were doing was in the best interest of the United States, as well as Canada and world peace.” Polyansky agreed to “accept this explanation as a satisfactory one.”43 On the whole, the ambassador found his talks with Polyansky heavy going: “I am reporting this conversation in some detail simply because it shows the difficulty of getting through to the Russians, even when they see for themselves the situation in a democratic country. They work within such strict limitations that they find it almost impossible to believe anything which does not fit in with their previously conceived ideas.”44 As the trip proceeded and the Canadians tried to show Polyansky and his colleagues the benefits of Canadian life, the Soviets made clear that they would not be transformed quickly into polite and deferential liberals and democrats. A constant critical refrain of the members of the visiting delegation was that they observed great differentials in wealth in Canada but not in the Soviet Union. A purpose of the trip had been to expose the Soviets to democratic and prosperous Canada; but the Soviets were partly turning the tables by finding things to criticize in Canadian life. Finally, Thereza “got mad” and pointed out that the Soviet leaders themselves who were making these comments had enormous wealth at their disposal that set them far above the general population. “Cars and chauffeurs, and vacations, dachas, a special room in all [railway] stations.”45 Occasionally, she wrung a grudging admission from Polyansky that perhaps she had a point. Despite problems, the Polyansky visit to Canada proved fruitful. Some years later, just before the Nixon-Brezhnev summit in 1972,

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Polyansky told Ford “that in many ways we together had started this whole process; it was the invitation to Polyansky to visit Canada in 1966 that had broken the ice and gradually built up an atmosphere of co-operation and made the breakthrough in Soviet-American relations possible.”46 That the trip was a success was in no small measure because of the timely counsel and intervention of Thereza Ford. Thereza’s role in Canadian diplomacy was evident again during the second Polyansky visit, in which he attended Expo ’67 in Montreal. The Quebec premier Daniel Johnson had said in a speech at a dinner at which the Soviets were guests that the status of Ukraine and Byelorussia in the Soviet Union was superior to that of Quebec in Canada, because the Soviet Union had assured to each of its republics “a very large international role.” Having anticipated “remarks of this sort,” Ford, as he reported to External, had asked Thereza, who would be seated next to the Quebec minister of education, Jean-Jacques Bertrand, to explain to him the “real situation” of Soviet republics.47 “As a Latin, a Catholic and fluent French speaker,” recalled Ford, “she was able to do this inoffensively and successfully so that M. Bertrand after dinner asked me a few pertinent questions on the subject. Later I noticed another Québec minister approach him to quote M. Johnson’s speech as a felicitous blow for Québec to which M. Bertrand replied: ‘My dear friend, I believe that you have chosen a bad example. Federalism does not exist in Russia.’” The next day Ford talked to the federal minster Jean Marchand on the same theme, and the ambassador concluded that the conversation with Thereza had provided the material for Marchand’s “excellent declaration” to La Presse on 16 August 1967 and a Le Devoir editorial the following day, both papers making the point that Ukraine hardly enjoyed a position in the ussr comparable to that of Quebec in Canada. Polyansky later told Ford that he “had realized what was going on” and had no intention of “being dragged into the dispute” and had deliberately not responded to Johnson’s remarks.48 Pierre Dupuy, commissioner general of Expo ’67 and a former ambassador to France, said “he was certain that M. Johnson knew the real picture but was simply using the Ukrainian example as another way of attacking the Federal Government.” But Ford had enlisted Thereza who had successfully countered the premier’s gambit. But again Thereza’s role was lost. In later years, when writing his memoirs, Ford misrepresented what had happened at the banquet,

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stating that it was he (not Thereza) who had been seated next to Bertrand when Johnson spoke; Thereza’s role became his own. He wrote, “I was sitting next to Jean-Jacques Bertrand and had set him straight about Johnson’s comments: I told him the Premier was badly misinformed and that even the worst enemy of Québec would not wish on it the fate of Ukraine … In practice it was an integral part of the Soviet Union, firmly under the thumb of the central government which had not the slightest compunction in suppressing any sign of Ukrainian nationalist or religious feeling. Bertrand took this all in, said it was clear the analogy was wrong, and right after the banquet told Johnson.”49 Here is an instance when Ford directly contradicts himself, and the result is to fail to give Thereza credit for fulfilling an assignment that he himself had given her. In defence of Ford on the Johnson banquet, it seems probable that he did not have the documents in front of him, including his own earlier account to External, for he was writing after his retirement to France, and he could have misremembered events that had taken place a dozen or so years before. His first account, reported at the time to External and located in Ottawa archives, shows that Ford gave his wife a specific assignment, that she performed it well, and that the result was favourable for the government. Robert Ford was an outstanding diplomat and recognized as such by his colleagues in Canada and throughout the Atlantic Alliance. He was an especially acute observer because he plunged into the life and culture of the Russians. The Polyansky trip shows that he relied on Thereza absolutely, trusting her judgment and her ability to carry out diplomatic work. Ford judged the Polyansky visit a major success for Canadian diplomacy. It firmed up economic relations dominated by the important grain trade, stirred interest in Canada as an important capitalist country in its own right and not as a satellite of the United States, and it began “the slow process toward détente in East-West relations.”50 After some 6,000 Soviet citizens visited Canada during Expo, Ford concluded that a new stage had been achieved in EastWest relations because “Canada became the only Western country they knew.”51 For the Soviets, they wished a strong and stable Canada and believed that a Canada that broke up over the issue of Quebec and French culture would fall prey to US domination and strengthen the Soviets’ traditional foe.

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Perhaps, Ford speculated, the visit of Polyansky to Canada in 1966 had been too successful and had aroused enormous resentment among his rivals in the leadership.52 Ford took seriously Brezhnev’s remark to Paul Martin: “We call him the Canadian. If he can get elected, you can have him.” Ford detected “an under-current of sarcasm” and finally concluded, “The Russians are always capable of doing things which seem to us totally incomprehensible in the light of their own self interests.”

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commemo r a t iv e e v e nt s had political significance in Moscow, and they offered Ford yet another way to gauge the mood of the regime. Increasingly, the leaders glossed over the difficulties faced by the ussr; effective solutions to problems appeared to be beyond their grasp. The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Revolution of November 1917 was observed in 1967, and Ford found that “collective harmony” reigned among the Soviet leaders, who had registered some achievements and a slow improvement in standard of living. These signs were superficial. He doubted that the population was ready to tackle fundamental problems that faced the country.1 Ford attended the May Day celebrations and reported that these normally important events were suffused with a spirit of boredom, which he shared. The traditional commemoration of Lenin’s birthday the week before had been badly attended by the leaders, and those who did attend “were there because they were told to be” and “suffered in bored indifference.” From the perspective of power alignments, the ambassador thought that the members of the Politburo were “more or less in balance.”2 In preparation for the main directions of foreign and domestic policies, the authorities published enough material before the Fiftieth Anniversary celebration to reveal that the “picture is one of immobility and lack of inspiration in foreign policy, of a similar conservatism in intellectual life, and of cautious innovations in other fields of domestic policy” aimed to give the citizenry only a somewhat better standard of living.3 The main point of tension, which would resurface in Soviet life following the anniversary, would be the increasing hostility to writers and artists.

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Brezhnev’s government feared internal criticism and determined to head it off by repression. This appeared obvious to Ford again in January 1968 with the arrest and trial of four young writers: Alexander Ginsberg, Yuri Galanskov, Alexander Dobrovolsky, and Vera Lashkova. By trying and condemning to prison camps “these unimportant young people,” the regime had exposed to doubt the essential ruling myth – “the myth with which the Soviet Communist Party maintains its moral claim to total power – the myth of unanimous acceptance by the whole population with the exception of a few cranks or foreign agents.”4 Although the rulers hoped that the trial would deal with the problem of dissent, would “stop the dry rot and frighten the intellectuals into submission,” it opened to wide public and foreign scrutiny the growing disaffection of young intellectuals, especially by means of coverage by foreign correspondents, whose reports then made their way back into the ussr. Other young intellectuals – Larisa Daniel and Pavel Litvinov – following the trial directly challenged the authorities by beginning a petition drive against the sentences. Ford saw the whole matter as a terrible blow to the rulers: The “kgb mentality would hardly permit any other choice than that of severe repression. What is surprising is the extremely stupid and clumsy way the police have handled the problem, starting with the detention of the four for a year before bringing them to trial.” As for the young intellectuals, they were the heirs of the nineteenthcentury intellectuals who had made protests against absolute power “in an apparently useless attempt to bring down the tsarist system and in the sure knowledge that death or Siberia waited. It is a mixture of a masochistic Slav attraction to martyrdom, a fanatic attachment to the idea of personal liberty, and a canny idea that in spite of everything these superficially hopeless acts of self-sacrifice might be the only way of sapping the strength of the state giant.” Ford described this pitting of the self-sacrificing young intellectuals against an immoral state power as a “Russian phenomenon,” and he concluded that the Soviet leadership faced an “insoluble dilemma,” because it could not at the same time modernize Soviet society and return to the practices of Stalin.5 Ford’s familiarity with Russian history had led him to the observation that the trial – however unimportant the accused – would have long-term influence on the authority of the state.

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By mid-1968 Ford, over the course of four years, had written telegrams and dispatches for External that consisted of searing indictments of the Soviet system and its leadership. He consistently stayed with themes that he had first elaborated in his initial major paper on the Soviet system in 1954. Most important were the following: (1) that Russian history imposed enormous influence on Soviet behaviour; (2) that the Soviet system of political and economic controls was unworkable except by the application of force; and (3) that the Soviet leadership was of poor quality, wished above all to preserve its own position, and increasingly relied on the kgb to maintain control over society. It employed self-defeating methods to try to control intellectuals. Because this failed system of political organization was in possession of modern weapons, Canada had no choice but to understand its weaknesses and cultivate its leaders. Beginning in 1968, Ford understood that the developing crisis over Czechoslovakia was intensifying the flaws in the Soviet system. Increasing Soviet nervousness with events in Eastern Europe coincided with the growing influence of the kgb in Soviet foreign and domestic relations. The targeting of Canadian military attachés again occurred during the first months of 1968, and Ford connected them to “long-delayed revenge” by a kgb that was responding to a series of setbacks in Canada. The kgb would have responded earlier but had been prevented from doing so for political reasons. Ford believed that it had reacted to the expulsion from Canada on charges of espionage of the Izvestiia correspondent and two members of the Soviet Embassy commercial staff, the identification of a number of kgb officials and the refusal to grant them visas during Expo year, 1967, and the refusal of a visa to Malakhov to assume his duties as a counsellor of the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa. The actions against Canadian officials on Soviet territory culminated in a serious incident in May, and Ford called on Valentine Falin at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs about the Soviets’ “violation of diplomatic immunity” of a Canadian Embassy military attaché, Lieutenant Colonel Watson, who had been travelling by train in the Far East with his wife and another embassy attaché and his wife. The Soviets accused Watson of making notes on intelligence matters while passing in the neighbourhood of a Soviet air base. Four Soviet civilians and the sleeping car porter had burst into the Canadians’ compartment, roughed them up, searched their belongings and

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their berths, and accused Watson of photographing an airfield. A major of the militia had suddenly appeared, and Watson pointed out that he and his companions had diplomatic status and demanded to know who these people were, but he received no answer.6 “In the incident,” wrote Ford, “Watson incurred scratches on neck, chest and back, a bruised thumb, a wrenched back. His wife has a badly bruised and swollen arm.” Ford believed that the incident had been staged, because the four civilians disappeared as the train pulled into Nakhodka. The sudden appearance of the train conductor and the militia major were other signs of a provocation. Watson had not even known that the train was passing an airfield, and arousing further suspicion was the Soviets’ knowledge that Watson had two cameras, although the second one had not been visible to the nocturnal visitors. The so-called “notes” were “trip notes,” prepared in Moscow before departure and on the train before the incident.7 Falin said that “it would be a good idea for us to reflect on this because it would not be pleasant for us to see Watson’s notes” but that every attempt should be made to maintain good relations. Ford replied that “when they [the Soviets] permitted police to overstep all limits of diplomatic norms and then retaliated on an attaché it was bound to be publicized and react on our relations.”8 The Soviets then declared Watson persona non grata, and he departed for Canada. The Canadians, refusing to accept any of the charges against Watson, expelled a Soviet military attaché in return, Lieutenant Cononel Didenko, an action that resulted in Falin summoning Ford to the ministry at noon on 31 May.9 The two sides refused to yield on their separate views of the Watson affair. Falin had the Watson notebook on his desk and insisted that it revealed the “outlines of espionage tasks” assigned to him. Ford replied that “there was no point in entering into a detailed argument since there were two sets of facts which were completely contradictory.” He continued: “I then said that it seemed absurd that we should permit such questions of marginal interest to both countries to interfere with the development of good relations.” Falin said that he agreed but that the Soviets were insisting that the facts adduced by the Canadian side did “not correspond to the truth.”10 Ford told External, “We must keep in mind that the kgb now have overruled civilian authorities and it is they who will determine the next stage.” He advised a statement to the press to explain the matter to the Canadian public – “a simple statement to the effect that Watson had been accused of espionage

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and requested to leave the ussr. We had no alternative but to arrange his departure although all the evidence at our disposal indicates that he had not been guilty.” Ford urged a tempered reaction to undercut those of the Politburo, who wished to underline the idea of a “threat” from Western diplomatic missions because of events in Eastern Europe.11 While he attempted to maintain the Soviets’ focus on the importance of good relations, Ford faced a similar problem in Ottawa – a retaliatory mood – and he made arguments to his political masters at External that echoed what he had told Falin. This was the clear theme of his telegram of 28 May 1968.12 The episode provided an opportunity for Canada. He wrote of the “strained relations” between the United States and the ussr and argued that Canada should therefore do what it could “to maintain relations on an even keel.” Of great importance was continuing the exchanges of persons, which did so much to “widen Soviet horizons.” Improved political relations had made possible exchange visits of political leaders and the emigration of many Soviet citizens to Canada under the “unification of families” policy. He stressed the huge purchases of Canadian wheat over five years with a value of $800 million, plus a $50 million sale of equipment for new Siberian oil fields. After reminding his readers of the substantial benefits that Canada had gained from its good relations with Moscow, Ford asked rhetorically, “What has happened to sour relations?” There were two basic reasons: “The first, and by far the most important, is the involvement of the kgb in the question. The second is the sensitivity of a big power, still unsure of itself, to being pushed around by a smaller country.” But not all the responsibility for tense relations lay with the Soviets.13 Ford recommended that the Canadian side analyze the effects of its own actions. “We must look back over the past few years to realize the amount of irritation and anger we must have aroused in kgb headquarters.” He explained: “There are the three expulsions on espionage charges of the Izvestiia correspondent and two members of the Soviet commercial staff in Ottawa. There was the defection of Olga Farmakovskaya, whose husband was an ris [military intelligence] colonel, and who may have been a kgb agent herself. So far as the Russians are concerned they think this was engineered by Peter Worthington [a Toronto journalist] whom they consider a Canadian secret agent. This must have been a severe blow to kgb prestige.”14 Ford added that since January 1967 Canada had refused

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visas for twenty-four Soviet consular officials, actions that he saw as “extremely galling” to the Soviets. As well, he believed Canada’s Expo ’67 had produced a deeply favourable impression on thousands of Soviet visitors and had spurred the kgb to take measures to “paint a different picture of Canada.” The Russians, he said, had not taken strong retaliatory actions against various affronts until the refusal of a visa to embassy counsellor Malakhov. This, plus general nervousness in the leadership over Eastern Europe, Ford thought, had led to a free hand for the kgb, and it had used it in the Watson matter and in denying a number of visas to Canadian Embassy staff.15 He argued, in defence of maintaining good relations, that détente’s influence on the ussr had been profound: “Western policy has encouraged a remarkable evolution of thinking on the part of the Soviet intelligentsia and technicians, possibly even of many Communist Party politicians. This has generally taken the form of a greater realization of the economic and social progress in the West, a more realistic appraisal of the outside world and a serious questioning of Soviet values and Marxist dogma.” These accomplishments were major ones, and the burden of Ford’s argument now was that Canada and its Western allies should avoid direct challenges to Soviet control over the satellite countries lest they provoke a violent Soviet response. Détente had worsened Soviet relations with the more radical Marxist parties of the world and had increased difficulties for the Soviets to work both with existing governments and with Communist parties in many countries of the world, especially in Latin America. The Soviets had also had to “avoid a direct and unprofitable clash with the usa.” As for Canada, the economic, scientific, and technical benefits of easier relations had been considerable. He wrote: “Canada obviously can develop its own personality and its trade and prosperity more successfully in an atmosphere of genuine détente.” On the negative side, détente had had the effect of loosening the nato alliance, but Ford believed that nato unity could be maintained.16 Looking back on 1968 the next year, Ford marked the “highest point” of Canadian-Soviet relations as 1967. The signing of the 9-million-ton wheat contract in June 1966 had commenced the upswing in the collaboration of the two countries. It was followed by Polyansky’s successful tour in July 1966, the visit of Paul Martin, secretary of state for external affairs in November, and the “massive” Soviet participation in Expo ’67. During the same year there had

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been numerous Soviet official and unofficial visitors to Canada, and a number of high-level technical, commercial, cultural, and scientific delegations from Canada had visited the ussr.17 In retrospect, Ford concluded that all of the contacts between Canada and the ussr were an “over-extension” on both sides and that fewer would naturally occur after the celebration in 1967 of the Canadian centennial. Hastening the drop-off was the “insult” the Russians believed they had suffered because of the “violent and highly publicized” demonstrations at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa on the occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Russian Revolution on 7 November 1967. Ford believed that “resentment about this went very deep, particularly since the Russians felt their active and expensive participation in Expo justified a greater effort by the Canadian government to prevent interference” with their celebrations. A more serious problem soon confronted the Soviets. Brezhnev himself had made a quick trip to Prague in December 1967 to give his backing to the long-term Party leader Antonín Novotný, but without success, and the Czechoslovak Central Committee replaced Novotný the following month. Ford had warned External in January 1968 that the Soviets were extremely nervous about West Germany’s growing influence in the East European bloc of satellite countries and in Yugoslavia. He pointed out that the Soviets had been worrying about the resurgence of neo-Naziism every time the West Germans established a new link with one of the satellite countries. The Soviet leaders, he wrote, with respect to Eastern and Central Europe, were “fearful, emotional, conservative, and defensive,” and their attitude was focusing in particular on Czechoslovakia. They could no longer use Stalinist tactics to impose subservience on countries that were now “drawing away from them.”18 Ford anticipated some action against Czechoslovakia, based mainly on his assessment of the psychology of the Soviet leaders. Disturbances in Poland and Czechoslovakia in May – initially not mentioned in the Soviet press – left the Soviet leaders in the throes of a “painful process of assessing events.” Ford predicted that they would be unable to tolerate a Czechoslovakia now under the leadership of Alexander Dubcˇek, head of the Communist Party, which during the “Prague Spring” was diverging from a system that featured “police coercion, censorship, centrally controlled elections and falsified history.”19 Relations began improving in the summer of 1968, but by midsummer departures from established Communist rule in

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Czechoslovakia had shaken Moscow, and Ford took note of “the virulence and distortion of the press in its comments on events in Czechoslovakia, sickening even by normal Communist standards.” Included were “elaborate inventions about Western, nato, reactionary, imperialist, etc. counterrevolutionary activities” in the country.20 The Soviet leaders, Ford believed, were alarmed not only by Czechoslovakia but by a spillover effect on the peoples of Ukraine and the Baltic republics. Deepening unease at the centre of Soviet power appeared in a new form: the Soviet leadership was publicly vacillating on several issues. An announced meeting with the Czechoslovak leaders to take place on Soviet territory was changed one week later to Czechoslovakia. The release of this information to the Soviet population showed a departure from the “usually majestic attitude” assumed before the Soviet people. Having attempted various ways of putting pressure on the Czechoslovaks, the Soviets must have been taken aback at ˇ ierna-nad-Tissou when they discovered that Dubcˇek the meeting in C would not give way and reverse his internal reforms. The character of the Soviet leadership appeared in its starkest form, reported Ford. “The Soviet leaders are simply incapable of understanding how to handle a situation of this sort and my feeling is that they had no real contingency plan.” Convinced that the Czechoslovaks would ˇ ierna anticipate using force. give in, they did not at the time of C They “were really not prepared for failure. It is in their character and in the nature of their rigid Marxist mentality, to be unable to work out a meaningful compromise.”21 Inside the ussr this same mentality produced an increase in kgb activities against dissenters and a stalling of economic reforms. The Soviet leaders were “shocked by what they saw happening in the economic field, first in Yugoslavia and, more important, in Czechoslovakia. They saw that economic reform led inevitably to an increase in demand for intellectual freedom and to a weakening of the cp monopoly of power.” Ford believed that the leaders of the ussr had come to another disturbing conclusion: they could not claim the loyalty of great sections of their own population, and they knew it. “We arrive at probably the core of the matter. The reason why these persons in whose hands rests almost total power, demonstrate such an unbelievable fear – fear of ideas, fear of the slightest innovation, fear of Germany, fear of America – is because, basically, the present leadership is made up of small, petty, limited men whose

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careers are largely the result of a painstaking but ruthless climb up through the Party apparatus … They care primarily for the preservation of their Party and their positions.”22 From the “frightened schizophrenics in the Kremlin” could be expected only increased repression. And Ford had in mind the leaders of one of the world’s most powerful countries, whom he listed by name: Brezhnev, Podgorny, Suslov, Kosygin, Kirilenko, and a few others. These were the men who had unseated Khrushchev and who had embarked upon a program to stabilize the ussr. When the leaders in Moscow finally did bring themselves to order and sent Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia on 21 August 1968, having forced upon its leaders an “invitation” to justify this action, Ford judged that they had done great damage to Soviet influence in the international Communist movement in the less-developed countries and in relations with the West. The Czechoslovak invasion had completely altered world opinion about the Soviet leaders: It had been widely held that “the present Soviet leadership was more cautious and rational, more open to reason and safer to deal with than Khrushchev,” wrote Ford. “Indeed, the Soviet leaders had presented themselves in those terms. Now they have shown themselves, if not impulsive, at least capable of taking major decisions in defiance of most western predictions of how they would behave and on the basis of some elements of bad miscalculation.”23 Domestically, the Soviet leadership understood that it was dealing with a more sophisticated population than that of Hungary when it put down the revolution there in 1956 with a “totally implausible line.”24 To Ford, the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the way the Russians had behaved demonstrated that “the Russian Soviet character has not changed. When the chips are down they revert to type.”25 In the treaty imposed on the Czechoslovaks in October 1968, Ford saw the naked application of Soviet power justified but not concealed by legalistic phraseology. In a damning conclusion to his comments, he wrote, “Like Hitler in his time Russians have always attached enormous importance to appearances of legality, and its absence in the Czechoslovak case greatly perturbed them. The fact that the whole world is aware how fictitious legalization will seem in the case of Czechoslovakia will not disturb them in the least.”26 The treaty was obviously fraudulent, but the Czechoslovaks had decided that they had no choice but to agree to it. Article One provided for the temporary stationing of Soviet troops on Czechoslovak territory

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in order “to protect the socialist community from German revanchism.” This provision gave the Soviets a “legal” basis for stationing troops in Czechoslovakia, quite apart from the provisions of the Warsaw Pact. Other provisions gave the Soviet military full rights to enter and depart from Czechoslovakia, which would allow civilians attached to the Soviet armed forces to do the same. The “Russians could flood Czechoslovakia with kgb agents under this provision and claim it was all legal.” The Soviets, summarized Ford, stated in the treaty that their occupation “is not an infringement of Czech sovereignty nor will the occupation force interfere in Czech internal affairs, although their very presence constitutes both infringement and interference.” The Russians had “forced on the Czechs a punitive treaty which could reduce the country to the status of a colony.” Soviet actions would give them some influence in the international Communist movement, but to everyone else around the world it was clear that the treaty had been imposed under duress. A rethinking of Canadian policy toward the countries of the Eastern European bloc of Soviet satellites followed the August 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact powers. Events in Czechoslovakia had also induced major changes in the thinking of the Soviet leaders. They had reacted powerfully, although the Czechoslovaks had posed no physical threat to the ussr; Moscow had sent massive armies into the country and imposed an occupation on it simply because of fear. Although the ambassador’s telegrams included candid and specific assessments of the Soviet leaders and their motivations – as revealed during the Czechoslovak crisis – he advanced a general perspective as well in a separate paper on the implications for détente and so-called “peaceful coexistence.”27 By militarily occupying Czechoslovakia, the Soviets had delivered a “nasty jolt” to their influence in the “developing world,” where they had patronized “national liberation movements” as a means of promoting socialist regimes. They had tried to repair the damage inflicted on their relations with the Afro-Asian states by arguing that “temporary contradictions” had arisen in the unfolding world revolutionary process, which the imperialists were attempting to exploit by their criticism of the occupation. Even worse, so-called Maoist “splitters” (i.e., the Chinese) were also slandering the Soviets.28 Ford found that the Soviets had contrived a new explanation to account for their action in Czechoslovakia; this explanation, while unconvincing, had ominous overtones for their future behaviour.

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Soviet official commentators argued that sending armies into a Socialist country was necessary when a “quiet” or “peaceful” counterrevolution had broken out, as the Soviets claimed in Czechoslovakia. The concept of national sovereignty now had to give way in order to defend the international class struggle. This was essential, according to one Soviet official, because “international imperialism … tries to counter-attack the historic offensive of the forces of socialism and national liberation.” Accordingly, the Soviets would fight “international imperialism” but would not intervene in Third World countries because, according to Soviet doctrine, no one could introduce socialism to a country from the outside; building socialism was a matter for the people of individual countries. But the argument also seemed to proclaim a new doctrine – soon to be tagged the Brezhnev Doctrine -- that conditions described as “counter-revolutionary” in the Eastern bloc could justify military intervention by the so-called “socialist community” – that is, the ussr. Ford had no doubt that this was a new doctrine, although it constituted little change in the Soviets’ attitude toward Eastern Europe. Any talk of doctrine really meant “power” and referred to the countries already under the Soviet thumb in Eastern Europe: Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Hungary.29 While defending the Czechoslovak invasion and finding new arguments for it, the Soviets insisted that their Third World policy was unchanged. Ford concluded that they had suffered a setback in their policy toward the developing countries: although countries dependent on the ussr endorsed the invasion of Czechoslovakia, others now wished to avoid close dependence on the Soviets. For Canada, this state of affairs offered an opportunity: “The picture of a big country brutalizing a small one may make the idea of seeking help from the smaller developed countries like Canada even more attractive than before in the eyes of countries in the less-developed world.” By invading Czechoslovakia, the Soviets had shown that they could not tolerate the “gradual liberalization of the economic ideas of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia, as well as their doubts about the reliability of a Communist like Dubcˇek.” The Soviet leaders were reacting to the local bosses in the ussr. Ford had summed up thinking in Moscow on the eve of the invasion as follows: The summer of 1968 was crazy. The comings and goings and the meetings and the promises and everything and then,

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“bang!” The troops marched. But the real reason for that was that … the word was coming into Moscow from the Party leaders across the country that the ideas of the Czech Communists were becoming known to the members of the Communist Party of whom probably one-fifth at minimum were simply in the Party for career reasons, in order to get ahead, and they did not care about the ideology. These small Party-Stalins who ran their own fiefdoms were afraid that “Communism with a human face” would weaken their positions. I am not saying that this was true at all. I don’t think that the real word of what was happening in Czechoslovakia went out to Sverdlovsk, or Nakhodka or wherever they might be. But it reinforced the views of the hard-liners and, above all, of Brezhnev and Suslov. This had to be stopped, by the military of course, and it had to be stopped before it penetrated other Communist countries and, above all, the Soviet Union itself. And, of course, when it was over they had to stop the very modest economic reform in the Soviet Union and, once again, it went back to central control of the economy and of everything else.30 Communist leaders throughout the ussr, the ambassador reported, were deeply afraid that they might lose their hold on the country as a result of the disintegration of their system of economic planning. In view of the Russians’ “unpredictable and edgy mood” and the dangerous state of affairs they had created in Central Europe, Canada should dampen its hopes for “gradually weaning the satellites away from Moscow,” advised Ford.31 In future, Canada should concentrate on trying to promote change in Russia rather than on the periphery of the Soviet empire. Many assumptions that had governed Canadian policy toward the ussr would have to be “modified considerably.” First of all, Canada maintained its separate national identity best during times of international détente, but there would be no détente for the foreseeable future; he suggested that now was not the time to stress the promotion of Canadian national identity. “Whenever relations with the ussr seriously deteriorate, it is natural for the nato allies to close ranks in the face of a threat to all of us.” With particular emphasis on the US-Canada relationship, he noted that under threatening circumstances “there is a tendency to subordinate our national interest to the common interest, particularly in relation to the defense of North America.”

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While, therefore, working toward an eventual resumption of détente, Canada should make sure that it would be genuine, and in the meantime it should support the efforts of the non-Communist countries to restrain Soviet ambitions. In Europe – the most likely place for a military confrontation – Canada must work to prevent conflict, advised Ford. Because the Russians now seemed “determined at all costs” to hold on to Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, it appeared too dangerous to try to loosen the Soviet hold over its satellites. Canada should therefore take a new attitude toward German reunification and to promoting liberalization of the satellites. We “must not give the impression to the satellites that we have lost interest in them. But we should not do anything which would give the Russians reason to think that we were helping them to escape from the Bloc.” Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister, invited Ford to the ministry on 28 October 1968 for a broad-ranging discussion, but his main purpose was to set aside the invasion of Czechoslovakia as irrelevant to relations between the two governments. Ford would not yield the point. Gromyko opened the meeting by praising the constructive role that Canada played in foreign affairs, especially at the United Nations, where it avoided the “emotional element obvious in so many countries.”32 Ford advanced his government’s position at the outset: Canada valued progress in bilateral relations, but the Czechoslovak invasion had damaged them and was making progress more difficult. Gromyko, “ignoring the negative aspects of this,” said that Canadian-Soviet relations “should not be determined by mood, or by events of a temporary nature, but by the basic national interests of both countries, including security.” Ford replied that Canada and other countries could hardly ignore Czechoslovakia and that Gromyko himself and the newspaper Pravda had raised the issue of limiting sovereignty in the Communist world. Gromyko dismissed the idea that there was a new doctrine and said that Czechoslovakia had involved Soviet “security,” and he could not understand why anyone should be surprised at Soviet actions. He hoped that Canada would not permit “other countries to influence us excessively in determining our policies.” Ford reminded Gromyko that Canada had its alliances, whereupon the foreign minister replied, “Oh, nato, we always get back to it.” He then hesitated, as though he was about to say something else, and said that nato always seemed to complicate any problem.

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As on other occasions, Soviet officials attempted to encourage Canada to be “independent” in foreign relations, by which they meant supporting Soviet actions in Eastern Europe and diverging from the policies of nato, especially of the United States. Ford in response firmly defended Canada’s links with its allies while insisting to the Soviets that it was their international behaviour that made the Western Alliance necessary. For the Soviet leaders, Czechoslovakia had domestic repercussions that required reasserting the control of the Communist Party over the population. The Party continued to target young people and used the occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the founding of the Komsomol, the Communist youth organization, on 29 October 1968, to this end. The speeches at the conference and accompanying articles in the newspapers and in the Party’s publications insisted that recalling the early “militant” days of revolutionary Communism could infuse current youths with enthusiasm for revolutionary socialism. Brezhnev set numerous “tasks” for the country’s young people, including summoning them to be “innovators in technological change.” The Komsomol was to be “hardened” with newly dedicated members, and they would have new roles in Soviet society – for instance, in selecting students to enter educational institutions, in hiring and firing workers in factories, and in bonuses and housing allocations. Ford, in surveying the new measures, concluded that they were “potentially powerful” but would likely have little impact on the “cynicism of Soviet youth toward the regime.”33 Not only Soviet tactics in response to the invasion of Czechoslovakia displayed the mendacious nature of the Soviet system, but so did the continuing promotion of Brezhnev as a commanding popular leader and international statesman. This campaign was to become more extravagant as the general secretary showed more and more signs of serious illness. Diplomats in Moscow, Ford included, understood that the official image of Brezhnev contrasted sharply with the real man and with conditions in the country. Moreover, the official image glossed over the corruption at the core of the Brezhnev regime.34 But no amount of state propaganda could cover up the realities of the Soviet dictatorial regime or the consequences of its permissive attitudes toward the favoured. The general secretary’s favourite daughter, Galina, was married to “one of the lesser lights” of the Moscow Circus. (He was known in Moscow as Boris the Gypsy.) He was the one who anchored other members of a gymnastics team

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by holding them on his shoulders. While on tour with the circus in Western Europe, he somehow acquired a Mercedes and drove it back to Moscow. Some weeks after his return, he showed up at the German Embassy seeking help for the maintenance of his car. He visited weekly and became friends with the German ambassador’s driver, who was a Mercedes mechanic. In the summer of 1977, when the Moscow Circus toured the United States and Canada, Boris the Gypsy asked if he could leave his Mercedes in the German Embassy garage. “It was the only safe place in Moscow. Even if he were ready to pay the exorbitant price of putting his Mercedes in a safe place, and it was not sure he would be able to find one, he would certainly find all the moveable parts gone when he got back.” Upon his return, in gratitude, Boris the Gypsy and Galina invited the Mercedes mechanic, who was a former tank driver, to dinner. The German ambassador “was vastly amused by the idea of the son-in-law of the most important man in the ussr quite unabashedly using the facilities of the West Germany Embassy to maintain his prized possession, a Mercedes car.” The Soviet habit of dissimulation Ford found rooted in the “Russian system of lying.”35 As an example, he cited the transpolar flight from Moscow to Vancouver, in Washington State, following the route of the Soviet aviator Chkalov in 1937. Ford said, “We know, and the Russians know we know, that the flight of June 18 did not follow the original flight plan nor, I understand from the American ambassador, was it even nonstop. To the humiliation of the Russians, the plane had to land at Fairbanks to refuel.” However, all official Russia – including the captain of the plane, the tass correspondent in Seattle, and the Moscow press and tv – insisted that the flight followed Chkalov’s original path nonstop over the North Pole. “Although the temptation is great to write a letter to Pravda pointing out these inaccuracies obviously nothing would be gained and the Soviet (I should say Russian) resentment would be great.” This was one of those times, said Ford, “when the Russians consider it necessary and honorable to engage in lying when they themselves know they are lying and they know their interlocutor knows they are lying and, if he plays the game, must not refute the lie. It seems to play an often obligatory role in Russian life.” Another example of the Soviet practice of dissimulation was a series of Ford encounters with “Professor Anatoly Nikitin,” who was in reality a kgb agent by the name of Anatoly Gorskii (alias Gromov),

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who had been the Soviet case officer of the British spies Burgess, Maclean, and Philby and of John Watkins (who had been entrapped by the kgb), a Ford predecessor in Moscow, both as chargé d’affaires and, in 1954, as Canadian ambassador. (Ford believed that Watkins, who the kgb discovered was a homosexual, had been not a genuine spy but an “agent of influence.”)36 Nikitin became one of Ford’s principal contacts with the Soviet government. Ford knew who he was and Nikitin knew that Ford knew, but neither spoke about what both knew. Yet they conducted an ongoing dialogue about major issues in Canadian-Soviet relations. In many cases, Nikitin asked Ford about matters that Ford had already conveyed through regular channels to the Soviet government. Nikitin was probably “the official” quoted in Ford’s dispatches who wished to speak to him informally in December 1969 on the possible changes in Canadian policy toward the ussr by the new prime minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau. The official said that there was now the “possibility of cooperation in political problems.” Ford replied, in general terms, that of course there were opportunities to improve relations, to reduce tensions, and to learn to live together peacefully. The official had more concrete interests in mind: he “said that the Soviets thought the policy toward the ussr being followed by the French Government was the most sensible of any nato Government and they have the impression Canada would like to adopt a similar policy, if it could.” The official then pressed the matter and, Ford writes, “asked me outright when Canada would implement its policy of withdrawing its forces from nato Command in Europe. I said it had been announced that half of the force would be regrouped in Canada next year. More than that I did not know, and he could hardly expect me to tell him in any case.”37 Then, “abandoning this line of attack,” Nikitin pressed him on a possible visit of Trudeau to the ussr. He said he understood that Trudeau had told Gromyko that Ford would be charged with working on the dates for the visit. “I said I had told the Deputy Foreign Minister Mr. Kozyrev all I knew about a possible visit by the Prime Minister. He kept worrying away at this, however, asking if I could not make a guess as to the period of the year the Prime Minister would come and so on. He also stressed that the Soviet leaders were very busy men and we had also to take their busy programs into consideration.” Nikitin approached Ford some years later at a Kremlin reception for the 7 November revolution and said he wanted to discuss several questions in “peace and quiet.” Ford invited him to the embassy on

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21 November. A Conservative minority government had just been named in Canada, replacing the Trudeau government, and Nikitin wanted to know Ford’s opinion whether Canadian-Soviet relations would be affected. Ford doubted that there would be any change; these relations had not been an election issue. Nikitin also asked Ford his views on Germany, the Middle East, relations with the United States, and Vietnam. On the important issue of relations with the United States, Nikitin presumed that the new minority government would encounter American demands for economic, financial, and trading concessions. Ford replied that this was a fair presumption, “but I also assumed the Canadian government would resist.” Ford explained, “The economy was strong and the country as a whole was strong in spite of the indecisive election results. He asked how could the economy be strong when unemployment was high. I said this was paradoxical but it was a fact.” These conversations with Nikitin had their use, and Ford clearly learned about Soviet concerns by talking with an official who was closely connected with the Foreign Ministry, although an officer in the kgb. From the Soviet side, the purpose seemed to be to find out more information about subjects that Ford had already discussed through official channels; and, secondly, to try to encourage Canadian policies that would be advantageous to the ussr, especially to weaken Canadian ties to nato. In this way, Nikitin was a kind of extension of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs but an unofficial spokesman on behalf of foreign policy. A third likely possibility also existed, and Ford was fully aware of it. The kgb was conducting its own foreign policy, which included several elements: to reduce or eliminate Canadian participation in nato in order to weaken the alliance, and to seize upon the perceived intention of Prime Minister Trudeau to establish a Canadian foreign policy independent of the United States. In the aftermath of their invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Soviets believed that Canada, seeking to establish an independent foreign policy, could be encouraged to change its role in the Western Alliance. Ford had no doubts about Soviet intentions and continued to accumulate evidence that the system was deeply flawed. Official fawning over the ill and incapable Leonid Brezhnev strengthened the ambassador’s view that Soviet efforts to project strength showed deep and irreparable weaknesses. Still, Ford understood that a basis could be found to improve relations.

6 Trudeau’s Opening

w hen pier r e el l i ot t t r ude a u became prime minister in 1968, Robert Ford welcomed his readiness to build on Lester Pearson’s legacy of conducting good relations with the Soviet Union. But Ford also held for maintaining strong defences against the Soviets. For their part, the Soviets believed that the arrival of Trudeau presented them with an additional opportunity to loosen Canada’s link with its nato allies. Ford was squarely in the middle of security discussions during the Trudeau years because they focused predominantly on Canada’s stance toward the ussr. Trudeau was determined to project a new sense of national independence in foreign affairs, and relations with the Soviet Union became a centrepiece of that project.1 Ford continued to alert his political masters in Ottawa to the fundamental hostility of the Soviet state and managed to blunt the application of Trudeau’s more extravagant ideas. Still, Trudeau, the Liberal from Quebec. and Ford, the Progressive Conservative from Ontario, worked well together and largely crafted for a short period a fresh approach to the ussr that opened the way for others to do the same. Ford understood that Trudeau’s early radical inclinations toward Europe and the ussr, if effected, would have very likely hardened the policies of his nato allies and made negotiations with the Soviets more difficult. Ford had first met the future prime minister in 1952 when he was chargé d’affaires in Moscow. Trudeau had spent nearly a month there, partly to attend what Ford called “a mysterious economic conference organized by Soviets and attended by representatives of communist front organizations.” But Trudeau drifted away from the conference, which droned along with monotonous condemnations

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of Western capitalism, and he spent a lot of time at the Canadian Embassy.2 This experience with the future prime minister left Ford with lingering suspicions that Trudeau might have been an ideologue on the left. When Trudeau became head of government, Ford worked to inject realism into the prime minister’s assessment of the Soviets. Trudeau first served as prime minister from 1968 to 1979, a period when Canada’s relations with the ussr achieved a kind of apogee and Canada became a leader of the Western Alliance in trying to establish ways to work constructively with the Soviets. Ford believed that Canada could assert its independence only by remaining firmly within the alliance, about which Trudeau felt deep doubts when he came to office. Ford found himself instructing the prime minister about dealing with the Russians even as he repeatedly urged on the Russians an understanding of Canada’s independent foreign policy and the peaceful intentions of the Western democracies. In retirement, Ford spoke frankly about Trudeau: “Then we go on to the mysterious Pierre Trudeau,” Ford said in an interview with the author. “Nobody has ever been able, really, to figure him out. He continued on the social side, of course … and developed the very liberal policies of Mike Pearson, but was only interested in the question of relations with Russia.” In the winter of 1968–69, Ford served as co-chairman with Paul Tremblay, the Canadian ambassador to Belgium, of an interdepartmental committee to review Canadian relations with Europe. This was one of several reviews of Canadian foreign and defence policy going forward at Trudeau’s instructions. The prime minister’s legislative assistant, Ivan Head, and evidently Trudeau himself, found this group insufficiently alert to the problems of non-European impoverished countries of the Southern Hemisphere. Head and Trudeau wrote later, “An influential member of this group was Robert Ford, longtime ambassador in Moscow, who believed deeply that the pre-eminent threat to Canadian security was an unpredictable and expansionist-inclined Soviet regime.” Others among the “distinguished diplomats … Canada’s most senior” believed that foreign policy should remain focused on relations with Europe, the continent of origin of many Canadians and a principal trading partner of Canada.3 Ford later described his co-chairmanship with Tremblay as “the not very happy effort to produce a new look in our policy toward Europe.” He thought that the timing of the report was “wrong” and that the next year would have been

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better: “I am sure that if we produced it this winter, it would receive a more sympathetic reception than it did at the time.”4 Another review of current policies, that of defence, produced in February 1969, argued for continuing Canada’s commitment to nato, even though the prime minister and other ministers had led the public to expect major changes. Trudeau “knew how outraged his more reformist cabinet colleagues would be” at the resistance from entrenched old-line diplomats who had spent their careers in Atlantic Alliance countries.5 The senior diplomats’ review was “deeply disappointing” and “could be interpreted as a slap in the face to the new government, an assertion of power by a well-established mandarinate.” Trudeau asked External to look at the document again, but the diplomats did not alter their opinions, and Trudeau and Head saw the conflict in stark terms: here was “proof of our hypothesis that, in this area of foreign policy, Canada’s instincts for responsible innovations were suffocated by the professional establishment’s desire for team acceptance.”6 Among the issues studied was the proposal for the complete withdrawal of Canadian forces from Europe, where they were serving under the command of nato. The Ford-Tremblay committee recommended maintaining the forces at full strength but asserting Canadian national independence by deepening cultural and commercial ties to Europe. Trudeau was bent on following the lead of his predecessor, said Ford: About all he talked about were these policies set up by Pearson shortly before he stepped down, to study our role in nato and, in fact, our role in Europe as a whole, and security in the Commonwealth … It [that role] was militarily necessary, particularly our role in Norway. This was overlooked by Trudeau, whose answer to our paper was to halve the Canadian forces in Europe. But he didn’t go further than that … He had not been prime minister for a week, but he let me know that he was coming to see me.7 I reported this to Marcel Cadieux, the under-secretary, that is. He just blew a fuse and said that “This is absolute nonsense and he doesn’t mean it. He says that to everyone. And he doesn’t mean it. And you can believe me” … and as a matter fact, relations between the prime minister and … Cadieux were extremely tense. I came back very frequently

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to Ottawa, and almost every time he simply couldn’t fit it [me] in. Trudeau saw me, and I was semi-official liaison between Trudeau and Cadieux and External Affairs. Trudeau hoped to bypass External in many ways, not only because of his personal antipathy to the professional diplomatic service and to the embassies … He relied enormously on the views of others … and the extreme of the left-wing and, above all, with regard to Russia.8 … Even some members of the cabinet were in favour of our adopting policies of neutrality, of leaving nato, and of continuing in the Commonwealth, for what it was worth.9 Another “foolish, I think, adventure of Trudeau with respect to his Soviet policy,” Ford said, was his visit to Fidel Castro in January 1976. “He didn’t understand that the satellites of the Russians, and by satellites I of course include Cuba, paid a great deal of attention to protocol and dress and ceremony, and for Trudeau to turn up in blue jeans and for Margaret also to be in blue jeans … but I suppose that the Cubans were so anxious to have him that he could have come in a bathing suit and they would have been delighted.”10 Trudeau was backing away, and Canada had moved close to Ford’s position on the ussr. Ford recalled that James Richardson, who was minister without portfolio at that time, was in favour of neutrality for Canada and for getting out of nato. Richardson said 10,000 Canadian troops wouldn’t make any difference if the Russians attacked Western Europe: “They’ll all be slaughtered anyway. And we can use the money for our new social programs.” “In other words, you are asking that we become a dependant of the United States,” remonstrated Ford. “Well, Sweden is your example of a neutral country. You want us to become neutral, but it costs Sweden almost one-quarter of its annual budget to maintain its neutrality by maintaining viable and visible military forces to defend it. And are you prepared to leave the defence of Canada entirely to other countries, [such as] the United States? And, furthermore, the money we spend on nato would be a drop in the bucket for the social programs.” Richardson responded, according to Ford, “Oh, gee, I hadn’t thought of that. Well, I’ll look at it again.” “In the end,” recalled Ford, “we presented a draft report to Trudeau. In fact, we presented a report that was intended to be an independent and objective report recommending the status quo as

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far as nato was concerned and our forces in Europe, and as you know, Trudeau nonetheless went ahead and cut our forces in half.”11 The prime minister announced the cut in April 1969. Ford and his colleagues’ arguments finally took hold, and Trudeau’s thinking began to change. Ford said, “And he shortly began to realize that we would not be able to claim any role in the world, above all with the Russians. They would simply consider us either a sitting duck with no influence in the world or that our interests would be entirely in the hands of Washington. One way or the other, neutrality simply meant that we abdicated any independent role, unlike Sweden, and their [the Swedes’] independence depended on the fact that they had a very good military industry and very fine airplanes and artillery, and even from 1940 they were able to make it clear that any attempt to invade Sweden, to encroach upon its independence, would be militarily a very expensive job.” Ford explained, “ I realized that Trudeau had to take some time to build up … confidence in Washington and London (I am not sure that he ever did) and then in France. Those were the first things he had to do. I don’t know that he ever really succeeded in creating more than a rather suspicious tolerance in Washington and a rather amused tolerance in London, but an extreme fury in France, which was reciprocated by Trudeau because of the attitude of de Gaulle.”12 Ford said he thought the explanation for Trudeau’s attitude toward External was related to the treatment he had received at the hands of Canadian embassies on trips abroad when he was a private citizen. “But other actions of his were related to alleged insults or slights that he had received,” noted Ford: Although he spoke perfect Parisian French when he wanted to, something must have happened in his years in the Sorbonne … that made him really hate the French. For example, when he came to Moscow, I organized a reception which was not called for in the program, but which the Russians welcomed. It was a reception to meet all the members of the Politburo, or quite a few of them, and to meet with ministers and other high officials and the heads of diplomatic missions. I stood next to him in the official reception line to introduce the guests. They just came as they happened to be in line, there was no order of precedence or anything of that sort. But, curiously enough, the

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Chinese chargé d’affaires came just ahead of the French ambassador. He [Trudeau] must have spent about five minutes talking to the Chinese chargé d’affaires and how important he considered their role in facilitating his visit to Russia, and the great country that it was, and so on. And the Chinese chargé had a smile all over his face, and the French ambassador was right behind him, fretting at this. Finally, the Chinese chargé moved on and the French ambassador appeared and Trudeau simply said, “enchanté” and then looked for the next one to come along.13 Another instance that Ford cited to show Trudeau’s personal sensitivity occurred on a visit to France when a French tv interviewer complemented him on his excellent French. “Trudeau got absolutely red in the face and he banged his hand. He was mad and said, ‘Merde. It is my native language. You imbecile,’ or something like that. It was silly on the part of the French reporter … The French are very insensitive, and very often I have heard scathing remarks about the Québécois, about their accent and about their peculiar expressions.”14 The drawdown of Canadian troops assigned to nato – which Ford saw as a Trudeau assertion of national independence with overtones of personal biases – spurred Canada’s allies to argue for reversing or ameliorating the action. The Canadian ambassador to nato, Ross Campbell, passed along the concerns of the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (saceur). Campbell said he believed that the objections reflected “deeply felt concern from the point of view of European security and political solidarity and that it would reduce any adverse effect on our relations with them if we could go as far as possible to accommodate them.”15 Ford weighed in along the same lines, and the prime minister backed off from his initial extreme ideas about nato. Trudeau answered these concerns in a letter to Manlio Brosio, the nato secretary general, in July, when he assured him that there was no “weakening of Canada’s commitment to the principle of collective security, which remains a fundamental foundation of our defense policy.”16 Trudeau also couched his explanation of Canada’s decision in financial terms – that the government policy review had concluded that the Europeans could bear more of the costs of defending their continent. By mid-summer

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1969 the prime minister himself had largely dispelled the initial feeling of some government ministers that Canada could conduct a fully independent foreign policy. Following the tension over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, a return to good relations with Moscow resulted from an Ottawa initiative, to which the Soviets, eager to overcome international isolation, were ready to respond. Canada, at Ford’s urging, in the summer of 1969 invited Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko to visit Ottawa from 1 to 3 October, meeting with Prime Minister Trudeau on 3 October.17 Because Canada had been the first “nato country to break ranks in the ineffective political boycott of the Russians in response to Czechoslovakia,” Gromyko agreed immediately to the visit. “This was one of the few occasions,” recalled Ford, “ when I saw Gromyko let down his defenses and show what he really meant: surprise and delight.”18 In pointing to the subjects that Gromyko would probably raise while in Ottawa, Ford believed that “an unavowed consideration which underlies their [the Soviets’] positive approach is almost certainly a desire to repair relations damaged by Czechoslovakia with Western countries generally.”19 Ford reminded his colleagues that many Canadians would object to the invitation: “There could be anti-Soviet demonstrations which would mar the visit.” Canada should not agree to everything the Soviets would propose. Gromyko, he reported, would likely raise the long-standing Soviet wish to open consular, trade, or shipping offices in Montreal, Toronto, or Vancouver. Ford argued that because there were no reasons for opening Canadian offices in the ussr, Canada could not permit more Soviet offices on its territory. There were other matters that might come up, in particular, a renewal of the trade agreement between the two countries, a formal agreement on technical exchanges, and discussion of a draft maritime treaty. Among international issues, China would be “uppermost in Gromyko’s mind” because the Russians had been labelling it as a “threat to world peace.” Gromyko would undoubtedly raise questions about Canadian negotiations to exchange ambassadors with China because of his suspicions about underlying Canadian purposes. Ford wrote, “This will provide an opportunity to try to talk the Russians out of some of their neuroses on the subject. It cannot be too often repeated to them, for instance, that Canada is acting in its own interest, not as a talking-horse for the usa; and that to see our

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negotiations as part of a world-wide usa-inspired conspiracy to develop Sino–American rapprochement at Soviet expense is a gross distortion.” The Vietnam War and the Middle East would also be subjects of interest to Gromyko, as would European security issues. Ford thought it best to confront the latter question openly, “because prolonged silence and hesitation on our part simply gives them a cheap propaganda victory; and more important, because unless we talk to them, we have only our suspicions to go on in judging what they have in mind.” Gromyko’s visit had its critics in External as well as in Canadian society. A sharply worded memo from V.G. Turner, head of the East European Division, contained a warning about Soviet activities in Canada, with reference to the “so-called commercial staff … engaged in espionage and subversive activities.”20 Gromyko, as Ford expected, cast relations between the two countries in positive language. He told the prime minister that the ussr “valued certain tendencies which had appeared in Canadian foreign policy.” He said that “it was appreciated that Canadian policy was guided by a desire for détente, peace and ‘hand-cuffing’ of those who sought to increase tensions.” As always, Gromyko used the occasion in this way to try to weaken Canada’s commitment to the US alliance. He extended an invitation to Trudeau to visit Moscow. Gromyko in his memoirs singled out Trudeau for very high marks as an international statesman because he was “well informed” and when “his evaluations were muddled then it was probably nato solidarity speaking.” The Soviet foreign minister said, nevertheless, that Trudeau “stood head and shoulders above statesmen of other nato countries who are blinded by their hostility to socialism and either cannot or will not recognize the situation as it is. Countries which have different social systems must sort out their differences by peaceful means: there is no other way.”21 Trudeau reciprocated Gromyko’s admiration, as did Ivan Head; both were less critical of Gromyko than Ford. They wrote that “Gromyko was at his charming best; a gracious, witty guest, who was able to defend the position of the ussr effectively and effortlessly.” The prime minister was “much impressed by Gromyko … found him an attractive personality, one of obvious intelligence who spoke his mind forcefully, yet without giving offence. There was no evidence of posturing or of ideological cant in his remarks.” Head found praiseworthy Gromyko’s disinclination to engage in diplomatic “small talk.”22

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In Head and Trudeau’s account of Gromyko’s visit to Ottawa there is no hint that the Soviet foreign minister was in town for anything more than a friendly review of international issues, praise for Canada’s independent foreign policy, and the invitation to the prime minister to visit Moscow. Given that Gromyko in his work concentrated exclusively on the United States, Western Europe, and disarmament issues, the visit to Canada was an unusual development aimed to accomplish larger political objectives. From inside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow comes a more critical assessment of Gromyko, written by a Soviet ambassador who knew him well: “[Gromyko] ‘borrowed’ from Molotov not only thoroughness but qualities that were far from positive: a tendency toward dogmatism and formalism, and a disinclination to appreciate and respect the views and interests of negotiating partners.”23 Another Russian diplomat, Oleg Grinevsky, cited with admiration Gromyko’s toughness as a diplomat. He writes that Gromyko himself said that, in negotiations, “Demand the maximum … Boldly play your game on alien ground and demand what has never belonged to you … Threaten … while offering talks as a way out. There are always those who fall for this, saying that all disputes should be settled at the negotiating table, by peaceful means. And they will negotiate because there is nothing else they can do.”24 Ford, while remaining alert to the foreign minister’s obvious designs, thought the Gromyko visit enormously important, not only for Canadian but for Western relations with the ussr. But he was disappointed that others, even the Russians, did not see it as a major breakthrough. The embassy, in evaluating on 6 October the Soviet press coverage of the visit, underscored his disappointment: “No explicit advantage seems to have been drawn from the fact that the visit was unprecedented in the history of Soviet-Canadian bilateral relations. Nor was it placed in the context of reconstruction of eastwest relations post-Czechoslovakia, except perhaps by implication.”25 Here was an instance when Ford thought that Canada had gained a major diplomatic achievement, but the ussr did not. The talks with Gromyko suggested the reason: Gromyko was mainly interested in political developments in the United States. While in Ottawa, he repeatedly brought up the question of usa-ussr relations and wondered about President Richard Nixon’s statement, in February’s State of the Union Address, that he wished to move from a time of confrontation to one of cooperation.26 Ford found himself, as on

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many other occasions, interpreting US actions and statements for the Soviets. J.G.H. Halstead, head of the European Division, who had been edgy about the visit, expressed relief that anti-Soviet demonstrators had not filled the Ottawa streets: “What was rather surprising, although very welcome from our point of view, was that no Canadian ethnic organization seized the opportunity to register its anti-Soviet feeling while Mr. Gromyko was here (although the press report mentioned the alleged presence of some ‘Hungarians’ outside the Chateau Laurier on October 2). Perhaps the shortness of time between the public announcement of the visit and the visit itself was helpful in minimizing the possibility of any really large antiSoviet demonstrations.” One sharp critic of the visit and of Gromyko’s performance was Ross Campbell, the ambassador and permanent representative to nato, who wrote to Halstead from Brussels on 13 November 1969, commenting on External’s circulated notes after the Gromyko visit: “My own opinion is that … Gromyko was utterly hard-nosed (sometimes verging on snide) on Germany, Berlin, Czechoslovakia, and the treatment of Jews in the ussr; that he was deceptively ambiguous on North American participation in the European Security Conference, tendentious on salt and evasive on npt [the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty].” Halstead responded on 20 November, rather stiffly, essentially rejecting the idea that External was succumbing to Gromyko’s blandishments. “I am glad to have the opportunity to explain our views on this subject because I have had an uncomfortable feeling for some time that we are not entirely on the same wave length and your letter has now confirmed this.”27 Halstead endorsed Ford’s approach to the Soviets in a concise summary of Canadian relations with Moscow. He had seen Gromyko’s charm for what it was: “Of course, it has been a well-known Soviet tactic to contend that it is possible to have normal (more or less but not completely normal) relations between two countries regardless of opposed … views on international issues. But this is also the Western tactic in the game we call ‘détente.’ And I would contend that, provided we keep our eye on the ball and insist that bilateral relations can only become normal if concessions are made to our own interests as well as to theirs, the resulting improvement in freedom of East/West movement and enhanced confidence is bound to favor the West on international issues.”28 In a note to Ford, he

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commented: “There is no doubt that Ross holds views not only on the Gromyko visit but also on our general approach to East/West relations that are out of step with those of the Department and the Government. As you can imagine, this poses a problem in getting our view across to the nato Council, particularly on a subject such as the European Security Conference where the balance between realism and conciliation is so delicate.”29 This summary of Canadian policy accorded with Ford’s views and shows that if Trudeau had any illusions about the Soviets, they were not shared by the Department of External Affairs or his ambassador to the ussr. Both held that there were ways of conceding Russian interests without succumbing to Soviet efforts to break up the Atlantic Alliance. Reigning opinions among the professional diplomats, therefore, were based on a realistic appraisal of the Soviet leaders’ motives and had characteristics of what Halstead called a “game.” Gromyko, in Ottawa as on other occasions, had attempted to encourage Canada to be “independent” in foreign relations, by which he meant supporting the Soviet position in Eastern Europe and diverging from the policies of nato and especially from those of the United States. Gromyko’s attempts to weaken Canadian support of nato did not alter Trudeau’s policy, and a Canadian military force, although reduced in size, remained in Europe under nato command. If Trudeau had at one time entertained a radical departure from the alliance system, he had abandoned it by the fall of 1969 and had swung more in the direction that his experienced diplomats – especially Ford – were advising.30 Dealing with the Soviets, Ford believed, would remain difficult because of “two important contradictions in Soviet foreign policy.”31 The first was “the insistence on peaceful coexistence and the practical rejection of Marxist dogma of the inevitability of war between Communist and capitalist systems … which contrasts with the doctrine of basic hostility of the West to the Communist system.” Soviet leaders believed they must guard against Western attempts to undermine their system even as they said they wished to cooperate with the West. The second contradiction was that China was a greater challenge to the ussr than the United States was, but the leaders did not face the fact and constantly stressed the hostility of the United States.

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Ford wrote Ottawa that the government of the Soviet Union remained essentially unchanged, resistant to democratic ideals and hostile to the West. Stalin’s terror under the hand of “one semioriental despot” had disappeared and would not return on the scale of the past. But the regime would not tolerate “any manifestation of independence of thought or, of course, opposition. They are going to be suppressed ruthlessly, as in fact they always have been.”32 The discussion in External surrounding the Gromyko visit showed that Canadian diplomacy, led in this instance by Ford, had not altered its perception of the Russians; the diplomats would continue to seek ways to deal with the Russians but understood that they remained adversaries. Nonetheless, beginning with the naming of the Trudeau government and the Gromyko visit, the Canadians began to formulate a new policy toward the ussr. The culminating event in this policy was the prime minister’s visit to the Soviet Union in May 197133 (see chapter 7). Ford believed that a new era in Canadian diplomacy had commenced. Several months before this visit, Ford had pointed to another Soviet dilemma: the leaders were encountering new problems in governing the country. Soviet propaganda organs were “floundering” because of difficulties in maintaining focus on an “external enemy.” The leadership, Ford had concluded, seemed “to feel that it was essential that the Soviet peoples (and those of Eastern Europe, as well) continue to feel beleaguered by an external enemy. It justifies the maintenance of huge armed forces, a vigilant police system to fight the threat of espionage and sabotage, economic shortages, of all kinds, and a very low standard of living.”34 The propagandists had recently lost their principal Western target with the signing of a trade agreement with West Germany. The Soviet government had proclaimed that it was possible to work with the West Germans; Brezhnev had invited West German Chancellor Willy Brandt to the Crimea; he could hardly reverse these departures from past hostility. Attacks against China, Israel, and South Africa were unconvincing to most Soviets, so the only remaining hostile country was the United States. And as Ford pointed out, “The usa is only a rather doubtful target as far as the average Russian is concerned” because the ussr was negotiating with the Americans on salt and the Middle East. He explained, “In spite of years of anti-American propaganda it is hard to convince Russians that Americans really are savage brutes

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intent on destroying their country and system.” Ford had advanced a strong indictment of the Soviet system: its leaders depended on conjuring up threatening enemies. Here was another instance of the Russian practice of lying, embedded in the system of rule and projected onto the international stage, where it contributed to international tensions. Accompanying Soviet gestures on behalf of détente was a huge buildup of Soviet military power and corresponding influence around the world. Although the Russians were troubled by domestic problems, including the erosion of discipline among the youth, Ford believed that they had reason to look at their international position with “considerable satisfaction” on the eve of the Trudeau visit. Part of their outlook was because of the discomfiture of their principal rival, the United States, as the Vietnam War wound down and American society appeared to be in the throes of a moral crisis. Ford argued, however, that the Soviets “constantly misinterpreted” events in the United States, partly because whatever accurate reports they were receiving were filtered through the guardians of ideology in the Secretariat of the Central Committee before reaching the policy makers in the Politburo. In Moscow’s view, relations with the major European powers had improved, and Russian influence was dominant in the Arab world and was advancing in Africa and Latin America. The Soviets believed that nato was weakening and that they could look ahead to a time when American and Canadian forces would leave the Continent. Accompanying political and economic gains was a corresponding expansion of the operations of Soviet naval power to the oceans of the world. Ford’s principal point was that the Soviet leadership, because it saw the world as a friendlier place for Communism, might take a more relaxed posture in international affairs. But he warned, “Old habits are hard to shake and, as indicated earlier, the present inclination is not relaxation either internally or externally but to consolidation or expansion of Soviet influence at the expense of Western.” The Soviets had not wavered from their zero-sum game when they saw every loss for their adversaries as a gain for them. Ford consistently argued his view that Brezhnev’s détente, supported by Gromyko’s diplomacy, was a masking of the Soviet leaders’ intentions to extend their power and influence throughout the world. Ford also underlined other reasons for the increasing confidence of the Soviets on the world stage – their “rapid evolution into a world

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power” in a “traditional sense” over the second half of the 1960s. “There is not a development in any part of the world which does not now evoke a reaction in Moscow. Soviet economic and political presence is now felt everywhere and this is being accompanied by a rapid expansion of Soviet naval power, the aim of which is eventually to support a political presence in a tangible way on every ocean. The Russians have been avid disciples of Mahan and are well aware of the close relationship between political and military powers.”35 Ford listed the areas where the ussr was assuming a dominant presence, such as the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia. In Latin America, Ford saw the Soviets as also having made impressive gains in influence, especially in Cuba and Chile. The ussr could count on strong support from national liberation movements. Although its “traditional” foreign policy had produced satisfactory results, its Communist foreign policy was foundering because of the rivalry with China.36 Ford offered additional evidence in the aftermath of the Gromyko visit to support his view that the adversarial regime in the ussr remained unchanged, despite Gromyko’s efforts to win Canadians to believe otherwise. Ford pointed to the “Lenin Centenary Theses” that were published in December 1969 – about three months after Gromyko’s visit – a 13,000-word document issued in advance of the centenary of Lenin’s birth on 22 April 1970.37 The document asserted that the Communist Party and the ussr had resulted from Lenin’s ideas and that the current leaders were heirs of Lenin. Further, Lenin had been not only a great Russian nationalist but an internationalist who taught Communists and workers in all countries to defend the “first socialist country in the world.” The “Theses,” Ford wrote, shaped Lenin’s ideas to the purposes of the current leaders, who wished to be seen as heirs of Lenin though they were actually heirs of Stalin; but they had simply brushed aside the history of the Stalin era. The Soviets were continuing to insist on an official view of the world based on fantasy. Official contacts could be difficult as well, and Soviet leaders sometimes introduced surprisingly jarring notes into policy discussions. Ford had suggested that the new head of the Second European Division in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, E.N. Makeev, might want to visit Canada. Soon, however, he changed his mind. He wrote Halstead, “I have had a couple of very difficult confrontations with him and I certainly do not now feel inclined to do anything to change

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his mind about Canada.” The British ambassador agreed. “We both feel it is highly regrettable that someone as rigid and crude as Makeev should head the Second European Division at this time.”38 Other strong evidence showed the Soviet leadership becoming more prickly in its relations with Canada and the West in general. In commenting on the so-called Leningrad Jewish Trials (the accused had allegedly attempted to hijack an airliner at Leningrad airport), Ford wrote, “The savage sentences passed on Jews at the Leningrad trial provides further evidence of a hardening of ideological lines in the ussr and of increasing indifference to reaction in the West since it seems unlikely that Soviet leaders did not foresee the effect on Western public opinion, as well as the Communist parties. No doubt they were also thinking of the need to discourage Jews from thinking of emigrating to Israel and of any Soviet citizen attempting to hijack Soviet planes.”39 Ford detected on yet another occasion that the Soviets were deliberately making relations difficult. They had issued a sharp comment on Jewish demonstrations in front of the Russian Embassy in Ottawa, and Ford thought there was a “persistent tendency on the part of mfa [the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs] to make things worse than they are by exaggerating the significance of certain events and by distorting facts.”40 As Trudeau was preparing for his visit, Canadians of Ukrainian origin and their sympathizers were pressing the Canadian government to establish a consulate in Kiev and were demonstrating their anger over Soviet treatment of Ukrainians at home. Ford wrote in November 1970 that he opposed a consulate in Kiev. He thought that some Ukrainian Canadians believed that a consulate would encourage Ukrainian nationalism. Ford pointed out that an opposing interpretation might be put on the matter: “By establishing a form of direct relationship with the Ukraine we were recognizing the present regime’s oppression of Ukrainian nationalism.”41 The Ukrainians in Canada would continue to press their case and would have a serious impact on Canadian policy with respect to the Soviets following the Trudeau visit to the ussr. Again, Trudeau would find that reality encroached on his ideas for a new Europe based on easy collaboration with the Soviets.

7 Trudeau in Moscow

trudea u ’s v isit t o t h e ussr in May 1971 was the highest point in a period of relations between the two powers that had commenced in 1963, when a Soviet crop failure had necessitated a large-scale wheat purchase from Canada. The first academic exchange began and the first Canadian newsmen went to Moscow to report on developments in the ussr. The trade agreement signed between Canada and the ussr in 1956, during the Pearson visit, was renewed in 1960, 1963, 1966, and 1969. The agreement led to a trade balance in Canada’s favour because of the continuing sales of wheat. When in 1969 and 1970 the Russians bought no wheat from Canada, the trade balance quickly swung slightly to favour the ussr. A particularly good year for Canada-ussr relations was 1967 because of Soviet participation in Expo ’67 and the many visits by Soviets to Canada.1 Ford concluded in the late sixties that the Soviets were growing less interested in commerce and trade with Canada because other opportunities were opening up for them relating to an increasingly political rather than commercial emphasis – with the French, for instance. He reported that the “political attitude of Paris” had resulted in the Soviet Pulp and Paper Ministry receiving orders “to buy pulp and papermaking machinery from France, not in a normal sense of the word the obvious supplier of this type of machinery.” Political interests had now come to the forefront. For that reason, the Soviet’s interests had shifted, and they were now “intrigued by Canadian foreign policy” and would like to be in a position “to take advantage of any possibilities which might be offered.”2

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In the Westpolitik launched in the summer of 1970, the Russians hoped to open a “new era” in their relations with Europe in order to increase their security, encourage the departure of the Americans from Europe, and improve their trading relations with the West Europeans.3 By December 1970, moreover, Ford concluded that the Soviets were rethinking their assessment of the United States and were beginning to view it in a less confrontational, even more respectful, manner. They had miscalculated US weaknesses and mistakenly thought the Americans were anxious to avoid further trouble in the Middle East and would overlook ceasefire violations by the Russians and Egyptians in order to start peace talks. They had, in particular, underestimated the American president Richard Nixon, who won election in 1968, and now saw him as “tougher and cleverer than they had believed.”4 Further, they had at one time become “mesmerized by their Marxist analysis of American society” and had concluded that there was a deep crisis, but more recently had reversed themselves and come to the conclusion that there was no crisis. Then, also troubling to the Russians and putting them on the defensive, Nixon had not responded to hints from the Soviets that Premier Kosygin was ready to meet him in New York at the United Nations, and then Nixon had visited Romania and Yugoslavia, visits the Russians saw as “provocative and meddling.” The genuine Soviet effort of the summer of 1970 to improve relations with the West now appeared to have fallen flat. Ford recorded that the Russians found it very difficult to cope with the consequences of their own faulty judgment. America now was on the offensive. In Moscow, increasing signs of “hysteria” had appeared over even mildly liberal voices, and there was a “tendency to ascribe any departure from the most conservative Marxist Orthodoxy to encouragement by the West.” Ford had concluded that the Soviet leadership wished to “vastly improve their trading relations with the advanced countries of Western Europe.” Their ultimate objective was to “make the ussr a world power on the same basis as the usa, and one which has the right to be everywhere in the world.”5 As the Soviets were puzzling about how they should deal with the United States, they welcomed the Canadians’ readiness to offer a way to put relations with Western countries on a more predictable basis. Canada’s foreign policy toward the ussr, the ambassador believed, became truly innovative in 1969–71, during Trudeau’s first term as prime minister (1968–79). Prior to that time, he wrote, “although

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Canada had by no means neglected the ussr there had been no serious effort for calculated reasons of national interest to develop a specific policy toward the ussr.” Then Canada worked out a closer political relationship, and “the soundness of this policy is proved by the fact that it has subsequently been followed by the usa, Great Britain, and possibly even West Germany.”6 This is a striking claim, but it does stand up to a chronological assessment of improved relations between individual Western powers and the Soviets. Extensive preparation preceded Trudeau’s arrival in Moscow. A.E. Ritchie, the under-secretary of state, compiled a number of “tactical considerations” for the guidance of the prime minister and Canadian negotiators in Moscow.7 He thought that the trip carried risks and, essentially, he was putting the Canadians on alert as they prepared to fly to Moscow. Although Ritchie held that the ideology of Communism might have some place in Soviet life and action, he contended that the Soviets’ main purpose was to avoid war and maintain stability in countries bordering the ussr. Equally important objectives were cultivating “deep-seated Russian feelings of national pride and the objectives of internal stability, orderly progress and growth of economic and social strength and cohesion.” Preservation of the position of the ruling class and the socialist system were paramount. Ritchie’s assessment of the Soviets was very close to Ford’s and stressed that psychological drives animated the Russians and lay behind their belligerency. Ritchie found the Russians defensive and anachronistic in their foreign policy. Soviet diplomacy retained a nineteenth-century concept of international relations. “The Russians appear to interpret the international system in terms of simplistic formulations such as balance of power, spheres of influence, and the basic hostility of the capitalistic states, with other similarly obsolete doctrines of antagonism.” The resulting focus of the Soviets’ policies along the lines of national interests helps to explain their tactics. At the beginning of negotiations, said Ritchie, the Russians often take extreme and “even threatening” positions, with the objective of producing a solution most favourable to them. If they are forced into a compromise which they do not like, they will return again and again to their favoured position, often ignoring earlier agreements. Concepts of fairness do not limit them. A frequent second tactic of Soviet negotiators, Ritchie noted, is to seek to find out the other side’s position before presenting their

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own views. The objective is mainly to seize upon apparent weaknesses and to expose and probe them. The Russians send experienced and expert negotiators who are prepared to “engage in a test of endurance.” They will make a small concession in the course of a prolonged negotiation in the hope of eliciting a generous response from the other side. If the Soviets find that they cannot attain their objective, they will use various diversionary tactics, including “lack of frankness.” Sometimes, the Soviets will simply employ a tactic of propaganda, “playing to the gallery by floating proposals and making statements irrelevant to the issue – with the immediate object often being to impress the Third World or the Left in Western countries.” Ritchie was one of the realists in External who would grant no elements of goodwill to the Russians; Ford’s assessment of them was not appreciably different. By the time Trudeau travelled to Moscow, the Canadians could recall the Pearson and Ignatieff negotiations, and foresee that the Soviets would attempt to twist negotiations to their own benefit, including demanding the inclusion of seemingly innocuous language in documents that favoured their ideological positions. The Canadians’ preparations were tested immediately.8 Ford summarized his ideas in two briefs, “The Soviet Union in 1970” and “The General Lines of Soviet Foreign Policy,”9 and they provided preparatory reading for the prime minister. He also wrote “sketches of the personalities of the main Soviet figures based on my own knowledge and assessment.”10 Thereza Ford added her impressions of Soviet wives, for the benefit of Margaret Trudeau.11 First scheduled for October 1970 but postponed because of the October Crisis in Quebec, Trudeau’s visit to the ussr in May 1971 proved enormously successful. The Canadians saw gains for their country’s standing in the world. A paper prepared in the Prime Minister’s Office had already anticipated a distinctive Canadian world role as a mediator between West and East. It was an assessment that essentially advanced Ford’s ideas: “We have a unique part to play in inducing the ussr to recognize that Western countries are not fundamentally hostile – no small task in view of the history of Russian xenophobia and Western distrust. Canada is well placed to encourage progress toward East-West understanding; we attract Soviet interest because our environments are similar, because of our advanced technology, and because of our proximity to, and alliance with, the usa.”12 With this statement from the Prime Minister’s

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Office, Ford’s approach to dealing with the Soviets had found confirmation at the highest level of the Canadian government; it described a unique role for Canada between East and West without separating Canada from the Atlantic Alliance and the United States. As Ford had long argued, Canada gained influence in Moscow in part because of its links to the United States. Ford repeatedly emphasized the importance of the prime minister’s venture: “There is little doubt that the visit of the pm will mark a watershed in our relations with the ussr. There is no doubt in my mind that the reception of Mr. Trudeau will be exceptionally warm, partly because the Russians have waited for a long time for a Canadian prime minister to visit the ussr; partly because of a genuine desire for better relations; partly because, like so many others, the Russians are intrigued by the personality of Mr. Trudeau.”13 Trudeau would deal with the top Soviet leaders. In particular, Ford singled out Kosygin and Brezhnev as his main interlocutors. Kosygin would be well briefed and “tough but courteous and underneath his dour appearance he can be very human and even amusing.” His “loyalty to the cp and to Communist ideology is no less than that of Brezhnev.” As for the latter, he had emerged as the leading figure in the Politburo, and “although he gives the impression at times of slowness, his ability should not be underestimated.” Brezhnev, Ford reported, tended to talk in terms of political clichés and was less flexible than Kosygin on issues and more interested in “maintenance at all costs of total control by the Party of the apparatus of government and of the thinking of the Soviet people.” During the visit, Trudeau deferred to Brezhnev’s limitations. Ford recalled, “Trudeau never asked him any tricky questions. I wanted to, but … he [Trudeau] kept the whole conversation on a rather trivial note, which was possibly the correct thing, because Brezhnev would have avoided answering and even have been annoyed, because he was incapable of doing that, but … he was seen to be primarily interested in maintaining the system as it was then, but also protecting what had been accomplished … that is political as well as military equality with the United States.”14 Brezhnev had put his stamp on Soviet policies, as he demonstrated at the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress in March 1971, just two months before Trudeau’s arrival, when he announced his so-called Peace Program and launched the era of what in the West was called détente. The general secretary had cleared the way to show that the

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Soviets were serious about peace during the visit of the prime minister of Canada, the first major foreign guest after the Congress. The Soviet hospitality extended to Trudeau was unprecedented. Ford wrote later that, in his experience, only three other foreign leaders had been hosted with the same lavish attention – Nixon, de Gaulle, and Pompidou – and all were heads of state. Prime Minister Kosygin was Trudeau’s official host, and he spent twenty hours with him, but Trudeau also met with President Podgorny and had a twohour discussion with Brezhnev. Trudeau told the Soviet leaders that Canada wished to play an independent role in the world as a country with its own views, values, and national individuality. His visit to the ussr was the first opportunity for Canada to discuss systematically political issues with the Soviets.15 Numbers of high government and Party officials attended every social event, and there was wide publicity in the Soviet media, including front-page coverage almost every day.16 Editorial comment was “friendly” and stressed that the two countries had similar problems and were “disposed to cooperate in an amicable spirit to solve them.” Ford detected a “vague feeling that we share something with the Russians, that we are big and rich enough to bother with but not strong and aggressive enough to threaten them.” Following the Moscow meetings and cultural events, and a Kremlin banquet, the Trudeaus and the delegation spent a week on the road, travelling to the cities of Kiev, Tashkent, Norilsk, Murmansk, and Leningrad. Trudeau requested the visits to the two cities of the Far North as a means of showing the similar character and interests of the two countries and thereby demonstrating that they had enough in common to work together. The principal diplomatic result of the visit was the signing of the Canadian-Soviet Protocol on Consultations on 19 May 1971 and an umbrella agreement on economic cooperation. The Soviets, typically, attempted to use the Protocol to lessen Canadian commitment to nato. They proposed signing a document similar to the one signed with France in October 1970, which would have pushed Canadian foreign policy toward greater independence. Trudeau, alerted to Soviet tactics, rejected the Soviet proposals. He believed that the final document preserved Canada’s participation in its established alliances. As Ford said later, “We were successful in limiting our commitments … As it stands, the Protocol will have only the value which both parties wish to give to it.”17 Ford believed that

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Moscow had “seen a chance to drive a small wedge” between Canada and the United States and had seized it, but it would remain to be seen whether the Soviets would try to open it further: “In fact time alone will tell to what extent the main Soviet interest lies in Canada per se; or as the usa’s neighbor and maverick friend.”18 Head and Trudeau found the Protocol useful for what it did for Canadian standing internationally: it was “an acknowledgment by the Soviet Union, never before made, that Canada was a power worthy of recognition on its own merit, not one to be regarded as an appendage of the United States, as had been the Soviet inclination previously.”19 Trudeau, at a press conference before leaving the ussr, unexpectedly handed Moscow a minor diplomatic victory. When asked about the reason for signing the Protocol, he said that it was partly because Canadian identity was threatened by the “overwhelming presence” of the United States from a cultural, economic, and “perhaps even military point of view.” Ford wrote, “I was immediately subjected to intense questioning by American and other allied officials about the significance of the remark, above all the reference to the American military presence as a threat to Canadian identity. What angered the Americans was that it had been made in Moscow and that the Soviets were unabashedly delighted.” Ford said that he did not think that Trudeau wanted to say that Canada felt threatened by the United States and therefore wished a better relationship with the Russians. The ambassador believed that it was “simply a slip of the tongue” but that it was, as well, “a psychological lapse” and a reflection of “a deep-seated distrust of the United States and a friendly feeling toward the Soviet Union on the part of the prime minister.”20 Ford on this occasion understood that the prime minister spoke his feelings but believed that he should have avoided doing so. Trudeau’s visit taxed the Fords and the entire embassy. The prime minister had brought his new bride, the former Margaret Sinclair, who confided to Thereza (she had not yet told Trudeau) that she was expecting a child, and she felt unwell much of the time. Margaret, a younger woman than her husband, found the dull and endless official Soviet functions trying. A month later, Ford drew up this summary of the visit for his friend the writer Lillian Hellman: “It was all very interesting and gave me an opportunity for constant contact with the Russian leadership, but at the same time was extremely exacting both physically and mentally and we are just now beginning to unwind.”21

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Personally and politically, the Soviets responded eagerly to Trudeau. Before leaving Moscow, he invited Prime Minister Kosygin to come to Ottawa in the fall; back in Ottawa, the Canadians were taken aback by the quick, affirmative response. Ford thought the invitation premature. But Trudeau, in the flush of a successful Soviet visit, had personally wished to extend an invitation to the Soviet official with whom he had developed especially cordial relations. When the Canadians returned home, they proposed an early date in order to demonstrate their commitment to the new relationship, and in the summer Ford received instructions to extend the invitation. He recalled, “To his [Trudeau’s] surprise, Kosygin, the prime minister, accepted immediately and agreed to come in October of the same year, only six months later.” Trudeau in this way promoted the idea, Ford believed, that by issuing the invitation rapidly it would look to the outside world – and most of all to Washington and to the Russians – “that he was serious about the Protocol on Consultations that he had signed and that we wanted to create a combination with the ussr as a counterbalance to the United States.” But while the Canadians wished to create an impression, they had no wish to rush into more agreements. Almost right away, they began to have reservations about drawing too close to the Soviets. The Soviets wanted “further forms of agreement … as evidence of the momentum of the relationship.” But Head and Trudeau thought it “unwise” to enter into “successive proclamations of good faith and cooperation if circumstances did not merit them.” It was for this reason, Head says, that he suggested the early date for the return visit, “so early that there could be no possibility of new agreements being seriously advanced by the Soviets.” He writes that the “novelty” of the idea of an early visit “appealed immediately to Trudeau.” Head knew that Ford, “always concerned about how the Americans interpreted any Canadian initiative, was far from enthusiastic, but had no basis for objecting.”22 Head at this juncture misread Ford’s view; Ford believed that the invitation should be issued only after careful preparation for the visit. But Ottawa, fully satisfied with the Trudeau visit to the ussr, had achieved the sought-for recognition and was now a major diplomatic player. In this instance, the Prime Minister’s Office proceeded with a major diplomatic initiative against the advice of Ford, the diplomatic specialist on the scene. One can surmise, based on the evidence available, that Trudeau and Head did wish to make the

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point that Canada was now conducting an independent foreign policy. Later, however, Trudeau had second thoughts and “confessed it had been a mistake to invite Kosygin back so quickly because this at once was interpreted by the Russians as an indication that the Canadian government wished to go much further in developing relations with them than in fact it did.”23 Canada’s independent Soviet policy was now fully established to the satisfaction of Ottawa, but Ford in customary fashion probed Moscow’s role critically. On 11 June, Canada was “singled out in an unusual way,” and very positively, in a Brezhnev speech delivered in Moscow on the eve of elections in the Soviet republics. Brezhnev held up the Protocol as showing “the possibilities of cooperation between states of differing social systems.” Ford suspected, however, that although Brezhnev was talking about Canada, his remarks were directed at the Americans – that Brezhnev was citing the agreement with Canada “as a model for other countries, notably the usa.” Brezhnev had said that the agreement with the Canadians “applies in full measure also to such major problems of modern times as the ending of the arms race”24 – a clear reference to the rivalry with the United States. Pravda reported from Ottawa and emphasized the importance of the ussr-Canadian agreement to world peace, and the correspondent saluted the Canadian desire for an independent foreign policy. Other Soviet voices chimed in and emphasized the importance of the upcoming Kosygin visit to Canada. The editor-inchief of Pravda, Nekrasov, waxing enthusiastically, told Ford that he thought the Kosygin visit would match the importance of Nixon’s trip to China. Ford demurred and pointed out that the two visits were hardly comparable.25 One week before Kosygin’s arrival, Ford returned to Ottawa from Moscow to prepare Trudeau for talks with the Soviet premier, and he concluded that Trudeau’s interest in the ussr was waning. He recalled: It was one of those beautiful Octobers that occasionally happen in the second half of October when the colours are brilliant and the weather is beautiful and he [Trudeau] had organized an extremely elaborate program for him [Kosygin] which took him to Victoria and to Edmonton … I had come back earlier and had talks with Ivan Head and, of course, the minister, Paul Martin. Trudeau invited Thereza and me to his house for

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escaping from Ottawa in the Gatineau Hills at Harrington Lake. We drove up there on a Friday evening after Parliament had ended its session. … Trudeau disappeared. He was already dressed for Parliament, of course, and he suddenly appeared in an Indian costume, he had on buckskin, and so on. He does have a certain amount of Indian blood as many French Canadians do. After all, they were settlers … in the first settlements. Naturally, there was no alternative to Indian women. He has the high cheek bones, and some Indian influence on his personality. But I had not realized that until he put on this Indian costume.26 Ford had written the guidelines for the Kosygin talks in the briefing book for the prime minister. “But I knew in advance, External knew in advance, from our informant in the East Block that he had not even looked at it. And so I said at one point, ‘I think we ought to go through the main points and then perhaps you could read it because I think that it’s a very good document and that it would be helpful.’ He said, ‘Oh, yes. Yes. Very well.’ He put it down and looked at it occasionally and never read it during the time-outs. But he asked me at one point, ‘What were the main points that you raised with Kosygin?’” I said that we ought really to press Kosygin very hard on wheat sales and some of things that we can supply. I know that they [the Russians] do not have very much hard currency and they object to their inability to get into the Canadian market. I said that there must be something that we could buy from the Russians … When it came to the official talks, he raised one thing and I am sure that he never read the briefing book at all. He tended to play it by ear and his intuition rather than facts, and he had caught my comment about the Middle East and the first thing that he raised was the question of Russian-Jewish emigration to Israel, which went along amicably about the level of Jewish emigrants, and it was quite irrelevant to what we really wanted to discuss.27 Ford, in keeping with his role as ambassador, hoped that the Kosygin visit would produce concrete results; the prime minister viewed it

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as an occasion to promote goodwill and did not duplicate the preparation time that preceded his Moscow visit. The principal diplomatic result of the visit was agreement to establish a joint commission to promote visits of experts in culture, economics, science, and technology, but the Russians did conclude that there was more to be gained from the Canadian connection than the Canadians wished to provide. The two sides had differing expectations. The Canadians were now satisfied that they had accomplished their main objective of enhancing national objectives; the Russians believed that a window of opportunity had opened up to achieve their designs in Europe. Kosygin’s visit to Canada in October 1971 was deeply controversial and, in particular, did nothing to satisfy either Jewish or Ukrainian groups; but the intensity of the reaction on the part of some Canadian groups to the appearance of the Soviet prime minister was symbolized when a young man of Hungarian origin broke through security lines and threw himself on Kosygin’s back while he was walking with Trudeau in front of Parliament.28 The intensity of the reaction to the presence of the Soviet prime minister in Canada (as described in the next chapter) was strong enough to help deflate Trudeau’s earlier enthusiasm for deepening ties with the ussr. Head nevertheless exuded great satisfaction from the visit, because shortly after Kosygin returned to Moscow from Canada, President Nixon announced that he would visit the Soviet Union the next year, 1972. Head and Trudeau saw additional reason to congratulate themselves: “It was a move that pleased each of us, both because of its potential for reducing superpower tensions and because it was confirmation that Canadian international initiatives, if taken responsibly and openly, might possibly be of some influence in paving the way for positive steps by others.” The two authors continued: “One could not expect any acknowledgment to this effect from a superpower, and certainly not from one led by persons with the egos of Nixon and Kissinger”; still, there was “considerable satisfaction” among “those many members of the Canadian foreignpolicy community who were not mesmerized with immobility and shadow-watching, characteristics not entirely absent among some of their colleagues.”29 Soviet spokesmen from Brezhnev down, as Ford recognized, hoped that the Trudeau visit could be parlayed into warmer relations

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with the United States, progress on disarmament, and a weakening of nato. While talking to the Canadians, the Russians were looking at the Americans, somewhat in the manner of Sobakevich in Gogol’s Dead Souls, who was constantly looking off at a corner of the stove or the door while speaking with someone. Ford had a meeting with Vasily V. Kuznetsov, first deputy foreign minister, which he reported in November. The ambassador noted that the Soviets appeared to be taking the Protocol on Consultations seriously. They had informed the Canadians about a recent meeting in Paris between Brezhnev and President Pompidou. Ford found their “informing us … more significant than the content.” Kuznetsov told Ford that the Soviet side was very interested in Canadian views on the situation in East Pakistan, and he “referred to continuing consultations in the spirit of the Protocol.” Ford seemed to find all this attention rather surprising, and the Canadians were unready to respond: “The Russians have now taken initiatives on several different occasions to outline their position on a number of matters. So far as I recall we have never done so.”30 Even grander visions of a new Canadian role siding with the socialist countries opened up. Soviet diplomats looked ahead to “deepening relations” with Canada and had concluded that Trudeau wanted regular meetings and consultations between the two sides. Expectations increased. N.M. Lun’kov, the director of the Second European Division, met on 11 November 1971 with I. Monori, the ambassador from Hungary, and reported that Trudeau was interested in further “contacts and connections” with the socialist countries, “both for the resolution of separate international problems and for the development of bilateral relations.” He continued that the Soviet government had taken note “that as a part of this aim the Canadian government is moving toward a more independent course in international relations.” The talks between Kosygin and Trudeau showed that “Canada has begun to occupy a more favorable position for the Socialist countries, first of all on European questions and especially East Germany.” Monori thought that Kosygin’s forthcoming visit to Canada “can be taken as another step in Canadian evolution toward the Socialist countries, which Canada sees as a declaration of independence.”31 Lun’kov met with P. Lukendorff, the East German ambassador, on 17 November 1971 and told him that the Canadian government had “moved ahead”

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of other Western governments on the question of East Germany, although further steps would depend on the outcome of ongoing negotiations between East and West Germany. As an early objective, the Soviets hoped to draw the Canadians into working out a common understanding on certain issues before the meeting of the European Security Conference in Helsinki. S.A. Kozyrev of the Second European Division wondered the next year, on 8 June 1972, whether the Canadians and Soviets “could work out a single approach to the multi-country consultations in Helsinki for the preparation of the general European security conference.” Kozyrev raised the issue of East Germany with Ritchie on 22 September 1972 and asked the Canadians to support the establishment of East Germany as a sovereign state with observer status at the United Nations.32 The Soviets also wished to revisit the issue of repatriating persons resident in Canada whom they said were “war criminals.” Canada’s refusal to recognize the ussr’s annexation of the Baltic republics was also on the Soviet agenda. With palpable eagerness, some Soviets believed that they had already been successful in prying Canada away from the Western Alliance, as shown in Trudeau’s visit. More limited in his appraisal, Ford saw a lessening of tensions ahead and that the Canadian business community now had the opportunity to look for opportunities in the ussr. The Trudeau visit had helped to put economic, technical, and scientific exchanges on a firmer base. For their part, Ford believed, the Soviets had exaggerated the extent to which the Canadians were ready to chart a foreign policy course separate from the Western Alliance. No sooner had Trudeau signed the Protocol on political consultations in May than he began to develop doubts that Canadian foreign policy could become as independent as he had at one time hoped. Trudeau pulled back from his own bold gesture. Dealing with the Russians would not follow easily. Ford tried to discern what the Russians meant when they spoke of deepening commercial ties. During a luncheon at the Canadian Embassy in honour of a visiting trade delegation, Ford asked a Soviet guest, Manzhulo, the deputy minister of foreign trade, what the Soviets meant by “Canadian Soviet joint ventures.” The minister said they were not thinking of joint enterprises but favoured what the Japanese were doing: first, studying the Soviet five-year plans, figuring out

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long-term projects that might interest Japanese business, then discussing with Soviet authorities possible business projects that could be fitted in with Soviet planning. Ford was unenthusiastic about this approach to business but passed it along as perhaps having “some use in trying to figure out how Russians want to do business with us.”33 The return of Nikolai A. Tikhonov, deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers, from a visit to Canada gave Ford the opportunity to meet him at the Moscow airport and get his thinking about trade possibilities. Canadian businessmen, said Ford, were not accustomed to business decisions involving the government and had no large Japanese-type firms that were. The Russian, however, brushed these points aside, and “no practical Canadian objection … could deter Tikhonov from pressing on with the authoritatively established policy line about the applicability of Japanese and other Western countries’ examples to Canadian-Soviet trade relations.”34 Few consultations between the two sides followed, and several of those that did take place had a forced character. Within a year or so Ford saw the results of the Protocol to be disappointing. The agreement did little more than provide a signal of potential improvement in relations with the Russians, who began to implement it indifferently, but so did Canada. Within months, all political will to utilize it for consultations had vanished.35 In Ford’s view, the Canadian side had been the first to neglect the Russians and had not taken advantage of the Russian interest in developing the Protocol. For its part, Ottawa believed that a great deal had been accomplished already: of greatest importance, the Soviets had recognized that Canada was an independent power in its own right. Moreover, the two sides had signed several useful agreements in trade and culture. Head’s idea that Canada should invite Kosygin before the Soviets had time to prepare substantive agreements for discussion strongly supports the view that Trudeau and his team had no more useful ideas and that they mainly wanted to maintain momentum in the relationship between the two countries and, in particular, to demonstrate to the Americans that Canada was capable of conducting an independent foreign policy. At the moment of the great Canadian diplomatic triumphs – the visit of Gromyko to Ottawa and of Trudeau to Moscow – the prime minister scaled down his interest in the ussr. The Russians began to concentrate on developing ties with the United States, and having established a new relationship with the Americans, with the prospect

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of attaining major foreign policy goals, diminished their activities with Ottawa. Ford understood that Canada would have to compete for the attention of the Soviets. Two differing views of dealing with the Soviets had developed: Ottawa had achieved its main goals for the moment, but Ford believed that diplomacy was a seamless web and one accomplishment should unfold into the next.

8 Trudeau after the Peak

trudeau’s visit to the ussr was a major success in Canadianussr relations and in Ambassador Ford’s diplomatic service. Ford believed that Canada had set an example to other governments by showing that the Soviets were ready to enter into agreements with Western powers to lower international tensions. The Canadians had taken advantage of the poor relations between the United States and the ussr to work out both political and economic agreements with the Soviets. Favouring negotiations with the Soviets was the arms control issue that bedevilled relations with the United States. On the Soviet side, there was interest especially in Canadian wheat, technology, northern concerns, and Canada’s close connection with the United States. But the glowing relations between the two countries would lose their lustre; this was inevitable, as Ford recognized. The important visit of Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in October 1971, despite its success as a diplomatic event, though without substantive accomplishments, marked the end of a series of positive developments that had begun in 1969, early in Trudeau’s term in office. In the following years, Trudeau sent many ministers to Moscow (sometimes with little purpose). “He, for reasons kept to himself,” said his ambassador, “encouraged ministers to go: Judd Buchanan and his previous minister of northern and Indian affairs, Jean Chrétien … the foreign minister, and Allan MacEachen, secretary of state for external affairs.1 Anyway, there was a considerable stream of ministers, to the extent that Thereza commented … that they [External] hated us. Because of course they all had to be … furnished with Russian entertainment, and they stayed with us in the

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embassy, and, of course, it … interrupted the proceedings of the embassy a good deal.”2 Ford said he was surprised that Trudeau never returned for an official visit to Russia because he had every justification and even an obligation from a protocol point of view. “It was ’71 and then until ’79 and the elections and Joe Clark, and then he never came back to Moscow. I couldn’t quite understand … He had every occasion to come when he was prime minister. In fact, the Russians asked me several times, ‘Should we invite Mr. Trudeau again?’” Trudeau met Brezhnev at the Helsinki conference in the summer of 1975, and Ford told the Russians in May 1977 that he had just returned from Ottawa with the message that Canada anticipated “new, major steps” in the relations of the two countries and that he anticipated a Trudeau visit before year’s end.3 In August 1977, Ford said that he thought a decision was pending on a Trudeau return visit. Ford assured the Soviets about the good intentions of the prime minister and brought to the attention of M.N. Zemskov of the Foreign Ministry that at a recent press conference Trudeau had declared that the Canadian government had no intention of pressing the Soviets on the question of human rights.4 At these meetings, the Russians invariably declared their enthusiasm for a Trudeau visit. Ford had this explanation for Trudeau’s failure to return to Moscow: “He had aroused the suspicions of the Allies and even some of the Canadian liberal centrists and the right wing because of his attitude toward the Communists … and he probably kept putting it off.” During the years from 1980 until Trudeau retired in 1984, there was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the emplacement of the ss-20 missiles in the Western territories of the ussr, and the insertion of Cuban forces into Angola. “The relations between the [Canadian] Embassy and … the major countries and Russia were very bad … and Trudeau felt, even he felt, that he didn’t want to run the risk of doing something foolish.”5 Coming to the forefront, in the meantime, and likely affecting Trudeau’s cooling on another trip to Moscow as prime minister were the protests by Jewish and Ukrainian groups in front of the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa and elsewhere. These protests unquestionably put Canadian officials in a dilemma: Was a strong relationship with the ussr worth provoking domestic turmoil? The demonstrations preoccupied officials in Ottawa as they did in Moscow. Jewish groups insisted that persecution of Jews in the ussr was getting

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worse, and they asked to see Trudeau to press for government intervention. Before Kosygin’s visit to Canada, Trudeau’s parliamentary secretary, Barnett Danson, had met with Jews who were protesting the visit, and he reported to the prime minister on a planned Jewish Defence League demonstration: “This could prove embarrassing should the demonstration get out of hand and there is damage done to the Embassy. My feeling is, that by treating these people as something akin to terrorists, we can strengthen our hand in our discussions in the ussr, and would not likely incur the displeasure of the Jewish Community in Canada.” As for the Ukrainian groups, Danson appealed to their leaders to control their members at demonstrations.6 V.G. Turner, the under-secretary, pointed out that there was an important distinction to be made between the Jewish and Ukrainian groups in the ussr. There was a “special need for caution” when speaking on behalf of the Ukrainians, he pointed out. They have their own republic in the ussr, and there is often a nationalist flavour to protests made by Ukrainian Canadians. Some want to press for a separate Ukrainian state. “We consistently try to avoid steps which somehow imply support for separatist objectives.”7 Trudeau had already admitted that the Ukrainian protest movement in Canada limited his government’s dealings with the ussr. En route home from his Soviet visit, he was asked by a reporter whether he had raised the issue of Ukraine during his talks in Moscow. Trudeau replied that he had not because he knew that the Soviet leaders would reply, “Why should you put revolutionary flq [Front de libération du Québec] leaders in jail and we not [put Ukrainian separatists in jail]?” On 1 June 1971, Trudeau had said to reporters following a session of Parliament, “I find it a bit difficult to intervene in another country’s internal affairs and discuss the seeking of independence by any part of that country if I didn’t want that country to return to discuss those who in Canada are trying to break up the country.” He would, however, be ready to intervene in individual cases of repression. This statement dissatisfied Ukrainian groups, and they demanded a public apology and struck at the weakness in the official Canadian position on the issue: the prime minister, they insisted, had equated Canada with the “Russian Empire” and compared “honest Ukrainians demanding their rights with flq terrorists.” Ford underscored the sensitivity of the Ukrainian issue to the Soviet leadership (and the powerful influence of the kgb) when he

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reported that the Soviets had cancelled twelve charter flights to Ukraine for Canadian tourists at a loss of $6 million to Aeroflot and another half million for expenses. Ford wrote, “In a difficult period for Ukrainian agriculture, as predicted for this summer, and one of reported nationalist unrest, apparently the kgb believes it unwise to accept Canadian tourists in spite of the thirst for foreign currency, and the desire to extend Aeroflot’s operations [to Canada].”8 Ford received an “urgent call” from “a Soviet contact” on 31 October 1973 to say that the Soviet authorities were extremely worried by news that an all-world Congress of Free Ukraine was to be convened in Toronto, that federal ministers planned to attend, and that Canada had issued a visa to a “known war criminal” to travel from Europe to attend the congress. The Soviet contact wanted Ford to understand that his government viewed this as a major issue in the relations between the two countries. Did Canadian authorities, he asked, think that this anti-Soviet activity would contribute to the atmosphere during Foreign Minister Mitchell Sharp’s visit to Moscow?9 Did Canadian authorities consider that this was in line with real development of Canadian-Soviet relations? Ford asked on whose behalf the man was calling. The “contact” replied, “You can be assured that I am talking authoritatively.” External took the position that there should be no governmental involvement in the congress in order to avoid an “adverse effect” on relations with the ussr. The “contact” then asked to meet Ford, and the ambassador reported to Ottawa that he would meet him and point out that the Canadian government must respond to domestic political concerns. The dispute with the Soviets on this issue ended when External wrote on 9 November 1973 that the congress had produced little public impact, that participation by government ministers had been “innocuous,” and that if the Soviets persisted with their complaints, Canada would assume that they were trying to make an issue of it. Within months, the Ukrainian controversy surfaced again when a group of so-called Moroz Freedom Fighters allegedly “roughed up” a Soviet diplomatic family on a street in Ottawa. The group claimed to have acted on behalf of Valentin Moroz, an imprisoned dissident in Ukraine who was on a hunger strike to protest Soviet control of his country. At the same time, External said that there was substantial public support for Moroz, largely generated by the “Committee for the Defense of Valentin Moroz” under the chairmanship of Walter Tarnopolsky. “It has been a serious, sustained,

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and peaceful effort with clear objectives and has received support from various sections of the country, including the media.”10 Ford said he thought that Canadians on the whole favoured the attempts in 1971 to improve relations with the Soviets, but they “aroused animosity in certain groups,” especially Ukrainian Canadians, East European ethnic groups, Balts, and the Jewish community. The public protest gave Ford an opportunity to express his view about intellectuals and academics “who previously criticized the Government for not adopting a sufficiently pro-Soviet policy … [and] now criticize us for supporting a [Soviet] Government which oppresses writers and artists.”11 Relations with the ussr now centred on the Ukrainian issue. External informed Ford in July 1974 that Trudeau had met with Soviet Ambassador Alexander Yakovlev and they had discussed the health in prison of Valentin Moroz. “We agree with your comments … that it would be unwise to underestimate Soviet sensitivities to Moroz demonstrators.” Furthermore, “We have taken pains to ensure that Canadian government expression of concern not be considered as intervention in the internal affairs of the ussr.” The matter could become “a serious irritant.”12 Canadians of Ukrainian origin in the 1970s slowed the development of their country’s relations with the Soviet Union. Trudeau and Ford generally approved closer ties with the Russians, but their plans had to be restricted in the seventies because Canadian Ukrainians were agitating against the treatment of Ukrainians in the ussr, and any hint of support for Ukrainian nationalists on their territory deeply alarmed the Soviets. It is likely that the Ukrainian groups’ protests influenced Trudeau not to pay a second visit to Moscow as prime minister. They caused Soviet officials to develop doubts about their earlier hopes that Canada would lead the way to a weakening of nato. Ford understood, correctly, that the kgb had become the main influential voice in Moscow in sounding the alarm over the effects on Ukraine of the agitation in Canada. And the ambassador frequently protested in meetings with Soviet officials in the Second European Division about their use of the word “campaign” against the ussr when they raised the issue of the demonstrations outside their embassy in Ottawa. The Soviets periodically insisted that the demonstrations were “linked” and therefore inspired, and that the Canadian government’s “special services” if not inspiring the demonstrations could prevent them if they wished.

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Ford contended, however, that the Canadian policy had opened the way to improved relations with the ussr and that other major countries, especially the United States, had then followed. Soviet specialists, however, usually assign the leading role to others. Harry Gelman, for example, credits West Germany. He writes, “Soviet normalization with West Germany … closely preceded and prepared the way for the emergence of détente with the United States in 1971–72.”13 Gelman has in mind the agreement between the Federal Republic of Germany and the Soviet Union in August 1971. He does not mention Canada, but Canadian agreements with the Soviets predated the West Germans’ and culminated in the successful Trudeau visit of May 1971, about a year before President Nixon’s arrival in Moscow. Canadian-Soviet cooperation – especially at the political level – received a setback from the United States’ decision to normalize relations with Moscow. President Richard Nixon visited the ussr from 13 to 15 April 1972, about a year after Trudeau. The 1972 Basic Principles Agreement between Brezhnev and Nixon, signed in Moscow, overshadowed the major foreign policy project of the Trudeau government.14 Ford wrote later, “Unfortunately for us the American-Soviet political and economic scene has been totally transformed since June 1972 and for the moment the Russians were completely overwhelmed by the prospects of massive trade with the United States. I thought that in due course this would be deflated and that Canada would secure an appropriate share of the Soviet market.”15 Ford, although he understood that the United States and Canada were now in some sense competitors, shared his experience with the Americans on dealing with the Soviets. He summarized Canadian policy toward the Soviets for Nixon in advance of his visit and stressed two objectives: the mutual benefits of increased trade and a contribution to “security and stability” that would result from “doing business together.” As for the Soviets, he said that their main interest was in “Western technical, managerial and scientific information” to overcome the “now widening” technological gap. A second motive was to give credence to Brezhnev’s effort to show that the ussr could cooperate with the West. Brezhnev’s purpose was to create a climate for the acquisition of technology from the West and a higher standard of living for the Soviet people while, for the present, downplaying his

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belief in the eventual victory of Marxism-Leninism. A third aim of Soviet policy was to try to get away from dependence on the need for an “external enemy” in order to govern the country, connected as it was to the use of fear and repression domestically. The Soviets had been cultivating Canada for a purpose – to “induce us to play a major role in creating conditions for the establishment of a new regime in Europe which will provide stability as far as possible on Soviet terms.”16 Ford said that the Canadians, while attempting to show the Soviets that “we are prepared to work and to live with them,” remained alert to the possibility that latent Soviet hostility toward Western countries could once again appear. American thinking was now running on a track that paralleled Canadian, and Nixon’s visit proved to be a breakthrough in United States–ussr relations. Ford thought that the Soviets had been “misreading the American situation,” which had been “complicated by Soviet misunderstanding of Nixon.”17 Ford had been telling Soviet officials that they were incorrectly assessing events in the United States and failed to understand American intentions. The Soviets had been so convinced that Nixon was an unimportant Republican politician that they had “snubbed him before the elections.” President Nixon’s sending American troops into Cambodia in the face of widespread domestic opposition impressed the Russians. “This meant (a) that Nixon meant what he said about unpredictability as a weapon of his policies; (b) that he was tougher and cleverer than they had believed.” The growing Soviet respect for Nixon was a factor in the next important development in relations between the United States and the ussr, the achievement of an agreed-upon working relationship. Ford conceded that the “high-level of activity in Canadian-Soviet relations achieved in 1971” was exceptional and therefore could not continue, but several events in 1972 had resulted in a “certain downgrading of the position of Canada in Soviet eyes.” After the Nixon visit, he noted, “the Americans with their usual enthusiasm have almost overwhelmed the Russians with visits of every sort on almost every subject.”18 Ford believed that following Nixon’s departure from Moscow, “many foreign offices are now giving top priority to the question of where the Soviet-American summit is likely to put their countries.” The new usa-ussr relations were “very much like an iceberg. Little by little it becomes clear that a very high proportion of the Soviet–usa understanding lies under water” so that it was still

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unclear “what kind of superpower relationship or understanding was sketched out by Messrs. Nixon and Brezhnev.”19 Ford believed that the Russians especially wanted better relations with Washington on the economic and technological fronts in order to obtain credits and farm products. But they had more in mind, and despite an “ambivalent attitude” toward the United States, “would probably have liked a very long time ago to establish a superpower understanding to divide the world.” Furthermore, the Russians and Americans had been coming to a meeting of minds, and this unwritten understanding introduced “a new element into all of our calculations.” It was “the feeling that they together have much in common that they alone count in the long run, and that neither is going to be pushed around by smaller countries.” Additionally, their relations now included “an emotional factor … a lingering American admiration for the Russians, and on the Soviet side a fascination for American ‘bigness.’” Ford believed that the Soviets had now achieved “a situation whereby each of the super powers accepts the other as a military and political equal; whereby the two have agreed, as much as one possibly can, to eliminate war between the two because it is impossible and expensive.”20 Another factor in the closer relationship was China. Ford talked later in the year with Deputy Foreign Minister Kozyrev and said that he supposed that the ussr would have to turn to the “white” world because of the “Chinese fact.” Kozyrev replied “without hesitation – that’s beginning already. To start with we have agreed with the Americans that there can never be war between us.”21 Ford believed that the intense Russian interest in Canada had been temporary; it had developed at a time when the Soviets and the Americans had poor relations. There had now occurred the “inevitable shift” in the position of the two countries in Soviet minds, partly to be explained by Nixon’s election and the Soviet knowledge that he was “in place” for the next four years. As for Ottawa, the Soviets were now in a stronger negotiating position because the Americans were commercial rivals and highly competitive. Ford answered critics of Canada’s policy who argued that the improving relations between Moscow and Washington showed that the idea of “playing the Soviet card to counterbalance the usa influence … was badly conceived – irritating the Americans and getting little in return.” He countered, “Where would Canada be now if we had not established good relations with Pekin [Beijing] and Moscow before

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Washington, d.c. did? Probably in the position of Australia – frozen out in the cold as far as either country is concerned and ignored by Washington, d.c. as well.”22 On the key issue of trade, Canada had lost some advantage because of American competition, but Ford believed there were areas where Canada could hold its own, for instance, in agricultural products. But in technology and science, he thought that the Canadians would face increasing rivalry, in part because the ussr, with the limited personnel in modernizing sectors of its economy, would be unable to deal equally with both the United States and Canada and would concentrate on the American connection. Improved relations with the West raised problems for the Russians and affected Soviet domestic politics; the main political result, Ford concluded, had been a new assertiveness on the part of Brezhnev by means of his policy of détente. There were groups in the ussr who opposed drawing closer to Western countries, and the agreement with the West Germans had generated domestic opposition to Brezhnev, even in the Politburo. The Moscow-Bonn treaty on trade, signed in Moscow on 12 August 1971, had been a major step in Brezhnev’s policy of détente, but his project had not produced complete acceptance. A number of Soviet leaders believed that the treaty would strengthen West Germany at the expense of East Germany, the country on which the Soviets depended to maintain their control over Eastern Europe. A substantial portion of the leadership, Ford said, believed that East Germany was the key to domestic political stability. A weakened East Germany “would open the door to ‘liberal’ ideas such as were current in Dubcˇek’s Czechoslovakia, and they in the long run would threaten the position of the Soviet cp bureaucracy in the ussr itself.”23 Pursuing a risky foreign policy and confronting opposition in the Politburo had driven Brezhnev to take the offensive against opposition and assume a commanding role in foreign policy decisions. Western ambassadors who had visited him reported a new authority and self-importance in his manner.24 Canada, faced with new, more difficult conditions in dealing with the Soviets, was still trying to find ways to show goodwill and promote productive relations. The Trudeau visit did not end hostile Soviet actions. Ford complained to the Foreign Ministry about Soviet harassment and the blocking of persons attempting to enter the Canadian Embassy. He wrote that the “protective services” had

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engaged in several incidents, including a member of the militia standing on the stoop to the entrance and blocking all those who tried to enter and exit. “I myself was forced to request the militia man to move one day on returning to the Embassy in order to obtain sufficient room to ascend the entry step.”25 Still, Canada searched for ways to show its willingness to work with the Soviets. The next gesture seemed to lack substance and falls into the category of a diplomatic move designed to contribute to a good atmosphere. Ford had no enthusiasm for it and seems to have had no role in the decision. He was accredited to Mongolia as Canadian ambassador. He explained: About that time, in ’74, the Russians had been, not putting pressure on us, but urging us to recognize Outer Mongolia which was a member of the United Nations … In ’74, it was decided to do so. The reasons were rather superficial, I think. We might learn something about the land [more northerly] that was beyond the grain-growing regions in western Canada, for example. And other things like that. This was quite futile, I think, but at any rate, and what were we going to do in Mongolia? There were only two Western resident ambassadors in Ulan Bator. One was an eccentric Englishman who went every three months to Peking by railway in order to sit for one week to contemplate the Ming ceramics and get spiritual strength to return to Mongolia. And the other one was the French ambassador … but she spent six months on the Quai d’Orsay and six months in Mongolia or perhaps it was three months in one place and three in the other. And I think that I was twice in Mongolia … and the French ambassador was in despair because she had just received a telegram from the Quai d’Orsay notifying her that she should be permanently resident in Ulan Bator.26 Confirming Ford’s continuing role as a go-between for External with Prime Minister Trudeau – and confirming that he was up to date in the prime minister’s thinking about Russia – is a report from him to A.E. Ritchie, under-secretary of state, from New York in April 1974, after Ford had just visited Ottawa and was on his way back to Moscow. He marked the letter “Secret and Personal” and wrote: “I had almost five hours of conversation with him [Trudeau] as we

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drove together to Harrington Lake and he was in a very relaxed and expansive mood.”27 Their discussion centred on policy toward the ussr, and the prime minister told Ford that he had considered a personal, unofficial visit to the ussr. He asked about inviting Brezhnev to Canada, but Ford thought it unlikely that the secretarygeneral would accept because he was “deeply involved” in relations with the United States. Possible Canadian official visits to the ussr were also discussed, and Ford advised a “wait and see” position before making any gestures toward the Soviets. At one point, Trudeau picked up the phone and called the energy minister, Donald Macdonald, and asked him if he would like to visit the ussr to discuss energy issues. Ford intervened and said that he “did not think we should go about provoking an invitation. The Prime Minister agreed but said if one was forthcoming he would favor acceptance in principle.” The rest of the conversation “covered almost every aspect of current international affairs as well as numerous diversions into literature, philosophy, and Canadian life. He was in fact in peak form and the whole evening, which even included a karate lesson for Justin, was a delight.” Back in Moscow, Ford filled in some details of this meeting with Trudeau in a memo to External titled “Conversation with the Prime Minister.”28 Trudeau had just completed successful negotiations with the provincial premiers and was therefore “feeling very ebullient,” Ford wrote. “When I remarked on the success of the conference, he said it was due to playing the West against the East and that was the secret of all Canadian politics, playing off one side against the other.” Ford had told the prime minister about a “tea party” with the Soviet ambassador, Alexander Yakovlev, whereupon Trudeau said he was baffled by the man: “He was said to be intelligent but he did not seem particularly bright or attractive.” Trudeau added that he was going to try to make a greater effort to know Yakovlev but at the moment found it rather hard to break through to him.29 During the evening at Harrington Lake with the Trudeau family, Ford had a look at the casual ways of the prime minister: At about 10:30 at night, Margaret suddenly said she had forgotten that a certain member of the Cabinet had called and asked that he phone back, urgently. (He [Trudeau] did not seem to take it very seriously, however, as he had not phoned back by the time we left.) Anyhow, this reminded the Prime

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Minister of a few weekends previously when the “gold phone” which is kept in a cupboard went out of order on a Friday night. This is the line which keeps the Prime Minister in direct touch with norad and of course mdc and External Operations Centre. The technician said it could not be repaired until Monday. There was some consideration as to whether or not they should get in some special repairman from Ottawa, and the Prime Minister finally, in one of his typical “shrugs,” said he figured there wouldn’t be a war before Monday morning. He added, however, that on one occasion they had hidden the gold phone so well nobody could find it, and another occasion when there was an exercise to test the efficiency of the norad communications it took one and a half hours to reach him.30 Ford’s report to External suggests that Trudeau was listening to his ambassador to the ussr and was weighing his advice on relations with the Russians. As far as Ford could tell, External relied on him to report the head of government’s thinking on Soviet issues. Ford believed that officials in External had become accustomed to one of their own, Lester Pearson, as prime minister and that they were late in accepting the idea “that a new era had arrived.” Trudeau “had his own ideas about foreign affairs and intended to apply them.”31 Ford’s accounts of his dealing with the prime minister, however, suggest that the blush had worn off the Soviet issue for Trudeau and he was happy to permit his ambassador to take the lead in conducting relations with the Russians. Although Trudeau threw out a few suggestions on possible connections with the Soviets, he had no special interest in deepening relations with Moscow at the time. His earlier enthusiasm for personal dealings with the Soviets appeared to have dissipated. In 1975 Ford wrote a paper for the Department of External Affairs that examined why the promises of the Trudeau visit four years earlier had faded.32 He summarized developments in this way: Under Trudeau, Canada had formulated a new policy toward the Soviet Union, that of developing “counterweights.” The obvious counterweight to the usa was the ussr. Ford explained, “It was felt that this need not be, and should not be, thought of in terms of hostility toward the usa or of an abandonment of our traditional ties and alliances, but as a means of strengthening our political position in the world and also of our bargaining position in Washington.”

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Second, Canada could develop a “more effective and fruitful relationship with a country which was becoming not only the equivalent to the usa as a military power but also a global power in political terms, and a rapidly evolving economic force.” A third reason was the promise of trade, exchanging scientific and technical information, especially as they applied to the Arctic and conditions in the Far North. A fourth aspect of the Trudeau policy was closer relations with Europe as a concomitant to closer relations with the ussr. Finally, because the Soviets were pursuing a policy of détente, Canada, as one of the “more responsible Western countries,” must respond. Ford contended that the great value Canada had for the Russians had diminished as the American-Soviet special relationship had emerged. Canada bore some responsibility for the worsening of relations with the Soviets. The Canadians had not cultivated the political relationship by, for example, arranging the high-level visit that the Soviets had anticipated. Trudeau’s failure to return had had a dampening effect. But the Soviets were also at fault, probably because the limit of Soviet aspirations may have been achieved, and they saw no prospect of further gains by maintaining close relations with the Canadians: “Whether they even seriously expected us to leave nato and adopt a neutral policy is questionable.” As for the current policy, Ford thought that Canada could now take advantage of “Soviet disillusionment with the American connection” to promote trade. But Canada would have to rekindle a political relationship because the Soviets, in matters of trade, “invariably choose the supplier most likely to pay political dividends.” For their part, the Soviets repeatedly told the Canadians that they were not holding up their part in the bilateral relationship. Suslov, for instance, told C.J. Marshall, head of the Eastern European section of External, that “so far, the majority of proposals for this or that constructive steps in the relationship between the ussr and Canada have come from the Soviet side.33 At breakfast at the Canadian Embassy on 27 June 1978, M.N. Zemskov of the Foreign Ministry told Ford that the Soviets “viewed the policy of razriadka (détente) as a long-term strategic course of our government; there is no reasonable alternative. The principles of this policy were laid out at the Helsinki Conference and to realize them a constant strengthening is needed by all governments.” Recently, Zemskov continued, razriadka had slowed, but it was not the fault of the Soviet Union, for “there is no other country

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in the world that underwent more suffering and deprivation during the years of the Second World War and aspires more to a permanent peace than the Soviet Union.” Zemskov then lectured Ford that there were competing ideologies in the world and that the “issue will be decided by history, and must not be resolved by war.”34 Ford charted the decline in official visits by Canadians after the banner years of 1971 and 1972; there were fewer in 1973 and none in 1974. The Soviets attributed the lessening of contacts to Canadian attitudes, and Ford argued that concrete measures could be taken to improve relations. He called on the government to take a number of steps, including visits, opening a Canadian commercial centre in Moscow, and concluding an umbrella agreement that would embrace all aspects of trade and commercial relations. The main result of these suggestions was a visit by a Canadian parliamentary delegation to the ussr in September 1975 and a return visit in October 1976 by a delegation from the Supreme Soviet of the ussr. For all their protests about Canadians, the Soviets were unable to keep relations on an even keel. A particularly irritating issue for Canadians was the behaviour of Soviet vessels off Canadian shores in the fishing grounds of the North Atlantic. Yakovlev, the ambassador, warned his government that the matter had become a political issue for the Canadians and was a “serious threat” to further cooperation between the two countries on fishing.35 Despite meetings between Canadian and Soviet officials and an agreed-upon warning system, Soviet trawlers were time and again, seemingly with malicious deliberateness, destroying the lobster gear of Canadian fishermen.36 External wrote, “The wholesale destruction of Canadian lobster gear by Soviet trawlers must be considered a serious problem affecting Canadian-Soviet relations. The destruction of approximately 1,600 lobster traps in mid-July raises serious questions concerning the operations of Soviet fishing vessels.” The fleet was sending disquieting reports: “A Canadian captain has reported that on one occasion he saw a Soviet trawler alter course so that it proceeded through the gear rather than avoiding it.” Ford protested the actions of the Soviet fishing fleet and declared that many Canadians thought they were “deliberately trying to drive Canadian fishermen from the area of their industry by destroying their rigging.”37 The Soviets repeatedly responded to Ford that the government had issued orders to Soviet trawler captains to observe the agreements with Canadian fisheries officials. Finally, Canada closed its Atlantic ports to the

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resupply of Soviet fishing vessels; there followed new meetings, but Canada ended the problem when on 1 January 1977 it extended fishing limits for all foreign trawlers to two hundred miles – following the lead of the United States and Mexico. The measure addressed the “crisis situation pertaining to the fisheries off Canada’s coasts.”38 Another area where the Canadians had hoped to make more progress was the “reunification of families,” and they pressed the Soviets to permit the departure of Soviet citizens who wished to join their families in Canada. This program was not without successes, but repeated obstacles appeared: Soviet officials responded to Ford that decisions had to be made in individual cases, according to Soviet law, and by local authorities. When the Canadians supplied lists of persons, the Soviets sometimes replied that there were “war criminals” among the Canadian supplicants and refused to grant their relatives permission to leave the country.39 Even as Ford assessed the reasons for the fall-off in relations with the Soviets, they were advancing reasons of their own. The Canadian sector of the Second European Division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs offered Ford a summary of Canadian-Soviet relations since the exchange of ambassadors in 1942.40 The document noted that the prime minister had stressed that relations with the ussr were a major development in the Canadian drive for independence and the elevation of Canadian standing in international affairs. Continuing to rankle the Soviets, however, were various “legacies of the ‘cold war,’” such as the demonstrations in front of their embassy in Ottawa and the anti-Soviet agitation of “forces that were not interested in improving of relations between the two countries.” Canada still had not recognized the “entry” of the Baltic states into the Soviet Union, a pointed reference to the Soviet claim that many anti-Soviet activities in Canada were carried out by Balts living in Canada, including alleged “war criminals.” Soviet protests over the “continuing hostile campaign” against the ussr in the Canadian Parliament and press were routine. The expulsion of thirteen members of the Ottawa embassy had prompted a summons to Ford to appear at the Foreign Ministry, where he pointed out that the criticism in Canada arose from the behaviour of the Soviets attached to the embassy; when Soviet representatives in Canada changed their practices, such criticism would stop. Ford also said, as he had done many times previously, that the Soviets must understand that the Canadian government had no control

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over Parliament, the press, or groups who wished to demonstrate.41 V.P. Suslov summoned Ford for a verbal protest over events at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa on 24 February 1974 when some persons threw stones at the building and caused some damage. Suslov insisted that the police were “holding back” – a charge that Ford denied. The Canadians, he said, would pay for damage to the building.42 Business projects between Canadians and Soviets were an area where early promise did not materialize. A series of talks between Soviets and Canadians that took place in 1974, when Parliament was confirming the trade agreements of February 1956, only served to expose all the reasons why the two countries found it difficult to move to industrial cooperation. The Soviets proposed that the Canadians join them to develop peaceful uses of atomic energy in both countries and jointly build atomic power stations in Third World countries. The president of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd replied that there were different technologies and principles of construction in the two countries. Additional problems would include financing such expensive construction and the unwillingness to buy Soviet equipment in the face of American opposition. The Soviets vainly proposed construction in Canada of Soviet metallurgical enterprises, claiming that they had more advanced technology than the Canadians. They offered taking payment in the form of industrial equipment for the timber industry, agriculture, and oil production. Additional proposals to sell the Soviets equipment for paper and cellulose production similarly produced no results. The Soviets recorded that the two sides “had not been able to find the correct form of collaboration.” They complained that the Canadian businessmen came to Moscow for only a short time and left without signing contracts. Soviet firms had made many contacts with Canadians but no orders had resulted.43 Not a single Canadian firm had responded to Soviet invitations to send representatives to the Moscow trading centre to make contacts with Soviets. By the end of the 1970s the successes of the Canadian-Soviet relationship marked by the visit of prime minister Trudeau to the ussr had largely ended. There would be no breakthroughs in the political links between the two countries, as both at one time had hoped. The obstacles to further progress had become clear as the two sides groped to deal with each another. There were political and economic obstacles to close collaboration that became evident as the two powers sought to deepen their relationship.

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Even during the most positive period of Canadian-Soviet relations – the early 1970s – there were reasons why cooperation would always be shadowed by doubts. Substantial sections of Canadian society, members of Parliament, and journalists simply did not trust the Soviets and did not believe them to be fit international collaborators. The Soviets in many instances acted against Canadian interests in an arbitrary fashion and offered constant proof of the distasteful character of Soviet society and government. The features of the ussr that troubled Canadians appeared in the reports of Ambassador Robert Ford at the same time that he advocated the Trudeau policy in Moscow and attempted to improve relations. The repeated charges – revealing deep suspiciousness – that the Canadian government was orchestrating a “campaign” of protests and demonstrations against the ussr underscored the difficulties of finding common ground with the Russians. Ironically, the career in Ottawa of Soviet Ambassador Alexander Yakovlev (see chapter 11) offers confirming proof of a Soviet Union torn within itself and unable to resolve how to deal with Canada.

9 Soviet Meetings

poetr y – so met h i ng of a n unwor l dl y art – gave Ford unusual access to the realities of Soviet life. He became acquainted with intellectuals whose sensitive antennae registered political shifts in Moscow. Conversations with them, although avoiding subjects that would redound to harm them, nonetheless were fruitful sources of impressions and information about the inner workings of the system. The artist Lili Brik occupied a special place in Ford’s Russian experience. In a striking gesture, Ford dedicated his last book on the Soviet Union, A Moscow Literary Memoir, to the memory of Lili and to that of Thereza, and he mentioned Lili’s name first. Brik’s legendary Russian life left Ford smitten with this unusual woman, who was already eighty when he met her. She embodied for him values of beauty and courage, feminine values widely celebrated by poets. Ford found her “one of the most intriguing women of the century.”1 She had been the great love of the “proletarian poet” Vladimir Mayakovsky, and for a time she lived in a ménage à trois with her husband Osip Brik, a critic and editor, and her lover. But she “abandoned” – to use Ford’s word – both her husband and Mayakovsky in 1923, although Mayakovsky continued to live in the Briks’ house until he committed suicide in 1930. Ford met Lili Brik in December 1967 at the Bolshoi Theatre through an introduction arranged by the poet Andrei Voznesensky. He wrote, “I was … surprised not only to find her alive but still remarkably vivacious and with traces still of great beauty.”2 He continued, “She appeared in a Paris dress sent to her by her sister, her hair dyed a light red, very well made-up, looking 15 years or

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more younger than she actually is. One could well imagine her as the temperamental beauty of 50 years before.” According to her third husband, Vasya Katanyan, the Armenian filmmaker, “her passion to preserve her beauty lay in Mayakovsky’s suicide note in which he implored her never to change. However, I think there might be a less literary and more straightforward feminine explanation,” commented Ford.3 As was often the case with him, he cited a romantic Russian explanation and added his more matter-of-fact Western view. Ford believed that although she had been an artist and filmmaker, her “real genius was her ability to inspire the creative talents of others, not only Mayakovsky, but other artists, who enshrined her in their work.”4 Ford heard her speak of Mayakovsky’s “disease,” his determination to kill himself after he, a loyal Bolshevik, became convinced that the Revolution, which he had welcomed and ardently supported, had fallen into the hands of bureaucrats, the very kind of person whom he had deeply loathed during the tsarist regime. If he had not taken his own life when he did, Brik believed, he eventually would have been caught up by the intolerant Stalinist regime and sent to a prison camp.5 She believed that, for Mayakovsky, belief in the Revolution and in Bolshevism was “simply poetry.” As a personal incarnation of the “spirit of revolt,” Mayakovsky had supported the Revolution for emotional, not political, reasons. But he had soon found the restrictions of the authoritarian state at odds with his character. “His great defect,” as Ford summarized Lily Brik’s assessment, was his “impatience in love, in politics, in poetry.” He “wanted everything immediately and when it was not forthcoming, then he lost interest. Even in poetry, if he found an idea hard to transmute into verse, he would reject it and thus sacrificed a great deal of his best poetry because he was too impatient for the poem to work itself out.”6 Brik had been born in St Petersburg in 1891, the daughter of a well-off Jewish lawyer, and she died in December 1978 in Moscow. Ford was the only Westerner in attendance at her cremation outside the city. She had taken a courageous step in 1935 when she wrote a letter to Stalin and criticized Soviet publications for ignoring the poetry of Mayakovsky and dismissing it as incomprehensible. During the five years after the poet’s death, not a word about him had appeared in any publication. A month after sending her letter, she

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was invited to Moscow to the office of N.I. Yezhov, future head of the nkvd but at that time fourth secretary in Stalin’s personal secretariat. Yezhov had before him her letter to Stalin with the dictator’s notations on it in red pencil. He agreed with Lili about the importance of Mayakovsky, and from that moment publications in the ussr began to treat Mayakovsky as the great poet of the Revolution. Lili’s courageous letter had commenced the creation of the Mayakovsky cult by Soviet literary authorities. The Mayakovsky legend that they fostered, however, was not that of the unquenchable personality but the poet who supported the Bolshevik revolution.7 Boris Pasternak rightly commented that Stalin’s approval was a “second death” for Mayakovsky, because the dictator had promoted Mayakovsky’s poetry, as Lili recalled, “forcibly like the potato under Catherine the Great.”8 At the time, Lili had married again – to a hero of the revolutionary war, General Primakov. He was arrested soon afterwards, in the purge of high military officers in 1936. Other generals’ wives followed their husbands into the camps, and Lili expected the police to come for her at any minute. But she was spared; she believed that the contact with Stalin over the legacy of Mayakovsky had saved her. Later, Ford learned of another explanation from an official of the French Embassy in Moscow: that because Lili was the sister of Elsa Triolet, the wife of Louis Aragon, a French writer and well-known member of the French Communist Party, Aragon had provided his “protection” to Lili and saved her from Stalinist repression. Ford and Thereza visited Lily Brik several times at her apartment in Moscow and at her dacha near the city. A visit to the apartment was a step back into Russia’s Victorian era. “The apartment is strictly out of Chekhov,” Ford wrote. “The divans and stuffed chairs with antimacassars probably date from before the Revolution … The walls are literally covered with photographs of Mayakovsky and intellectuals and writers of the period. In addition there are a number of interesting and very valuable paintings and drawings – Tishler, Tatlin, Larionov, Goncharova, Malevich, Popova, Bakst, three magnificent Pirashmanvili (a Georgian primitive) and a unique Cubist selfportrait by Mayakovsky himself. The corridors are lined with extraordinary post-Revolutionary and Civil War posters by Malevich … every conceivable kind of junk has been added including Chianti bottles suspended from the ceiling and dangling ribbons.”9 In the midst of

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all the repression and the clutter, Ford asked Lili if she would not prefer accepting an offer from Aragon to move to Paris. Her response was that she could never leave Russia. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, another poet, moved in and out of Ford’s life in Moscow and provided the ambassador with a close-up look at another kind of intellectual, one who seemed to flit between a critical stance toward the regime and official approval. He had created the impression abroad that he was a dissident; others saw his status as ambiguous. Because of the poet’s wide reputation in the West, both as an enfant terrible of Soviet cultural life and as a “kept” literary figure, he was for Ford a kind of barometer of the political weather in Moscow. Yevtushenko was hard-bent on capitalizing on his reputation abroad and was eager to travel. Ford recalled, “At 7:30 in the morning of 24 May Yevtushenko telephoned me to say that he wanted to see me urgently that day. As I was very busy with the National Arts Centre Orchestra and other things, I asked him to put it off until the following day. He said he had to see me the same day, but it would only take five minutes. I finally arranged to see him; he came; and stayed over an hour.”10 The poet sought the ambassador’s help with the Union of Soviet Writers in order to get its approval for an invitation to travel to York University in Toronto as a poet-in-residence for six weeks. He would in return give one recital at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, but would be free to travel anywhere in Canada at York’s expense. York offered him not only all expenses but $10,000 and even more if the Gardens sold out. The poet asked Ford not to mention the financial aspect of the York offer to the Union of Writers. Yevtushenko said it was the best invitation that he had ever received. “He thought this represented the difference between Canadian and American civilizations. In the States it was go, go, go all the time. He loved it, of course, because it was exciting but he was also exploited and often had to give three or four recitals in a row.” In Canada, moreover, he thrilled at the idea that he would live in a students’ residence, and he “hoped he could go into the Canadian forest and get the feel of the big woods.” Ford wondered to himself why Yevtushenko had to go to Canada to find big woods; there were vast tracts of woods in Russia. Ford asked why the poet needed his support to get permission from the writers’ union, with which he was in good standing. There

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followed a long and convoluted explanation. Yevtushenko commenced by stating his position and refuting recent critical articles in the foreign press. “He said it baffled him how the position of writers in the ussr could be so misunderstood abroad. He never made any secret about being a patriotic Russian and a supporter of Soviet society. (He did not say Communism.) There was a lot he disagreed with and disapproved of and he had spoken out more often than many others including, he added ‘your friend Voznesensky.’” He believed that he had made a contribution to literature and to the liberalizing of writers’ conditions for work. He said that he preferred to work within the system rather than spend his life in futile silence. Ford said he had heard in Paris that French intellectuals were saying that Yevtushenko was vendu au système, and this prompted another “long harangue” about the “insensitivity of those living in the West who understood nothing at all of the problems, the difficulties, the calculations which had to be made by a writer living in the ussr who loved his country, loved living, and wanted to write something he was proud of.” Yevtushenko then brought up the earlier visit to Canada of Voznesensky and his meeting with Prime Minister Trudeau. This had aroused a great deal of interest at the Union of Writers. The executive secretary of the union, Markov (“a real s.o.b.”), who was chairing a meeting, had said, “This was a very important event for Soviet literature. Of course, Mr. Trudeau had not meant to honor Voznesensky but to honor the Union of Writers, and this was something they greatly appreciated.” Yevtushenko said that this statement provoked laughter, but nonetheless showed the importance of such a meeting, and he wondered whether it would be possible for him to meet Prime Minister Trudeau in Canada. He inserted that he had been received by President Nixon at the White House for over an hour. Ford said that he would see what he could do, and in the end the results were favourable to Yevtushenko. He travelled to Canada in October, gave a number of successful readings, and met Trudeau – a meeting which the Union of Writers told him to conceal from Ambassador Ford. As always, Yevtushenko’s earnings had to be handed over to the kgb, which kept them in a special account for him and gave them to him when it thought he needed them.11 Andrei Voznesensky was another Soviet intellectual often seen as a dissident in the West. His poetry and plays were not anti-regime, but they did not follow the canons of “socialist realism”; the result

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was that he from time to time encountered difficulties with the censorship. His relationship with the state, therefore, offered Ford an opportunity to gauge whether the regime was lightening or tightening its controls over writers. On the whole, Ford thought, Voznesensky “is considered too good a poet, and too popular, to persecute. And, of course, his poetry generally avoids specifically political themes.”12 Voznesensky’s wife, the novelist Zoya Boguslavskaya, also had her troubles with the authorities – sometimes, Voznesensky implied, to “hit back” at him. Close knowledge of the lives of several leading writers gave Ford a personal perspective from which he could assess their relationship to the state. It showed that the question of dissidence was more complex than ordinarily thought. For some time, Voznesensky and his wife had been excluded from the magazine Yunost (Youth), but then in the fall of 1970 both appeared to be back in the good graces of the journal. The story was a tangled one. The writer Vasily Kuznetsov had invented a story about Yevtushenko which had caused the latter’s removal from the editorial board of Yunost. Kuznetsov’s purpose was to put himself in a position to travel to England, where he planned to defect. With the departure of Yevtushenko, the main obstacle to publishing faced by Voznesensky and Boguslavksaya had been removed. Voznesensky believed that “Yevtushenko hated him and did everything possible to denigrate him.”13 Ford recalled that once, when lunching with Yevtushenko, the poet had asked him why he translated poems by Voznesensky and not by him. Ford said, “I replied that I would translate him if he wrote poetry I liked … It seemed to me Yevtushenko was primarily motivated by jealousy, with which opinion Voznesensky agreed.” Ford conceded that he might have seen Voznesensky’s exclusion from Yunost as a political matter if he had not known about the personal rivalry between Yevtushenko and Voznesensky. Luncheon at the Peredelkino dacha of the Voznesenskys, while exhilarating, was usually a taxing experience for Ford. He recounted after one such occasion: “Over an interminable (dreadful), Russian lunch which went on from 1:30 until evening, we touched on a number of interesting topics, some of it literary gossip which seems to be almost the only continuing subject of conversation in Moscow literary circles, some of more political interest.” Voznesensky recounted that he and his wife had recently attended a birthday party for the poet Bella Akhmadulina and told Ford that her poetry

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was going “badly.” The reasons were that “‘she is too prosperous, too happy and she is not drinking.’ It seemed unfortunate that she only produced when she was miserable, unloved, and drinking herself into a stupor.” Ford recalled, “I was practically in a stupor myself by this time, not from wine, but just the endless chatter … and the soporific effect of the feeling of boredom that gnaws at these people. So much so that they cannot stay in one place very long … And of course the idea of a trip abroad makes it all just bearable.”14 The Soviet intellectuals’ political knowledge was often sketchy, but that did not stop them from forming opinions. Voznesensky and a translator colleague had taken at face value Soviet reports that the British had said the United States was responsible in 1959 for turning the Chinese against the Soviets. Ford said this view was “patent nonsense” because the Americans had no relations with the Chinese at that time. The poet insisted that the “British” had said so and that made the allegation accurate. Ford concluded, “I was struck by the fact that these two highly literate and intelligent people could have believed such an extraordinary bit of nonsense.”15 Ford’s relations with the “liberals” of the Soviet cultural scene, the most prominent of whom in the West were Yevtushenko and Voznesensky, was, as the ambassador himself understood, not indicative that the regime itself was “mellowing” toward the arts. On one occasion he tried to convince the visiting columnist Joseph Kraft that they and a few others were very special cases and were tolerated because they were popular at home and abroad and because it satisfied “the Soviet authorities to use them to let a little steam off.”16 Near the end of Ford’s posting in Moscow, in 1980, the political tensions had risen, and he “hesitated to seek out” his few remaining acquaintances in the intellectual community. He finally saw Voznesensky at his dacha on 22 June and found him depressed over the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the deteriorated relations with Western countries. It appeared that Reagan would be elected as US president, a cause for deepening gloom. “And that will mean war,” Voznesensky said.17 However, he wanted to talk about “his current girl friend … a 27-year old beauty from Santo Domingo,” Ford recalled. “She is apparently from a rich family but very leftist. She shocked Andrei by saying she admired Stalin. They met in the bar of a so-called Russian restaurant in Paris called Rasputin. She had never drunk vodka before and proceeded to get violently sick. He seemed to think that this is a normal way to start a romance.”

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Other Russians provided Ford with different angles of vision on the regime. Early in his posting, while Khrushchev was first secretary, the ambassador paid a call on a rusticated Soviet politician, Mikhail Menshikov, minister of foreign affairs of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic. This visit revealed another failing of the Soviet system frankly attested to by a relative insider. Menshikov had been minister of foreign trade under Stalin, then ambassador to Washington during Khrushchev’s visit to the United States in 1958; since then, the leadership had relegated him to an honorable but inconsequential position. A debonair man, friendly and charming, he appeared in public most often for ceremonial and protocol events. When Ford saw him at his ministry, “a rather shabby building in an unlikely part of Moscow,” he seemed “obviously underemployed” and “was prepared to spend the entire afternoon talking.”18 Menshikov wanted to stress that Khrushchev was an “experienced and balanced man whose word can be trusted” and who genuinely wanted to reach an agreement with the Western powers. In contrast, Stalin had forced the country into a vacuum with respect to the outside world and the Soviet leadership into a vacuum with respect to the people. Menshikov said that the ussr now needed more contacts with the rest of the world, and he hoped for stronger trade relations with Canada. But he “seemed very preoccupied with the question of Soviet trade with the usa, and the failure to make any progress. This tends to confirm, incidentally, what I said in my telegram of 30 June on Canadian-Soviet trade relations, to the effect that the Russians’ main aim is trade with the usa, and if there is a break through there we will find ourselves left behind.” Not much later, the Moscow scene saw an attempt on the part of the authorities to improve life for foreign diplomats. The setting up of special stores by the Soviet government, including a “diplomatic shop” for foreign embassies, was a means of overcoming the severe shortage of consumer goods in the ussr for those with hard currency (Russian rubles were “soft” and unacceptable in such places); for the Soviet government, the stores offered a way of earning hard currency, to be used in turn to make purchases abroad. After several years of preparation, the authorities announced the opening of one such establishment in Moscow. The store circulated a catalogue to the embassies listing the goods to be available, including wine, vodka, tinned goods, and an assortment of imported fruit and vegetables. The catalogue included a list of acceptable hard currencies

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and explained that goods ordered by phone would be delivered to the purchaser. Ford placed a bet with a colleague that at least one listed item would not be available. He won hands down; there was no Riesling wine, although it had been listed. He ordered some vodka by telephone and the question of payment came up.19 The store demanded foreign bills, but the ambassador pointed out that it was illegal to import foreign currency into the ussr. He proposed paying by cheque, but the answer was that no delivery could be made until the cheque had been cleared through the Canadian bank. Finally, after additional discussion, the store accepted the cheque but stated that it did not deliver goods and the ambassador would have to come and pick up the item himself. Several days later a small box of apples arrived from the store with the explanation that it had inadvertently overcharged for the vodka in the amount of forty-four copecks and was providing the change in the form of Chinese apples, said to be very good. A later phone call explained, with apologies, that the apples were not Chinese but Bulgarian. Ford concluded that his dealings with the special store showed that “Russia or at least the Soviet Union, has not changed very much.” A more expensive confrontation occurred with Nicholas Koudriavtzeff, the Montreal impresario, who told Ford about his experience in attempting to bring the Bolshoi Ballet to Toronto to appear at Maple Leaf Gardens.20 Koudriavtzeff received assurances from the Russians that they would send the prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya to dance a new ballet, Carmen, written by her husband, the composer Rodion Shchedrin, with choreography by the Cuban Alberto Alonzo. The impresario engaged Maple Leaf Gardens, started advertising the forthcoming appearance of Plisetskaya and looked forward to attracting a full audience of 6,000. But when Koudriavtzeff went to Moscow in July 1967 to sign the contract, he was told that the minister of culture, Mrs Ekaterina Furtseva, had seen the ballet and had decided that it should not be shown in Canada. The objection seemed to be that Plisetskaya danced in “very abbreviated black tights.” Two weeks later the Soviets phoned Koudriavtzeff, who was then in Vienna, and summoned him to Moscow to an urgent meeting in the office of the minister of culture. The meeting lasted from ten in the morning until five in the afternoon, with sandwiches brought in “to stimulate the participants.” The proceedings “consisted largely

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of a running battle between Plisetskaya and Furtseva.” At one point Furtseva pointed at Shchedrin and proclaimed him a thief for having tried to pretend that Carmen “was his own work when ‘everybody knew it was written by a French composer, Bizet.’ Plisetskaya sprang to the defence of her husband and demanded that Furtseva withdraw her charges or she would never dance again either abroad or in the ussr. Furtseva replied that this was fine as far as she was concerned since Plisetskaya was too old to dance anyway and was on the way down. All this was accompanied by various insults, screams and invective.” Furtseva won out, and Carmen was withdrawn from the Maple Leaf Gardens program. Instead, the Soviets sent Don Quixote, danced by Maximova, and the audience reached only 2,500, a commercial disaster. Plisetskaya vowed never again to dance in any ballet not written by her husband. Somewhat later, Soviet authorities allowed Carmen in Moscow, and it was given a “tumultuous welcome” by the social and intellectual elite of the city and taken as a signal of loosening controls on culture. Ford and Thereza often hosted for luncheon or dinner Soviets who were shortly to leave for Canada as members of artistic or official delegations. These occasions gave Ford the opportunity to sample opinion among persons who were often willing to speak frankly about life in the ussr in the relatively relaxed atmosphere of the embassy. One such event was a dinner for Kyrill Kondrashin, the director of the Moscow Philharmonic, and his wife. Ford writes, “I gave them a choice of dress and they chose black tie, obviously to permit Mrs. Kondrashin to wear a new evening dress. They were rather stiff at first but gradually became more garrulous as the evening wore on.”21 Kondrashin said, as Ford reported, “that there were many things in the West that he envied, the easy intellectual intercourse with other musicians for one thing. In Moscow, he said, there was constant quarreling going on and the underhand methods used to get to the top, or bring those at the top down. I said this was not unknown in the West but he replied that I had no idea how complicated things could be in the musical world of the ussr.” Some weeks later, before their departure for Calgary, Ford gave a luncheon for the Soviet figure-skating team. “The average age seemed to be about 22 when we included two coaches and the representative of the Sports Union, a formidable female who would probably break through the ice if she even ventured out onto it. However, she made

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a very pleasant speech and presented me with two pennants inscribed by all members of the team.” He continued: All of the skaters were … quite self-assured. The men’s singles silver medalist, Chetveryukhin, was obviously the most independent-minded and was the only one who drank a glass of champagne. He said flatly that this was his last year in competition – unless “they” forced him to continue. He said he had more important things to do in life. He is a very handsome young man with very fine features. When my wife remarked that he looked as if he were of aristocratic origin, he blushed scarlet and changed the subject … Most of the skaters complained of the discipline to which they were subjected. When I told Miss Rodnina that our Canadian champion, Karen Magnussen, had told me she had great difficulty in devoting more than two hours a day to practice she sighed and said their average was six, and that this went on for eleven months of the year. They had special school classes and their examinations were arranged to avoid the competitions. When I said this sounded highly professional she just shrugged her shoulders. Another who then joined in agreed that the discipline was onerous but said they had lots of perquisites – access to dollar shops and above all foreign travel.22 Ford provided an additional perspective on the relations among the skaters at the luncheon. This concerned the “problem that arose in Sappora [Japan] over the estrangements between Miss Rodnina and her partner. The latter had apparently fallen in love with Miss Smirnova who was the female partner in the number two Soviet team and had spurned Miss Rodnina. True, alas, all too true,” commented Ford. “He married Miss Smirnova the day before our luncheon but not knowing this I had placed the two ladies opposite each other. He refused to leave his bride and sat beside her while Miss Rodnina alternately glared and feigned indifference. It did not stop them winning first and second places in the pair’s competition in Calgary.” The Fords gave a dinner party in February 1977 in honour of the visiting Canadian ballet dancers Frank Augustyn and Karen Kain. Because of the presence of Soviet guests from the Bolshoi Theatre,

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Ford and Theresa had “several opportunities to glimpse behind the veil of secrecy that the Soviet authorities draw across the activities of the Bolshoi Theatre.”23 Marius Liepa, one of the two leading male dancers at the Bolshoi, was the main source of information. Ford wrote: “Organizing this party proved even more difficult than usual, and a great deal more difficult than a somewhat similar party a few years ago when the Bolshoi Ballet went to Canada. I first approached the Director of the Bolshoi, Georgi Ivanov, to secure his cooperation. The next we heard was a call from the Chief of Protocol of the Ministry of Culture, Vladimir Starozhilov, ostensibly hurt because we had not first approached him. We then submitted a list of names for him to vet. He replied that the party was approved in principle and he would let me know in due course ‘who was permitted to come.’ I have seldom seen the control and censorship principle spelled out quite so blatantly as this.” Starozhilov then vetoed a number of dancers, including Maya Plisetskaya and her husband Rodion Shchedrin. “Plisetskaya phoned herself to apologize with a rather lame excuse, but I later heard from the poet Voznesensky that in fact she had been told that she ‘need not go.’ It seems extraordinary that the world’s top ballerina cannot attend a party in honor of Canadian dancers performing at the Bolshoi because of the decision of authorities.” Other conditions worked against the planned party. “Our dancers were in Kiev, due to arrive in Moscow at noon the day of the dinner. At six they phoned to say that they still had not taken off because of fog and had to come by train. The Ministry of Culture, we later discovered, then phoned to the Bolshoi dancers to tell them not to come to the Embassy. Liepa, however, paid no attention and came anyway. It is interesting to note that Ivanov did not know about this and several times during the dinner he remarked that he could not understand why such and such a dancer had not turned up ‘since it had been approved!’”24 Ivanov, Ford concluded, seemed to know very little about ballet and was probably “a kgb-oriented administrator.” The Bolshoi dancers, Liepa said, had forced the previous director out and now regretted it, because Ivanov was “tough and applied pressure to conform whenever and wherever necessary.” Liepa said that the mood in the Bolshoi was dreadful and dominated by petty personal quarrels and internal politics.

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He gave as an example the domination of the Bolshoi by the choreographer Grigorevich. Liepa admitted that Grigorevich was very competent but at the same time unimaginative and very conservative. As a result very few new productions were staged and those that were, such as “Ivan the Terrible” were not good. Furthermore, he refused to permit anyone else to have a say. Nevertheless he was accepted by the politicians because his ballet “Spartacus” was politically acceptable and popular abroad. Liepa admitted that he was barely on speaking terms with Grigorevich. For example at a recent special ballet evening honoring the 60th birthday of Grigorevich, the only major dancer who was excluded was Liepa. The reason, Liepa said, was because he had an affair with Grigorevich’s wife, the ballerina Bessmertova. But Liepa said the real reason was that Grigorevich, who is a homosexual, was having an affair with a male set designer and exaggerated his alleged rage against Liepa in order to conceal his own peccadillo. The dancer told Ford that the first list of participants for a Bolshoi Ballet trip to Paris had not included his name. He went to see the minister of culture, Demichev, and the latter sent orders to include him. Ivanov agreed to do so but rearranged the program in Paris so that the two ballets in which Liepa would dance were on consecutive nights, and he received an exit visa for only four days. He refused to go. Ford asked Liepa how he was able to influence Minister Dimichev. Liepa explained that he was sleeping with Brezhnev’s daughter and in fact was having breakfast with her the following morning. “This was what kept him out of trouble. ‘They’ were afraid to be too nasty to him … Liepa also said that the Bolshoi needed a major renovation but nothing was being done. The wooden floor of the stage was rotten, as Karen Kain can attest,” noted Ford, “and many of the sets were old and falling apart. The corps de ballet was getting worse, and there was very little enthusiasm particularly since the new ballets were poor. ‘Angara,’ a dreadful piece about building a dam in Siberia, he admitted was dreadful.” Ford, from time to time, was able to bring together Western intellectuals with Soviet writers and artists. The Westerners were usually quite sympathetic to the Soviet socialist experiment but found it difficult to develop sympathetic relations with the Soviets. Ford recounted that he had given a luncheon at the embassy for the

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visiting American writer S.J. Perelman and had invited Andrei Voznesensky and his wife Zoya Boguslavskaya. “They did not hit it off too well,” he wrote to Lillian Hellman. “But I think he was interested in seeing some members of the Soviet writing community. Then Ed Stevens [US ambassador] organized a party for him and I sat with him most of the evening and had a most interesting conversation. The trouble was Yevtushenko got in on the act and I had to spend a certain amount of time interpreting one to the other.”25 Ford had first met Lillian Hellman in 1961 in London; she travelled to Moscow in 1965 to attend a writer’s congress and on a 1979 visit stayed with the Fords. On the basis of her first experience, she discovered Soviet reality completely at odds with her sympathy for Communism. Ford recalled, “She found Russia boring, dismal, unattractive, hopelessly inefficient.” She “complained bitterly about the hotel, the service, the food, the constant surveillance of very unsubtle kgb ‘guides’ and shadows, the glum city, everything.” During her second visit, Ford arranged dinners and luncheons with several Russian writers, including Yevtushenko, Voznesensky, and Konstantin Simonov. “It did not go well … Perhaps it was her procommunist views that distanced her from those she most expected to be her natural ‘comrades.’ They held back, not liking or trusting her.”26 Ford thought that Hellman’s procommunist views had developed in the 1930s when it appeared that only the Soviet Union was prepared to stand up to Hitler. Ford’s literary and social encounters in Moscow opened wide a window on both Soviet life and politics. If anything, they showed the arbitrariness of the system but also revealed the personal element defying the rigidities of Communist practice.

10 The Decline of the ussr

i n th e ea r ly 1 97 0 s during the heyday of good Canada-ussr relations, Ambassador Ford had been giving less attention to the distasteful features of the Soviet Union that he had emphasized in his earlier writings; in the second half of the decade, the prospects for the ussr darkened in Ford’s reports as Brezhnev’s illness took its toll on the Soviet leadership and the Soviets made a number of serious mistakes that poisoned the international atmosphere and created greater difficulties for the leadership. Those who had seen Brezhnev up close knew that he was ill. Ford reported to Ottawa on the results of a conversation that Thereza had with President Urho Kekkonen of Finland while the Fords were in Helsinki for a hospital visit. Ford recalled later, “I had a British doctor [in Moscow]. I went to him because I was having trouble with an eye. He immediately diagnosed it as a detached retina. He said, ‘I will make a reservation on the first plane to Helsinki. They have a first-class eye doctor, a surgeon there. And I said, ‘In Helsinki?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you can count on it.’ I said, ‘Make it for now, for God’s sake.’ And I went on Aeroflot and got a woman doctor, and she was extremely efficient, kind. Helsinki, Finland, is a wonderful country, and the hospital was spotlessly clean, the nurses were efficient.”1 Later he told Lillian Hellman, “Three years ago after a very bad fall I developed a detached retina and had to be taken to Helsinki where a marvelous woman surgeon put it back again. I was lucky but I had a frightening six weeks particularly as they debated for a long time if I could be operated on because of my muscular disability. Finally they did so under a local anaesthetic – no fun.”2 Although surgery was the main purpose of the trip to Finland, Ford

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picked up valuable political information there. He reported to Ottawa that Kekkonen “recognizes the necessity of having close, personal contacts with the Soviet leadership and has an almost unique insight into the leadership.” Kekkonen had seen Brezhnev and Kosygin the previous June on a visit to Moscow, and he said that Brezhnev “looked to him like a very sick man, trembling very much and tired and he certainly would not give him a long time to live.” As for Kosygin, he also looked “terrible,” and the “growth on his face looked burnt and cracked as if it had been subjected to some form of radiation.” Kekkonen thought that changes in the leadership of the ussr were not far off.3 In Moscow, the Canadian Embassy tried to make sense of the available information. But traditional Soviet practice continued to promote an image of Brezhnev in full command. One hint of the measures taken to protect his public image came from the pictures that appeared in the state-run press taken on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Lenin’s death on 21 January 1974. The firstrow lineup in the Izvestiia photo, taken by its own photographer, showed, from the left, Kosygin, Brezhnev, Podgorny, and Suslov, with three figures in the second row. But in Vechernaya Moskva (Evening Moscow), which came out at the same time as Izvestiia, there was a photograph of the same lineup from tass that showed a second row of unidentifiable ghostly figures, one of whom might be Gromyko looking over Kosygin’s shoulder. One paper gave “Gromyko” only a single foot, and that in the wrong position. There were now five or six figures. On 22 January, Trud (Labour) printed a picture of the same scene, but by another photographer, in which there were no “spectral phenomena.” Two schools of interpretation resulted from these strange photos: “The American or the one-ghost school holds that the first ghost is Gromyko, who has been simply moved forward to a more conspicuous position in the second line. Where Gromyko stood, a second ghost had been pasted in. The French three-ghost theory casts doubt on the idea that Gromyko is in the picture at all and holds that none of the figures can be identified.” Ford sums it all up in this way: “One of the reasons at the time for perhaps even closer attention than usual to these pictorial discrepancies was the ongoing speculation about the physical or political health of Brezhnev. If there were doubts about Brezhnev’s continued leadership, some argued, this

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could explain the extreme Soviet sensitivity to the positions of leadership figures in the pictures before the Lenin mausoleum.”4 Ford’s growing understanding of Brezhnev’s actual state of health made the Soviet government’s attempts to show him as the dominant presence on the Soviet political scene appear all the more forced. Honours done to Leonid Brezhnev on the occasion of his seventieth birthday on 19 December 1976 exceeded anything granted to any other Soviet leader except Stalin. In the weeks before the ceremony, all the Eastern European Communist leaders had travelled to Moscow to bestow on Brezhnev their countries’ highest decorations. The ussr published a photo-biography of the general secretary covering his entire career, but containing no photos of Brezhnev with either Stalin or Khrushchev or with any member of the Politburo whom he had expelled. Photo captions unstintingly praised Brezhnev for his “tireless work,” “consideration for people,” his “courage, staunchness and a cool head” during the war, and the like. Two biographical films on him were produced: Life Story and Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev in Kazakhstan. Three collections of Brezhnev’s speeches appeared in print. Brezhnev received a second “Hero” of the Soviet Union Gold Medal; he was already in possession of the Gold Medal for Socialist Labour. He received as well a sword bearing the insignia of the hammer and sickle and a specially created award recognizing his “outstanding services” in perfecting the armed forces and strengthening the country’s defences. Despite the extensive and exclusive honours bestowed on Brezhnev, the Soviets denied that they were creating a new “cult of the personality.” Mikhail Suslov, the main birthday speaker, praised Brezhnev for embodying the “collective reason and will” of the Communist Party. Brezhnev himself was the picture of modesty in his acknowledging speech; he credited the Party for the successes of the ussr and pictured himself as a selfless follower of Leninist ideals and a co-worker with other members of the Politburo. Ford inferred political meaning from this display of contrived humility. Brezhnev was now the most powerful political figure in the ussr but was restrained by his position in the Politburo. He was now a kind of “constitutional leader” who merited praise for carrying out the will of the Party.5 Ford questioned the Soviet leaders’ perceptiveness at that very moment when the Soviets considered that they had achieved their greatest success in their relations with the West, that is, in the

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Helsinki Final Act in the summer of 1975. This was the culminating event in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (csc), first proposed by the Soviets, which had been in preparation for several years and was designed to confirm the European borders in place since the close of the Second World War and put the finishing touches on détente as a permanent condition. There was a lot at stake. Ford reported during the preparatory period that the Soviet leaders clearly hoped that the conference would “mark the end of the postwar era and beginning of a new system leading to achievement of a different set of Soviet goals.”6 Recognition of the European borders by all the powers would mean acceptance of East Germany as a separate sovereign state and would end all talk of the reunification of the two Germanies. It would establish firmly the East Germans as the cornerstone of Soviet control over East Europe and preserve stability in the ussr. Initially, the Soviets had attempted to exclude Canada and the United States as non-European powers but finally relented, and in the summer of 1975 all the European and the two North American powers sat down with the Soviets in Helsinki to work out the final agreement. A successful Final Act, from the viewpoint of the ussr, would be the greatest achievement of Brezhnev’s détente policies. But before reaching that stage, the Western powers (Canada played a leading role) had pressed the Soviets to agree to adding the so-called “basket three” package on human rights; the Soviets finally accepted it because they were anxious, above all, to settle the question of borders and were willing to pay a price. The consequences of the Helsinki Final Act for the Soviet Union’s authoritarian system proved to be disruptive because the Act gave rise to the human rights movement in the ussr and throughout Eastern Europe and served to heighten the issue in the West. Ford wrote that the human rights issue would have continued to be an irritant in relations between East and West, but the “Helsinki document sharpened western perception of the issue and made it an even more rancorous cause of dispute than it might otherwise have been. How the Soviets failed to foresee this in signing the act is difficult to fathom.”7 Another puzzle was the way in which the Soviets stressed the Apollo-Soyuz joint space flight shortly after Helsinki, in August 1975, because their media coverage displayed their American rivals in a favourable light.

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Ford had lunch in the country with a number of writers just after Pravda’s publication of the full text of the Helsinki documents – another unprecedented development. The Soviet media, in another surprise, had made a 180-degree turn on coverage of the United States: “One writer remarked on the cynical way in which leading Soviet tv and press commentators had shifted from a violently antiAmerican line to one praising things American.”8 Another journalist commented on the problem of showing Apollo-Soyuz live on television: “It was the first time this had been undertaken and the tv producers were frightened that something would go wrong and were invariably unready for the unexpected. For example, when President [Gerald] Ford telephoned direct to the cosmonauts and astronauts, the logical thing would have been to link Brezhnev up with them, but they were paralyzed by fear of doing the wrong thing, and in any case there were so many bits of red tape to disentangle to get Brezhnev’s approval that in the end nothing was done.” Another writer wondered why there had been so much publicity because the tv coverage showed the Soviet equipment “so much more primitive than the American.” The writer then went on to explain the space flight disaster of several years before. Ford recounted, “There was tremendous political pressure on the space center to copy the American feat of sending three men into space. The Soviet space ship could really only carry two cosmonauts comfortably but they forced three into the ship. This was too small for moving about, and when they came down there was not enough space for them to get back into their pressure suits so that they simply burst when the ship re-entered the earth’s sphere.”9 That the Soviets continued to exploit relations with Canada in pursuit of détente was clear when the tass correspondent in Ottawa filed a final report before departing from the city. It was ostensibly an interview with the prime minister. The journalist, Mironov, reported that Trudeau shared Brezhnev’s views on bilateral relations as expressed at the Twenty-Fifth Party Congress. Ford told External that Trudeau was quoted as using words “virtually identical to the text of Brezhnev’s speech.” External replied the next day that the “socalled interview was in fact about a 90-second encounter in the pm’s outer office at Mironov’s request to say good-bye.” The encounter was “little more than a handshake.” Ford was “relieved” to hear the explanation, especially because “the Soviets still do not give access

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to their Ministers by foreign journalists and if we make it easy for Soviet Journalists … it militates against our attempting to achieve any sort of quid pro quo here.” It also turned out that the Soviet ambassador in Canada contended that the “interview” had lasted ten minutes.10 That the Soviets were inflating attempts to keep their interpretation of détente with Canada alive appeared again when Brezhnev wrote a “unique” letter to Trudeau – not addressed to other leaders of the Western Alliance – which Ford thought was designed to promote economic relations with Canada that in turn could help the Soviets improve their relations with other major countries.11 Soviet efforts to strengthen ties with Canada had taken on a note of desperation and often foundered; Moscow remained unaware that other actions negated its efforts. S.G. Sunitsin, chief of the Forest Regulators and Forest Resources of the State Forestry Committee was angling for a visit to Canada, and Ford agreed that such a visit might lead to Canada becoming a supplier of machinery and equipment for the Soviet forestry industry. But “in light of the … slowness with which the Soviets have responded to other Canadian invitations, regarding ministerial visits,” he wrote, “I do not believe we should react very promptly.”12 The next year [1977], Ford had become skeptical that another Trudeau visit would be “justified” in the minds of the Canadian public unless there were to be some gains in the bilateral relationship; there had been no important developments, and an episode of “electronic intrusion,” or “bugging, by the Soviets into the ambassador’s office had soured relations further.13 Brezhnev’s flagging leadership, as well, overhung all discussion of relations with the Soviets. Ford had sent Theresa to a lunch with Soviet leaders that he could not attend because he was in the hospital. Based on her report, he concluded that the leadership would soon have to change. Brezhnev “looked like a very sick man, trembling and very weak and tired.” Ford said he would not give him long to live. Kosygin also “looked terrible.”14 When Jimmy Carter was elected president of the United States in the fall of 1976, new opportunities seemed to open to the Canadians. Ford thought that the Soviets would have preferred Gerald Ford, Carter’s Republican rival, because of the long period of reasonably good relations with the Republicans under Nixon and then Ford. But new crises occurred, in large part because the Soviets and the Carter administration failed to understand one another. President

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Carter’s policies essentially suspended détente. He launched a human rights campaign that truly baffled the Soviets and changed their attitude toward the Americans. In February 1977 the new president exchanged letters – which were published – with the ussr’s most implacable and influential dissident, the physicist and human rights campaigner Andrei Sakharov, and then Carter hosted at the White House Vladimir Bukovsky, who had been imprisoned in a Moscow “psycho-prison” and denounced in the Soviet press as a “criminal.” Bukovsky had launched an international campaign against the Soviet use of psychiatry to incarcerate dissidents for their political views. Carter’s foreign policy, wrote Ford, “upset and confused” the Soviet leaders partly because of the “rigidities in the Soviet system and by the difficulties the old men in the Kremlin find in adjusting to new situations.”15 Some probably even believed that “American support for the dissidents is part of a plot to undermine the regime.” The Soviet leaders, moreover, became frustrated as they tried to communicate their reactions to the Americans and gain an understanding of American intentions. Ford recorded various instances when Brezhnev was clearly but futilely attempting to alert the United States that it was engaging in “intolerable interference” in the ussr’s internal affairs. A confirming insult, Ford believed, came on the first day of a visit of Cyrus Vance, US secretary of state, to Moscow in March 1977. Brezhnev complained once again about American “interference,” and Vance replied by stating that the American position on human rights was not directed against the Russians but against the whole world. Ford commented, “I am sure this was interpreted by Brezhnev as a brushing off of legitimate Soviet concerns.” Then Vance’s proposal on disarmament took the Russians completely by surprise and deepened their suspicions of American intentions. Vance offered to sign the Vladivostok Agreement on strategic weapons but without any mention of the fearsome US cruise missile.16 This alarmed the Russians. In addition, Vance’s proposed deep cuts in missiles and weaponry created “fear of being put in a position of military inferiority … and the irritation at having the disarmament initiative taken away from them.”17 Ford believed that the Russians were “congenitally in a mood of inferiority vis-à-vis Americans and have been disoriented by Carter and his diplomatic initiatives and are unsure how successfully they are going to be able to react to them.” Ford explained: “The foreign policy of President

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Carter has really upset and confused the Soviet leadership … All of them, including the kgb, must be baffled as to what the real purpose of the human rights campaign is.”18 The ambassador stressed these points again in a conversation with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, in Washington in April.19 He said that the manner of the Soviet rejection of the Vance proposals was “a reflection of Soviet anger over the Administration’s position on human rights and uncertainty and confusion over US aims.” Ford recorded that Brzezinski replied that “the President had no intention of changing course but he would not do anything to ‘humiliate’ the Russians.” Ford said that this was slightly negative, since the Russians lived in constant fear of losing face, and it might be difficult in present circumstances to avoid some act on either side that would further complicate the situation. The Soviets’ flat-out rejection of Vance’s proposals, Ford thought, was “a kind of emotional gut reaction.”20 They felt themselves in a difficult position because they knew that Carter had public opinion behind him and that they could not afford the cost of countering the US cruise missile. If they were forced into an expensive crash program, it would “destroy the present five-year plan,” which was likely premised on the savings to be achieved from the Vladivostok Agreement on limiting strategic weapons to specific numbers on both sides. To offset Carter’s foreign policy, the Soviets believed that they could counter with a number of intangibles: their Marxist-Leninist political philosophy and its appeal to non-aligned countries, their considerable political influence throughout the world, and their military power, or at least the widespread perception that they possessed an overwhelming military capacity. In effect, Ford had judged that by the late seventies the residue of Soviet world influence, resting on Marxism and the projecting of military strength, was the only riposte to American power that was available to the ussr. These proved eventually, even to the Soviet leaders themselves, to be futile counters to the human rights campaign promoted by the Americans and the Helsinki Final Act. Still, Brezhnev continued to try to put relations with the United States on a better footing, as he said in his election speech in April 1979.21 But the basic contradiction in Soviet foreign policy appeared in stark relief in December, when the Soviets sent their troops into Afghanistan. Once again, Soviet defensiveness had done great

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damage to relations with the West; once again the leaders poorly understood the perception of their actions elsewhere. The Soviet attack on Afghanistan, in Ford’s mind, was the result of the perceived threat to the very existence of the ussr that had developed in the minds of Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders since the Czechoslovak crisis in 1968. The policies of the Carter administration deepened the sense of threat in Moscow. In 1977 nato attempted to look ahead into the 1980s. Ford contributed a paper on what the future likely held for the Soviet Union. This paper showed that he had not changed in substance his assessment of the weaknesses of the country in which by that time he had spent thirteen years as ambassador. Enduring characteristics of the Soviet Union contributed to the fragility of the system, he believed. Of principal importance was “the determination of the Communist Party to retain its total hold on the country and to find means of justifying and legalizing its rule.”22 Top members of the Party and the many thousands of members below the top leadership lived “in comparative luxury” and did so by maintaining control over the limited economic resources of the country. Ford anticipated growing social pressures within the Soviet Union as various groups strove to improve their position even as the ussr found it “increasingly embarrassing” to compare itself with the West because of its poverty. Unyielding Party control had consigned the Russians to backwardness: “The ussr, in spite of its vast natural resources, seems doomed to be a relatively poor country … The communist system also seems practically guaranteed to keep it that way.” Those who had acquired a great share of “the limited rewards are not going to redistribute it any more than they have to.” Among the economic problems that appeared to defy solution, Ford put agriculture in first place but doubted that there were solutions in sight “so long as the present system exists.” Other problems included the difficulty and expense involved in exploiting natural resources, poor labour productivity, and the declining birth rate of the Russian population. The Russians, because of their declining numbers, would surely impose stricter controls on non-Russians, which would prompt resistance from the nationalities, especially the Ukrainians. Just as the ussr had concluded that it was catching up with the United States in traditional industrial sectors, fundamental changes connected with the electronics and computer revolutions and new

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forms of economic organization meant that no sooner had the Soviet Union begun to close the economic gap than it again began to fall behind. “Some 10 or 12 years ago it dawned on the Soviet leadership … [that] the nature of the world’s economy had changed.” As the Soviets began to try to adapt their centralized economy to the new circumstances, they had to take care “not to sacrifice ideological principles or party control.” Ford recalled that modest reforms were rejected because of the fear during the crisis over Czechoslovakia that the entire system was under threat. Reform was too risky, so the Soviets imported technology, but they failed to alter the inherent inefficiency of the economy. Money that might be used to improve the economy went into the military because of the “overpowering Soviet feeling of insecurity and the need to reach parity with the United States.” Other reasons for a large standing army included the threat from China and the leaders’ belief that they must hold in check Eastern Europe and their own people. Ford understood that the Soviets faced an unsolvable dilemma: politics had become so intertwined with economics that it was impossible to extricate one from the other. The ideology, essential to the preservation of power, could not be squared with the demands of a modern economy. He explained, “I also thought that the system of the Five-Year Plans, crazy as it sounds, was the essential element in central political control. A whole bureaucracy had been built up in Moscow which was able to control every element of the economy. And most of them [the bureaucrats] had no idea of economics, except Marxist economics, if you can call Marxist economics, economics. And then they built up their own personal interest in retaining the power and the privileges that the people who controlled the economy, which included agriculture, of course, gave them. And the fact that it didn’t work, didn’t I think really dawn on Brezhnev.” Ford concluded that Brezhnev never understood that the Soviet economy was not working and that it could not work.23 Confronting the enormous challenges would be required of the new post-Brezhnev leaders, but “at the moment no one seems to have any great talent or think differently from the present leaders.” There was one certainty: “Any future leader will be someone who came up through the Party apparatus and has been thoroughly schooled in its way of thinking. He would in all likelihood resist economic and social reforms as long as it was humanly possible to do so.”24

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Soviet methods of rule and government were so deeply embedded that the new leaders would hardly change their thinking simply because more educated and Western-oriented technicians and economists would like to reform the system. The new leaders would think like their predecessors: They would mimic Brezhnev and try to achieve government by consensus rather than harsh dictatorship, but they would be no more tolerant of dissent than he had been. Even the major triumphs of the ussr – immense political influence and military power – were limited accomplishments because “economic backwardness does not give it the base from which it can fully utilize this power.” The Soviets had “on the whole in the past 15 years shown considerable caution in pursuing their foreign policy aims … They could make an error in judgment, or permit a foreign initiative to get out of hand. But their past performance would tend to reinforce the belief that their policy is not per se expansionist.”25 Then, in the years after 1975, when the illness of Brezhnev began to tell on the Soviet leadership, the leaders began to make a series of almost inconceivable mistakes, frittering away power and influence and arousing the West against them. The incapacities of the top leadership were already evident. Ford received confirmation of his own observations on this during a visit to Moscow of the Finnish president. President Kekkonen of Finland was in Moscow in June 1977, and the Finnish ambassador called on Ford to summarize events at a Kremlin dinner and meeting during the visit hosted by ussr President Podgorny. According to the ambassador, Podgorny showed no sign of his impending dismissal, though Brezhnev treated him very badly at official meetings – he was “impatient and excitable and making jokes at the expense of Podgorny which did not seem to upset the latter in the least.” The Finns had included a doctor in their delegation in order to observe Brezhnev’s behaviour. “They were astounded at his nervousness and irascibility, both at official talks and the Kremlin dinner and his behavior varied considerably. At the talks he was at one point almost incomprehensible but after drinking two glasses of some liquid he revived. But this did not last long and he shortly afterwards appeared in a kind of dazed state … By the end of the dinner he appeared distracted and unable to concentrate or even to recognize people.”26 Among all the leaders there seemed to be cause for great tension that was not concealed from the Finns: “tremendous coming and going with officials shouting

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at each other, something unheard of in Finnish experience.” At dinner, “the wife of the [Finnish] Ambassador, who spoke fluent Russian, asked a waiter why they were offering two kinds of soup. The waiter replied in an off-hand way – that’s because we have so many diabetics.”27 Mistakes in the second half of the 1970s, culminating in the invasion of Afghanistan, sacrificed Brezhnev’s policy of détente. Ford saw the same causes at work in all cases: the Soviet leadership was weak, it poorly understood how the United States and nato would react to its moves, and it attempted to apply Marxist-Leninist ideology in foreign affairs. An example of the Soviets’ failure to grasp the consequences of their acts occurred over the ss-20 missile. The deployment of this new weapons system, directed at Western Europe, deepened suspicions in the West about Soviet intentions. Ford explained: Every time I went back to Ottawa, we got to the problem of the ss-20 intermediate range missile.28 My theory was that this was a typical Brezhnev mistake … that it would take about ten years when you started planning a missile as complicated as that … and that would take us to ’67–’69. That was the time that the Americans bombed Hanoi when Kosygin was there. He never forgot that, he took it as a public humiliation, he couldn’t believe that the American intelligence would allow that … and that it was a serious escalation of relations and possible American intervention by bombing Hanoi at that time. And so they began to develop this missile about that time. If you take from eight to ten years, it would take it up to 1978. In ’77 they would be ready and in ’78 they would begin to deploy them. Well, they probably had them ready before then, but the military were increasingly exerting influence on Brezhnev and flaunting it by making it [a threat to] the Soviet Union and [against] the forces opposed to it and all that sort of nonsense. They had the missile, and it was no use unless it was deployed to strengthen their position as a defensive weapon in Eastern Europe. As a political ploy primarily. [And Brezhnev could see] that it was a great idea, but of course it had the opposite effect on nato. And it resulted in the deployment of the Pershing, which was already built by then. Any talented Russian could have realized that the deployment of an intermediate range

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missile by the Russians would change the military balance in Central Europe and that the West had to respond.29 Ford considered that “this, plus the introduction of Cuban troops into Angola in 1975, was another stupid move on the part of Brezhnev. The military wanted it … but they miscalculated tremendously.”30 Then followed another serious miscalculation – the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It was the last major event to occur while Ford was in Moscow, and it exposed all the weaknesses in the Soviet system that Ford had observed over twenty years: it revealed a country with immense military power but without the capacity to employ it effectively in the service of its diplomacy. At the moment when the ussr’s power seemed greatest and its political influence widespread, its weaknesses were revealed in stark outline. In his reports, Ford had emphasized the parochialism and blind defensiveness of aging and ill leaders who clung to power, the illusionary character of the ideology which they had chosen to guide them, their incapacity to understand how the leaders of other countries viewed their actions, and the weaknesses in the economy and society. Ford said he believed that the United States also made a major mistake by misinterpreting Soviet intentions. The Soviet invasion “was an application of the Brezhnev doctrine to a Communist government that was on the soft underbelly of the Soviet Union. But Washington interpreted it as … a move toward the Indian Ocean, which would completely disrupt the balance of power in the Middle East and make it possible for the Black Sea fleet to be taken out of the Black Sea and moved to the Indian Ocean.” But Ford was “sure that this was not the intention.”31 Ford, accordingly, saw the invasion of Afghanistan as a defensive action on the part of the ussr, but poorly thought through. The war deepened all of the domestic and foreign problems that Ford had cited. It was a departure from long-term foreign policy trends and a Soviet response to nationalistic and Islamic turmoil that might spill over the Soviet frontier and create unrest among Soviet peoples of Uzbek, Tadzhik, Azeri, Turkomen, Kazakh, and Kirghiz origin who inhabited that vast sprawling crescent along the southern borders of the ussr.32 There were huge populations of these peoples living just across the frontier in Afghanistan. For decades, the Russians had been satisfied both with their influence and of the stability of these regions.

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Invading Afghanistan, Ford concluded, came about over a difference of opinion between two Afghan leaders who belonged to different tribes but were both Communists.33 The rivalry was between Nur Mohammad Taraki of the Khalq faction of the Communist Party and Babrak Karmal of the Parchem faction. Taraki came to power in April 1978 when he and the Afghan Communist Party overthrew a democratic republican government that had replaced the traditional monarchy five years earlier. Taraki immediately announced that he intended to create a Soviet-type government and society with the assistance of the Soviets. He provoked intense resistance from a traditional Islamic society and replied with harsh repression. Only increasing Soviet support and advisers could help Taraki, and he became increasingly dependent on them. The other Communist faction, the Parchem, joined the opposition to Taraki. Another rival appeared in Afghanistan, Taraki’s own foreign minister, Hafizullah Amin, who had just visited Moscow and had received support from Brezhnev and Gromyko. Amin ordered the murder of Taraki and assumed power. Taraki’s supporters then revolted. The turmoil in Afghanistan was taking on larger dimensions and appeared to bring more and more radical Islamic elements into the field. In Moscow there was deepening alarm as the Communists appeared to be losing their hold on the country. With the prospect of a Communist defeat in the midst of an internecine struggle, the Soviet military intervened. But the Soviets contrived an implausible explanation for their intervention and informed the Canadian government in Ottawa on 27 December that “outside interference” was threatening the “democratic regime” in Afghanistan. They offered no evidence in support of this contention, and the Canadian government rejected it. Ford heard in Moscow that Soviet military advisers in Kabul had advised Defence Minister Ustinov that the security situation in the country was on the verge of a breakdown and that a small Soviet military force could quickly restore order. All Western governments quickly protested the Soviet action, and when Ford delivered the Canadian protest to Deputy Foreign Minister Ivan Zemskov, he received from Zemskov “a revealing, highly emotional version of events as seen by the Soviets.”34 Zemskov, whom Ford knew well, added another rationale to the reason for intervention: these events were the result of US attempts to “encircle” the ussr, and it was now supporting “counterrevolutionary groups” in Afghanistan.

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By invading Afghanistan in December 1979, the leaders exposed once again their inability to gauge accurately world responses to their actions, and they were “surprised by the extent and harshness of international criticism.”35 The Soviets perhaps thought that the Americans would understand that Afghanistan was “a vital security area” for the ussr. “While we would think,” Ford wrote, “a neutral Afghanistan sufficed for Soviet security purposes, the Soviets were never satisfied with anything less than total security which for them would mean real control of Afghanistan.”36 The Soviet leaders had forgotten the lesson of 1948 in Czechoslovakia: installing a Soviet puppet there had led directly to the formation of nato. Ford noted another glaring contradiction: the invasion was at odds with the “Brezhnev doctrine” that justified military intervention only in defence of countries designated as “socialist”; Afghanistan did not meet standard Soviet socialist criteria. The Russians justified their move as a response to the Carter administration’s attempt to reinforce American power and to give the United States strategic superiority over the ussr. The Brezhnev government believed that its “rough strategic parity” with the United States must be maintained and would not yield in the face of the “unreliable” Carter administration. Further, the Russians noted that the Europeans now had doubts about the American leadership, and these doubts gave them the opportunity for “wedge-driving” tactics toward the Atlantic Alliance. Sooner or later, the Soviets believed, the West “would be compelled to accept Soviet action in Afghanistan.” By assessing Soviet intervention in Afghanistan as the result of fears and misunderstandings in the minds of the Soviet leaders, Ford had returned to the characteristics of Russian leaders deeply rooted in history. The invasion “compounded one of the major errors in Soviet foreign policy since Stalin’s decision in 1950 that the time was ripe for taking over South Korea.”37 He saw the invasion as an “historic miscalculation,” a reaction to what the Soviets believed were the intentions and polices of the US government – that is, another manifestation of a grand design to subvert the Soviet order, first evidenced when Cyrus Vance, the US secretary of state, had proposed deep cuts in weaponry two years earlier. Ford advised his government to postpone several Canadian official visits to Moscow to drive home “our feeling about the invasion of Afghanistan. It would be a clear signal that their aggression would affect our relations.” He also made a second recommendation,

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jointly devising it with the US ambassador, Thomas Watson: “I suggested that there were two ways to register disapproval: by a selective economic boycott which had never proved very effective in the past and usually hurt us as much as the country targeted, or by a boycott of the Olympic games,” (coming up in the summer of 1980).38 Otherwise, Ford believed, Canada would be saying “that in spite of harsh words we meant to continue business as usual.”39 The Soviets, as in the past, wanted détente – or at least its “surface manifestations” – to continue despite Afghanistan in order that the flow of technology from the West would remain constant. They even saw the possibility of isolating the United States because of the “clumsiness of the Carter administration.” Ford found President Carter’s “surprise” over the invasion surprising in itself, because “Moscow’s decision to commit armed forces in Afghanistan, although unwise, was consistent with the overriding strategic and political importance the Russians attached to the country and to the Soviet Union’s soft underbelly.”40 Ford detected no Soviet interest in expansionism as such, and he did not believe that the Russians had mounted a drive to dominate the territories on the shores of the Indian Ocean and to position the Soviet Black Sea fleet there. The Soviet defensive moves, however limited, caused a deterioration in economic conditions in Russia. The Afghan conflict had created a shortage of supplies that was “as bad as I can recall.” The crisis would affect the economy further and worsen the political void in Moscow. The leaders were an “ill, aging and uninspired group of men,” wrote Ford, “but this is particularly evident now that Brezhnev has been officially declared to be suffering from a catarrhal complaint and Kosygin has been absent from the scene for more than two months without explanation.”41 With these leaders simply “hanging on to power,” the government could not deal with the problems that confronted it. Brezhnev clung to his policy of détente that perpetuated the basic contradiction in Soviet foreign policy: “Brezhnev’s definition of détente is a definition of international relations that on the one hand calls for placidity in Europe to permit growing trade relations, to defuse direct military confrontation and ultimately lower military budgets and, on the other hand, allow as much meddling as possible in theaters somewhat more distant from direct Soviet security interests (though not/not necessarily so distant from those of the West, i.e., the mid-East and Persian Gulf).”42

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Ford found that, as in other crises, East and West were not communicating: “I was struck by Brezhnev’s bewilderment at Warsaw over Giscard’s explanation of the reasons for Western indignation about the invasion.43 This is further proof of the extent to which top Soviet leaders are fed interpretations of events abroad which coincide with Soviet policy, as well as their inability to understand the West. If Western leaders can manage to get a message across to Brezhnev and others, then this is, at once, an important reason for the contacts. As I have said on other occasions, the most dangerous aspect of the present situation is the totally different perceptions on both sides of the other’s intentions.”44 The West had to convince the Soviets that the United States had no intention of turning Afghanistan into an anti-Soviet military base. “Given their present paranoia about China and the usa plus their need to justify their intervention in Afghanistan they end up believing their own grossly inflated inventions.” Under the conditions of flagging and incompetent Soviet leadership, Ford saw continuing evidence of official fantasizing in all the attempts to make Brezhnev appear a commanding leader. He had further convincing evidence of the permanent fissure between Soviet practices and reality. Ford had begun to raise doubts about the secretary general’s physical condition after the Trudeau visit, when he thought that Brezhnev was “suffering from some unspecified illness.”45 A weakened Brezhnev would affect the apparent “delicate” political balance in the Politburo, especially over the policy of détente with West Germany and the United States. The question of Brezhnev’s health caused considerable speculation in Moscow, and the Canadian Embassy tried to fashion available information into at least tentative explanations of the political state of affairs among the leadership. Soviet practice continued to promote an image of Brezhnev in full command when, as Ford knew, this was an elaborate but false picture. In Brezhnev’s last years, said Ford, Brezhnev spent his time writing, or having somebody else write, his so-called war memoirs. He was a political commissar on the southeast front, but he gives the impression that he was at Stalingrad and practically liberated Berlin. And this was printed in millions and millions of copies in a really deluxe edition. And the average person just laughed at it. And he was

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absolutely delighted with collecting medals, particularly military medals, and about the end of the 1970s everybody, particularly the regular members of the Politburo, were really eager for him to go, but nobody had the courage, obviously, to push him out. And then when he did die, I watched the ceremonies of the burial on television and I thought, “My, God, is this possible?” Right down to the last detail it was a copy of the burial of Stalin, although they didn’t put him in Lenin’s tomb in order to dig him out again. He couldn’t see anything else except following the line, which as far as he was concerned, had made Russia equal to the power of the United States. And his biggest disappointed was that he was not accepted on an equal level politically, at least Russia was not.46 Ford believed that the “Russian system of lying,” accompanied by Russian self-deception, were permanent features of Soviet practice and life; they formed a constant theme in the ambassador’s assessment of Soviet politics over a period of twenty years. He found that the follies of Brezhnev, exacerbated by his illness, revealed in sharp outline the flaws in the system.

11 The Soviet Embassy, Ottawa

robert fo r d b eca m e e xp e r t at divining Soviet reactions and intentions because he grasped the depth of mendaciousness that governed the Soviet system. Ford’s counterpart in Ottawa, Ambassador Alexander Yakovlev (from 1973–83), gives parallel testimony. Both came to the same conclusions about the basic character of the Soviet system, although coming from differing backgrounds. Ford was a consummate rationalist who studied Russian culture and Soviet politics from the outside and achieved the understanding of an insider. Yakovlev was an able, intelligent, and believing insider who rose close to the centre of power in Moscow. Stepping mentally outside the system, he became acutely disillusioned during his tenure as ambassador in Ottawa. The dominant role of the kgb and the Central Committee in Soviet embassies destroyed Yakovlev’s deeply held belief in the Soviet order, and he uniquely managed to liberate himself intellectually and spiritually from the system he served. That Yakovlev continued to occupy a high post even when his defection must have been obvious to his superiors suggests another characteristic of the system that Ford had chronicled: the Soviet Union, as a powerful military and police state, remained dangerous, but it had lost its cohesiveness and purpose. Funnelling propaganda abroad through the Soviet embassies and “fraternal” socialist parties was a common practice of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. Soviet embassies, particularly in the leading Western countries with whom the Soviets had relations, directed the Communist parties abroad, although those parties always argued that they were independent political organizations and should be accepted as normal participants in their

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countries’ democratic political process. But in fact Moscow set the “line,” as it was called, for this far-flung network of propagandists. Local parties depended financially on Moscow and, by their own admission, could carry on a full program only with assistance from the Central Committee. When widespread criticism developed abroad against the Soviet Union, the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the kgb combined to utilize virtually all Soviet organizations at home and abroad – including local Communist parties – to attack the allegedly organized “campaigns” conducted abroad. These efforts were responses to such issues as the Katyn Forest Massacre1 and the Soviet use of psychiatric prisons against dissidents. In the latter case, the head of the kgb, Yuri Andropov, ordered the Ministry of Health to take advantage of scientific exchanges with other countries in order to defend Soviet psychiatry.2 The ministry quickly organized an “action group” of psychiatrists to prepare to refute accusations against Soviet psychiatry at a congress of world psychiatrists held in Honolulu in August 1977. The authorities also organized propaganda attacks against Soviet emigrés who wrote and spoke critically about the ussr in the foreign press. There were special projects against writers Valery Tarsis and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the dissident Alexander Ginzberg, and others. To counteract the so-called anti-Zionist campaign against the Soviet Union and its obstacles to Jewish emigration, the Central Committee and the kgb developed a “plan” to fight back in 1972.3 The Soviet press agency Novosti was to distribute material of an “active character and go on the offensive.” Interviews with Soviet jurists were to lay out the legal reasons for the payment of “compensation fees” by Jews before they could emigrate from the ussr. The kgb was to “organize” letters from Soviet citizens to be sent to publications abroad, and Novosti was to send dispatches “to authoritative organs of the press” expressing the Soviet viewpoint in those countries where “Zionist groups” were active. Local authors “who support the Soviet position” were to be enlisted to write articles for publications. The State Committee on Television and Radio was instructed to “send to the capitalist countries,” in the first instance the usa and Canada, the countries of Western Europe and Israel, dispatches that “unmask the policy of international Zionism and the State of Israel.” And the kgb was to “take measures for the unmasking and suppression of the hostile actions from the special services

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of the enemy, the foreign Zionist organizations and the Jewish nationalists inside the ussr.” Instructing its own Secretariat, the Central Committee on 14 January 1976 proclaimed that anti-Soviet propaganda in the West had become “sharp and vicious” in its attacks on the way of life in the Soviet Union and the other “socialist” countries.4 Because of the Helsinki Accords of 1975 and the peaceful Soviet policy of razriadka, or détente, the “aggressive forces” of imperialism were accused of being on the defensive. The Western countries were said to be stoking international tensions to divert attention from the internal pressure for revolutionary change that was intensifying in their own societies as socialism made gains in various parts of the world; their aim allegedly was to discredit the life of the working people of the socialist countries, whose material existence, access to medical services, and education were said to be superior to those of workers in the West. Another alleged “campaign” against the Soviets following the Helsinki Accords enabled the Soviet government to “respond” with Central Committee instructions, approved by the Politburo and directed to the kgb, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the embassies. The intention of the instructions was to attack the human rights movement.5 Having signed the Helsinki Accords, the Soviets themselves accepted human rights as applicable to their society, but they did not favour human rights movements either in the ussr or in the Eastern bloc countries. Soviet propagandists now contended that the human rights campaign was an assault on the Soviet way of life. The Central Committee ordered the following approach: that outside critics had no right to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries on the basis of human rights arguments; that activists in human rights were doing the bidding of external enemies; and that, moreover, the human rights records of others were hardly exemplary. Examples cited were Northern Ireland and South Africa. Soviet propagandists were also told to emphasize that the Soviets guaranteed the human right to work, where others did not. It was an article of the Soviet Constitution, but the US Constitution had no such provision. Human rights monitors and dissidents in the ussr were to be exposed because of their connections with antiSoviet organizations abroad, in particular nts, Possev, and Radio Liberty.6 “Bourgeois propagandists” were using these outlets to attack the ussr. The Central Committee insisted that “the whole mind-set

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of these renegades opposes Soviet morality, our entire form of life, and precisely for this reason they are angrily condemned by the Soviet people.” Soviet embassies abroad were channels in this propaganda system and could utilize local Communist parties as conduits to disseminate propaganda. The Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, for instance, reported at the end of 1976 on “informational-propaganda work in the Ukrainian emigration in Canada” channelled through “progressive” organizations, that is, the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians (touk) and the Workers’ Benevolent Association (wba). Among the claims was the distribution of more than five hundred copies of material from the Twenty-Fifth Party Congress, including Brezhnev’s report. The embassy estimated that about 26,000 Ukrainian Canadians had heard representatives of the embassy speak during the year, about half of whom were “neutral” Canadians.7 Bookstores run by Communist parties were a principal means for the distribution of Soviet publications in Western societies. Moscow was willing to spend and even lose money to maintain these outlets. The Central Committee approved a grant of us$9,000 of the $35,000 required to open a bookstore in Montreal. The request came from William Kashtan, head of the Communist Party of Canada, who was in Leningrad in 1970 for the centenary celebration of Lenin’s birth. A. Beliakov, the deputy director of the International Department of the Central Committee, endorsed the request, as did International Book, the Soviet book distribution agency. Kashtan explained that there had been no store in Montreal for the “communist party of Canada to distribute active propaganda of Marxism-Leninism, the attainments of the Soviet Union, and to struggle against bourgeois ideology.”8 The Canadians promised that 75 percent of the books and periodicals sold in the store would be Soviet-produced. In agreeing to help finance the bookstore, the Soviets said that their books and periodicals would reach Canada through the “progressive” book firm Unity, and although ordinarily it did not grant monopoly rights on the distribution of its publications, as requested by the Canadians, it would do so in this case by default, because “over the past few years book firms in Montreal [had] not approached Unity with any business proposals.” Unity, moreover, had been experiencing difficulties with several firms in Canada serving as its distributors – Book World in Toronto, the Cooperative Bookstore in Vancouver, and New Times Book Service in Regina – because “these firms over a

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long period have not met their financial obligations.” The Toronto book store Progress Books “also had a long-standing debt but its director M. Frank, in discussions in Moscow on 20 April 1970, declared that the liquidation of the debt will be arranged soon.” Kashtan asked the Soviets to inform him every six months about these debts through the Trade Representative and the Ottawa embassy so that he could make certain that all the bookstores paid their bills. Kashtan promised “in the near future to regulate the question of liabilities of the progressive firms and to inform Unity.” Money from the Soviets supported other Communist publishing activities in Canada, always granted for the purpose of advancing the international class struggle. A subsidy for the Communist Party paper, the Canadian Tribune was provided indirectly in the following way. Kashtan wished to increase the number of copies sent to Russia (where it was on sale at some newsstands) from 1,500 copies to 2,000. He explained: “We are presently considering plans for expansion of circulation and of staff in Canada so as to make the paper an even more authoritative spokesman of progressive politics. An increased order could prove helpful in implementing such plans.” The International Department authorized an annual payment of $1,295 to pay for the additional 500 copies.9 Additional funds subsidized books. Kashtan requested that his book published in Russian in Moscow receive a subsidy for an English edition. The book was titled The Working Class and the AntiMonopolist Struggle, and according to the deputy director of the International Department of the Central Committee, it “broadly lays the theoretical and practical activity of the Communist Party of Canada as one of the vanguard units of the international Communist movement.” The Central Committee granted Cdn$6,000 for the publication of Kashtan’s book. Another volume was subsidized for publication in Russia at about the same time, “a book about Comrade Tim Buck, a prominent figure in the international and Canadian communist working-class movement, former chairman of the Communist Party of Canada.”10 Buck had received earlier assistance from the International Department when two years previously he had suffered a heart attack in Mexico. The Soviet Embassy in Mexico City had asked for and received approval to spend $250 so that Buck could consult a specialist.11 The Federation of Russian Canadians, which published in Russian the newspaper Vestnik (News), was supported by an organization in

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the ussr called the Motherland (Rodina) Society, which promoted cultural links between Russians at home and abroad. Rodina was also a part of the system of propaganda, and officials in the Central Committee in Moscow declared that the federation was a “progressive” organization and that it played “an important role in unifying emigrants, familiarizing them with Soviet reality, and instilling in compatriots a feeling of patriotism.” In 1956 the Soviets had supplied the newspaper with two linotype machines and matrices; in 1975 the federation requested seven sets of matrices for the linotype machines and the cost of shipping to Montreal from the factory in Leningrad. The cost of the equipment alone was 3,000 rubles. Approval for the project came from the highest level of the Party propaganda system: “The International Department of the Central Committee of the cp and the Department of Propaganda consider it advisable to grant the request of the Presidium of the Rodina Society.”12 Canadian Communists of Ukrainian origin received similar assistance. The Association of United Ukrainian Canadians – identified by the Soviets as a “progressive” and therefore Communist organization – appealed for help from the Soviet Ukrainian organization, the Ukrainian Society of Friendship and Culture. This organization served a function similar to the Rodina Society but targeted Ukrainian emigrés. In 1969 it provided two printing presses and matrices to enable the publication of two publications, the weekly paper in Ukrainian Zhittia i slovo and the journal the Ukrainian Canadian. The cost of the equipment was 2,580 rubles, and the Ukrainian Society bore the cost of shipping to Canada by the Soviet commercial fleet, which delivered it to Montreal. The next year the Canadians received a “gift” of two additional sets of matrices.13 Soviet sensitivities toward Ukrainian Canadians meant special attention. At the time of the Twenty-Third Party Congress in March 1966, Kashtan met Petr Shelest – a member of the Politburo and first secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Party – about a subsidized trip of three weeks in the fall of 1966 to Ukraine for six members of the Communist Party of Canada who were of Ukrainian origin. They would “familiarize themselves with life” in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and return to Canada with positive reports. The International Department approved the trip and charged the plane fares to the government of the Ukrainian ssr.14 When the group of Ukrainian Canadians, who belonged to the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians, visited the Soviet Ukraine

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in March–April 1966, they were alarmed to discover widespread use of the Russian language, and they came away with a sense that the Soviet government was deliberately attempting the “russification” of Ukraine. They raised the issue at meetings of the Communist Party of Canada, published their impressions in the Ukrainian press in Canada, and insisted that the Soviets were violating Leninist principles of nationality.15 Kashtan visited the Ukrainian ssr in August 1966 and described a full-blown crisis in the Communist Party of Canada on the Ukrainian issue. Many leading Communists were members of touk and had forced the summoning of a commission to investigate the “russification of Ukraine.” Two groups of ten young people were to be invited to Ukraine to see first-hand that there was no discrimination against the Ukrainian language, and this and other recommendations were approved by the Ukrainian Party’s Central Committee and by the Communist Party’s Central Committee in Moscow.16 The Secretariat of the Central Committee in Moscow virtually drummed the group out of the Communist movement. The delegation had “given an excuse to the propagators of bourgeois views on the national question to cry out about the concurrence of their views on the state of affairs in Soviet Ukraine with those of the delegation of the Communist Party of Canada.”17 The Secretariat of the Party’s Central Committee in Moscow followed up with a secret telegram to the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa on 24 January 1968, instructing Kashtan and Buck to deal with the dissident group, whose statements gave the impression that “it is not possible to resolve the national question under socialism” and, furthermore, that “it is hardly necessary to demonstrate that such statements have something in common with allegations of the enemies of Communist Party of the Soviet Union and of the Communist Party of Canada.”18 The Ukrainian Central Committee recommended that the Party’s Central Committee in Moscow undertake “counter-propaganda measures” against the dissenting Canadians, and it drafted a letter for dispatch from “prominent figures in culture, science, and the arts in Ukraine – persons who had met with the Canadians during their visit – to criticize their “incorrect divergences from the spirit of Marxism-Leninism.”19 The major propaganda organs of the ussr – the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the kgb – were unable to bring under control the Ukrainians’ widespread criticism of Soviet language policy in Ukraine. Viewed from Kiev, however, the Communist Party

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of Canada appeared to be managing the problem of dissenting Ukrainians better than others. V.V. Shcherbitsky, the first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, won approval from the Central Committee to “counter antiSoviet activity of the Ukrainian bourgeois-nationalist organizations abroad.” These “emigré centres” had “strengthened their activities among the 3 million Ukrainians abroad, especially by means of a number of faculties of Ukrainian studies in universities, publishing houses, journals, and newspapers of Ukrainian nationalists,” and they had opened an information centre at the United Nations in New York. The Central Committee of the Ukrainian Party recommended “using many years’ positive work experience with the Ukrainian emigration in Canada, conducted by the Embassy of the ussr,” to make recommendations to Soviet embassies in the United States, Austria, England, and West Germany to strengthen their work among Ukrainian immigrants. Approval for this project came from the Central Committee, which then instructed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to issue appropriate instructions to the embassies in question.20 The Soviet ambassador to Canada, however, had a different idea about the Ukrainians. Alexander Yakovlev had arrived in Ottawa as Soviet ambassador two years after Trudeau’s visit to Moscow in 1971. The prime minister’s relationship with Yakovlev has remained something of a mystery and caused some consternation in External because Trudeau, according to Ford, ”would slip out of his residence on Sussex Drive on foot and drop in on the Soviet ambassador. No reports were ever made on these peculiar rendezvous, and what passed between Trudeau and the ambassador remains secret.”21 The meetings between the two were not dissimilar to the informal, partly social meetings that Ford had with Trudeau on each of his visits to Ottawa. Yakovlev later told an interviewer, “We sometimes had long private sessions without ever talking politics.” He explained, “We discussed philosophical issues, Dostoevsky and Pushkin.”22 Yakovlev had come to Canada as a result of difficulties in Moscow. He had for the previous four years headed the Department of Ideology and Propaganda for the Communist Party, and he also wrote for the press, including an article on anti-Semitism in Russia, which caused him, he later wrote, to be “banished by Brezhnev as ambassador to Canada. I became one of those suspicious people.” Even as ambassador, therefore, he was under surveillance in his own

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embassy, and the “Special Services [kgb] had instructions to report on his activities, especially his contacts with the press.”23 Still, Ottawa was not a hardship post, and it was considered a “gift” among the professional diplomats. Embassy work was largely routine. “I conscientiously busied myself with various nonsense, vainly expended time and energy on masses of paper, reports, memos and all to no purpose. At the center [Moscow] there were few who were seriously concerned about Canada. Everything was concentrated on the usa. Yes, from me most of all was required information about the American aspect of Canadian life. I understood too late that my many telegrams did not get to the top and remained at the staff level … And if I succeeded in doing anything, it was only during my leaves. Then I could take advantage of my connections.”24 Yakovlev did not therefore consider himself an “outcast” in powerful places and regularly saw Gromyko, the foreign minister, when in Moscow, and Gromyko invited him annually to join the Soviet delegation at the open session of the United Nations General Assembly. Yakovlev visited Yuri Andropov when he became Soviet leader, as well as Boris Ponamarev, the secretary of the Central Committee, and many other highly placed Soviets. Gromyko, in Yakovlev’s view, was not the “dry and morose” person that almost everyone took him to be. At dinner, Gromyko would not talk about official matters but was a warm and humorous conversationalist. He liked talk of books, especially memoirs, literary works, and books on Russian history. As Yakovlev later learned, when he was invited to Moscow to report to the board of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he had been set up for a special attack by several other officials because he was not a professional diplomat yet was enjoying an appointment to a desirable posting. But Gromyko, who was presiding over the meeting, came to his defence and said he was an exemplary ambassador: there were none of the usual squabbles at the embassy, he had good relations with the Canadian government, and especially with the prime minister of Canada. In what other country, Gromyko asked, does the prime minister of the country drop in on the Soviet ambassador with his children and ask to have a talk? Hockey was for the Soviets political and thus involved Yakovlev in discussions in Moscow. “Doubts tormented the high leadership,” he recalled, because it feared a Soviet loss in the first Canadian-Soviet

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series, and the leaders “demanded a Soviet victory.” The contention that “sport is sport got nowhere. They told us this is politics.” Finally, however, the Politburo gave its approval for the Soviet team to travel to Canada. Political consternation also agitated high Soviet officials during the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. Hundreds of Soviet citizens visited the city for the games, including a great number of Soviet officials. Yakovlev reports, “Every evening there were drunken gatherings to the state of madness. Being idle, they dreamed up all kinds of protests and demanded that the Embassy and Consulate make them official. These chinovniks [low level officials] were not interested in the Games, but in demonstrating career activism. For example, there were frequently Canadian-Ukrainians at the Games and from time to time they unfurled a Ukrainian flag. Nothing I could do helped to calm down the chinovniks. They demanded official protests.”25 The Central Committee’s deputy for propaganda appeared in Montreal to organize at the Soviet Embassy the “coordination of all services” because of “panicky telegrams” to Moscow from kgb agents in the embassy, who reported that an “anti-Soviet bacchanalia” was taking place in the city in connection with the games and that the embassy “went along complacently.” Some Soviet officials demanded that the ussr withdraw from the games following the disappearance from the Olympic Village of a Soviet diver. When the kgb agents, led by two generals, prepared to fan out across Canada to bring him back, Yakovlev visited Trudeau and the two came to an understanding on how to resolve the potential crisis. Yakovlev told the prime minister that without such a resolution there would be a serious setback in Canadian-Soviet relations.26 Trudeau provided assistance and the matter was resolved; within weeks, the diver returned. Yakovlev also reported defusing the Ukrainian issue by means of a visit to Shcherbitsky, the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party and a member of the Politburo. The ambassador had concluded that the alleged anti-Soviet activities of the Canadian Ukrainians were largely figments of the imagination of the kgb. It became clear how this issue was employed in Soviet politics: he wondered about the hostility between Russians and Ukrainians and why citizens of the same country with a long common history had begun “to live separately.” He concluded that “the whole system of Party-kgb structure was directed not to unite people, not to make them friends with people who care about their country in

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Ukraine, but to make enemies, alienating them from the common fatherland by means of every untruth.” At least one new kgb agent, said Yakovlev, arrived at the embassy every year. The practice had started after the defection of Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko right after the Second World War. Rebukes came from Moscow to the embassy that it was not doing its work well, that it did not have the essential influence. In a word, “the kgb, as a rule, found guilty persons by means of its own failures.” Yakovlev believed that the kgb sent out agents simply to “aggravate the atmosphere.” An “especially unpleasant” episode occurred in 1979 when Canada expelled thirteen persons accredited to the embassy after the rcmp had filmed them attempting to suborn Canadian officials. The prime minister offered to show Yakovlev the film. “The center (read kgb) forbade me to view the tape,” recalled Yakovlev. “It was understood that the kgb did not want the ambassador to understand the actual causes and details of its own failures and tell Moscow about them.”27 Andropov upbraided Yakovlev for “insufficiently valuing intelligence on the North American continent,” and the ambassador expected another telegram announcing his dismissal; but it did not come, and he learned later that Andropov had recommended his dismissal at a meeting of the Politburo but Suslov had overruled him, saying, “The kgb does not direct Yakovlev as ambassador to Canada.” Andropov “could not hide his confusion, slumped in his chair, cut short. Brezhnev kept silent and ended the debate.” Ivan Head credits Yakovlev with the principal role in persuading the Soviet government not to retaliate when Canada expelled the Soviet diplomats for violating their diplomatic privileges.28 Yakovlev hoped to replace some of the kgb agents in Ottawa and visited Vladimir Kruchkov, the director, the next time he was in Moscow. His reception was unfriendly: “He met me dryly, gloomily. He growled, ‘You have lost the feeling of fellowship.’” Oleg Kalugin, a kgb officer and a one-time fellow exchange student with Yakovlev at Columbia University, warned him away and Yakovlev never saw Kruchkov again.29 Yakovlev was at his post in Ottawa when “the next farce in my country” took place, the “rolling of the drums in honor of the greatness of Brezhnev.” Party officials “quickly found people who were ready to lie and to deceive. They always exist. Many high bureaucrats who swim on the surface of power are ready to return to the practice of idolatry with all of their powers. The practice is base, but effective.

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They made a prominent writer out of Brezhnev, who could hardly sign his own name. They gave him a Lenin prize in literature. His books were published through the system of Party publications. His wisdom was proclaimed to the heavens.”30 Other salutes to the general secretary followed, including an oratorio in Kazakhstan, a play based on his autobiography in Moscow. The first secretary of the Krasnodar Party regional committee proclaimed that the people’s love for Brezhnev was inexhaustible. Yakovlev writes, “An avalanche of gibberish rolled through the country. It was as though everyone had lost his mind.” Instructions came from the Central Committee of the Communist Party that the ambassador of every embassy must lead the staff in the study of Brezhnev’s book. Soviet ambassadors in the major countries were praised for their “brilliant organizational work” in the study of the “epochal theoretical works” of Brezhnev. The Central Committee said that these studies had made a “profound impression” on the workers in the embassies, who had been assisted in their “theoretical understanding of contemporaneity.” Yakovlev found all this to be “absurd stuff and nonsense.” The Central Committee later reported that only one ambassador had failed to carry out the study program: Yakovlev in Canada. One after another “laughable and stupid” orders came down. These instructions from Moscow – called ukazes in the embassy, or tsarist decrees – both from the kgb and Central Committee gave Yakovlev ample time to think about the character of his country: “Why don’t we want to throw off the fetters of dogma? The answer is simple: the imbecility of authority would become all the more obvious.”31 In 1977, when the authorities in Moscow became aroused over the “human rights” issue that followed the Helsinki Accords, Moscow demanded that its Western ambassadors launch an effort to convince society that the issue was merely a “mask of the falsehood” that “concealed the deepest violations of human rights in the West.” Yakovlev recalled, “To do this was simply impossible. One would have to be not only a liar but a fool.” The Soviet Embassy “usually passed these instructions along to the Communist Party of Canada and reported to Moscow that ‘widespread propaganda had been deployed.’”32 Yakovlev admits to the mendacity required of a Soviet ambassador. “While I was in Canada there were many times that I was embarrassed by what took place in our foreign policy … I had to explain what

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they cranked out … having cast my eyes down, to lie openly.”33 He recalled “panicky telegrams” from Moscow when the Soviet Cosmos satellite fell on Canadian territory: “The first explanations began with a lie.” Then, “It was embarrassing to explain the causes of sending our army into Afghanistan. And to read and to distribute materials from Moscow on Grigorenko, Solzhenitsyn, Sharansky, and Rostropovich34 …Thank God. No one in Canada would print these materials.” The visit of Solzhenitsyn to Canada alarmed Soviet authorities, and Yakovlev received specific instructions on how to deal with the writer. “Several days prior to the arrival of Aleksandr Isaevich [Solzhenitsyn] I received instructions from Moscow not to allow the visit, and if this was impossible, then to take all measures so that he not meet with Trudeau. Such a meeting would damage Soviet-Canadian relations.” Yakovlev explains: “The nervousness in Moscow was obvious. I met with Ivan Head and discussed all this. He, well knowing our political customs, smiled and at the end of the conversation asked me to calm Moscow, declaring that the meeting with Solzhenitsyn will be short and formal. Indeed, the conversation was prolonged, although afterwards Head phoned me and confirmed that it was short and formal and therefore he could say nothing about it. I reported this to Moscow.”35 Yakovlev had begun his Party career determined to be “an angel,” to soar over the sinful earth and to perform good acts. He then learned that “one could not be such a person in the Party apparatus.” In the Secretariat of the Central Committee, he wrote, “I accurately and in a disciplined fashion fulfilled my routine work, signed all the papers, conducted various meetings and committees.” Bureaucratic routine, however important to an ambassador, could not deliver Yakovlev from the necessity of lying, both in Canada and to Moscow. By all accounts, Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to Canada in 1983 was an eye-opener to him and strengthened his reformist views. Gorbachev toured a number of farms in Ontario and Alberta, visited Ottawa, and met Trudeau. The initiative for the visit came from Yakovlev, who proposed the visit to Eugene Whelan, the Canadian minister of agriculture. At the time, Gorbachev was his counterpart in the Soviet government.36 Head and Trudeau gave credit to Yakovlev for being “extraordinarily adroit and effective” as ambassador. Both had great confidence in him, as they recorded in their jointly authored book: “Head would take the ambassador’s telephone

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calls at all hours, and receive him in his Langevin Block office on the weekend. Trudeau was available at 24 Sussex Drive without notice, so confident were we both that Yakovlev would not abuse the privilege. Nor did he.”37 They wrote that Yakovlev “on several occasions lunched with Trudeau either at the Prime Minister’s residence or the Ambassador’s and that Head entertained Yakovlev and his wife several times in their home.” Yakovlev’s disillusionment with the Soviet system is similar to Ford’s criticism of the ussr: it was dominated by mediocre men who would go to any lengths to conceal their own failings and mistakes and preserve their hold on power.

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f ord a t t he t im e of hi s r e t i r e m e nt had reached the pinnacle of his career; he was widely valued for his penetrating judgments on developments in the Soviet Union. His viewpoint was long-term, that of an observer who sought to penetrate the minds of the Soviet leaders and to discern the covert reasons for their actions. Ford was not a so-called Kremlinologist – a specialist in Soviet affairs who gauged from a distance the political meaning of piecemeal adjustments to the Soviet hierarchy. Ford aimed to promote a different kind of diplomacy, based on a sense of perspective, including that of Russian history. Accordingly, he constantly engaged in a search for common interests with the Soviets, an approach that would avoid Western overreactions to aggressive Soviet tactics. There was, he believed, no substitute for calm and steady Western unity in dealing with Moscow. To maintain diplomacy at this level, Ford concluded that the Department of External Affairs required a select number of officers who had been trained to this outlook. But External was losing sight of the requirements for effective international diplomacy. These ideas were never far from Ford’s mind in retirement even when he and Thereza faced mounting health problems. Before he left Moscow and long before his retirement, Ford had found the French model for a foreign ministry applicable to Canada as the best means for “effective formulation and application of an external policy.”1 He explained, “The United States is rich and powerful enough to afford the luxury of various voices in foreign affairs. A country like Canada cannot. We might well take a lesson in this case from the French who, through a highly disciplined

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Foreign Ministry and close coordination with the Elysée, are able to determine what they want to do and execute it. Of course, it is probably simpler for the French because they can operate in terms primarily of narrowly conceived French national interests without bothering too much about moral and humanitarian considerations.” In this note to External, he went on to say, “Of course I need hardly tell you that so much depends on the caliber of our officers. One outstanding man is worth ten efficient but plodding officers, although we need the latter as well.” Ford warned that the quality of External was declining: “In spite of the contribution of individuals, however, we can only maintain a leading role if we prove over the long run our ability to provide the ideas and the analysis of foreign affairs related to Canadian national interests, which are fundamental to the formulation of policy and without which we could not long sustain our Central Agency role. In other words, although it may sound ‘elitist,’ we have to establish the intellectual predominance of the Department … In this connection I have been worried over the past decade at the ‘deintellectualization’ process in the Department. I do not mean that we should produce academic-type papers. God forbid. But there is a requirement for carefully-reasoned background papers, for attempts to estimate future trends, to analyze political and economic situations in depth. Not only are they essential for the drawing up of practical plans of action, but when they are utilized in international bodies, such as nato, they do enhance the prestige of Canada and help to justify our claim to be heard. At a time when the circles of power tend to be drawn closer and closer, this is a consideration not to be neglected.”2 Somewhat later, Ford argued that Quebec separatism, economic problems, and the decline of the Canadian dollar had raised questions around the world about “the ability of the country to survive or at least to operate as effectively on the international scene as in the past.”3 Only External could formulate and implement foreign policy and do so in a way that defended Canada’s “international position.” Foreign issues had become increasingly complex and were now “intermeshed” with Canadian priorities. The quality of foreign service officers had to be improved to get away from the “trade union mentality” that included “exaggerated attention to securing merely pecuniary or job advantage.” Having become overwhelmed by the necessity of responding to events, the Department should

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instead devote more attention to producing “ideas and analyses on a wide variety of foreign issues.” Ford proposed the establishing of a School of Administration and Management to train a select number of “brilliant officers ready for hard work and discipline.” Later, he set up a fund, the income (annually from $200,000) of which would go to a young diplomat annually for the best “thinkpiece” in the areas of East-West relations, the Soviet Union, East European, Chinese, or Latin American studies. He explained his purposes to J.H. Taylor, under-secretary of state: “I have been disturbed, as I am sure you have, at the extent to which management skills have been supplanting expertise in foreign affairs and original thinking as major qualifications for advancement in the Foreign Service. But I would like my award to be utilized as much as possible to re-establish “expertise” in important fields as a vital factor in an officer’s career.”4 In 1983 Ford was still commenting on the state of affairs in Canada’s foreign policy establishment. He wrote to William Heine, “External Affairs is in a state of confusion due to yet another reorganization.”5 Ford was partly responding to the efforts to “modernize and enliven” the department made by Allan Gotlieb while he was under-secretary of state for external affairs. Ford wrote to Gotlieb’s successor, Marcel Massé, “The Department cannot play the role intended for it unless it can clearly establish its intellectual credentials, both with other ministries and with foreign governments and international organizations. In the long run, this is the only justification for considering the Department as a central or key organ of government …When the Department was small it could be done by the exchange of ideas over lunch but the issues were less complicated than they are now.”6 Ford also explained that the Canadian Embassy in Moscow had already become highly “integrated,” a condition now sought by External for all foreign posts.7 The integration had been necessary because “the ussr is one of the few countries in which trade is determined largely by politics.”8 He explained that although large grain purchases had been made by the Soviets in Canada for many years, only after Trudeau’s visit to Moscow and Kosygin’s to Ottawa had trade in non-agricultural goods begun to increase. But it was still awkward to do business with the Soviets. First, there had to be worked out a long-term agreement on industrial and technical cooperation, then a mixed commission, and then various working groups on agriculture, forest-related industries, oil, gas, and other

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economic sectors. Further, Canadian trade had to mesh with the Soviet Five-Year Plans. By conforming to these requirements, Canadians had increased their trade enormously with the Soviets. But this trade “would almost certainly never had happened without a strong political incentive, just as it is likely to decline again as our political relations become strained.” To conduct political and trade relations in harmony with one another, Ford had met with all embassy officers weekly, especially international trade officers, who had to be kept abreast of political developments. He had been working for a decade to bring military attachés into close contact with political officers so that “their activities do not jeopardize the work of the Embassy as a whole or Canadian interests in general.” As he departed from Moscow, Ford told Malcolm Toon, a former US ambassador and a friend: “After 16 years in this bloody place the best Soviets can do for my farewell lunch is Kornienko! And of course little likelihood of seeing anyone else. As Thereza says, however, it is so much easier to leave hating them. Incidentally, don’t let anyone fool you (who could?) – the Olympic boycott was understood and effective on all who count here.”9 Ford reported to Lillian Hellman in June 1981 that he and Thereza had left Moscow the previous September and settled down in a “charming place” in La Poivrière, France, nine kilometres from Vichy. They had purchased the chateau at one time lived in by the Nazi gauleiter of Vichy. “It is perhaps folly but for the moment we are thoroughly enjoying it.” In retirement, he remained connected to External by his appointment as special adviser on East-West affairs, and he wrote and travelled. Illness plagued both of them, but Ford managed to continue working, and freed from the pressure of frequent reporting on political developments in the ussr, he could turn to his memoirs, poetry, and reflective articles on Russia. Membership on the Palme Commission, initiated by Olof Palme, the prime minister of Sweden, was the ambassador’s first major project following his retirement. The commission set out “to chart a way out of what seemed to be a nearly hopeless tangle of international conflicts.” There were representatives from a cross-section of world organizations: former heads of state, cabinet-level officials, and political leaders from nato, the Warsaw Pact, industrialized nations in Europe and North America, and developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.10 Ford sent a copy of the preliminary

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Palme Commission Report to Lillian Hellman in September 1982 and said that it was “partly my work.” He worked closely with a few others: “I enjoyed working with people like David Owen, Cyrus Vance, Olof Palme. I fear the impact of the report will be minimal.”11 Founded in September 1980, the Palme Commission issued its first report in 1982 and the final document in 1989. At first, the report received a “mixed reception,” but the endorsement of Mikhail Gorbachev gave it widespread publicity, and greater support followed for the central idea of “common security” and the view that nuclear weaponry and technological changes meant that “the traditional idea of national security is obsolete.” Ford started work on the Palme Commission with some optimism, but he was skeptical that it would accomplish much. “The first meeting was in Vienna in September [1980] and was fascinating. Not much likely to come out of it, but every little nudge toward sanity helps.”12 By the next January, Ford wrote to John Holmes more pessimistically about a second meeting of the commission in Vienna: “This was a more interesting session than the first since Vance, Arbatov, and Egon Bahr turned up. Still, it is a depressing exercise. How to get governments to discuss disarmament when relations are bad and confidence is lacking? Of course it is precisely at such a moment that we need some movement in disarmament to improve relations.”13 Nor was the makeup of the commission especially promising. He explained the problem: It was confined to about twelve countries [there were thirteen] by Palme, some pretty peculiar ones such as Nigeria and Indonesia and Tanzania and Mexico because of their left-wing governments and views.14 But Trudeau had contributed $25,000 to Palme for this and Palme thought it would support some of his, Palme’s, left-wing views. But Trudeau consulted Allan Gotlieb and Gotlieb said, “Ford is leaving Moscow just at this moment. He’s the perfect man for the job.” Trudeau said, “Fine.” And in the end there were three – myself, Cyrus Vance, David, now Lord, Owen – who were almost alone in presenting a conservative view, that is, a liberal, objective, and sensible view. Most of what the Mexican [Alfonso García Robles] said was out of the question. It was wildly left-wing and nobody paid any attention to him much. The Nigerian [Olusegun Obasanjo]

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came dressed as a Nigerian tribal chieftain with two bodyguards at our expense and had nothing to say about anything. The Indonesian [Soedjatmoko] turned up once only. The Japanese never opened his mouth.15 Another member was [Shridath] Ramphal, the Guyanese Indian who was the Commonwealth secretary general, the successor to Arnold Smith. And then there was Arbatov [Georgy of the Soviet Union].16 And, in effect, the work was done by the secretariat, and the three of us, plus Egon Bahr from Germany. It was rather left-wing but quite sensible. The title of the report, which was “Common Security,” eventually became almost the phrase or the slogan … when the Soviet regime became modified by the reformists. And it was invented by me. I had suggested it because it is something like the “basis for a mutual form of security.” And Egon Bahr had the better idea of making it “common security,” which, of course, is much more sensible. But at any rate, I do think that I played an important role in that presentation and in the second report which was continued after the murder of Palme. We presented a second report in ’88 which was the last time I was able to travel. Although Ford missed the meeting in 1989 because of health problems, he sent his comments, but the commission was running down by that time and Ford discovered that his report had evidently been misplaced. He heard from the commission’s executive secretary, Hans Dahlgren, in Stockholm in April 1989: “I am sorry about the way your suggestions on the earlier drafts had been handled. I talked to Barry Blechman [a secretary] about this, and he sincerely apologizes for having overlooked your proposals. I brought them again to his attention at the meetings in Stockholm and I know that he took up at least some of your suggestions during the course of the meeting.”17 Thereza’s illness – a very painful form of Hodgkin’s disease – broke into the Fords’ life. In January 1983, Ford reported, “Thereza is still in the American hospital and I stayed on in Paris after the nato meeting in Brussels in mid-December. She has had a very rough time with several operations and a very painful treatment for a form of lymphoma. However, they all say it is curable but it means another two or three weeks in the hospital.”18 In the fall of 1983 she fell very

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ill. “I am very worried. It is an unpredictable disease and can start up again at any time,” he wrote on 1 October. He followed up on the twenty-first: “Thereza has had a relapse and was back in the hospital for awhile. She is now at home with a nurse and is a bit better but this set-back has terribly depressed her particularly as she is very weak and bed-ridden. But she still has flashes of her old spunk and sends her love.”19 Andrey Voznesensky, the poet and Moscow friend, wanted to visit Thereza, but she said no. He recalled, “I could never get to Vichy and I regret it. When Thereza was dying she didn’t want me to come because she looked terrible; she was disfigured, her face had become distorted before she died. I wanted to visit her in the hospital in Paris, but she wouldn’t let me; and perhaps it was for the best, I think now. I might have shied off. And she would have remained in my memory as quite another person. That was her courage, a woman’s.”20 By late November, Thereza was gone and Ford wrote, “I am sorry to have to say that Thereza died a few days ago. Since she had a malignant tumor of the lymph there was no hope for a cure and she suffered a lot in the sudden relapse which occurred just a few weeks ago.”21 Without Thereza, Ford could no longer endure life in the chateau, and he moved to the renovated carriage house on the estate at La Poivrière, divided the property, and sold the chateau. At about the same time, his own health declined. “With the illness of my wife, it must have been psychological because at the same time my own disease began to progress again and I quickly realized that I had to get into a wheelchair.”22 He understood that one day he would be entirely bedridden. He was now on his own and required the care of the Portugese family, the Estevés, who remained with him. There were hints of his physical problems to come. He wrote, “I am really getting a bit mixed up with all the legal things necessary … following Thereza’s death, and then recently I have been disturbed by signs of a further weakening in my arms. But the only thing to do is fight it and carry on. The doctors say not to worry. Hah!”23 He wrote, “Life continues though it is sad without Thereza, and physically hard. But there are sunny spots.” A year later he reported on “hard work and a fight against various maladies” and having “neglected my friends.”24 Several journalistic articles had appeared (for instance, in Maclean’s on the anniversary of Yalta)25 or were on the way into print, and his translation of Russian poetry

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had been published. His memoirs were taking much of his time, and he was about to leave for a trip by car to Portugal for a few days with his Portugese couple. Back in France, Ford finally got down to working on the book that later became Our Man in Moscow. He wrote to John Holmes that he had in mind “a study of the ussr since I first went there in 1946,” to include analyses of the Soviet society and the political system.26 He sent Lillian Hellman an outline in July 1981 and explained, “As you see I try to cover the nearly 21 years I spent in Moscow, plus Belgrade and Cairo, but primarily related to the ussr.” His main purpose was to “write something substantial” on Russia: “But of course drawing on my personal experiences. I guess I have had longer in that ambiguous country than any other Western diplomat or journalist.”27 At one point, Ford seems to have had another book in mind. William Heine describes it as “a massive study of ‘Russia in Our Time’ which will be a comprehensive account of the ussr from the end of the War until the death of Brezhnev.”28 As it turned out, Ford chose quite a different approach in Our Man in Moscow, an approach that permitted a personal look at his subject and would not require the documentation necessary for a comprehensive study. Old friends came to La Poivrière to see Ford. One was the former US ambassador to Moscow, Tom Watson. He flew his own plane and landed at a nearby airport. Ford recalled: “The ambassador of Jimmy Carter, Tom Watson, Jr, the son of the founder of ibm and a multibillionaire … gave a lot of money to the Democratic Party, and his only justification for coming to Moscow as ambassador was that he was a pilot and he flew a couple of bombers from Alaska to Moscow or, I don’t remember, from Moscow … and we became very good friends, and he admitted that he knew absolutely nothing about Russia, and on Afghanistan he was flabbergasted by the Russian actions.”29 Ford continued, “We were good friends, obviously, and we were born on the same day, the eighth of January. He wrote to me quite a number of letters, asking my opinion about what was going on during Gorbachev – that was after he left and was replaced by Arthur Hartman. And finally he wrote a long letter in which he said he had just piloted his own Lear Jet over the same route that he had followed during the war.” Ford explained that Gorbachev had arranged this. “It was played up in the Soviet press and Gorbachev received him, and he wrote

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back to me, literally, that ‘I think Gorbachev is the greatest Russian of the time, perhaps of all time, of one thousand years. And what he is doing to Russia is going to completely turn it into a democracy and it is going to become a modern, Western country.’ I wrote back and I said, ‘You cannot believe this, surely. Think of Peter the Great, Ekaterina [Catherine] the Great, Tolstoy, even Alexander II. That somebody could put Gorbachev ahead of them is nonsense. Furthermore, I have no confidence in Gorbachev, and I don’t think that he will succeed.’”30 Continuing to reflect on Russia, Ford wrote several major papers in the 1980s as East-West adviser for External on Soviet foreign policy and the possible reasons why the Soviets had embarked on their military buildup. He found answers partly in Russian history but also in the character of the Soviet leaders and the system over which they presided. The ussr had evolved as a political system but remained untrustworthy as an international power; its challenges to the West were both military and political. He recognized that the United States was the single power capable of standing up to the Soviets. In 1980 he warned that Grenada seemed to be “slipping with alarming swiftness into a Marxist regime” and could easily become dependent on Soviet military aid. “What bothers me about this is not so much the military threat this might constitute, but the political inconsistency. If the world suddenly comes to realize some morning that Grenada has become a Soviet satrap will not Europe and the Third World ask why the United States finds a Communistimposed regime in Central Asia a threat to the West and not the takeover of a Caribbean Republic on its doorstep?” He said, “I hope that they do not interpret it as a lack of willpower on the part of Carter and readiness to defend real US national interests.”31 Soviet penetration of Central and South America set Ford to “brooding for some time, springing from my knowledge of the area,” he explained. He sought to deepen the discussion in the Canadian government over the possibility of joining the Organization of American States, and he warned the government that it should not expect the countries south of the Rio Grande to become democratic and liberal. “Nothing in their history, local conditions, or peoples’ temperament has prepared them for a moderate course. Extremes of love and hate are the norm and they are reflected in their politics, accentuated, of course, as well by extremes of poverty, climate, and geography.”32 Ford had concluded that all the countries of the

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region to more or less degrees suffered from a permanent “illness.” No country managed to escape the “plague,” whether of Spanish, Portugese, Dutch, or English background. Problems of racial division, “debilitating heat,” soil exhaustion, inhospitable geography, and the oligarchical system of control doomed the region to undemocratic governments. Even when “democracy” had been proclaimed, it was confined to the white-mestizo minority populations and designed to protect their favourable positions of control. Some form of oligarchical government was inescapable. His prognosis was pessimistic: “I can see no solution which would satisfy Western revulsion against the bloodthirstiness and inhumanity demonstrated, on both sides, but I cannot bring myself to believe that leftist regimes, which is the only possible alternative, would display any less brutality towards their opponents and produce regimes we would find it much easier to live with. Unless, as in the case of Cuba, we are prepared to forget democracy and human rights and live with them.” The Soviets, he concluded, because of the ideology of support for “national liberation movements,” would naturally support revolutionary movements both ideologically and practically, and local revolutionaries would of course look to them for support. Ford doubted, however, that the Soviets would incur the costs involved in supporting additional self-proclaimed Marxist governments in Central and South America in the way they had supported Cuba. The Soviets would be “secretly delighted” if the Americans decided to crush the leftists in El Salvador and Nicaragua because it would help put the United States “on the same plane as the ussr with regard to Afghanistan and Poland, divide the West, reap huge propaganda victories in the Third World, and distract attention from their own peccadilloes.” Soviet realism, Ford believed, would work against trying to take over any other country besides Cuba. The Soviets must balance their support for revolutionary movements against their need to avoid challenging the United States in an area of its vital interest. At best, the West should work to lower the tone of rhetoric associated with the region, appreciate the limits on Soviet activities in Latin America, and stop exaggerating the international implications of events in the region. Strengthening Ford’s view of Soviet interest in Latin America was the Falklands War between Argentina and Great Britain in March– June 1982. It came as no surprise to the ambassador that both Moscow and its Communist ally Cuba supported the Argentine

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military dictatorship against Britain. The ussr, wrote Ford to External, has “once again … demonstrated that it will never be deterred by ideological considerations in Latin America.” The episode showed “to what extent Moscow and its Communist client states” were “prepared to act in a pragmatic way to exploit any political means to combatting the United States and its allies.”33 Overhanging world events into the 1980s was the enormous Soviet arms buildup of the Brezhnev regime; Western experts were still trying to make sense of its political meaning. Ford took up the issue of Soviet naval power at the Symposium on Sea Power organized by the European Commander, Atlantic, in Annapolis in June 1982.34 Ford, typically, was interested mainly in what the Soviets intended by building a large deep-water fleet, including nuclear submarines, which “for the first time in history has made Russia a formidable naval as well as land power.” To understand these developments, he said, an effort must be made “to penetrate the minds of the Soviet leaders.” Ford reminded his listeners of the history of Russian naval power as it had developed since the time of Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century. The Russian navy, he saw, had the limited purpose of protecting the coastlines of Russia on the White Sea, the Black Sea, the Baltic, and later on the Pacific coast of Russia. This state of affairs had existed right through the Second World War, when the Soviet fleet had played a secondary role in that conflict, and much of it, in any case, had been destroyed during the war. Until Stalin’s death, the ussr had sought to replace the wartime losses, again in order to defend the approaches to its four coastlines. Only after the death of Stalin did the Soviet Union begin to build a fleet that was in keeping with the status of a superpower as envisaged by the leadership. The Cuban Missile Crisis, furthermore, brought home to the Soviets that “they did not have a naval force capable of carrying out a political-military operation in an area distant from Soviet ports.” They needed a conventional force as well. There was also a powerful motive of injured pride behind the Soviet shipbuilding program under Brezhnev. Ford recalled, “Shortly after I arrived, a senior Soviet official told me that they would never again permit the humiliation of Cuba to be repeated, no matter what the cost. And this was repeated to me frequently over the years.”35 Admiral Gorshkov, who was the architect of the expanding Soviet fleet, explained its purposes as providing mobility on the seas of the world in order to be in a position to pose a military threat or use

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force where needed against coastal countries. He argued that the “aggressive forces of imperialism” had gained a strategic position in a number of maritime countries, so the ussr had no choice but to turn to an “oceanic strategy” in both conventional and nuclear warfare.36 Even within the Soviet leadership, however, there were doubts about the feasibility of finding and holding accessible ports. As Ford pointed out, the Soviets had recently lost their alliances in Egypt and Somalia and therefore the naval bases in Alexandria and Berbera. He also noted that the current leaders of the ussr were products of the Second World War and its land battles, and had no direct naval experience. Fulfilling Soviet ideological aims was the fleet’s main purpose, but Ford believed that “as far as ideology is concerned the Soviets are highly pragmatic.” They would undertake an international action only if an advantage seemed attainable. Ideology alone would never govern their actions, but because the Soviet system depended for survival on demonstrating its “ideological credentials,” the leaders would always make sure that it was an “element” in foreign policy. A good example was Soviet support for national liberation movements. The West, Ford believed, had made a mistake in the 1970s by failing to understand what the Soviets were saying when they expounded the doctrine of “peaceful coexistence.” Brezhnev, after Nixon’s visit in 1972, explicitly stated the doctrine, which, as Ford put it, meant “continuation of the struggle between the two systems by means other than war.” Specifically, it included Soviet support for “revolutionary regimes or revolutionary movements sympathetic to the ussr.” Because first the United States and then other Western powers signed documents accepting this principle, the Soviets were “astounded when the United States accused them of cheating when they helped the leftist régime in Angola.” Logically, the Soviets were correct, but politically their view of Western perceptions was “disastrously wrong.” The Soviets, Ford believed, would always therefore support revolutionary movements in the world, but only if they were justifiable according to the Soviet calculus of advantage. To render such support in distant lands, the Soviet fleet had to “ensure the delivery of economic and military supplies” to “make the Soviet presence felt,” and to show that the ussr was a superpower. Ford believed that both Russian and Soviet motives were driving the Soviet naval buildup. With a vast territory to defend, the Russians

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needed a large standing army. But their huge size and long boundaries created at one and the same time feelings of “arrogance and uncertainty” in the Russian people. The enlarging fleet plus the land force raised the issue of whether the Soviets were now advancing a doctrine of offensive fighting as a form of defence. Ford doubted that they had a global strategy of expansion, but he pointed out that in the case of Afghanistan, for example, defence of a Communist regime had resulted in the extension of Soviet military power to the border of Pakistan and eastern Iran. A second motive for building a world fleet contained both Russian and Soviet elements, and had the political purpose of making sure that the ussr’s size, population, and nuclear strength gave it a position equal to that of the United States. Because the ussr was “a very flawed giant,” explained Ford, that meant “increasingly reliance on the one area where it does have parity with the United States – military power.” The motive was again revealed in the eagerness with which the Soviet Union under both Khrushchev and Brezhnev signed agreements around the world whose principal purpose was to confer status on the ussr. As additional evidence of this aim, Ford said, during his years in Moscow the Soviets were trying to turn the city “into a world capital comparable to Washington.” By 1980, when Ford left town, the Soviets were behaving in quite a different way from that when he had arrived sixteen years earlier: they were responding to events that took place in the most distant corners of the world. By September 1982, about five months after his discussion of the motives for Soviet naval expansion, Ford had concluded that with the departure of Brezhnev at hand, the ussr, in strategic terms, had become a weakened giant. He applauded the readiness on the part of the United States under President Ronald Reagan to recapture military parity – essential before serious negotiations could begin – but cautioned that a strategic comparison should cover more than the amount of military hardware.37 Ford wrote that the West tended to look at the military balance by counting the number of weapons. He, of course, did not. “But the Soviets, fully cognizant of their economic weaknesses, of the threat from China, of the unreliability of their East European allies, look at the strategic balance taking all factors into consideration, and their conclusions are invariably that, at the very best, there is no more than an approximate balance in the correlation of forces.” He recognized that it was exasperating

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to try to deal with the Soviets because they clung to their political philosophy “which assumes the downfall of the capitalist states, while objecting if we foretell the collapse of communism.” Despite this permanent warping of the dialogue with the Soviets, Ford presented to US Secretary of State George Shultz an approach to the Soviets which he had found paid dividends: “I think it important that an effort be made to avoid unnecessarily humiliating them. They are extremely sensitive and insecure about their place in the world. A lot can be gained by giving them at least the appearance of political parity with the US.” He advised patient negotiations with the Soviets during a very difficult five or six years ahead as a new leadership appeared, which would be “just as tough and difficult as Brezhnev” but faced with the necessity of tackling a series of mounting economic problems. Ford’s next major paper as special adviser on East-West relations was delivered to a meeting of National Defence officials in Ottawa in February 1983. He examined the problems posed for the West by the death of Leonid Brezhnev and the naming of Yuri Andropov as his successor.38 Ford spoke first of Brezhnev’s ability to cling to power, which had enabled him to survive longer than any other Soviet leader except Stalin. A principal reason was that “his associates believed it essential to keep him going.” They did so because Brezhnev had constructed “a pyramid of power in which most of his colleagues … were so personally involved in his fate that interference with the structure endangered the position of each of them.” Brezhnev had his own techniques of rule: “He never isolated himself, as Khrushchev did; never identified anyone as his obvious successor; and never hesitated to exclude from power anyone who seemed even remotely a threat to him.” His successor, Andropov, had secured sufficient power to become secretary general, and he clearly had the backing of the Party apparatus and the kgb, but he had not managed to assert his authority over the government in the manner that Brezhnev did. Ford thought that Andropov would have less leeway to launch any foreign initiatives and would therefore largely adhere to the foreign policy of his predecessor. Andropov faced the enormous economic problems on which Brezhnev had made some headway, but the standard of living of Soviets was still “appallingly low … except the armed forces and the Bolshoi Theatre.” And the circumstances were not good for the solution of continuing problems: “A leader not in particularly good health; a collective leadership

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on which Andropov probably has not yet had time to impose his full authority; an economy in trouble; and abroad the problems of Afghanistan and Poland, plus a confrontation with the United States and the risk of a new and costly arms race. Without that set of problems it took Brezhnev six years to feel sure enough of himself to launch his policy of détente.” Ford had seen stories on Andropov before he had been selected to lead the ussr, and he wrote to William Heine, “I think we should be cautious in concluding that he is a reformer. He is very intelligent and probably knows deep down what has to be done. But, even if he gets the top job, which is by no means sure, he will not have a wide enough power base to introduce sweeping reforms. They might come eventually but it will take time. However, I would prefer to have to deal with him than Chernenko or Kirilenko.”39 In all likelihood, Ford held, the ussr would likely want to call a halt to the arms race because it was bound to become “increasingly complex and sophisticated.” Andropov would likely encounter resistance from the Russian military, and it would take a long time to achieve a successful agreement because of the deep distrust on both sides. Negotiations would inevitably be complicated by the following factors: the predictable espionage activities of the kgb abroad; the Soviet disregard of commitments to the human rights in the Helsinki agreement; the obligatory ideological support of “national liberation fronts” abroad; the continuing Soviet military operations in Afghanistan; the Western support of the Polish people against the Communist government; and the Soviet military buildup and “almost insoluble” problem of Soviet intentions. Still, Ford said, there was no reason to be afraid of the Russians if a “realistic and mutually profitable political-military relationship” could be worked out. A few months later, after Andropov fell ill and was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko, Ford wrote an article for Foreign Affairs assessing the new regime.40 It was his last major published analysis of the Soviet Union and, as it turned out, a summing-up of his more than twenty years’ experience studying the ussr. The suggestion for the article came from John Holmes, who had heard Ford’s paper on “The New Soviet Leadership” at the 1983 conference summoned by the Canadian government to examine new foreign policy options, and Holmes made the suggestion to William Bundy, editor of the journal.41 Bundy welcomed Ford’s special perspective on Soviet affairs. “Quite frankly,” he wrote to him, “our store of Soviet articles

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in the magazine has tended to rely too much on a handful of our academics, who are excellent men but tend to take the shorter view than is often wise, and who occasionally fall for the belief that Mr. Arbatov is necessarily a true index of Soviet trends and thinking.” Bundy went on to say, “Dobrynin [Anatoly, the Soviet ambassador to Washington] is vitriolic on that subject, and I suspect that you might be too.”42 As Holmes had predicted, Ford, despite the painful period of Thereza’s illness, “worked up into something more stylish” the brief piece that he had prepared for the conference in Canada. Holmes understood Ford’s powers of concentration and, moreover, the therapeutic effect that intellectual activity had on his capacity to deal with his illness. Thereza’s “illness could interfere with his ability to complete the draft on time but, on the other hand, I have the impression from his letter that he welcomes this opportunity to put his mind to something of this kind.”43 Ford’s article appeared in Foreign Affairs in mid-1984. Soviet political behaviour had its roots in the nature of the country, its society, and its leadership. From his first days in Moscow, Ford had never believed that the Soviet Communists, in accordance with a Marxist design, were pursuing a program to achieve world domination. But their bellicose statements and aggressive behaviour often made it appear that they were bent on conquest. Westerners, Ford believed, often misunderstanding what the Soviets had in mind, had to bear some though not the major responsibility for permitting the periodic setbacks in relations with the Russians. The main point of Ford’s argument was that relations could never be “friendly,” but they could be non-threatening to both sides, although the Russians would always be difficult – and could become malevolent – members of the international community of nations.44 In Foreign Affairs, Ford described a Brezhnev who had been a striking success as a Soviet Communist politician. He “slowly and painstakingly” put his men in positions of power and in this way developed a “system by which he became indispensable.” The “100,000 well-entrenched senior functionaries” accepted Brezhnev’s rule because it preserved their authority and perquisites. But Brezhnev had needed more – the economic, administrative, and ideological knowledge of Mikhail Suslov and Alexei Kosygin – and when they died, Brezhnev lost colleagues on whom he had been completely reliant. This system of rule, still in place at the time of

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Brezhnev’s death, restricted his successor, Andropov, who was able to do little during the brief tenure accorded to him. Chernenko, Ford wrote, was chosen to succeed Andropov in order to preserve the continuity demanded by the Brezhnevites. He lacked charisma and intelligence, and was ailing. Inevitably, a younger group of leaders would assume power during the next several years. They would have to improve Soviet technology, but they would not be political modernizers because they would have been indelibly stamped with characteristics of the Brezhnev generation of leaders: “strong nationalism and occasionally arrogant pride in Russia and the accomplishments of the past 60–70 years, and their belief in the vital role of the Party and ideology.”45 Ford, perhaps more than in any earlier assessment of the ussr, had in the Foreign Affairs article placed Marxism at the centre of Russian political life, not as a plan for social equality or world conquest but as a justification for a faltering system of rule. Many commentators had seen pragmatism on the ascendancy in Russia during Brezhnev’s regime. By contrast, Ford warned that ideology had retained its hold on the leadership. The leaders would be pragmatic men, but “the growing contrast between the life of the Communist privileged class and that of the average Soviet” would be “harder to defend.” To do so required Communist ideology. In Ford’s view, the Russians had turned Marxism on its head: from a vision to bring about equality, it had become a justification for the rule of the privileged in Russia. To defend their position, the leaders had at their disposal a powerful and “all-pervasive” police and security system and the Russian people’s traditional “toleration of authority.” Ford foresaw that tensions would appear in Soviet society because the economic system was beyond the reach of reform. Here, too, he took issue with the many commentators in the West who held that the system could be “fixed.” Officials would resist change because they had a vested and privileged interest in the economy and because they feared the consequences of any challenge to their ideology. The revolutionary ideology of Marxism had become an obstacle to reforming the system. Ideology also played a major role in relations with the West; it had taken the form of “peaceful coexistence,” an accelerated version of which was called détente. By these ideas the Soviets meant a continuing and even intensifying struggle on the world scene for socialism. Ford believed that the West had not truly understood this thinking. The Soviets “must have been delighted if

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not somewhat mystified when President Nixon and Mr. Kissinger accepted the use of the phrase in the official American-Soviet documents signed in Moscow in 1972. “Indeed it is baffling that this was done. The Canadian prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, politely rejected its inclusion in the Canadian-Soviet declarations.”46 Ford went on to explain that the Soviets might have concluded that the Americans had given them “freedom of action to support ‘national liberation movements’ in Angola, Ethiopia and Mozambique.” He anticipated a future in which a “prickly, tough, able and determined” group of younger leaders would likely be antagonistic toward the West and determined to defend Russian national interests and Leninist doctrines. They would insist upon equal treatment as a superpower by the United States. With much patience, the West should be able to live reasonably with these new Soviets. Later, when a new, younger leader did emerge in the person of Mikhail Gorbachev, Ford saw no prospect of necessary changes within the ussr. “I didn’t believe in Gorbachev … that he could reform the Communist Party, that he could keep the Communist system by making the thing work, which had been the view of quite a number of high-ranking Communist officials of the age-level of Gorbachev, which was my impression in the last years of the seventies.”47 Ford continued: “I said that I had lost real confidence in Gorbachev because of his edict about prohibiting vodka. In fact, it was exactly the kind of nonsense that Khrushchev, or even Stalin before him, was capable of doing, an extravagantly useless gesture without thinking, even to the extent of destroying the centuries-old vineyards in Georgia and the Crimea. And then forgetting about the other thing, that a major source of income for the government was the tax on vodka.” To Holmes, Ford wrote: “I have an awful feeling that Gorbachev is like a Kamikaze pilot because he is going so fast. But in a society like the Russian whether it be Peter the Great, Alexander II, or Khrushchev, Kamikaze tactics seem almost the only way to start real changes in a moribund nation.” Ford thought that the Canadians would continue to face enormous difficulties in trying to inject common sense into Moscow’s action – or for that matter, Washington’s. “The Canadian dilemma never seems to change. To be credible in Moscow we must appear to be credible in Washington otherwise the Russians will just try to exploit us. But it is not easy. Neither capitol appreciates moderate good sense.”48 Gorbachev’s action was “a

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typically Communist, Russian act of folly which was occasioned because he had no sensible program for the economy,” wrote Ford. “I did not think he would continue his reforms very much further except in the context of the Communist system. And, in fact even when he came back from Crimea after the putsch against him, he said quite clearly that he believed in socialism and that he was doing it for the Communist Party.” Ford was in Canada in June 1987 to receive an lld degree from the University of Toronto. As he recognized, John Holmes had taken the lead in putting his name before the University authorities. The two met in Toronto, and Ford reported back to Holmes, “I thought you were looking very fit for 75. I am now 70 and considering the fact that I am falling apart at the seams, doing not too badly, though totally dependent on my couple [the Estevés] who seem devoted and who helped nurse Thereza through her dreadful year.” He was somewhat appalled by the changes he witnessed in Toronto. “The Torontonians seem intent on destroying what previous charm the city had. University Avenue, of course, has become a thing of impressive beauty but I am not enamoured with all those gaudy monuments to money.”49 Back in France, he wrote to Joe Clark, secretary of state for external affairs, after talking with the former president of France, Giscard d’Estaing, who came to dinner in July 1987. The conversation was “extremely disturbing,” Ford told Clark, especially because if there was “a revival in the years to come of an independence movement in Québec, the role of France would again be crucial,” and Giscard had said that he never understood why Canada was not part of the United States: “It seemed so obvious that Canada was an integral part of the North American system in every way.”50 Ford said that, swallowing his indignation, he had given the French leader a short course in Canadian history and why Canadians wished to maintain their independence. Ford concluded that it seemed to him serious that a former president and a very important public figure in France “should entertain the kind of sceptical, almost condescending, attitude that he demonstrated about Canada, or even about Québec as far as it was concerned.”51 Ford hoped the remarks were “largely an intellectual exercise,” but if they were not, he was inclined to assign great importance to them, a strong indication that he had not lost his diplomat’s determination to take up the defence of his country even when it was not properly appreciated.

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Over the next years, Ford returned to reading poetry. His political commentary ceased except when friends visited him. But writing was impossible and speech had become increasingly difficult. He had always been a clear-eyed appraiser of events and of himself, and he knew that it was time to give way. Robert Ford died of a heart attack in his home on 12 April 1998.

13 A Retrospective Look

robert ford understood – as some Soviet officials had begun to sense in the early 1970s, more than ten years before Brezhnev’s death – not merely that the Soviet system was in deep trouble but that reversing its decline was impossible, given the character of the system itself. Ford had come to see this decline when many Western experts, focusing on the Soviet arms buildup in the 1970s, feared that the ussr was becoming an increasingly formidable opponent of the West. Ford had chosen diplomacy as a career by way of history and poetry. Both mattered most to him from secondary school into university and through graduate school. He turned toward world affairs when his father and a professor at Cornell urged him in that direction and when the Department of External Affairs opened its doors to him as a speaker of the Russian language. By next mastering Russian history on his own, Ford was able, in his dispatches from Moscow, to identify trends from the Russian past that influenced the ussr. He took into account Marxist ideas that had distorted politics under the Bolsheviks by warping Russian life. Marxism had shaped the psychology and outlook of the Soviet leaders, compounding their inability to view themselves and the world realistically. Ford’s writing on the Soviet Union was widely read, both within and outside the diplomatic world. His explorations of the political implications of the psychology of the Soviet leadership seem to be the most distinctive feature of his commentary. The Soviet leaders, despite their deficiencies, commanded immense power. Dealing with such formidable but fear-ridden men demanded great diplomatic skill. Ford relished serving in Moscow

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as ambassador because, as he put it, he got “hooked” by the language and culture of Russia, and though he despised the Soviet system of government, he never gave up on the people. He wanted to be in Moscow, and he spent sixteen years there as ambassador. No other diplomatic post held the same attraction for him. For all the others he had held or been offered, none satisfied him like Moscow, in the Canadian Embassy on Old Stables Lane, near the Arbat. He stayed there as long as he wished and felt himself capable. He savoured his capacity to explain Russian actions and to interpret them to others. He drew on his poetic standards of precision to vivify his prose about the Russians. His attachment to Moscow endured despite the difficulties of the post: the cloistered atmosphere of the embassy, the oppressive weather, the constant presence of the Soviet police and security snoops, shortages of food, absence of good help, tardy repairs to the embassy compound, restrictions on travel, and the obduracy of his Soviet interlocutors. These and other conditions made Moscow an unattractive post. No predecessor or successor remained in Moscow as long as Ford. Ford found nothing redeeming in the Marxism of Russia. Its exponents’ claim to promote the liberation of mankind was a cruel joke. A small group of jittery men had made use of Marxist ideology to seize power and then exploit the people and resources of a vast country to benefit themselves. They were too blinded by self-interest to adapt the country to changing conditions. The view of the world they expounded deepened traditional Russian suspicions of the West. Uneasy in their roles as leaders, Soviet officials dealt defensively and aggressively with the advanced countries of the West, especially the United States. Until Ford convinced them otherwise, they saw Canada as a puppet of the United States. He also emphasized to them, with small success, that they must modify their behaviour. Canada opposed the strident belligerence of the ussr, but Ford found ways to put relations with the Soviets on a less contentious basis. He continued Lester Pearson’s openness in his striking initiative of visiting the ussr in 1955, two years after the death of Stalin. No other nato foreign minister had preceded Pearson to Moscow. Ford, for his part, concluded that the Soviet leadership had expected that the deep enmity between East and West, cultivated by Stalin, must wane. A willingness to discuss issues of shared concern between Canadians and the Soviets should come first. Ford’s dispatches and his papers from 1954 on are of a piece: they chart the ups and downs

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of representatives of two competing systems of life, struggling to put relations on a more predictable, less threatening basis. There were no simple answers in the high-stakes game of dealing with the ussr. Ford aimed to create a more influential and respected Canadian diplomacy, independent of that of the United States, as a means of modifying Soviet policies. He put Canada forward as a country whose lack of military power compared with the United States put it on a non-confrontational footing with the Soviets, which might persuade them to find some common interests with the Canadians. At the same time, Ford stressed to the Soviets that the Americans would not take up arms to destroy the Soviet system. Ford reasoned that the Soviet system itself weakened the ussr and limited its options both at home and abroad. Ford year by year learned difficult lessons in dealing with the Soviets. He had staked a lot on exposing Dmitry Polyansky, a Soviet deputy minister, to the benefits of democracy and free markets by having him visit Canada in 1966. The cross-Canada tour was a constant argument about the merits of the two systems. The visit confronted Ford at first hand to the exploitive mind-set of a Soviet leader who presented himself as a man free of dogmatic thinking. Ford was caught by surprise by the political bomb Polyansky delivered in his arrival speech, prepared in Moscow, which attacked the United States. Polyansky had used Canada as a platform from which to assail the United States and weaken the nato alliance – an objective that failed. Five years later, the relatively good relations established between the two governments peaked with the visit of Prime Minister Trudeau to the ussr. At this very time of success, waning interest in signing new agreements dominated the attitudes of both sides. Ford’s disappointment was palpable as Soviet interest in Canada diminished but stayed concentrated on the United States. His superiors in Ottawa had lost their enthusiasm too. The Soviet focus on the United States culminated in the 1972 agreement between Brezhnev and Nixon. Ford believed, however, that Canada had made a major contribution to lessening tensions in the world by opening and continuing a dialogue with the Soviets, by conducting academic, scientific, and cultural exchange agreements, and by engaging the Soviets in business transactions such as selling wheat to the ussr. Robert Ford received many accolades and honours over a long career as a Canadian diplomat and poet. He welcomed public recognition, without question, but he was more a public servant than

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a seeker of the spotlight. He lived on more than one level, and he cultivated an inner life, which above all was expressed in his poetry. He felt a great loss in the death of his wife Thereza. In his last years, ill and entirely dependent on the care of others, he returned to poetry with a zest, saying it was the one thing left to him. My purpose in writing about Ford in Moscow has been to show his exceptional ability to decipher and explain to others the pronouncements and actions of the leaders of the ussr. As a practitioner in the art of poetry, Ford worded his dispatches plainly yet alluded to the tangled depths of human motivation. He saw the Soviet leaders as men whose actions concealed deep fears and anxieties which had troubled the leaders of Russia since ancient tsarist times. Because Ford was assessing motives behind actions, along with the actions themselves, his judgments about the ussr sometimes differed from those of his political masters in Ottawa and of fellow diplomats and journalists. A telling example was Ford’s assessment of Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister. Trudeau and his legislative assistant Ivan Head accepted Gromyko as the charming conversationalist he took pains to seem. Ford knew better. He understood that Gromyko, like other Soviet officials, used Canada to test American intentions and, if possible, to cause discord within nato on dealings with the ussr. As a diplomat in the ussr for nearly twenty-one years (covering three postings), Ford kept his true feelings concealed when he dealt with Soviet officials, but he constantly assessed their moods and thinking. He recorded the empty character and declining health of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev with full accuracy. Most important, his dispatches to Ottawa as a whole correctly pointed to the steady and irreversible disintegration of the ussr.

appendices

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appendix a

A Soviet Province

Ford’s first detailed picture of a Soviet province resulted from information collected from the Australian legation in Moscow about one of the strangest Stalinist social experiments, the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobijan, in the Far East. Birobijan began in 1924 under a policy launched by Lenin and carried out by Stalin, who was at the time the commissar for nationalities in the new Soviet state. The Australians’ attention was drawn to Birobijan because an Australian couple, the Melmans, who had emigrated to the area several years earlier, decided to return to Australia, and in order to do so they had to pass through Moscow. Based on the information they gave the legation, Ford, displaying his customary eye for detail and capacity to interpret Soviet life, describes the unpromising physical setting for the Jewish region, which was to be a homeland for Soviet Jews. He wrote this account during his first posting in Moscow as second secretary of the Canadian Embassy and dated it 29 October 1947.1

About three-quarters of the land is swamp and taiga, although there is some mountainous country. The ground is largely in a waterlogged condition and is subject to frequent and damaging summer floods. The winter is severe with temperatures falling to sixty degrees below zero (Fahrenheit); often there is no snow and there are winds of great intensity. The town of Birobijan with a population of between 25 and 30,000 … rests on swampy ground necessitating the sinking of foundations for dwellings to ten feet or more. All structures are, therefore, subject to rapid deterioration. The site was apparently chosen by a Scotsman named Mackenzie who was long resident in the Soviet Union and who was one of the chief advocates of the Jewish State. Experience has shown that his

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judgment in the location is open to question. Jewish organizations abroad became interested in the project. In 1928 the first large movement of immigrants left Canada and the United States. The first settlers brought with them a considerable amount of equipment, and the flow of goods from the outside continued in fairly substantial quantities until 1934 or 1935 when a Soviet decree forbade any groups in the country from benefitting from special privileges to the exclusion of the rest of the country. Most of the founders and administrators, [the Australians] said, were labeled Trotskyites or saboteurs. They were used, and are still being used, as scapegoats for its slow development. Progress was slow, despite the expenditure of large sums of money, until 1940. The main projects were drainage and irrigation, the beautification of the town of Birobijan and road-building. Nevertheless there are now only about fifty kilometers of surfaced road in the oblast and the unpaved roads in the built-up area are said to be a morass of mud in summer and a wilderness of frozen ruts in winter. Mechanical transport, where it can be used at all, is thus subject to very severe strain. With the exception of half-a-dozen brick buildings, the town is of wood construction. There are three cobbled streets, one of which is lined with trees, an Intourist hotel and several factories. The main enterprises are a brick works, a timber mill, a textile factory, a pipe-making works and a wagon-manufacturing works. There is neither a sewage system nor running water. The brick works have been damaged by floods and in order to construct stoves alone it was found necessary to bring bricks from neighboring towns and even to order them from Moscow. Mr. and Mrs. Melman are naturalized Australians of Jewish descent. They had been living in Australia for twenty years when they set out for the Soviet Union with their two children in July of last year. The Australian Legation has the impression that they were influenced by Zionism and political conviction in making the trip, although their political views at times seemed vague. The journey was preceded by lengthy negotiations with the Soviet Legation in Canberra. Mr. Melman is understood to have had connections with the Communist Party, but his exact position is not clear beyond the fact that his sympathies were, or even are, to the Left. It seems that his disappointments in Birobijan have not entirely alienated him from the Soviet system. He appeared to look upon the hardships as the inevitable concomitants of the struggle for a

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better society. This attitude leads one to place somewhat more faith in his information than if he had become an outright disillusioned Communist, of which there are probably no more bitter opponents of the Soviet system. His wife’s views were more negative and she appeared to be largely concerned with housekeeping responsibilities and the availability of food than with the political system. I am not sure of the exact length of their stay in Birobijan, but in any event it was short. If not disillusioned, at least they quickly became fed up with living conditions and applied very quickly to come to Moscow with the end in view of returning to Australia. This, of course, was a request whose fulfilment is both difficult and rare, even though the Melmans still had their Australian passports and Soviet papers issued to foreigners. Permission was ultimately given after consultation between the local secretary of the Communist Party and head of the mvd. The destination was set as Chernovitz [a city in western Ukraine], inasmuch as no permission to go to Moscow could be granted by the local officials. Nevertheless, as the local official pointed out, to get to Chernovitz it is necessary to pass through Moscow. They eventually arrived here and stayed ten days while trying to make arrangements to get back to Australia. They have now left, presumably for Chernovitz, and their future at the moment is very much in doubt. They were traveling with all their worldly possessions, including many trunks and household articles and a large sum in local currency; the quantity of their luggage illustrated their determination not to return whence they came. The life which they described in the town of Birobijan (for they were familiar only with the town and not the rural area) was extremely severe. The lack of running water necessitated a daily journey of three kilometers in a communal truck to obtain water, and people in other parts of the town had to go even longer distances. Since there are very few shops, similar journeys are necessary to buy food, although for the most part the townspeople avoid the shops as much as possible by living on the potatoes and vegetables grown on their own allotment. These allotments were said to be necessary for survival … Life each day is presumably made up of from ten to twelve hours at a factory or on a collective farm (all farming is collectivized), and the remaining time divided among the cultivation of a garden, the building of a house, traveling long distances to obtain food and water, preparing meals and sleeping. Many people have

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learned to live for years on two meals of black bread and vegetable soup or cereal a day. Most fantastic were the tales of those who found it necessary to take two jobs to live; many apparently go from one factory shift to a shift at another factory or to a farm. One of the examples which was cited was of an engineer with a wife and four children who was said to have been working in this way for the past three years for a total of nineteen hours a day from seven in the morning until two at night … The system of piecework is universally applied. Tradesmen such as carpenters, or boot makers are divided into seven grades and a norm is fixed for each grade. A man in the highest grade, by exactly fulfilling his norm, would receive 617 roubles a month. For twice the norm he would get twice the salary. Those in lower grades are given proportionately less. With the present level of food prices it would be virtually impossible to live on 617 roubles a month, and therefore norms must be over fulfilled, but the over fulfillment of norms is bound to result sooner or later in their revision. The picture is therefore gloomy in the extreme. It may be added that the piecework system, in Birobijan and elsewhere, does not take into account damage to machinery which results in lay-offs until the fault is repaired … The Australian immigrant stated that the factories contain a great deal of Russian-made equipment which was brought from the west before the war. Local conditions, they said, had reduced it to a state of interrupted breakdown, and, when it was working, full advantage was not taken of its potentialities. For instance, although there is a pipe works in the town, there are no sewers, a lack said to have been caused by shortage of skilled labor, poor maintenance, immense administrative inefficiency and simple lack of initiative and ability to use what machinery is available. Much of the machinery sent from abroad before the decree forbidding such imports was left completely unused because the plans made for it by the Jewish settlers in Birobijan were disallowed by someone in Moscow. It would be difficult to find a more striking example of rigid and stultifying centralization. The autonomy of the region is undoubtedly entirely nominal. Many of the administrative posts are held by Jews, the local Party Secretary is a Jew, and preference is apparently given to Jews when filling posts from Moscow; these people appear to act as ordinary Soviet functionaries and the only important distinctive nationality feature is the position of Yiddish as an official language theoretically

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equal to Russian. Street signs are usually bilingual, but in practice Russian is the main language of administration and business. The Russian inhabitants outnumber the Jewish who are said to form a quarter of the population … Two movements of Jewish settlers had apparently been moved in [from Ukraine] during recent months; to these has now been added a third trainload of some 1,500 families … Any movements out of the Ukraine may be attributed more to Government than to individual interest. Most of the settlers are said to have signed contracts to work in factories or on farms for periods of from three to five years; they are promised a loan of ten thousand rubles, repayable in eleven years, for the building of a house; two acres of land and the gift of a new cow or pig. It is claimed that these promises are often not kept. The cost of living soon exhausts the loan which cannot be repaid, and the house remains unbuilt through the lack of time, material and help. At the end of the contract, the settler may very well be worse off than when he came; what happens if a settler cannot repay the loan is not known. Despite the recent influx of settlers, Mr. Melman does not feel that there will be attempts to revive Birobijan as a Jewish National Home. He feels that the Government has lost interest in the scheme and that it is now being treated like any other remote part of the Soviet Union. Two factors might be adduced to support this theory. The first is the lack of propaganda for settlement; the press lacks the stories which one might expect and in the city of Moscow I have never heard any mention of a drive to persuade Jewish citizens to set out for the promised land. Generally speaking, I do not think that Muscovites know very much about the scheme. The same may not be true of the Ukrainians, but even three or four thousand families is a small number to be taken as a sign of wholesale revival. Such a movement might even be explained as the result of a desire to move Jews out of the Ukraine rather than a wish to move them into Birobijan, which is merely the most logical place to put such a minority for resettlement. Secondly, the area has apparently been handicapped by the fixing of low priorities on machinery and other materials. Priorities are often a very good guide to the interest taken in given areas, although it would be a mistake to regard them as conclusive evidence. In view of the foregoing picture, it would appear to be the course of common sense to abandon Birobijan as a Jewish Home. To replace

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it by another area would be a confession of failure which would have to reflect on none other than Stalin himself, who was Minister of Nationalities when the settlement was founded. The unfortunate Mackenzie doubtless stands low in the Soviet regard, if he still lives, but it would be impossible to blame him entirely when his choice was approved by the Minister, especially when that Minister in another capacity has presumably authorised the sinking of a great deal of money into the project since 1924. The search for a scapegoat would therefore be difficult. The abandonment of the entire plan would present the same embarrassing questions. Therefore the simplest policy would appear to be to keep the Jewish Autonomous Region on paper as an example of “the successful solution of the nationalities problem,” but not so prominently on paper that it might achieve too much embarrassing attention abroad …

appendix b

Early Travels with Ford, 1952–1953

Ford, as second secretary, had no opportunity to travel in the Russian provinces, but he was aware of them, especially as a source of information on the reality of Soviet life. He well knew that Moscow, however impoverished it appeared, did not offer a complete picture of life as most Russians led it. As chargé d’affaires he visited Ukraine, Georgia, and Leningrad.

journey through central europe, 23 september 1952 During my recent leave I travelled by train in the middle of July through some parts of Central Europe which are not visited very frequently by Canadian officials … This was approximately six months since the last time I had made this trip and there was very little change to be noted in construction in the towns en route. Haymaking was in progress in the fields along the way but not once did I see modern agricultural equipment being used. The scenes of haymaking looked as if they could have taken place 50 years ago without changing one detail – the men cutting hay with scythes, the women barefoot, raking the hay up into piles with homemade wooden rakes. This is, of course, one of the poorer agricultural areas of the ussr but the complete absence of modern equipment did strike me as extraordinary. Nevertheless, in several stations I noted modern agricultural machinery standing on flatcars. As we had a six-hour wait in Brest-Litovsk we utilized the time for a visit to the town. While it has many of the aspects of a small Russian provincial town it has nevertheless succeeded in keeping some of the characteristics of its Polish period. Most of the main streets while

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cobblestoned, have curbs and sidewalks, and it is only in the suburbs that one encounters the sloppy unpaved streets of the Russian town. Practically all of the streets have boulevards of linden trees. There are quite a few parks, although they are badly looked after. With the help of a loquacious taxi driver we succeeded in identifying the headquarters of the mvd, the mgb,1 the oblast party committee, the state bank of the ussr, the headquarters of the Military Command and the main jail. The latter is a Polish structure, according to the driver as, in fact are all the previous buildings except the mvd headquarters. While I heard nothing but Russian spoken in the streets, the taxi driver told me that there were still quite a few Poles and Hungarians in the town. Although Brest is supposed to be a BeloRussian city there are no visible manifestations of the so-called Belo-Russian culture to be seen anywhere. The shops in the center of the city are practically indistinguishable from the same kind of shops in Moscow with the same kind of goods on display at about the same prices. We visited the market which occupies a large area not far from the center of the town. It has permanent wooden stands and was doing a thriving trade. Even though this was the middle of summer there was, however, a remarkably small variety of goods offered for sale. The number of beggars on the outskirts of the market struck me as very large. Most of the women were barefoot and the clothes of the peasants looked poorer than those of the kolkhozniki [collective farmers] one sees in the Moscow markets. The largest church in the city is Roman Catholic but it was closed and, according to the driver, is not functioning because there was no one left to go to it. The Russian Orthodox Church has, however, recently been redecorated and was obviously “working.” While adhering to the general plan of Russian church architecture, it is a large, more solid looking building than those of Central Asia and the lines cleaner and simpler … The city was full of troops, which is not surprising as it is the main transfer point for soldiers moving into the Soviet Zone of Occupation in Germany, and there must also be a fairly large permanent garrison. At any rate, the German train which carried us from Brest to Berlin was full of soldiers. While run by Germans this is, of course the Russian military train and as such no visa for East Germany is required. The train itself is very modern and well furnished and makes an extraordinary contrast to the antiquated Russian train.

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The Germans, however, added one refinement to their communist model. The Russian train has a loudspeaker in each corridor which, if one has the persistence can be kept toned down. The Germans, however, have placed a loudspeaker in each compartment and it is impossible either to modify it or turn it off. We searched high and low in the compartment for some way of turning it off, or at least lowering the volume, but without avail. We then attempted to take the entire apparatus out of the wall but the German communists had foreseen this eventuality and it would have been quite impossible without carpentry tools to remove the diabolical device. As a result we were subjected to propaganda, interspersed with Russian popular music, from 8 o’clock in the morning until midnight, at which time the announcer wished all the Comrades goodnight. Similarly at 8 the next morning he greeted us all with a comradely salutation and the news of the day. Most of the Russians did not seem to mind the noise and even we, by the end of the second day, were less aware of it. I am sure that after a while it becomes just a part of the background of the train like the noise of the wheels. Through Poland from Warsaw to Frankfurt-am-Oder we noticed a great number of Polish soldiers at the stations along the route, and from the German border to Berlin the tracks fairly swarmed with black-coated East German Volkspolizei. At each village there was a squad of police, often numbering as many as 50, and at a distance of approximately a kilometer apart along the track we saw German police, usually with police dogs. We discovered the explanation for this activity after we reached Berlin. Apparently the Russian military train the previous week had been derailed and 160 Russian soldiers had been killed. Credit for this job was given to Polish Guerrillas. Whatever the explanation the Russians were obviously not taking any chances again … For one coming from the Soviet world, particularly after Berlin, Vienna looks remarkably normal. Entering the Soviet Zone by train at Linz one is subjected to only a rather cursory examination of documents by the Soviet officials although I understand that they can be very tough on occasion. In the city itself, of course, one passes without hindrance from one sector to another, and we drove with some Austrian friends to the Leopoldsberg in the Soviet Zone without seeing a Soviet official … I might just add two comments on the two typical manifestations of the Soviet occupation. The first is that within a block of each other, in the center of Vienna, are the

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American and the Soviet Information Offices. The American office is extremely modern and tasteful and the displays are ingenious and interesting. Inside there’s a reading room equipped with good easy chairs and neon lighting. The Russian office, however, looks precisely like the dowdy main office of the International Book Service … in Moscow. The windows are painted dark brown, the vitrine is jammed full of old copies, mostly in Russian, of Marxist literature. In the doorway there is a little space in which an old divan has been placed. It seems incredible that any intelligent Russian could think that this kind of display fulfills any useful purpose whatsoever in a city like Vienna. On the contrary I should think that it does positive harm to their cause. The other point is the comparison between the bustle of activity and the really quite remarkable construction going on in the western sectors and the lack of activity at least in the official areas in the Soviet Zone. The most striking contrast is between the West bahnoff, which is a splendid new structure, and the Ost bahnoff, from which the trains depart for Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The East Station in fact does not exist. It consists of a gravel yard, a semi-circle of unpainted huts and the railway tracks. To get out on the platform one walks through one of the freight sheds, ascending by a ladder, without even a railing, on to the platform. I should have thought that even for prestige purposes the Russians would have made an attempt to build some kind of an adequate station for the railway serving Eastern Europe. There is still an international wagons-lits service direct from Rome to Warsaw, passing through Vienna, and we travelled on this train …The train goes south from Vienna for a few kilometers and then crosses the Danube, again turning north at Stadlau and passing through Dutch-Wagram, Angered, Dunkrut, roughly paralleling the Hungarian and Czech frontiers until reaching Hohenau where the Austrian border control takes place. Compared with the Western Zones of Austria the country looks unkempt and the stations repaired but sloppy. Once one crosses the Danube below Vienna there is a very marked change from the rest of the country. One is already to all intents and purposes on the Hungarian Plain. The villages and houses are less neat and tidy and there is much less reconstruction going on, though of course this lack of neatness may be less due to the communists than to the beginning of the East. As Metternich said, “The Orient begins at the Budapest chaussee.”

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At the Ost bahnoff in Vienna there were flags, pictures of Stalin and the usual slogans, but apart from that there were no visible signs of the Soviet occupation all the way to the Czech border … At Hohenau the relatively perfunctory Austrian border control examination took place. It was entirely in the hands of the Austrians and no Soviet officials appeared. The town itself was badly damaged in the war but there is some reconstruction going on. From Hohenau the train moved slowly across the border into Czechoslovakia. The train stopped just beyond the border in the middle of a pine woods while Czech soldiers with Tommy guns walked the entire length of the train apparently inspecting the undercarriages of the coaches. Even on the Czech-Austrian border I noticed high wooden watch towers with searchlights. The Czech border control, however, took place in the town of Breclav which looks like a fairly large town; the station at any rate is very big and in very good shape. We were aware that we were well within the Soviet world again by the numerous banners about peace and the series of photographs of Czech communists, though none of Stalin. The Czech control was extremely thorough but the officials were polite and one was delighted to speak a little English with me. From Breclav the train proceeded across Moravia. The villages, and in fact the countryside as well, looked to be a good deal neater and more prosperous than in the part of Austria we had just traversed …We reached the Czech frontier at Moravska-Ostrava but it was already dark and we were unable to see very much. It took exactly five and one-half hours between the time we reached the Czech border and the final clearance through the Czech and Polish border controls and we were once more under way towards Warsaw. One would think that the Poles and the Czechs could fear little in the way of currency smuggling or illegal entry of spies and saboteurs from one country to the other but, in fact, the control was just as thorough here as on the edge of the Iron Curtain itself. We reached Warsaw the next morning and stayed a day and a night there, going on to Brest-Litovsk the morning of the following day … There is little to report on the remaining stage of the journey back to Moscow. I saw no posters, flags or slogans on the stations between Warsaw and Brest, and relatively few Polish police along the track. Even the Polish locomotives have fewer communist slogans and red stars and so on than in Czechoslovakia. At Terespol on the Polish side of the Bug River an innovation I noticed is a ploughed

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strip about 15 yards wide running parallel to the river in both directions away from the railroad tracks. A similar strip exists on the Russian side of the frontier. The Polish control was as usual very strict and on the Russian side the train was searched inside out with amazing thoroughness, including a soldier walking the entire length of the train on top of the carriages and an examination underneath our bunks and seats. From Brest to Moscow nothing of great interest and we arrived back again in the Soviet metropolis on September 6 at dusk.

visit to ukraine, 24 august 1953 The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic is the largest most populous and economically most advanced of the national regions forming the ussr. It occupies an area larger than France and has a population somewhat bigger. Its people has been noted for centuries for a tenacious clinging to its national culture and traditions in the face of oppression from Poles, Lithuanians, Austrians, Hungarians, Tartars, Turks, Germans and Russians. It is the most important, most strategic, and probably the most vulnerable area of the ussr. Finally it has close connections with Canada because of the large number of Ukrainians who emigrated before the Revolution. When the Soviet authorities finally decided late in June to open most of the Ukraine to foreign travel I therefore decided it would be profitable to take advantage of the loosening of restrictions to visit its principal cities Kiev and Kharkov, the third and fourth cities of the ussr. I therefore informed the Foreign Ministry that I was leaving by car for Kharkov on August 15, continuing on by car to Kiev and returning by the same route. No obstacles were placed in my way and I met with full cooperation from the Soviet authorities on the trip. We started at 5 a.m. and traveled by the Moscow-Simferopol highway to Kharkov, passing through three medium-sized Russian cities, Tula, Orël and Kursk. The asphalt-surfaced two-lane highway is in good condition except for some fifty kilometers between Serpukhov and Tula where sporadic re-surfacing seems to be going on. Most of this highway was rebuilt by German prisoners of war in 1946–47. We almost immediately encountered bad weather, heavy rain until three o’clock in the afternoon and in the valley of the Oka River, thick fog. Just beyond Tula we developed motor trouble but fortunately

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were told where to find a garage by an obliging militiaman. We turned off the main highway at the village of Pervomaiskii and found a large establishment which appeared to be a combination of machine-shop, garage and truck repair center. We drew up at the large gates and were immediately surrounded by a large crowd who seemed to have nothing better to do than watch the proceedings. The manager was called and eventually, after a careful examination of our documents, ordered the gates opened and we drove into a large courtyard and then into a garage. During the three hours it took to repair the car a crowd numbering from twenty to thirty men was continuously in attendance and we must have seriously interfered with the day’s quota of work. If this was a fair example of labor discipline then one can sympathize with the daily exhortations in the Soviet press. After his first suspicions the manager was quite co-operative and showed us into a room at one end of the garage where we could wait in comfort. It was called “Krasny Ugolyok” (Little Red Corner) and was a lecture room with office beyond. On the walls hung dingy photographs of the leaders. The picture of Beria had been removed and the empty space between Malenkov and Molotov was all too conspicuous … Behind the platform was a large and very bad oil painting of Stalin. While the woman guarding the gate of the courtyard had shown the proper spirit of vigilance in not letting us through until our papers had been checked, another Soviet citizen had obviously not been reading his Pravda. I went off in search of the lavatory, its general direction having been pointed out to me. I entered the wrong building and encountered a man just closing a door. I tried it and found it locked. Without my asking, he came back, unlocked it and asked if I wanted something inside. I went in and found it full of lathes and machinery. He apparently did not think twice about letting a foreigner just look around. We left Pervomaiskii about noon, the manager having firmly refused any payment. It was still raining heavily and we made very bad time, reaching Mtsensk at 2 p.m. Outside this small town which has more churches functioning than any other place of comparable size I have seen in the ussr, the Russians have put up a large service station, buffet and inn. The ensemble looks from a distance not unlike an American “motel” of the Californian cornice style complete with wrought iron balconies, but once you get close you can see that

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the execution has not equaled the ideal. Both on this highway and the Kharkov-Kiev road we found new service stations à l’americaine where we were able to buy gasoline and make minor repairs. From Serpukhov to Kharkov on approximately this north-south line the Germans fought a series of fierce battles and all the towns along the route showed the signs of war. The churches, as the most conspicuous landmarks, all suffered severely, but on closer examination one has to admit that the damage was due to about fifty percent war and fifty percent neglect in the previous three decades. Every few miles along his route can be found primitive military cemeteries and war monuments. The town of Orël, with a population of some 150,000, is about half-way to Kharkov. Like other Russian towns it does not look nearly so big as it is. There are one or two cobbled roads, and all the rest of the city streets are dirt. The filth is appalling and the people look shabby and undernourished. There was a great deal of war damage and much reconstruction is going on. The only attractive feature of the city is the two blocks of arcaded, pre-revolutionary buildings in the middle of the city … Kursk, where we stopped for an hour for tea, has a population of about 200,000 and was also badly damaged. Unlike Orël, it stretches out in a long S built along the main road. The principal new buildings I noticed were the solid and very large premises of the mvd and the House of the Soviets. We contemplated spending the night in Kursk as it was already well after six, but one look, or rather one sniff, at the small hotel persuaded us to keep on to Kharkov. This small one-storey building of an incredible filth and sloppiness was the only hotel in a city bigger than Ottawa. We did, however, try the main restaurant which had clearly been recently redecorated. It was a large, bare room laid out for utility only. The main decorative effect had gone into the baby-blue ceiling. The tables were covered with dirty table-cloths, the food was very bad, and the flies hovered in swarms. The toilet facilities, though guarded by an attendant in a commissionaire’s uniform, were extremely primitive, as they were everywhere except in Kharkov and Kiev. While I settled the bill my wife waited for me in the car. When I came out I found it completely surrounded by an enormous crowd, who seemed motivated not in the least by hostility against the foreigner but by a rather friendly curiosity. One young woman could not restrain herself and putting her head in the car, asked my wife

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who she was. “I have never in my life seen people like you except in films,” she said, and then asked if we were actors. The police made no attempt to interfere with the crowd. At Oboyan, a pleasant small town with three large churches all apparently closed, we stopped at another gasoline station, and then started out on the last 200 kilometers to Kharkov. It was already dusk and our driver was clearly very nervous. When we wished to stop at one point he did so with the greatest reluctance and warned us against “hooligans.” As he probably reported to the police in Kursk, I suspect he was told to take us straight to Kharkov. There may well be “hooligans” on this lonely stretch, and it was indeed an eery feeling to be driving across the steppe without a sign of life for miles at a stretch. We reached Kharkov at midnight having been on the road 19 hours and we therefore went straight to the hotel, the former “Hotel de Russie.” I do not think it was the Intourist hotel before the war as it is rather small and located in a side street. It was, however, quite comfortable and the food was not too bad. An obvious effort had been made to modernize the hotel and new bathrooms had recently been installed. Unfortunately, however, in their attempt to provide hot running water it turned out that only boiling water came out of the taps. As there was no cold water this meant that one had to wait for a long time before the hot water cooled off sufficiently to permit a bath. The following day we spent in Kharkov walking and driving around the city. When we went out in the car we shortly discovered that we were being followed at a discreet distance and in fact we were also followed all the way to Kiev and back again. I am not sure why we were followed only in the Ukraine but it may be that because of the large Ukrainian population in Canada the authorities were afraid we might attempt to get in touch with friends or relatives of Ukrainian Canadians … The city is built along a cliff on the east bank of the Donets River and it stretches over a number of hills up and down the river. Many of the better pre-war monuments situated on top of the cliff were destroyed in the fighting, in particular the old university, the Red Army House, and an attractive 18th century church. The university is only a shell and the site has been moved to some other old buildings in a rather decrepit part of the city. The ruins of the Red Army House have not been removed but throughout the rest of the city

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there are few signs left of the war damage except empty spaces here and there. A great deal of reconstruction is going on. In the shops the same materials were on sale as in Moscow and the prices seemed to be the same. It seemed extraordinary to be unable to find fruit in a city of this size in the midst of such a rich agricultural area. Similarly meat was very difficult to find and even in the restaurant when it was ordered it was very bad. The people looked worse-dressed than in Moscow and the crowds in the streets were less well-mannered than in the capital. They looked more like peasants who had come into the city for the day. There seemed to be an attempt to put signs in both Russian and Ukrainian but I heard mostly Russian spoken on the streets. The loud-speakers at street corners broadcast in Russian and at one intersection a course was being given in Russian on how to cross the street properly. The 480 kilometers from Kharkov to Kiev we accomplished in good time because of the excellent state of the asphalt road which is almost as good as an autobahn which, in fact, it closely resembles. The road was probably built originally by the Germans during the war as a supply road from Kiev to Kharkov and I imagine was completed by prisoners of war after the end of hostilities. At any rate it is much like a German road even to the well-finished shoulders and the overpasses on all the railways … The interesting aspect of this trip was the Ukrainian villages rather than the towns. The Ukrainian village is completely different from that of Great Russia. Owing to the absence of wood the cottages are made of lathe and mud over which some kind of glaze is put to protect it from the rain. The whole is covered by a dazzling coat of whitewash and the roof is invariably thatched. The villages are on the whole a great deal neater than the Russian villages, and the Ukrainians seem to have a greater sense of personal cleanliness. Almost every cottage is surrounded by a little fence of some sort together with a small garden including flowers. There is none of the rubbish and litter which surrounds the incredibly sloppy Great Russian village … There seemed to be about the same number of livestock in the Ukraine as in Russia but more geese and ducks, which appear to wander in and out of the cottages at will. The latter all have a chimney right in the center of the thatched roof, the stove being built in the middle of the one room. From the amount of peat being dried in the villages, I presume that it is the principal means of

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heating. The stench in the cottages in the winter when they are completely sealed up against the cold must be incredible … The approach to Kiev from the east is an unforgettable sight. The city is stretched out along the high bluff on the west bank of the Dnieper and with the evening sun against it the skyline of churches and monasteries is very beautiful. The highway still crosses the Dnieper by a temporary wooden trestle bridge but a new and substantial steel and stone bridge is almost completed beside it. A little further to the south is the two-track railway bridge and about 2 kilometers to the north is a single-track railway bridge … In 1939 the city numbered about 900,000 and I was told it is now well over a million, making it the third city of Russia. It has, in fact, more the air of a big city in many respects than Moscow and certainly than Kharkov. The central part was very badly destroyed including the main street, the Kreshchatik. In the process of reconstructing it has been almost doubled in width and unfortunately the new buildings which are going up have no individual character whatsoever but are pure imitations of he ugly Moscow style. In the side streets, however, which largely escaped destruction, the buildings seem more of a piece than in Moscow. Nearly all of them are lined with chestnut trees and there are many very attractive boulevards with parks down the middle. The Kiev site is superb and its original planners took every advantage of its situation. It has more parks for its size than any city I have ever seen and most of them are attractively laid out and well kept up. Even in the city itself every little square has a well laid flower bed, many of them with fountains. Along the banks of the Dnieper there is one continuous park running for many miles. In this park are one or two rather attractive open air restaurants, an open air theater, and Dynamo Stadium … The Pecherskaya Lavra, which is one of the most ancient spots in Kiev, still stands but the main cathedral was blown up by the Germans. Nearby is the small church containing the catacombs, halfway down the bank of the cliff. Here we found hundreds of pilgrims who had clearly come very long distances in order to visit the most holy spot in Russia. Throughout the courtyard they were resting in two’s and three’s and waiting their turn to descend into the catacombs, candle in hand, and to pay their respects to the holy men of Russia. Personally I found the sight revolting as one must go through very narrow corridors only with the light thin tapers and pervaded by

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the smell of unwashed Ukrainian peasants and the accumulated odors of centuries. Along the wall are the coffins of the saints and their mummified remains. I was only too happy to get out into the fresh air again and I admired the piety of the Ukrainians and Russians who had come so far to refortify their faith at the source of Russian Christianity … The Potëmkin village, or false front, was not invented by the ingenious prince of that name to impress Catherine II. It is as old as Russia and still exists. On our return to Kharkov I had a vivid experience of how the Soviet authorities use it to give an erroneous impression of this country to foreign delegations. In front of the Intourist Hotel in Kharkov when we returned were drawn up three shiny new buses, with flowers in the windows and bright clean leather upholstery. They had brought a delegation of Scandinavian youth to the city and the transformation of the hotel was quite remarkable. The dining room where we had been three days before, had been dirty, fly-bitten, the food only just tolerable, and the waitresses frowsy and slow. Now the tables shone with clean tablecloths, quite different, and good silverware; there were roses in the cut-glass vases, the floor had been scrubbed, and all the Russian customers had been whisked away. The head-waiter was in tails, and the waitresses in smart black and white uniforms had obviously been to the beauty parlor. The food we were served was the best I have ever eaten in a Soviet restaurant and it included many items such as fresh fruit which were quite unobtainable previously. The rest of the hotel was also spruced up and the girls on each floor had on new uniforms. Furthermore all the staff ostentatiously refused tips though a few days before they had fallen over each other for a few roubles. The delegation had spent all day visiting the city, and had dinner in the Russian fashion at 4:30. After a rest they went to the theater at 8:00 and had a banquet at 11:30. This went on until 3:30 accompanied by songs and dancing. The next morning they left quite early for the next spot. It is easy to see how the combination of constant eating and drinking, fatigue and bonne camaraderie must quickly eliminate any spirit of objective criticism on the part of these people, particularly when what they are shown is so skillfully camouflaged as was the hotel in Kharkov … There was a marked difference between the crowds on the streets of these two cities and of Moscow, where the standard in clothing

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and footwear is much higher. Furthermore, the standard of behavior was much lower in the provinces, and crowds acted and looked much more like peasants just in from the farms. The great contrast, however, was to be seen in the countryside. We had a good opportunity to observe the Ukrainian village as we spent two days traveling at a rather leisurely pace through its richest part. It was, in fact, a truly depressing experience to pass through one of the richest agricultural lands in the world and note the abject and grinding poverty of the producers of that wealth. I find it quite impossible to believe that these people are much better off than they were in 1914. None of the villages we passed through, which are probably better off than the average, had electricity, telephone, water, except a communal pump, and most of them did not have either a store or a church. I noted one stretch of 55 miles in which several villages were passed without a village store. The roads, of course, are mere mud tracks. The people themselves were dressed in the poorest clothes, many in rags and the women mostly bare-foot. Those I talked to, both in the country and in the towns, seemed to me of an extraordinarily low intelligence. They looked under-fed, and mentally and physically brutalized. This is not very surprising if one recalls the centuries of serfdom, followed by the blood-letting of the First World War and the Civil War, the killing or exile of all the upper and middle classes, then the destruction of the more intelligent and enterprising kulaks during collectivization, and finally the human devastation of the Second World War. It seems incredible to me that the Russians can hope to build a great nation on such a base. They certainly have the technical means to be a great power, but I wonder how serious a threat such a people can be to the world. Perhaps this is essentially what Malenkov realizes when he has promised to improve the standard of living and the lot of the peasantry … The promises of Malenkov, if fulfilled, would reduce a little bit the heavy taxes on the private plots and give the peasants some cash for their kolkhoz labour. It might help to bridge the tremendous gulf between the urban and town dwellers, but carrying it out is going to create a tremendous number of difficulties for an economy which already finds it hard to provide the bare necessities for the urban population.

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Ukrainian nationalism is difficult to assess, particularly for a hurried traveller. In Georgia, because of the marked difference in race, language, culture and tradition, it was fairly easy to determine to what extent the Georgians had resisted russification. The Ukraine, however, is geographically an integral part of Russia and there is simply a vague ethnic boundary between the two, though it is marked in the Moscow-Kharkov road by a boundary post in the form of an obelisk. Racially also the Ukrainians differ little from the Great Russians and the language seems to a layman little more than a variant of Russian. I found I could read the Ukrainian newspapers without too much difficulty and I believe if one knows Polish it is even easier since most of the words which differ radically from Russian are similar to the Polish equivalents. In modern times the core of the Ukraine only became part of Russia in 1654. This European orientation shows primarily in Kiev and Kharkov which look far more eastern than Moscow. But it is difficult to believe it made much difference to the peasantry who seem much like their Great Russian cousins and whose outlook on life was coloured more by the steppe and natural surroundings than by the nationality of the overlord … I decided that it would be a good policy to fly the flag on the car on my trip through Ukraine, and I also prominently displayed the plaque with the maple leaf. At almost every stop a crowd quickly gathered around the car and in a matter of moments you could hear the word being passed around – “Canada.” I suppose in almost every town or village we passed through there must have been someone who had a relative or friend who had gone to Canada. At one point outside a church a crowd of several hundreds gathered around us. They were not in the least hostile but on the contrary showed a friendly curiosity. At this place when we left an old woman blessed us and everyone waved and smiled.

report on a trip to the georgian ssr, [june 1953] I left by train from the Kursk station at 7:30 in the evening of June 12 and arrived in Tbilisi in the late afternoon of June 15. This long and rather tiresome journey, however, proved rewarding in the excellent picture it gave of the immensity of the ussr and the variety of its landscape and peoples …

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At one point the train stopped for about 20 minutes in order to let another train pass. This was the signal for a large number of passengers to pour out of the train, rush down to the sea shore, strip down to their underwear and take a quick dip in the Black Sea … The Georgians are, of course, an entirely different race from the Russians and this is immediately obvious from the swarthy skins, black eyes and hair and lithe figures of both the men and women. One seldom sees good looking women on the streets of Moscow but they were numerous in Tbilisi … The men seemed to me to be better dressed on the whole than in Moscow and in addition to summer suits many of them wear a very sensible and rather attractive short coat of white linen or silk … The atmosphere on the streets is one of gaiety on the whole and wherever two or three Georgians are gathered together you can hear the ripple of conversation and laughter … Georgian men never sit at home. They have the sociability of the Russian but they congregate on the streets and in the restaurants rather than in each other’s homes … Tbilisi is a city of many races and while the Georgians of course predominate, there are also a great number of Russians resident in the city as well as Armenians, Jews, Azerbaijanians, Kurds (their women make a colorful figure as they still wear their national dress), Tartars and many of the other minor races of the Caucasus … The Caucasus is, of course, one of the most extraordinary melting pots of races in the world and it was curious to identify the various people in the streets of Tbilisi.

leningrad – 1946; and 1953 [dated 30 september 1953] My main impression on coming back to Leningrad is that, apart from continuing the process of tidying up and repairing the war damage which has by now been almost completed, at least in the parts of the city I saw remarkably little progress has been made beyond that goal. The underground is still far from ready, though I was shown one of the stations, opposite the Moscow Railway Station, which is under construction. I note that … this project had been started before the war; and I imagine the engineers have run into major difficulties if they have not yet been able even to get the main line, from the Finland Station to the Moscow Station, running. On my return from Leningrad the man across the aisle from me in the plane began a conversation by leaning across and saying:

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“Spechen Sie deutsch?” and encouraged by my “Ja, ein wenig,” we talked in bad German for a few minutes, then turning with relief to Russian at which an infantry officer sitting behind us joined in. The man who started the conversation, though in civilian clothes, was a naval officer and was proceeding to Vladivostok where he had a submarine. (So much for vigilance, which the papers have so long stressed must be shown, particularly towards foreigners.) The army officer asked me if I spoke Roumanian, and finding out that I was ignorant of that language, informed me proudly that he did. He had been stationed in Bucharest for sometime, but I could not find out in what capacity. He showed me a good Tissot wrist-watch and told me it was Swiss. I showed him mine, “Omega – also good,” he answered condescendingly. The sailor then insisted that the Soviet “Pobeda” was good too, but he did not sound very convinced. After finding out my nationality the army officer said: “Canada is American, isn’t it?” at which the naval officer scornfully corrected him: “Britansky dominion.” There was then a long discussion about our geography, peoples, language and political aims. The naval officer knew quite a bit about Canada. He said he was born in Leningrad but was a Ukrainian by birth. I told him there were many Ukrainians in Canada which he said he knew … We then got into a three-cornered argument about the relative merits of Leningrad and Moscow, the Army officer being a Moskvich and intensely proud of his city. He thought Leningrad dull and living in the past, to which the sailor replied that it was because they had stolen the capital from it and that Moscow was a village compared to Leningrad and had no right to be the capital. I imagine this grudge still rankles among good Leningraders. The army officer asked why we wanted to attack Russia. When I replied that we didn’t, he said he meant America. When again I replied that the Americans had no intention of attacking Russia, he seemed doubtful and questioned me a little bit more. I tried to get the naval officer from Vladivostok into a discussion of Korea but he was not to be drawn. Before landing, however, he said: “Let us hope there will never be another war,” to which I added my fervent agreement.

appendix c

Travels with Ford, 1954–1972

As chargé d’affaires in 1954, Ford with Thereza went on leave and travelled to Switzerland. Because the Soviet airline Aeroflot flying to Vienna stopped in Budapest, the Fords took the opportunity to see another Communist capital.1 They found the air terminal in Budapest rebuilt after the war but almost unused.

visit to budapest, 13 january 1954 We were put up at the Hotel Duna which before the war was called the Bristol. It is situated on the Pest side of the Danube and was one of a series of hotels which lined the bank of the river at that spot. Unfortunately, the Duna was one of the less elegant but it was the only one that survived the battle. It reminded me a good deal of the Hotel Bristol in Warsaw though the standard was not quite so low as the latter. It was more a question of the sinister atmosphere which seemed to clothe the place, the lack of taste in the furnishings, which consisted of the bare necessities, and the thug-like appearance of the staff and many of the patrons. It was quite cold in Budapest: the rooms were only barely heated and only a trickle of lukewarm water came out of the taps. The restaurant is somewhat better and is, I am told, used to impress foreign visitors. The food was not bad and it [the hotel] provided in the evening an orchestra which played surprisingly good American jazz. The prices in the hotel were high but the rate of exchange of the forint is more favorable than that of the rouble. The hotel had a sign in five languages, including Russian, announcing that foreign

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currencies could be exchanged for foreign money. I decided to have some fun at the manager’s expense and so produced some roubles for changing into forints. The manager was horrified and said at once that he could not accept roubles. I pointed to the sign and said in Moscow the Russians proclaimed the rouble as the world’s strongest international currency. The manager was adamant. I said that when I returned to Moscow and told my friends in the Foreign Ministry that even in Hungary the rouble was not acceptable they would not like it. The manager looked uneasy. Then I told him to forget it, adding, “I don’t want roubles. You don’t want roubles. Nobody wants roubles and you know perfectly well why, but why not be honest about it.” He had no answer … Budapest is, of course divided into two different cities, each with its own special character. Pest, on the south shore of the Danube, is perfectly flat and contains most of the business and shopping district and before the war the better hotels. Most of the government offices, including the parliament buildings, are located on this side. It is relatively intact with only the occasional gap left by bombing. The public buildings do not seem to have been seriously damaged. The hotels along the bank of the Danube were the chief victims as well as the bridges of which two or three have now been completely restored and work is proceeding on another. Buda, on the north shore of the Danube, is built around a mountain, the Var, and has an entirely different character. It consists of the old medieval fortress, the King’s Palace, the medieval city, some public buildings, the fashionable residential district, and along the Danube the slum areas. It took the brunt of the damage in the fighting and the old castle and city were almost completely ruined. The one thing for which the Hungarians must be given credit is the way in which they have gone about reconstructing the medieval town. They are replacing the buildings brick by brick and have already done a good deal, so that one can get quite a good idea of the charm of the old city. Some of the churches were pretty badly damaged and none of the treasures of Hungarian church architecture are as yet re-opened. Superficially the city looks not unattractive, for which, of course, the site and the pre-revolutionary monuments must be given sole credit. As soon as you look closer, however, you see the shoddy condition of the buildings, the lack of paint and proper maintenance and same general kind of tawdriness that you associate with Moscow.

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There were practically no private cars on the streets as it is almost impossible for a private individual to own one. As a result the city looked empty even in the middle of the day and by seven o’clock at night it looked like a dead town … In the Hotel Gellert … we had an excellent meal including some of the famous Gellert torta … the headwaiter, who spoke good English, spent most of the meal talking to us. He has a cousin in Toronto and asked many questions about Canada. He spoke in a very melancholic way about the Gellert before the war and how there used to be many famous guests including the Duke of Windsor. He ended up by saying that perhaps they would come back again some day. After the meal he took us to see the famous baths which were among the best known in Europe. They were full of “young pioneers” when we examined them and the headwaiter looked rather scornfully at the present users. On another occasion we were taken to the one remaining gypsy restaurant in Budapest, the Kisch Royal. The orchestra was excellent but unfortunately they were dressed up in dark business suits so it was a little difficult to get into the spirit of their gypsy music. Again the food was good but all the lights were blazing and the atmosphere had been completely destroyed. The few customers were about evenly divided between rather thug-like gentlemen who sat rather grimly gulping down their food and some very decadent looking youths. We walked around the streets a good deal and into some of the more typical shops. In the former most fashionable shopping street in Budapest it was rather sad to see the remnants of good shops. At one florist’s which still displayed the sign of the International Florists Union and the inscription in German that they could telegraph flowers to any place in the world, we could find only faded hydrangeas … In the other shops though some pretense has been made to make fashionable window displays, the imprint of Moscow can easily be felt. I visited one of the big department stores, now of course a state institution, and as soon as I entered the door I felt as if I were back in the Mostorg [a Moscow department store] – the same incredibly sloppy display of goods, the same tawdry materials and high prices. We made some comparison of prices and the scale seems to be about the same in comparison to salaries as in Moscow, which means that most of the goods on display would be quite out of reach of the

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average citizen. Even though it was in the pre-Christmas season very few people seemed to be buying anything … The trip to Vienna [by train] took about 6 and one-half hours though the distance is very short and most of this time was passed at the frontier. Once in Vienna you are to all intents and purposes outside the Iron Curtain, and the at least superficial gaiety and prosperity of the city and its inhabitants is a shock after Moscow and Budapest.

visit to the virgin lands, 15 september 1964 Mr. Khrushchev interrupted his holiday in the Caucasus in the middle of August to spend approximately ten days touring the entire Virgin Lands area. Presumably as a result of this trip and the favorable conditions this year the Soviet Foreign Ministry then invited the heads of Mission to also visit the area …We left Moscow on August 25 at 8:30 a.m. by Ilyushin 18 and landed in Tselinograd four hours and 45 minutes later, passing through three time zones en route … After a stirring meeting at the airport, including the presentation of flowers to each and every one of us by school children, we were whisked off to Tselinograd and installed temporarily in what looked like the converted ground floor of a new apartment building. It certainly was not a hotel as it had none of the requisites of a hotel. As it was by then 4 o’clock Tselinograd time, we had just barely time to freshen up before having a Russian style dinner at 5 p.m. in a restaurant in town. This had just been completed and was quite tasteful with waitresses smartly turned out in new uniforms, fresh linen, flowers on the table and reasonably good food. As the entire staff turned up four days later at the reception 250 kilometers north given by the Chairman of the Virgin Land area in Borovoe, I imagine it had been specially laid on for the occasion … We then returned to the hotel to fetch our luggage and boarded what seemed to be Mr. Khrushchev’s special train. At any rate it was made available to us for most of the remaining part of the trip. After spending the night on the train we stopped at 9 the following morning at a spot some 20 kilometers beyond the town of Yesil which is located approximately 400 kilometers due west of Tselinograd on the main Moscow-Kazakh railway line. Although we were in the

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middle of the steppe and there was no sign of any habitation in any direction there was a large caravan of busses and cars drawn up to meet us together with, once again, a deputation of children to present us with bouquets of flowers. We then proceeded to spend the next four hours visiting some five or six different state farms of the Yesil Production Administration which united approximately ten state farms under its general control. At each farm we were met by a farm manager and some of his experts and examined the crops in the fields, farm machinery and talked to the local officials. At about 2:30 o’clock we arrived at the State Farm Svobodny where we had a staggering banquet in the clubroom of the farm, given by the Manager and his staff. The banquet went on for about 3 hours and must have made a considerable dent in the economy of the state farm, or the Kazakh Foreign Ministry. It included, among other things, several Kazakh dishes such as koumiss, fermented mares’ milk, and a cooked sheep’s head set in the middle of the entrails of this animal. The various parts were distributed by hand to the honored guests. I was fortunate enough to be given a portion of the forehead as I was not looking forward with pleasure to the eye, the ear, the tongue, or some other part. During the meal there were numerous speeches about peace, friendship and peaceful coexistence, most of which were incomprehensible because we were provided simultaneously with a concert by the local talent. I was told very proudly that these were all members of the collective farm but when I went out behind the clubroom I discovered a caravan fixed up as a dressing room on which was printed “Mobile Performers Club of the Virgin Lands” – obviously a kind of group of entertainers which goes around from farm to farm to help relieve the monotony of life. During the banquet there was a sudden and heavy rainstorm preceded by thunder and lightning, very much like the sudden summer storms of the Prairies. When we emerged the courtyard and all of the street of the little village were a sea of mud and we had great difficulty in getting back to our train which had been brought into the Yesil station. One of the buses indeed had to be left in a ditch. We proceeded by train back to Tselinograd, reaching it that night at 11:45. We spent the night in the “hotel” and the following morning were taken to visit Tselinny Palace. This is a new building which combines a large theatre and cinema, canteen, restaurant and

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clubrooms. It is a most commendable structure, of a taste considerably better than most comparable buildings in Moscow, and was indeed the most striking feature of the Tselinograd landscape … At about 6 o’clock we left by train for Borovoe which we reached the following morning. Borovoe is an entirely different type of country. It is on the extreme northern edge of the prairies and looks very much like the country around Madawaska – rolling wooded hills interspersed with small farms and a conglomeration of about 70 small lakes. It is in fact to all intents and purposes an extension of the Siberian landscape. There are a number of sanatoria, rest-houses, pioneer camps and sports centers here. We were divided up into various groups – some went hunting hare and Siberian deer; others, including my wife, fishing; and others just driving and walking in the woods. It is said to have one of the most healthy climates in Russia and the air was certainly beautifully clear and invigorating. For luncheon we were taken on a picnic in the forest. This was a remarkable operation and looked as if it was organized by the Red Army. At a clearing in the forest several Kazakh- type tents had been set up, together with barbecues and rows of tables. The only catch was again the obligation to drink fermented mares’ milk and eat some of the more peculiar Kazakh dishes. We returned to Tselinograd by train and left for Moscow the following morning by air, after being once again overwhelmed with bouquets of flowers … The administrative capital of the Virgin Lands, Tselinograd, is located almost exactly in the geographical center of the area and I was told now has a population of 201,000. Like most Russian towns, this seems a flat impossibility until you explore the suburbs and realize how many people are crammed into a small amount of space. There are still a few faint traces left of the old Czarist garrison town of Akhmolinsk and a few streets obviously inhabited by Kazakhs but for the rest, the city is indistinguishable in its layout and architecture from any other city in central Russia. The population must have at least doubled since the launching of the Virgin Lands scheme and an obviously fantastic building job has gone on here. Since there is no wood or stone, presumably all building materials have to be transported a really tremendous distance. In addition to the long lines of monotonous looking apartment houses, the usual prerequisites of a city have been established, such as department stores, food shops, cinemas and the rather impressive combined theatre and clubhouse which I mentioned earlier …

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The gentleman who accompanied me during our visit to the Shortandi Agricultural Institution was called Irvin Franzovich Goessen. I said he must be German and he agreed that he was of German ancestry “but a good Russian.” My attempt to find out if he was a Volga German, or the son of political prisoners, was quite unrewarding. However, in spite of his attempt to prove that he was pure Russian now it was quite clear from his looks and his superior organization that he was of German origin … We had an interesting discussion about changes in Russia and he came out quite spontaneously with a peculiar story. He said that they were all obliged to have one political lecture a week and one “cultural lecture” every fortnight. The last cultural lecture had been delivered by a professor from Novosibirsk who had talked of the classical Greek city state and the beauty of life in those days. Goessen said that at the end of the lecture one of his colleagues had asked the professor when this beautiful life had existed. The professor replied, “over 2,000 years ago.” The questioner then asked, “well how can you explain that life was so beautiful 2,000 years ago and so ugly now?” The lecturer had been completely covered with confusion and had simply replied: “That is an interesting question which I will try to answer during the next lecture” … My German expert from Shortandi had with him, most untypically, a beautifully arranged briefcase from which he once by mistake brought out a sheaf of photographs of the farm a year ago. It was nothing but dust, and he admitted that last year had been pretty awful. And the years 60, 61 and 62. He said that even so last year not all the farms in the region had failed but nevertheless it is clear they had three poor years and one almost total failure. The question is, is it economic to continue when climatic conditions make it highly likely that this kind of cycle would be repeated? Unfortunately for the Russians the answer seems to be that it is in the final analysis dependent on rainfall, as most of the Soviet officials had to admit, and this is a very problematical factor … My feeling is that the Russians are hoping it will continue to provide at least a subsidiary grain supply until the program of intensification of agriculture in European Russia can be completed. They will then consider the Virgin Lands as more or less marginal, and crop failures, which are bound to occur, will not be catastrophic to the economy … The original purpose in settling the Virgin Lands was economic, but it will probably prove a wise political decision and I cannot

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envisage the enterprise being abandoned. The Chinese are too close, and too greedy. And then just for economic reasons it would be highly unlikely that the Russians would cut down, let alone abandon the huge investment they have put into the area.

visit to uzbekistan, 7 may 1965 Accompanied by my wife and together with the British Ambassador and Lady Trevelyan, I visited the Uzbek ssr from April 10 to 17, including the capital, Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara, Fergana and Kokand … We flew from Moscow to Tashkent in an Ilyushin 18 arriving in the early evening. [Tashkent] makes a pleasant contrast, because of its many parks and tree-lined streets, with the somber concrete of Moscow. This is partly due to the climate, partly to the good taste of the early Russian governors of Turkestan who had the foresight to plan the city well. It is, of course, a Russian city … The following morning we flew to Fergana in an an-24, a relatively small plane in which an amazing 48 persons were jammed, about half of them Uzbeks … The flight … was unpleasant because of the crowding of the plane and what seemed to me to be a failure of the pressurization of the cabin to work properly in our flight over the mountains … Fergana is a very pleasant little town laid out in Russian style but with a remarkable number of shade trees. This indeed we soon came to recognize as a feature of nearly all towns in that part of the world … Kokand lies 92 kilometers almost due West of Fergana. The road is asphalted and in good condition … As soon as we left Fergana I had the impression of being in the Middle East, more specifically in a Syrian oasis. The [Fergana] Valley owes its prosperity to a rich soil properly irrigated, and this type of agriculture, the way the trees and fields are kept, the mud and adobe buildings, and, in the countryside the almost universal use of the kaftan and turban by all the men, and native costumes by the women, plus the ubiquitous donkey, all made one wonder if one was still in the Soviet Union. In any case it was hard to believe we were scarcely 100 miles from China, and the ancient caravan route to Kashgar led due east from Fergana over the Pamirs. As there was uncertainty about being able to return to Tashkent that same evening we took a room in the main hotel. This looked as if it hardly had been touched since 1918 after occupation successively by both sides in the Civil War. A number of unfortunate Uzbeks

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were unceremoniously evicted from presumably the best room, the furniture of which consisted of four cots with iron springs, a table, a dilapidated wardrobe, and a chair. There was no wash basin or toilet, the latter being located in the courtyard … After a truly dreadful meal, we examined the town, which revealed very little except that the populace was largely Russian, which seemed to be true of most towns we saw except Bokhara. At the airport we found to our relief that in fact there would be a plane to Tashkent. The next morning we took off from Tashkent and reached Samarkand an hour later … We were fortunate in arriving for the Moslem New Year, El Eid El Kabir, so that a large proportion of the native population was out in the streets and bazaars dressed in their local costumes which are extremely colorful. The city gave an impression of considerable vitality and its Uzbek character was unmistakable in spite of the many Soviet buildings, and the old Russian garrison town … We traveled on to Bokhara in an il-14. This dingy town, with its fabulous monuments of Islamic art, is only just beginning to move into the Soviet 20th century. It has far more of the orient about it than Samarkand, since of course it remained the capital of the emasculated Emirate of Bokhara until 1920. In the last few years the Russians have begun rather belatedly to modernize the city and to look after the Ark, or fortress, and various mausoleums, mosques and madressahs. Bokhara was at one time one of the two or three great centers of Islamic teaching, but today only one of the theological colleges (madressahs) is functioning and when we asked to see it we were informed it was closed for the holidays … In some parts of the old city, “poor white trash” were living in dirt and poverty. These are probably the descendants of the Russian colonists who flooded in after the conquest in 1880 and who are described by Pahlen in his “Mission to Turkestan” (1912) as being lazy, unadaptable, arrogant, only interested in making a fast rouble, and convinced of their superiority over the natives … I was amazed at the very small effort made to appease Uzbek national consciousness. The main streets of the old town, for example, had names such as “Street of Red Proletariat,” “Karl Marx Street” and so on … The following day we asked for permission to visit a collective farm … The Engels II Collective Farm, located in the Kuzhdvan Raion covers over 5,000 hectares of arable land and produces cotton, grapes, apples, peaches, apricots, cherries and vegetables. Fifteen

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thousand people live on the farm, of whom 5,000 are workers. There are 2,000 head of cattle, and 200 tractors. Three thousand of the 5,000 hectares or arable land are sown to cotton. The entire farm depends on a complicated irrigation system, the original basis of which dates back to the times of the Arab conquest. The entire staff of the farm is Uzbek. The Director told us we were the first foreign guests ever to visit his farm of which he was quite rightly, inordinately proud. It was certainly the best I have seen in the ussr. The administrative buildings were clean and tasteful, though very simple. Every inch of soil seemed put to use. The orchards were neat and well looked after. And the Uzbek workers looked proud, though reserved. This contrasted so much with the dirt and inefficiency of Russian farms and with the sullen sloppiness of Russian workers. I was reminded of accounts of the first Russian immigrants to these parts who were invariably compared unfavorably by the Russian governors with the hard working, clean and efficient natives … The following day we returned to Tashkent by an an-24 plane, again jammed to the gunwales with Russian and Uzbek passengers. This time we made a more thorough visit of the Russian city and the old city which, as in Bokhara, reminds one of the Middle East. We visited the Barak Khan Madressah in the old city and were shown around by a very pleasant young man who claimed to be the secretary to the grand Mufti of Central Asia. A meeting of all the mullahs of Tashkent was in progress and we glimpsed them briefly seated in a circle on carpets in one of the rooms of the seminary, dressed in the traditional robes, their shoes neatly lined up at the door. I would like somewhat later, when I have more time, to review the whole question of Russian colonialism in Central Asia on the basis of this trip to Uzbekistan and my visit last August to North Kazakhstan. The pattern is becoming very clear to me, and the thread of continuity between the Russian “mission” in Central Asia in the nineteenth century, and Soviet colonialism is quite obvious. Suffice it in this context simply to quote General Skobelyov, the conqueror of Turkmenistan in 1880, to see with startling clarity the pattern of Russian thinking on this subject: “The might of Russia, God be praised, brings with it to Asia peace, equality and freedom of person and property; it is based, not on privileged classes, but on the struggling multitudes.”

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visit to leningrad, 25 january 1966 I traveled on the over-night train on Sunday January 2, arriving the following morning. We were delayed almost two hours by a very heavy fall of snow which continued through most of the day. The sun came out the following day and the old Tsarist capital looked stunningly beautiful under a mantle of fresh white snow … We stayed at the Astoria Hotel which has not changed very much since I first saw it almost twenty years ago, but the food, although expensive has vastly improved … The atmosphere in Leningrad continues to be less oppressive and more European than in Moscow and the local pride is still very strong. Because its population was already urbanized for at least a century before the Revolution, and it has not been subjected to the high influx from the countryside that has given a peasant stamp to Moscow, it seems more sophisticated. This is even apparent in the restaurants and theaters. Among the presentations we saw was a new ballet produced by the Kirov Theatre based on John Steinbeck’s short story, “The Pearl.” Although not very successful because it is stretched out over a three hour period it did at least include a real attempt at modern choreography. The story deals with the exploitation of Indian pearl fishermen in Southern California by capitalist middlemen and is distorted, at times grotesquely, for propaganda purposes. It did not receive enthusiastic applause. During the intermission I struck up a conversation with a rather distinguished looking Russian who, after some preliminary questions to determine who I was, queried me closely about Steinbeck, how true this picture of America was, and so on. I said he had painted fairly accurate scenes of small segments of American life at specific moments in American development but they hardly would be considered an up-to-date picture of America. He nodded and said he thought as much. One day we visited the former Summer Palace of the Tsars at Tsarskoe Selo, now called Pushkino, and Pavlovsk built by the Emperor Paul. Both were occupied by the Germans during the siege of Leningrad and very badly damaged. Indeed on my previous postings it had been impossible even to visit them because of the extensive damage, much of it vandalism pure and simple … Returning to Leningrad we gave a lift to a young man who had talked to us about the technique of restoring bronzes. He said he

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had tried history and found it too “complicated.” What he meant was that the Party line changed too frequently. He then went to the Institute of Foreign Languages in Leningrad where he learnt English. He was a bit vague about how he ended up in the Pavlovsk museum explaining bronzes to visitors. I mentioned that I had translated Anna Akhmatova’s poem about Pavlovsk upon which he recited the whole poem and spoke with great enthusiasm about her poetry, the difficult time she had, and her reestablishment in favor. “With Pasternak she is our greatest poet,” he said. “They can never really obliterate great poetry.” He then went on to talk about other good young poets who are beginning to establish their work but when I asked about Joseph Brodsky, he simply changed the subject. Brodsky is the Leningrad poet accused of parasitism and exiled to the Archangel District for a period of forced labor. Far fewer negro and Asiatic faces were to be seen in Leningrad public places than in Moscow but one disagreeable incident occurred in the Hotel Astoria restaurant. Two Tanzanian students who were already rather tipsy kept asking the women at every table in turn to dance with them and on every single occasion were turned down. They tried this on for almost an hour, although they were twice told to leave by the manager, who gave instructions that they were not to be served any more liquor. When they began abusing the ussr in a loud voice, and in particular complaining about racial discrimination, the management put them out. It was obvious from the looks on the faces of the Russians in the restaurant that they were embarrassed and disgusted.

visit to siberia, 28 march 1967 My wife and I sailed from Yokohama on February 14 on board the Soviet vessel “Baikal,” a 5,000-ton East German-built miniature of the “Alexander Pushkin” with the same rather shoddy second-rate furnishings … The sloppy, casual service and the really appalling food were made up for by the efforts on the part of the crew to be friendly and helpful. I gathered from a conversation with the purser that all their supplies are Russian and put aboard at Nakhodka. Nothing is bought at either Hong Kong or Yokohama. Since we were on the last two days of a fortnight out of Nakhodka, even what must

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have been at the beginning pretty awful food was almost uneatable by the time we returned to their home port … One approaches Nakhodka along the shore of the Primorskii Krai. The hills are treeless and there is no sign of either life or vegetation except for the occasional lighthouse, particularly apparent when the channel turns north and the Bay of Nakhodka proper opens up. The approaches to the port itself were full of ice floes and the “Baikal” had to twist slowly through them. Although the harbor itself was white with ice, it was obviously not very thick since the ship approached its wharf and berthed with only the assistance of a couple tugs … In appearance Nakhodka is a pretty bleak place since the surrounding hills have practically no vegetation, but the climate is considerably milder than the interior … I asked the mayor where the bulk of the population came from since it had obviously had to be imported. The bulk of the population, he said, had come from European Russia … Apart from the architectural differences, it reminded me slightly of St. John’s, Newfoundland … The Mayor was very proud of what had been achieved in Nakhodka in such a short time and seemed to think that the city is destined to be a great port. However, he admitted that it was now, and would probably continue to be, quite small compared to Vladivostok which has a population of 700,000 (compared with 110,000) … At Khabarovsk, which was fortunately undergoing a heat-wave (it was only –20 c. with bright sunshine), we were met by an official of Intourist and an official of the City Soviet who successfully evaded identifying himself either by name or position. Unlike the Mayor of Nakhodka, they were aggressive and determined to put across a consistently propagandistic view of their city. [It] numbers about 500,000 population and is approximately 100 years old. However, the bulk of the present population and much of the building is quite new. Although of course the city official did not reveal the fact, Khabarovsk is largely a product of slave labor working under the direction of the mvd. Perhaps this colored my view of the place but I found it a singularly unattractive sprawl of buildings of the Moscowsuburbs type. After a few hours in this large but dismal city, we left Khabarovsk on board the Trans-Siberian proper, the Vladivostok-Moscow “Express.” I put this in quotes since the average speed was about

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30 kms. an hour and the steam engine would have delighted the eyes of any railway buff. Although this is called Train No. 1, “The Rossiya,” it seem unbelievable that it could be dirty and so uncared for. Add to this the layer of soot which managed to infiltrate into the coaches from the steam engine and you can imagine that it was not a very comfortable journey … Shortly after the train crossed the Amur River, we entered the Jewish Autonomous Region. The train stopped for about 20 minutes at its capital Birobijan, an unprepossessing little town built almost entirely of wood. Apart from one or two signs written in Hebrew, there was nothing to indicate that this had once been Stalin’s dream for a Soviet Jewish homeland … The train drew into Irkutsk station just as dawn was breaking. Snow was falling heavily and the effect was hushed and eerie. We were met by a member of the Secretariat of the Oblast Committee, M.I. Alperin, the local head of Intourist, and a number of other officials who were never properly identified … Mr. Kravchenko [chairman of the Irkutsk Oblast Executive Committee] … explained how the building of the Irkutsk hydroelectric station on the Angara River ten years ago and the Bratsk hydro-electric station some 300 miles north, completed last year, were transforming the oblast. Up to ten years ago, he said there had been very little electricity outside the main towns but now it had spread to almost every village of any importance. It had also turned Irkutsk from a sleepy administrative town to an industrial city with a population of 480,000 … Unlike Khabarovsk and Novosibirsk, [Irkutsk] has a certain charm even though the constantly falling snow gave it a distinctly but not surprisingly Siberian look. It was in fact the tsarist capital of Eastern Siberia and one of the centers of exile for the more aristocratic revolutionaries, of which they seemed rather proud … Prince Troubetskoi had lived in Irkutsk. It has several charming and oldfashion avenues lined with trees, a theatre dating from the 1890’s and a number of quite interesting buildings such as the former governor’s palace … Alperin himself told me that he was born in Rostov-on-Don but “found himself in Irkutsk after the war,” married a local girl and liked it there. I asked him if he was Jewish and he replied simply, “I am a Soviet citizen.” Later on I asked him what his name and patronymic were and he said, “Mark Isakovich.” As the day passed, he

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became more friendly and spoke a good deal about his war experiences and gave me to understand that he had not been sent to Irkutsk by choice at the end of the war. I suspect in fact that he may have been one of Stalin’s victims who managed to survive and recover after the denunciation of Stalinism. It is also worth noting that at the airport on leaving he said to me, “Please excuse me for having been dishonest. Of course I am Jewish.” I mentioned this to the Israeli Ambassador a few days ago and he said that it was a perfect example of the complexes under which Jews in the ussr worked. Clearly with a name like Mark Isakovich Alperin, the man was Jewish but his reluctance to admit it was typical of the strictures under which the Soviet Jews had to function … We left Irkutsk about three o’clock in the afternoon and therefore had the good fortune to travel down the Angara Valley in daylight. This is a remarkable sight. It now consists of some 20 or 30 kms. with one factory after another. Clearly all this has been built up in the last ten years to take advantage of cheap power from the Irkutsk hydro-electric station … We had originally planned to spend a day in Novosibirsk and continue on by plane. Unfortunately, the heating system in our coach broke down. Curiously enough each coach on the train seemed to have its own coal stove which is independent of the train as a whole. Since the temperature outside was about 35 below zero, it was extremely cold in the train and my wife, who had caught a cold in Irkutsk, was running a very high fever. We therefore decided reluctantly to eliminate the Novosibirsk trip and continue on by train to Moscow. Incidentally, one of the complications of the lack of heating in the coach, which lasted for almost a full day, was the toilet facilities. The water system had frozen and had to chopped free about every two hours. Going to the toilet was, as you can imagine a dangerous and highly uncomfortable operation … We were following the route of the original Trans-Siberian line which went from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok. This means the most northerly east-west line in European Russia. The direct road from Sverdlovsk to Moscow goes through the city of Gorky. This is largely wooded country with occasional small farms looking not unlike Northern Ontario around Sudbury although not so rocky and with fewer lakes. There is indeed very little of interest on this entire stretch until the train switches from Urals-Leningrad line to proceed south to Yaroslavl and Moscow.

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visit to the kuban, georgia, and armenia, 4–10 october 1972 We flew from Moscow to Rostov-on-Don the morning of September 4. As is very often the case in internal flights, we were delayed approximately an hour and then departed in a really ancient Ilyushin 18 turbo-prop which was unbelievably noisy and shaky and in descent at Rostov the lack of proper pressurization made it very painful on the ears … I had been in Rostov-on-Don in June 1953 but had not been back since. On that first occasion Rostov was still out of bounds to diplomats but the plane taking us from Tbilisi to Moscow was forced by bad weather to land at Rostov. We were bundled out of the plane into a car with closed windows, rushed to a hotel where we were kept in our rooms, although provided with supper, and rushed back to the airport the next day. There I could truly say that I had been in Rostov but had never seen it … The following morning we set out by car to cross the Kuban to Pyatigorsk … The land is mostly flat or slightly undulating and the only sign of the Kuban Cossacks that we could see was the occasional horseman watching over a herd of cattle and one or two statues to revolutionary Cossack heroes … [After a night in Pyatigorsk] we left at an early hour because rain was threatened and because a message from the Georgian Council of Ministers had intimated that we would be met at the “frontier” … We were already well into the main mountains when we crossed the border into Georgia through a spectacular cut in the solid wall of rock leading down a long defile which must have been almost impassable for a hostile army in the past. Then the highway, now paved and in quite good condition began to rise rapidly. Suddenly the rain stopped and the sun came out revealing a wildly spectacular landscape of snow-covered peaks in the distance and a savage gorge – the Samathia Gate of classical times. At this moment we came upon a small party who stopped us. This proved to be an escort sent from Tbilisi … In view of the hair-raising nature of the road we were only too happy to have a police car ruthlessly stopping cars and trucks in advance of us. At the top of the pass we stopped to see Mount Kazbek, just barely visible as it towers 15,560 feet high. As we continued up the valley of the Terek, made famous by Lermontov in “A Hero of Our Time,” we saw the occasional ruined castle, many high

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stone watch towers, from which the advance of an enemy could be signaled to the next valley, and a number of still remarkably well preserved medieval churches … The last time I was in Georgia was in June 1953 when it was still basking in the relative quiet and prosperity brought by the patronage of its two famous sons, Stalin and Beria. Stalin died in March 1953 and when I was in Tbilisi in June we first realized a police coup had taken place in Moscow, eliminating Beria, when overnight the Beria Square became Square of the Revolution. But the disappearance of these unsavory protectors made little real difference and the feeling of nationalism, which Stalin implicitly tolerated, has continued to flourish. Signs of it were to be seen everywhere. First and foremost one has the feeling immediately that Georgia is Georgian and not Russian, whereas in the Ukraine, or Kazakhstan, for example, the Russian presence is obvious and overwhelming … This is not to deny Russian control. But it is exerted in a more subtle fashion than in the past. The Georgian cp is totally orthodox and loyal to Moscow. But even so Moscow must keep a close eye on Tbilisi to make certain that nothing is done to endanger the party line as laid down at the center. The pride of the Georgians in their past and in their language and culture is enormous, and justified. And every effort is made to instil this patriotic pride in the citizenry, modified … by respectful references to the ussr and gratitude to Moscow. One manifestation of this is the cult of Stalin … Mr. Tchipachvili [of the Georgian Foreign Ministry] told me that he considered Stalin a great man without whom the war would not have been won. When I remarked on what he had done to the Soviet people and suffering he had imposed, Mr. Tchipachvili simply replied, “He never touched Georgia.” For the Georgians therefore he was a remote tyrant who shielded them from the worst of his excesses, and I am sure many look back nostalgically to the days when a Georgian ran the country … The road from Tbilisi to Yerevan crosses the most westerly part of the Azerbaijanian Republic for about 45 kilometers. There are no towns and only a few small villages but the Moslem cemeteries and graves, the appearances of the houses, and the rather sloppy air of the people clearly mark it as belonging to Asia rather than Europe. But the country looks rich and there are many vineyards … Mr. Gasparov [of the Armenian Foreign Ministry] told me at least 40% of the people went to church regularly … He himself asked if

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I would like to visit the Catholicos or head of the Armenian Church. I accepted with alacrity and on Sunday morning we drove the 20 kilometers to Echmadzin which is the seat of the Catholicos. It seemed odd that the Secretary General of the mfa should propose the visit and actually escort us there … We were received by His Holiness Vasken I, in an impressive library, were invited to sit and partook of light wine and biscuits. He is a man of 55, of Romanian origin, and obviously intelligent, clever, and cultured. He spoke perfect French … He spoke with confidence of the future … The Catholicos volunteered that the church was really a living body, which had established excellent relations with the State. He saw no reason why the two should not continue to cohabit their same motherland … The Catholicos appeared a half hour later and walked in procession to the Cathedral though very large crowds of people. Since all could not get in to the church many of them stood outside and listened to the service broadcast. I also noticed at one corner of the cathedral a spot where a number of peasants had gathered to sacrifice a chicken. The strength of religious feeling in Armenia is clearly linked to Armenian nationalism. Through centuries it has been their religion which has sustained the Armenians in their travails so that it must be an integral part of their feeling as Armenians … I suppose the effort to recreate the Armenian Republic had to combine respect for the religion if it were to be successful. Then it must have become increasingly difficulty to limit the church’s activities and influence without having more trouble than was considered necessary … Whatever the reasons the results are unique and the situation is more like Poland than the rest of the ussr. So long as the Catholicos plays whatever game the Moscow authorities want him to play, presumably he will be able to continue to propagate the faith (a new issue of the New Testament has just appeared in Armenian).

appendix d

Travels with the Ambassador, 1978–1979

new soviet travel regulations, 20 march 1978 I decided to test the new regulations as regards travel in the Moscow area and drove to Volokolamsk.1 This city is situated about 120 kilometers nw of Moscow. Until recently travel has only been permitted up to the city of Istra which was the German advanced hq in the winter of 1941–42. About half way between Istra and Volokolamsk we stopped at a public parking area for sandwiches. Within minutes a militia car with four policemen, which had clearly been following us, drew up and announced that this was a forbidden area and we had to leave. I said the road was now open to foreigners. He replied only in transit. I told him who I was and that we intended to stay and picnic. He conferred with his colleagues and announced he would have to “call.” I told him to go ahead. After a while he came back and demanded my “dokumenti.” I refused, saying he knew perfectly well who I was. He then asked what I was doing on the road. I said it was none of his business. He and his colleagues, obviously stymied, then prowled around until we had finished our picnic and went on to Volokolamsk. We had no further trouble … I wish every casual visitor to Moscow could be forced to include this trip in their itinerary in order to realize the extent to which Russia is backward. Volokolamsk itself is a small town of perhaps 10,000 people, with some attractive old wooden houses and a monastery which was badly damaged in the war, probably because it occupies a commanding position above the town. The town itself is in a state of dilapidation which is hard to imagine for anyone who

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does not know rural Russia. Its lack of facilities, paved roads and indeed almost any aspect of a modern city is particularly striking when you think that it is only 60 miles from Moscow …

my trip to the southern ukraine, 25 may 1978 From May 7 to May 20 I made a trip to the Southern Ukraine and the Sea of Azov area accompanied by Mrs. Ford … The first day was probably the most difficult and disagreeable because of the appalling state of the road from Moscow as far as Mtsensk. It seems quite incredible that this main road leading out of the capital should be narrow, broken up, full of potholes, and almost indescribably bad. At Mtsensk we paused briefly and could well understand how “Lady Macbeth from Mtsensk,” the heroine of Shostakovich’s opera of the same name, should have decided in a total state of boredom to murder successive husbands in an effort to get out of it. From Mtsensk to Orël the road was slightly better and from Orël to Kursk again slightly better, but it really only improved after Kharkov … When we arrived at the Hotel Kursk, which is about 20 or 30 years old, we asked if there was a lift. The answer was “yes, but only to the third floor.” As our rooms were on the second floor, I then said I would take a room on the third floor. The manager then said that while in theory there was a lift and it went up to the third floor the lift in fact did not work at all. We were then introduced to a rather absurd comedy. The “dezhurnaya” had put our suitcases in the room and locked the door with the key on the inside. It took almost an hour and six people to finally figure out a way of entering into the room, to wit by a ladder up the outside, breaking a window and then getting into the room. However, it was reasonably comfortable although there was no hot water. About midnight, my wife got up for a glass of water and was horrified to see that a porter, in full uniform, was sitting on a chair in the main square beside our car. The next morning when I protested to the manager that it had been unnecessary he said not to be worried because this experience had given the porter something to tell his children. So much for excitement in Kursk … Another day we tried to go to Balaclava [in the Crimea] as I wanted to see the site of the famous Charge of the Light Brigade but it was impossible to do so. In fact, the Intourist guide finally admitted that

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this was the one area to which even Soviet citizens could not go. We did, however, get to the Balder Gates which is the farthest point permitted on the way to Sevastopol. It climbs up through the pass into the mountains and at the very top is the monumental gate erected at the time the road was completed in the early 19th century. Apart from that there was nothing much to be seen. Coming back, however, we did catch up with a Zil limousine, with a flashing light on top, and I am quite sure that the passenger was Suslov. The car was going about 40 kms an hour and there was another man in the back seat and a bodyguard in the front seat. When I mentioned this to the chauffeur he said it must be Suslov since it is well known that he is the only member of the hierarchy who refuses to travel faster than 40 kms an hour … We stopped for lunch at a small restaurant in an architectural extravaganza, built in the early years of the century by a GermanRussian millionaire for his Gypsy mistress. Towards the end of the meal we were approached by a young man to ask if we were Canadians. He said he was from Edmonton. He had worked on the pipe-lines for five years and was giving himself a European tour. He had already done Moscow, Irkutsk, Frunze and Odessa and was going on to Kiev, Bucharest, Istanbul, etc. At one point he said he was glad he had not had to call the Embassy for help but might still need it. He had hitch-hiked from Yalta to Sebastopol and, as he said, “when I saw all those battleships and submarines I began to think maybe I shouldn’t be here.” Nevertheless he crashed a sailors’ dance and hitch-hiked back without incident. Since I did not hear from him again I presume the Soviet police did not catch up with him … Zhdanov, formerly Mariupol, is a very pleasant, quite large city. The Mayor sent a representative to meet us and after we were established in the Hotel Spartak, which lived up to its Spartan name, escorted us around the town, carefully avoiding the huge Azovstal steel plant to the east. The hotel, built probably in the early fifties, was very poor, without even a lift, but the food was passable … Unfortunately, in view of the fact that I was the first ambassador ever to stay there, the Mayor had given instructions to have the vip “suite” redecorated. They so thoroughly repainted it the windows would not close properly. There was a cold wind and rain all night long which chilled us through and through. There were numerous Indians in the hotel, probably students at the Azovstal metallurgical plant. They looked cold and bored …

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Since we were the first diplomats to visit Taganrog officially we were given exceptional treatment. At almost every corner was a militiaman to salute us as we roared around the town, which has a population of about 30,000, with a police escort … Taganrog was occupied by the Germans from October 17, 1941, to August 30, 1943, and the scars are still there. One of the continuing sources of amazement during this entire trip was the extraordinary speed with which the Germans managed to over-run such a huge territory in such a short time. But we marveled at what the average German soldier must have thought when he reached Taganrog, or further on Rostov, and then looked beyond to the seemingly endless plains, wondering no doubt just how far he would have to go before he reached the end and the Russian armies laid down their arms … During my trip I noticed that the Russians still use the system of building huge grain elevators at distances of about 100 kms. I had first seen this in Northern Kazakhstan and the experts out there complained that it was very difficult to organize transport for long distances and get the grain safely to the elevators. I imagine a great deal of grain is spoiled or lost in transit. Later in the day we drove the 70 kms. to Rostov-on-Don, accompanied all the way by a Taganrog representative in an advance car. To our great surprise the new Hotel Intourist, put up by a Finnish company in 1973, is the best in the ussr, and astounding to find in Rostov. The old Hotel Rostov is an abomination … My main impressions of the trip as a whole are that the Ukraine is better and better looked after than the central part of the Russian Federation but still hopelessly behind the western world. Food supplies were very inadequate and limited in choice except in the hotels. Very little more than lip-service is paid to the Ukrainian language and culture. Nevertheless conditions are better than they were 10 years ago and much better than 25 years ago …

trip to leningrad and chudova, 12 june 1979 We arrived in Leningrad at about 6 p.m. on June 2, driving from Helsinki and had dinner that evening in the Astoria with the Consul General of Finland and Mrs. Karpinen in a largely transformed and now reasonably elegant restaurant. The main job of the Consul General is to keep his compatriots who arrive in droves to drink cheap

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liquor in Leningrad, out of jail. He was apprehensively preparing for Turku Week, Turku being twinned with Leningrad … Before leaving Moscow I had told the Foreign Ministry that I wished to visit the town of Chudova which is out of bounds for foreigners. The justification I gave was my interest in the history of Russia during the Napoleonic Wars. Chudova was the site of the first military colony set up by Alexander I’s Interior Minister, Count Arakhcheev, who had a large property in the vicinity … In 1941 Chudova was in the line of battle and was almost completely destroyed. After much palavering the Mayor produced some photographs of Alexander’s military colonies and the Arakhcheev palace to prove that nothing remained as a result of the fighting. This was the main reason for our visit and to cushion the disappointment the Mayor offered us a visit to the house of Nekrasov, and to a match factory … We then arrived at the Match Factory, a very large building conspicuously clean by Soviet standards and even equipped with a lift which took us to the 4th floor where we met the director in his “board room”… I asked when we would see a match being produced and the answer was evasive. In reply to my query about the type of machinery he said it was “of various sorts and from various sources.” We were then subjected to the usual Russian banquet at the end of which it was clear we were not going to see a match in production. In fact in the huge building there was hardly a sound, no machinery whirring, no trucks coming and going, only a few workers strolling around. Since it was a Tuesday this seemed very odd but I got no answer. However, I was two and one-half hours in a kind of phantom match factory, well named the “Proletarsky Znamya” [Proletarian Banner]… To satisfy our curiosity about the military colonies of Alexander I the town had imported a young man from the cultural department of the Novgorod City Council. He was very learned on the subject and spoke some English. When we found that he would have to go back on the bus that evening we invited him to go in our car as far as Leningrad. This took frantic telephoning before it was cleared. There was a revealing episode as a result of his driving with us to Leningrad. 200 miles further on the way to Moscow we ran into a militia block and our car was flagged down. All they wanted to ascertain was if we were 3 in the car. Obviously some officious

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policeman had reported seeing 4 persons in the car and they had to check it out.

impressions of germany, poland, and byelorussia, 24 november 1978 From October 6 to 15 I traveled from Paris to Moscow by car, following the route Bonn, Berlin, Dresden, Cracow, Warsaw, Minsk. My impressions , although fleeting, may be of interest … Crossing from Poland into the ussr was comparable, in the drop in living standards, to crossing from East Germany into Poland. Very soon after leaving Brest-Litovsk the ubiquitous log izbas begin and indeed stretch for 4,500 miles across the great northern Russian plain all the way to the Pacific Ocean. We stopped for the night in Minsk which has improved remarkably since our last visit and begins to look like the city of 1,000,000 which it now is. Considering that only three buildings remained standing at the end of the war there is a considerable achievement. The Minsk Hotel, however, is pretty awful and when I remarked on it was told that it had gone up very fast 25 years ago as an early priority but there was a plan for a new hotel in some unspecified future … The facilities for lunch on the roadside being very bad we detoured to Smolensk to try our luck, first having a look at the rather beautiful cathedral which has been restored after the damage it received in the last war. But the rest of the town is unbelievably drab and shabby. We found no reasonable restaurant, tried the market where some apples were available and went on. At the next town we stopped and went into a grocery shop where there was no bread, no meat or fowl, and no milk, cheese, butter or salami. We finally purchased some “hard tack” and a bag of nuts steeped in honey. This only some 200 kilometers from Moscow.

visit to novgorod, pskov, and leningrad, 12 june 1979 Novgorod lies 500 kilometers north of Moscow on the main road to Leningrad. Even after all these years in the ussr it still amazes me that the main highway between Russia’s two major cities should

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be in such a dreadful state. Even for military reasons one would have thought it advisable to improve the road. But it remains badly surfaced and frequently interrupted by long stretches under ostensible repair. I say ostensible because the end results never seem greatly to differ from the original … [Novgorod] was badly damaged in 1941 as the Germans advanced on Leningrad and even more when they retreated, the ancient Kremlin and churches on a water-enclosed site making it a natural fortress. It was this, of course, which appealed to the Varangians when they chose it as the place for the entrepot trade between Northern Europe, Kiev, and Constantinople. When the Germans departed there were only 44 buildings left intact in the town and all the historical monuments had been damaged to a greater or lesser degree. Now Novgorod is a city of 200,000 inhabitants and the Kremlin and churches have been almost completely restored. The new city is inevitably not very attractive and undistinguished, except for the central square and the streets around the Kremlin. In the usual Russian disregard for planning, row after row of identical apartment buildings litter the landscape, interspersed with factories. The major industries are chemical and electronics … [In Pskov, Acting Mayor E.A.] Petrov gave me a summary of the problems faced in rebuilding Pskov from its ruins to a city of 180,000 people, a saga similar to that of Novgorod. However, Pskov fortress had been more heavily damaged than the Novgorod Kremlin and work is still continuing on it. It was from the earliest time the major Russian fortress protecting Novgorod and Russia proper from the Lithuanians, Poles, Teutonic Knights and Swedes. It must have been an impressive fortress in its day. The inner fort itself is quite extensive and contains a very old Cathedral which, unlike most Russian churches, is very high and dazzling white, dominating the horizon from every direction. Beyond the inner fort are four outer walls, some of which are still standing. The Germans used it as a strong point in delaying the retreat in 1944 and as a result it was very severely damaged … We were also taken on the obligatory tour of the mementos to Lenin. In 1901, after he had been exiled from Petersburg and Moscow he lived in Pskov where he started the underground paper Iskra. The flat he lived in (very comfortably) still exists, and the wooden house in the suburbs where Iskra was printed. My only commentary was that

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the Tsarist police must have been almost abnormally incompetent to have missed all this subversive activity … The second day was spent at Pushkinskoe Gore, some 125 kilometers south east of Pskov where Pushkin spent several years of exile on his family’s estate. The house itself was in the front line in the last war and was destroyed, but most of the contents had been taken away and it has been meticulously restored – not too difficult a feat since it was a small, one-story wooden structure, in keeping with the poor agricultural land and the fact that there were 100 serfs who worked on the estate … The Soviets have seized on Pushkin as a kind of forerunner, faute de mieux, just as they did on the Decembrists. An enormously long and elaborate opera on the latter theme, by Shaporin, was on our program in Leningrad, and we could not help thinking of the poverty of the precursors of the Bolsheviks if the latter had to fall back for inspiration on aristocrats who were vaguely dissatisfied with the Tsar but had no intention whatsoever of giving up one iota of their privileges or changing the system on which their wealth was based. Coming out of the Kirov Opera House we ran into Prince George Golitsyn, whom we had known in London, and who is now conducting “art” tours to the ussr. I asked how he could do it. He replied that it was the only way he could re-establish contact with his beloved Russia. When I mentioned that we had just been in Pskov he exclaimed how he envied us the chance of seeing that great ville d’art. That great ville d’art is a myth if you compare it with a hundred richer cities in Western or Central Europe. But for the Russians, Pskov is the “Forpost” [Outpost], as they call it, of their civilization, and its shabbiness, backwardness and poverty are forgotten. The whole triangle – Leningrad-Novgorod-Pskov – is terribly poor country; the few villages unpainted, the shops miserable. But it is Russian history, and not just of the far distant past since on every step of the road to Leningrad you see memorials to the battles of the last war, including that of Luga, some 100 kilometers south of Leningrad where the Northern Army was broken and the Germans were able to rush through right up to the gates of the city … It was ironic that the two theatrical performances which we saw are both by contemporary Soviet composers but both take place at the time of Alexander I and are totally conventional in form. The first is the Decembrists by Shaporin. It is a hugely long (five hours)

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opera which attempts to portray the ill-fated conspirators of 1825 as revolutionary fore-runners. In the end it comes out mostly as a tremendous spectacle and loving portrayal of early 19th century Russian society. The second performance was “Ballad of the Hussars” by Khrenikov. It is a frothy story in ballet form of a girl who, imbued by patriotic fervor, disguises herself as an ensign of hussars and fights Napoleon. Again, it is a splendid spectacle but an odd subject for a contemporary Soviet composer. Khrenikov was present, incidentally, and received applause, although the premiere was several weeks ago. An official had told me that Pyotr Demichev, the Minister of Culture, was also going to be present. Certainly the side entrance was blocked off, the Director and staff were lined up and the security was considerable. But he did not appear. Possibly he was busy looking into the case of the members of the Leningrad Philharmonic who recently defected in Tokyo. The following day his Zil limousine passed us going at a dangerous speed on the way back to Moscow. . . .

a visit to the crimea, the black sea, abkhazia and georgia, 17 october 1979 On August 15 we left Moscow by Aeroflot tu–134a jet for Simferopol where we arrived two hours later. The weather was warm and pleasant in Moscow but 1,500 kilometers to the south, stormy. We landed in a frightening thunderstorm and continued with our driver, who was awaiting us, in a constant downpour, arriving in Massandra, just outside Yalta, an hour and half later. One day we drove to Evpatoria on the west coast of the peninsula about 50 miles north of Sevastopol which is, of course, still firmly out of bounds. On the way we passed through the small town of Saki which appears to be largely industrial but is becoming also a resort town, “cheap resort town,” as our driver characterized it. Much of this consists of camping sites near the sea. It was amazing to see huge areas covered by tents next to Zhiguli and Moskvich cars. There seemed to be the basic amenities, i.e., toilets and a grocery store, but the amusements must be very limited. I thought it extraordinary that anyone who could afford a Zhiguli would come on such a primitive holiday. Our driver said most people do not know what to do with a private car when they finally get one, and in any case most Russians’

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idea of a holiday is to do nothing but sit in the sun. The food in the resorts is terrible and they only eat a few basic things and drink. From Yalta we went by boat to Sochi, an over-night trip. Sochi is strictly a resort town. Although it existed before 1917 it was really built up after the Revolution and is the largest of its size in the ussr. Its usual population is about 100,000, but during the season it reaches 250,000. The result is controlled bedlam and, combined with temperatures of 40 degrees, and a very uncomfortable hotel, it was hard to imagine why the thousands of tourists, Soviet and foreign, including a conducted tour of Canadians, would want to go there. The Hotel Zhemchuzhina, which unbelievably means “Pearl,” is only four years old but looks at least 25. That is the problem with Soviet construction, almost instant decrepitude. The Intourist Director rather apologetically said it had been built on plans of 1960 but took 15 years to go up. On August 26 we left by car for Sukhumi. At the “frontier” between the rsfsr and the Abkhazian assr, which is part of the Georgian ssr, we were met by the Chief of Protocol of the Georgian Foreign Ministry, and his wife, and a representative of the Abkhazian Council of Ministers. We drove to Gagra, a pleasant resort town, divided into the posh section with parks, private villas and good hotel and sanatoria, and a more decrepit proletarian section. The first part is quite beautiful and quiet, the second cheap, dirty and noisy. We then continued on along the coast to Pitsunda. Access to the resort area of Pitsunda is carefully controlled by a barrier which is only raised after identification. The area contains five rest homes and a small hotel but, more important, the villa of Kosygin. It is very quiet. The whole area is covered with a kind of semi-tropical pine. The people we saw bathing or walking around looked infinitely superior to those in Yalta or Sochi and clearly it is a resort reserved for the most privileged members of this highly stratified society. We reached Sukhumi at dusk. It was very hot, 38–39 degrees centigrade and very humid. The old port area reminded me of a Greek town. This was indeed ancient Colchis and the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece is placed in this area. We were not permitted much rest that night. At 8:30 the Chief of Protocol called to escort us to an official dinner given by the Council of Ministers of the Abkhazian assr in an outdoor restaurant in the hills behind the

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city. The host was Vyacheslav M. Tsugba, the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers. Mr. Tsugba was married to a Russian who spoke not a word of either Abkhhazian or Georgian and scarcely bothered to conceal her distaste for the food and the whole elaborate ceremony of speeches, toasts etc., which are an integral part of life in that part of the world. Indeed the only time she came to life was when I talked about Leningrad which is her native town. Afterwards the Georgians made fun of her saying that she was typical of the Russians in the Caucasus who made no effort whatsoever to learn the language or customs of the country. Mr. Tsugba complained that it was very expensive to maintain Abkhazian culture but he thought it necessary. There was no sign, he said, of any flagging zeal for the language although most of those who go “abroad” (to Georgia or the rsfsr) soon become assimilated. It was clear to me that there was no love lost between the Georgians in our party and the Abkhazians and the common language was Russian. You may recall that there were nationalist riots a couple of years ago with demands to transfer Abkhazia from Georgia to the rsfsr. It was turned down but one result … was to transform the local institute of higher learning into a full-fledged university with some courses in Abkhazian. The problem of minorities within minorities is even further complicated by the Adzharski ssr centered on Batumi. Adzharski is a language akin to Georgian, however, and there is much less friction between them and the Georgians than between the latter and the Abkhazians. Unfortunately Batumi is forbidden to diplomats in Moscow and it was impossible to get permission to go there. The following day, after a tour of the city, we left for Kutaisi, the second city of Georgia. After Kutaisi the road climbs into the mountains and in parts is very dangerous. In a number of places, passage was very difficult because of repair work. In a small valley lies the town of Zestafoni where I saw one of the worst cases of pollution I have ever encountered. Big factories belched heavy yellow smoke which in the very hot dry air and helped by a strong wind completely blanketed the town. As we approached the town of Gori the Chief of Protocol asked if I would have any objections to visiting the Stalin museum. I said I would do so strictly as a tourist. He scarcely concealed his admiration for Stalin and commented: “At least they can’t take away the

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fact that he won the war!” They clearly referred to the Russians. Frequently in Georgia, incidentally, photos of Stalin were to be seen stuck in the windshields of trucks or private cars. In conclusion I should say that the Georgians seemed very pleased and flattered at our returning to their Republic and gave the visit considerable publicity.

small-town ussr, 20 december 1979 Contrasting with the restored monastic villages and church centers, the newly paved roads and streets around Moscow, the scaffolded old buildings, the city centers that have been quickly plastered and painted, is the City of Mojaisk about 120 kilometers southwest of Moscow. “Old” Mojaisk which comprises most of the center of town is a few square blocks of one and two storey ramshackle, plastered brick buildings along a pair of wide intersecting main streets. Some of the these buildings comprise the “shopping district.” Threadbare stores are as grubby inside as they are out, offering the most meager of consumer products: In the clothing shop, a rack or two of print dresses, a rack of suits, a few East German overcoats; and, at midmorning, a half dozen women elbowing each other to pick over a small table of cotton kerchiefs. Across the street is a large grey-windowed stand-up cafeteria which would not shame the worst Canadian small town greasy spoon; it has a steady flow of work-clothed truck drivers in for a late breakfast or an early lunch and a sprinkle both of disconsolate-looking housewives who have given up on the clothing shop and stout ruddy-faced women road or building labourers in shapeless khaki pants and white kerchiefs with yellow hard hats perched over the top of them. Next to this and most discouraging of all is a bread shop – the very heart of Russia, selling only small brick-like loaves which felt like they could best be used to repair the crumbling buildings. Perhaps the fresh bread disappeared earlier in the day since few shoppers were buying in this store and it is inconceivable that what was on display could be the standard daily fare. Set behind these “major streets” are the main housing areas consisting of narrow dirt streets lined with small dilapidated wooden houses that have not changed in style for centuries. Here it is clear from the tiny, well-cultivated gardens surrounding each house that

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Mojaisk does not depend greatly on its state stores for produce. Unfortunately, for a city with a population of some 7,000, its citizens do not depend much on state resources for municipal services either. Water is obtained at taps set at intervals along the streets. Sewers and electricity have similarly arrived but only in what appears to be rudimentary form. The condition of the unpaved side streets must be experienced to be adequately described since driving down them even in dry weather is a matter of navigating out of one pothole and through another. The “New” parts of Mojaisk are formed by its industrial outskirts which ring the town. These take the shape of a haphazard series of small industrial plants whose activities envelope the outskirts of town with a constant cloud of smoke and dust, adding considerably to the sense of an unplanned maze of dug-up roads, and other construction activity. This jumble is typical of Soviet industrial suburbs and is found even in certain parts of Moscow. Mojaisk is quite clearly a backwater in terms of planning and attention to management of its need for basic social services; however, on the positive side, it is also clearly a town undergoing the semblance of economic growth undoubtedly the fallout from its proximity to Moscow. Amid the disarray, new housing of typical Soviet apartment blocks is being constructed; these are five or six storey precast concrete structures clustered together in a drab permanently unfinished state, and exuding a sense of old age before they are even completed. This kind of housing, despite the loss of private garden space must represent in terms of heat, water and other facilities a considerable leap forward for its inhabitants. This dreary catalogue is not meant to denigrate the considerable achievements of Soviet industry and social development of what may a few decades ago have been small farm centers. What we are describing here is a vast often unseen contrast between small towns and cities in the ussr and which few foreign visitors spend any time seeing.

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Notes

abbreviations akhsd Archive of the Central Committee of the Community Party of the ussr, Moscow arcc Archives and Research Collections Centre, Weldon Library, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario avp rf Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, Moscow cic Canadian International Council, Toronto dea Department of External Affairs Archives, Ottawa lac Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa

preface 1 Winston Churchill’s enduring formulation in a radio broadcast in 1939. 2 Ford to Taylor, 21 July 1967, Library and Archives Canada (lac) mg31 e73, vol. 5.

chapter one 1 Peterborough Review, 20 February 1884. 2 Ford, interview with the author, 1 June 1994. 3 Arthur Ford gives an account of the history of journalism in Canada and of public figures he encountered as a journalist in As the World Wags On: The Autobiography of a Roving Editor (Toronto, 1950). 4 Both “Summer Rain, Goderich” and “Lake Huron” reflect nostalgia for the city on the lake.

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5 Ford, interview with the author, 31 May 1994. 6 Ford, interview with Alain Robert, 27 July 1991, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 5, no. 13. 7 Ibid. I asked a neurologist to comment on Ford’s description of his disease. The reply was that “he very likely suffered from a disease called ‘spinal muscular atrophy’ type iii, or ‘Kugelberg-Welander disease,’ sometimes also referred to as ‘Wohlfart-Kugelberg-Welander disease’… Weakness and muscular atrophy starts either in late childhood or adolescence, progresses to a variable degree and then seems to halt. The individual has a normal life expectancy … At the time he was diagnosed the investigations were still quite rudimentary … It is caused by disease of motor nerve cells with secondary ‘neurogenic’ atrophy of muscle, similar to Lou Gehrig’s disease but on an inherited basis.” 8 William C. Heine, in seconding the nomination of Ford by Mitchell Sharp for the Royal Bank Award in 1984. Heine Fund, Archive and Research Collections Centre, Weldon Library, University of Western Ontario (hereafter Heine Collection), box 28. Heine was executive editor of the London Free Press. The prize in 1984 went not to Ford but to the novelist Hugh MacLennan. 9 Ford, interview with Alain Robert. 10 The Robert A.D. Ford Collection at the National Archives contains the record of his mid-year grades in 1937–38, his final year. lac, mg31 e73, vol. 3, no. 16. 11 Ford, interview with the author, 31 May 1994. 12 To qualify at the minimum rank of third secretary, Ford was required to score 70% on an essay (he scored 74.4%), 60% on education and experience (he got 66.6%), 70% on an oral exam (he received 72.5%), for an average of 71.3% and a ranking of eleven among the group taking the exams (lac, mg31 e73, vol. 3, no. 16). 13 George Ignatieff was a son of Count Paul Ignatieff, the second-to-last minister of education in the government of the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II. 14 Ford, interview with the author, 31 May 1994. 15 Ibid. 16 Ford, interview with the author, 1 June 1991. 17 Ford, interview with Alain Robert. 18 Ford, interview with the author, 30 May 1994. 19 Ibid., 31 May 1994. 20 Ibid., 30 May 1994. 21 Ford, Our Man in Moscow, 4.

Notes to pages 10–15

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22 Zoya Boguslavskaya, interview with the author, Peredelkino, 10 June 1990. 23 Ford, interview with Alain Robert. 24 Ford to Marcel Cadieux, under-secretary of state, 27 April 1965, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 3, Robertson was Cadieux’s predecessor as under-secretary. 25 Ford to A.E. Ritchie, 24 November 1970, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 2, no. 13. 26 Ford to Ritchie, 4 February 1971, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 2, no. 13. 27 J.G.H. Halstead to Ford, 17 February 1971, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 2, no. 13. 28 Ford to A.E. Ritchie, under-secretary, Department of External Affairs (dea), 4 February 1971, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 2. 29 Ford, interview with Alain Robert. 30 Ford to Lillian Hellman, 8 May 1973, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 5, no. 19. Ford met Hellman in 1961 in London (see chap. 9). 31 Ritchie to Ford, Ford to Ritchie, 26 February and 14 March 1973, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 2, no. 13. 32 Ford to H.B. Robinson, under-secretary of state, dea, 9 January 1976, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 2, no. 13. 33 Robinson to Ford, 5 February 1976, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 2, no. 13. 34 “Foreign Service Officer Appraisal Report, 1977–78,” lac, mg31 e73, vol. 3, no. 16. 35 “Foreign Service Officer Appraisal Report, 1978–79,” lac, mg31 e73, vol. 3, no. 16. 36 A.E. Gotlieb, dea, chairman of International Committee on External Relations, to Ford, 21 December 1979, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 3, no. 16. 37 Andrei Voznesensky, interview with the author, Peredelkino,10 June1990. Later, Ford had this to say about the interviews: “They are fascinating if a bit embarrassing. I never felt I demonstrated courage in facing up to my handicap. It was a fact of life that had to be dealt with as best I could. But of course Andrei would say that it was typical of my phlegmatic Anglo-Saxon character. I had a handicap but was never sick or in great physical pain in Moscow. Mental torture – yes!” (Ford, personal letter to the author, 14 August 1990). 38 Ford, interview with the author, 1 June 1994. 39 Allan Gotlieb to External, 20 August 1982, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 3, no. 5. 40 Ford to External, 14 September 1982, lac, mg31 e73 vol. 3, no. 5. 41 Ford to External, 22 November 1967, Department of External Affairs(dea), 20-ussr-1-4. 42 Ford, interview with Alain Robert.

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43 Ford, remarks delivered in Ottawa (on his behalf by A.E. Ritchie) on the occasion of receiving a gold medal of the Professional Institute of Public Service in Canada, 18 November 1971, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 2. 44 Voznesensky, interview with the author. Some commentators have divided Ford into compartments: the poet and the diplomat. Voznesensky did not make this distinction, nor did Ford himself. 45 Ann Munton, “R.A.D. Ford, Poet and Diplomat: A Poetry of Tact,” Canadian Literature, Spring 1989, 138–9.

chapter two 1 Some embassy officers found Thereza pushy and even somewhat terrifying. One reported that Thereza gave junior diplomats specific assignments to entertain visitors at diplomatic functions. She also made insistent demands on Ottawa to provide for the embassy. 2 Zoya Boguslavskaya, interview with the author, Peredelkino, 10 June 1990. 3 Ibid. 4 Andrei Voznesensky, interview with the author, Peredelkino, 10 June 1990. 5 Yevgeny Yevtushenko, interview with the author, Moscow, 17 June 1990. 6 Vaclav Havel was president of Czechoslovakia 1989–92. He then presided over the division of the country into the Czech Republic and Slovakia and became first president of the new Czech Republic. He was a writer and dramatist and had suffered prison terms because of his criticism of the former Communist regime. 7 Thereza Ford, “One Woman’s Russia,” 2, lac, mg37 e73, vol. 2, no. 1. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, or German-Soviet neutrality agreement, was the notorious treaty between Stalin and Hitler signed on 23 August 1939. It contained the “secret protocol” that provided for the division of Poland between the territories controlled by the two dictators. The Soviets denied the existence of the pact for over fifty years. 8 Thereza Ford, “One Woman’s Russia,” 13. 9 Thereza Ford to Holmes, Moscow, 14 October [1946], Holmes Archive, Canadian International Council (hereafter cic). John Holmes corresponded from time to time with both Ford and Thereza. He was an assistant under-secretary of state from 1953 until 1970, when he resigned during an rcmp search for persons in the Department of External Affairs who might be homosexual and therefore susceptible to suborning by foreign agents. Holmes went on to a distinguished career as head of

Notes to pages 22–33

10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19

20 21

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the Canadian Institute of International Affairs until 1973 and as a prolific writer and lecturer on Canadian foreign policy. A balanced discussion of Holmes’s departure from the Department of External Affairs can be found in Hector Mackenzie, “Purged … from Memory: The Department of External Affairs and John Holmes.” This procedure still takes place at Brest, just inside the Belarussian border with Poland. The railway gauge established by the tsarist railway builders in the late nineteenth century was four inches wider than the western gauge. Each railway car is still hoisted by crane from one undercarriage and deposited on the other. Thereza Ford, “One Woman’s Russia,” 37. Ibid. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 50, 70–1. Ford to Marcel Massé, under-secretary of state for external affairs, 5 October 1983, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 2, no. 16. John Holmes summarizes the paper and agrees with Ford’s assessment. He says that the prime minister and the foreign minister were to show in thought and action that they had accepted the paper’s principal conclusions about the Soviets (Holmes, The Shaping of the Peace, 2:382–4). Ford, interview with the author, 1 June 1994. The original paper, written by Ford in Ottawa, was titled “Relations with the ussr: A Re-Assessment,” dated July 1954 and revised in November. Ford intended that a shortened version be included in his Our Man in Moscow. However, his editor advised omitting it from the book because it was too cerebral for general readers. I am following the typescript for the book given to me by Ambassador Ford. It covers the same essential points included in the original paper. The original paper as revised is in the form of a “secret” Department of External Affairs memorandum. As explained in the paper “Soviet Policy in Europe” of 30 May 1955, lac, rg25, Interim 87, vol. 298, 50128–40, no. 2. The wartime Allies – France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the ussr – had left occupying forces in four zones in Austria following the close of hostilities. The State Treaty, agreed by the Big Four and by the Austrian government, had established an “independent and democratic” Austria, and the Allied troops left the country in October 1955. Ford pointed to this treaty as an example of Soviet willingness to strike an agreement with the West.

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chapter three 1 Ford, interview with the author, 3 June 1994. French, British, and Israeli forces attacked Egypt in October 1956, after it had nationalized the Suez Canal. The Soviets invaded Hungary at the end of October and attacked Budapest on 4 November, in the midst of the Suez Crisis. 2 Ford, interview with the author, 3 June 1994. Herbert Norman was Canadian ambassador in Cairo from August 1956 to April 1957. He committed suicide, some have concluded, because of claims in the United States that he was a Communist and therefore of doubtful loyalty. Watkins was ambassador to the ussr from 1954 to 1956 when he organized Pearson’s visit. Suspicions about his Communist sympathies led to his secret detention and interrogation in a Montreal hotel room in 1964, during which he suffered an attack and died. Ford’s reference is to Our Man in Moscow, 146–7. 3 Ford, interview with the author, 1 June 1994. Ignatieff’s visit was a delicate diplomatic problem for the Soviets because they would have to receive and recognize the scion of a pre-Revolution aristocratic family. As one of the sons of Count Paul Ignatieff, the second to last minister of education of the tsarist regime, the Canadian diplomat Ignatieff could still lay claim to the title of count, or Graf in Russian. It turned out that Khrushchev addressed him as Graf and urged him to return to the land where he had been born to help the Russian people. Ignatieff concluded that the Russians’ calling him “Count” was insincere, and he told them he preferred to be addressed as “Mr.” When other Soviets, a number of whom Ignatieff pegged as kgb agents, pressed him to defect to “Mother Russia,” he finally insisted that they stop or he would report their approaches to Pearson. 4 Pearson, Mike, 2:191. 5 Ignatieff, The Making of a Peacemonger, 127–8. 6 Pearson, Mike, 199, 201. 7 The discussions in the Crimea are covered in Pearson, Mike, 204–11. John Watkins also left an account; see Moscow Despatches, 115–27. 8 Ford, “Relations between the Western Alliance and the Soviet Union,” 4 June 1958, lac, interim 114, 50128–40, no. 12. 9 The paper was “Relations with the ussr: A Reassessment” and is discussed in chapter 2. 10 Ibid. 11 Commissioned annually and broadcast by the bbc. Kennan’s lectures “Russia, the Atom, and the West” were delivered in 1957. Ford agreed

Notes to pages 39–48

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

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with many of Kennan’s views, including his belief that the Soviet leaders’ outlook was rooted in a traditional Russian sense of insecurity, combined with Communist ideology. Both men contended that confronting the Soviets militarily only strengthened their belligerent aggressiveness. Kennan became well known for his advocacy of “containment,” by which he meant responding to Soviet policies with political, economic, and diplomatic pressure. He did not mean military containment, as he said and wrote many times. Ford focused on negotiating agreements that drew the Soviets into the international community. He believed that after the death of Stalin, they were ready to improve relations with the West. Whereas Kennan stressed the US role in standing up to the Soviets, Ford concluded that unity among the Western powers was the starting point for modifying Soviet behaviour. He generally opposed single-handed US confrontations with the ussr. “A Commentary on the Reith Lectures of Professor George Kennan,” 31 March 1958, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 2, no. 18. Ibid. Ford, interview with the author, 2 June 1994. Ford, interview with Alain Robert. Ford to Holmes, 8 May1959, John Holmes Archive, cic. Ford, “Comments on Mr. Holmes’ paper concerning the future of the United Nations,” 8 May 1959, Holmes Archive, cic. Ford, “East-West Relations,” 7 June 1960, lac, interim 147, 50128–40, no. 20. Ford, “Coexistence: The Communist Challenge, 27 October 1959, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 2. This paper was delivered at a conference in Paris. Ibid. Ford, “East-West Relations,” 7 June 1960, lac, interim 147, 50128–40, no. 20. Ford, Our Man In Moscow, 43. Ford to John Holmes, 21 July 1961, Holmes Archive, cic. Ford, interview with the author, 2 June 1994. Ibid. Ford to dea, 27 November 1963, lac, 20-1-2 ussr, box 17, no. 1. Ford, interview with the author, 1 June 1994. Ford to dea, 2 April 1964, lac, 20-1-2 ussr, box 17, no.1. Ford, interview with the author, 2 June 1994. Ford, Our Man in Moscow, 55. Ford to dea, 21 October 1964, dea, 20-ussr-1-4.

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Ibid. Ibid. Ford, 29 October 1964, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. Ibid. Ford to dea, 21 October 1964, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. Ibid. Ford to dea, 19 November 1964, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. This judgment appeared confirmed by a session of the Supreme Soviet on 9–11 December 1964 in Moscow – a meeting hastily summoned and not preceded by (as was typical) a meeting of the Central Committee. Somewhat more freedom of discussion took place, and Premier Kosygin spoke of introducing into the economy “cost accounting, the establishment of economically-substantiated prices, the enhancement of the role of profit and of obligatory and systematic material incentive for good productive work.” Ford pointed out that the Soviet economy faced other fundamental problems as well, including a shortage of consumer goods. Factories producing retail goods complained they did not receive textiles, and textile mills did not receive raw materials. He wrote, “Reform is still largely on paper” (Ford to dea, 17 December 1964, 20-ussr-1-4). 40 Ford, telegram of 26 October 1964, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. Early in 1965, Ford saw no change in the Soviet aspiration to maintain good relations with the advanced Western nations and at the same time, “stress the revolutionary role of the cpsu and of the ussr itself” (Ford to dea, 9 February 1965, dea, 20-1-1-2 ussr). 41 Ford, interview with the author, 2 June 1994. 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

chapter four 1 Ford, “The Intellectual Climate,” 7 December 1964, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. 2 Ford, “The Intellectual Climate,” 3 February 1965, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. 3 Ford, “Local Government and Party Reform,” 28 January 1965, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. 4 Ford to the under-secretary of state, 25 March 1965, dea, 20-ussr-19. 5 Under-secretary of state to the Canadian Embassy, 21 July 1966, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. This document summarized fifteen incidents involving nine attachés between November 1953 and May 1964. The document was specifically compiled by External “to counter publicity adverse to the Soviet Union which is expected to come from Justice Wells’ report on Victor Spencer, due to be published shortly.”

Notes to pages 56–67 6 7 8 9 10 11

12

13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27

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Ford to dea, 12 May 1965, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. Ford to dea, 24 August 1965, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. Ford to dea, 12 November 1965, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. Ford to dea, 28 December 1965, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. Ford to dea, 30 December 1965, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. Ford to dea, 31 December 1965, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. Penkovsky’s story was published as The Penkovsky Papers, with introduction and commentary by Frank Gibney (New York, 1966). Ford to dea, 31 December 1965, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. This is the second of two dispatches on 31 December 1966, both dealing with the same subject, “Alleged Harassment of the Soviet Embassy.” Ford, “New Look in Soviet Policy toward Canada,” 22 April 1966, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. Ford was responding to an rcmp position that the Soviets were putting relations between the two countries in jeopardy. Ford to secretary of state, 21 December 1966, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. Ford to dea, 15 April 1966, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. Canadian ambassador [Ford] to secretary of state for external affairs, 12 June 1967, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. Interview with the author, 2 June 1994. Ford to secretary of state for external affairs, 20 January 1966, dea, 20-22–2-ussr. Ford to the secretary of state, 16 December 1965, dea, 20-22-2-ussr. Ford to secretary of state, 3 March 1966, dea, 20-22-2-ussr. Ford, “Soviet Personalities,” 25 March 1965, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. Ford to dea, 21 May 1966, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. There are two dispatches in this file, nos. 821 and 822. Safronchuk was disturbed by the extensive coverage in the press about Soviet spying. Gerda Munsinger, a prostitute who was living illegally in Canada, had an affair with an associate defence minster of the previous Diefenbaker government, Pierre Savigny. She allegedly was a spy with ties to the Soviet Embassy. The issue very nearly brought down the Pearson government as both Liberals and Tories traded charges of being lax on security. A new Commission on General Security was established, both to get to the bottom of the charges and to defuse the parliamentary and public discussion. Ford to dea, 13 June 1966, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. Ibid. Ford, “Mr. Polyansky’s Reaction to His Reception in Canada,” 6 July 1966, dea, 20-1-2 ussr. Thereza Ford, “Notebooks,” 7 July 1967, lac, mg31 e73, vols. 2–6.

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28 Ford, “Memorandum for the Prime Minister. Conversations with Mr. Polyansky,” 4 July 1966, dea, 20-1-ussr. 29 “Notebooks,” 26 June 1966. 30 “Notebooks,” 28 June 1966. It is unclear what Thereza got Ford “into,” but she is likely referring to her strong backing of the invitation to Polyansky. 31 Ford, Our Man in Moscow, 95. 32 “Notebooks,” 29 June 1966. Thereza is referring to Cardinal Stefan Wyszyn´ski (1901–81), the Polish prelate interned by the Communist government for several years because of his opposition to state interference in ecclesiastical affairs. Thereza mistakenly suggests that he was assassinated. 33 “Notebooks,” 30 June 1966. 34 Ibid., 30 June – 1 July 1966. 35 Ford, Our Man in Moscow, 95. 36 “Notebooks,” 4 July 1967. 37 Ford, “Conversation with Mr. Avdurakhman D. Daniyalov,” dea, 20-ussr-9. 38 “Notebooks,” 9 July 1967. 39 Ford, “Conversation with … Daniyalov.” 40 “Notebooks,” 9 July 1967. 41 Ford, “Conversation with … Daniyalov.” 42 Ford, “Conversations with Mr. Polyansky,” 4, 12 July 1966, dea, 20-ussr-9. 43 Ford, Conversation with Mr. Polyansky – Canadian Foreign Policy,” 12 July 1966, dea, 20-ussr-9. 44 A second report on the same day: Ford, “Conversations with Mr. Polyansky,” 12 July 1966, dea, 20-ussr-9. 45 “Notebooks,” 7 July1966. 46 Ford, Our Man in Moscow, 26 47 Ford, “Mr. Polyansky in Montréal,” dea, 20-ussr-9. 48 Ibid. 49 Ford, Our Man in Moscow, 101. 50 Ibid., 94. 51 Ibid., 100. 52 Later on, seeing Polyansky at home with his family, Ford questioned his own early appraisal of the man. “I wonder if he has in himself the total dedication to one goal which is normally the characteristic of excessively ambitious politicians in this or any other totalitarian regime … I just have a nagging doubt at the back of [my] mind that Polyansky has too

Notes to pages 77–85

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great a streak of softness within him to permit him to emerge on the top of the heap (Ford, “Dinner with Mr. Polyansky,” 14 September 1966, dea, 20-1-2-ussr).

chapter five 1 Ford to dea, 19 January 1967, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. 2 Ford to secretary of state, 2 May 1967, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. 3 Ford, “The Soviet Union on the Eve of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Revolution,” 30 October 1967, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. 4 Ford to dea, 15 January 1968, dea, 20-22-2-ussr. 5 Ibid. 6 Ford to dea, 13 May 1968, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. 7 Ford responded to Ottawa with further details about the incident in this telegram of 20 May 1968 (dea, 20-1-2, ussr). He said the notes were based on information about a stretch of the rail line in US and UK publications 7–8 years old. 8 Ford to dea, 18 May 1968, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. 9 Ford to dea, 31 May 1968, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. Ford had recommended expulsion from Canada of an attaché of equivalent rank, but he opposed anything more than a brief and restrained notice in the press. His main argument was that the Soviets seemed to be waiting for a Canadian response before deciding on their own reaction. 10 Ford to dea, 31 May 1968, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. 11 Ford to dea, 19 May 1968, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. 12 Ford to dea, 28 May 1968, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. 13 Ibid. 14 Peter Worthington recounts the story of Olga Farmakovskaya’s defection in Looking for Trouble. 15 Ford to dea, 28 May 1968, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. 16 Ford, “Canadian Relations with the Soviet Union,” 28 September 1968, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. 17 Ford to dea, 28 May 1969, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. 18 Ford to dea, 9 January 1968, dea, 20-ussr-1-3. 19 Ibid. 20 Ford to dea, 29 July 1968, 20-Czech-1-3-ussr. 21 Ibid. 22 Ford to dea, 6 September 1968, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. 23 Ford to dea, 10 September 1968, dea, 20-Czech-1-3-ussr. This paper was attached to a telegram as a “balance sheet” on the consequences of

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26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37

Notes to pages 85–94

the occupation.” One of the major miscalculations referred to was the anticipation that the Czechoslovaks would create a new government obviously friendly to Moscow. Ford to dea, 9 September 1968, dea, 20-Czech-1-3-ussr. Ford to dea, 6 September 1968, dea, 20-ussr-1-3-ussr. Brezhnev’s health became a factor in Soviet decision making about this time. The Kremlin doctor Evgenii Chazov believes that the “tragedy” of Brezhnev began during the “Prague Spring” in 1968, when the Politburo decided on the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the military forces of the Warsaw Pact, with the ussr in the lead. During one of the sessions to deal with the crisis, Brezhnev grew weak, lost the ability to speak coherently, and had to lie down on a table. The doctors decided this episode resulted from taking sedatives to relieve tension during this stressful period (Chazov, Zdorov’e i vlast’, 74–5). Ford to dea, 21 October 1968, dea, 20-Czech-1-3-ussr. Ford, “Canadian Relations with the Soviet Union – the Future of Détente,” 28 September 1968, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. Ford to secretary of state for external affairs, 22 October 1968, dea, 20-ussr-1-3. Ford to secretary of state [J.H. Taylor], “The Soviet Justification for the Invasion of Czechoslovakia,” 15 October 1968, dea, 20 Czech-1-3-ussr. Ford, interview with the author, 2 June 1994. Ford, “Special Task Force on Europe: Some Notes on Canada and Eastern Europe,” 1 September 1968, dea, 20-1-2 Stafeur-19. Ford to External, 28 October 1968, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. Ford sent a followup letter to Halstead to say that he was “a little disturbed” by the way Gromyko chose to ignore the negative aspects of what he had to say to him (Ford to Halstead, 29 October 1968, dea, 20-1-2-ussr). Ford to secretary of state, 4 November 1968, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. Ford to secretary of state for external affairs, 8 December 1967, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. Ford to the under-secretary of state, 25 June1975, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. Ford, Our Man in Moscow, 147–8. Ford to dea, 9 December 1969, dea, 20-1-2-ussr.

chapter six 1 A series of “white papers” on foreign policy issues stimulated the discussion. They were published as Foreign Policy for Canadians (Ottawa: Information Canada, 1970). An assessment of Trudeau’s policy toward

Notes to pages 95–9

2

3 4 5 6 7 8

9

10 11

12

13

279

the ussr can be found in Granatstein and Bothwell, Piroutte: Pierre Trudeau and Canadian Foreign Policy, 189–203. Ford, Our Man in Moscow, 113. Trudeau’s visit to the ussr is described in detail in Somerville, Trudeau Revealed by His Actions and Words, 50–6. This book is based largely on Trudeau’s own account of the trip, published as a seven-part series in Le Devoir. Head and Trudeau, The Canadian Way, 68. Ford to John Holmes, 26 October 1970, Holmes Archive, cic. Head and Trudeau, The Canadian Way, 79. Ibid., 80–1. Ford was in Ottawa at the time. Ford said that he could always see Trudeau on frequent trips to Ottawa for consultations. He held that both sides shared the blame for the poor relations between the prime minister and External. Trudeau was not a professional diplomat and had ideas of his own about foreign relations. External found it difficult to abandon habits developed when Pearson was prime minister. Trudeau’s occasional informal meetings with Soviet ambassador Alexander Yakovlev, posted to Ottawa in 1973–83, were a particular irritant to External. Ford, interview with the author, 3 June 1994. Ford believed that the “committee played some role in preventing a complete withdrawal, which would have disastrously weakened Canada’s voice in Western councils” (Ford, Our Man in Moscow, 115). Ford likely had in mind nato’s counting on Canadian troops, accustomed to winter weather, to play a major role in defending Norway. Ford, interview with the author, 3 June 1994. Ford, interview with the author, 1 June 1994. Head and Trudeau in The Canadian Way, 85, put a different interpretation on the importance of the cabinet document on defense policy that emerged on 3 April 1969 and declared, “The government has rejected any suggestion that Canada assume a non-aligned or neutral role in world affairs,” and made a commitment to its nato obligations “as may be agreed upon.” The argument is also advanced that drawing down the troop numbers stationed in Europe was not significant; but abandonment of Canadian forces’ training in nuclear weapons was. Ford, interview with the author, 3 June 1994.Those who believed in Canadian unity had been incensed by de Gaulle’s famous public speech in Montreal in July 1967, in which he had declared, “Vive, le Québec libre” from the City Hall balcony. Ford, interview with the author, 3 June 1994.

280 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35

Notes to pages 99–107

Ibid. Campbell to External, 18 July 1969, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. Ibid. Ford to dea, 28 May 1969, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. Ford, Our Man in Moscow, 115–16. Ford to dea, 16 September 1969, dea, 20-ussr-9, vol. 4. There were strong critics of Canada’s readiness to heal the breach with the Soviets over Czechoslovakia. The journalist Peter Worthington, for instance, deplored the “short-lived indignation” in the West. “Canada,” he wrote, “continued to sell bumper crops of wheat to the ussr, and within three years Prime Minister Trudeau was paying a visit and signing a ‘friendship’ protocol with Premier Kosygin – similar to agreements that Finland, Afghanistan, and Nazi Germany once had with the Kremlin” (Worthington, Looking for Trouble, 324–5). V.G. Turner, memo of 30 September 1969, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 3. Gromyko, Memoirs, 228. Head and Trudeau, The Canadian Way, 241. Andrei Alexandrov-Agentov, “Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko,” International Affairs, August 1991, 104. Oleg Grinevsky, “Golden Rule of Diplomacy,” International Affairs, 1995, 71. Embassy to dea, 6 October 1969, lac, rg25, 20 ussr 9, vol. 5. Ford, Our Man in Moscow, 116. The Turner and the Halstead memos are both found in lac, rg25, 20 ussr 9, vol 5. Halstead to Campbell, 20 November 1969, lac, rg25, 20 ussr 9, vol. 5. Halstead to Ford, 10 December 1969, lac, rg25, 20 ussr 9, vol. 5. This was clear in the prime minister’s speech to Parliament on 23 April 1969, which was notable for its internationalist outlook. The emphasis was on continuing Canadian participation in collective security agreements and that these agreements were necessary for international peace and security. See Thordarson, Trudeau and Foreign Policy, 155–6. Ford to dea, 10 September 1970, dea, 20-ussr-1-3. Ford to the Secretary of State, “Neo-Stalinism,” 22 December 1969, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. Ford, “Canadian Policy toward the Soviet Union,” 11 March 1975, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. Ford to dea, 10 September 1970, dea, 20-gdr-1-3-ussr. Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914), influential American naval officer, historian, and strategist. His most important work was The Influence of Sea Power on History (1890). The United States, he argued, had all the

Notes to pages 107–12

36 37 38 39 40 41

281

characteristics of a great, expansionist sea power, the Russians those of a great land power. Ford to dea, “The General Lines of Soviet Foreign Policy,” 23 September 1970, lac, rg25, vol. 9294, 20-cda-9-Trudeau-eur. Ford, “The Lenin Centenary Theses,” 30 December 1969, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. Ford to Halstead, 21 December 1970, lac, mg 31 e73, vol. 7. Ford to External, 29 December 1970, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 7. Ford to External 30 December 1970, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 7. Ford, letter of 19 November 1970, lac, rg25, vol. 9357.

chapter seven 1 A undated memo from K.C. Brown to Halstead summarizes relations up to the eve of the prime minister’s visit (dea, 20-1-2-ussr). 2 Ford to dea, 28 May 1969, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. 3 Ford to dea, 29 December 1970, dea, 20-ussr-1-3. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ford, “Canadian Policy toward the Soviet Union,” 11 March 1975, dea, 20-ussr-1-3, vol. 31. 7 A.E. Ritchie, “Objectives of Soviet Foreign Policy,” 14 May 1971, lac, rg25, vol. 9294, 20-cda-9-Trudeau-eur, vol. 7. 8 When Trudeau was re-elected following a Conservative government under Joe Clark in 1979–80, Ford gave his view that the period of the Clark government had been unsatisfactory from the perspective of relations with Moscow. The Soviets continued to believe that a Trudeau government offered them greater opportunities. Ford wrote to Trudeau: “Your re-election was greeted with a great sigh of relief by all of us here in the Embassy since the direction in which we were going in the previous months was taking us rapidly to the most dangerous kind of confrontation. The Russians now recognize that your re-election provides us with a greater freedom for manoeuver, and relations here vastly improved since the beginning of March” (Ford to Trudeau, 27 March 1980, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 2). 9 Ford, “The General Lines of Soviet Foreign Policy,” 23 September 1970, lac, rg25, vol. 9294, 20-cda-9-Trudeau-eur, vol. 7. 10 Ford to dea, 8 October 1970, dea, 20-cda-9-Trudeau-eur. 11 Ford to the under-secretary,“Biographies of Soviet Wives,” 27 April 1971, dea, rg25, vol. 9294, 20-cda-9-Trudeau-eur, vol. 5.

282

Notes to pages 112–22

12 This summary, entitled “Canadian-Soviet Relations,” was written anonymously and dated 2 October 1970 – before the first scheduled trip to Moscow. 13 Ford to dea, 13 February 1970, lac, rg25, vol. 9295. 14 Ford, interview with the author, 2 June 1994. 15 Trudeau to Podgorny, 20 May 1971, Archives of Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Russian Federation(avp rf), 99/100-Ka, sheet 60. 16 Ford to dea, 9 June 1971, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. 17 Ford, “Canadian-Soviet Relations,” 31 August 1971, presented to the Sixth Canada-Japan Ministerial Meeting, 13–14 September 1971, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. 18 Ford to dea, 9 June 1971, 20-1-2-ussr. 19 Head and Trudeau, The Canadian Way, 247. 20 Ford, Our Man in Moscow, 118–23. 21 Ford to Lillian Hellman, 19 June 1971, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 5, no. 13. 22 Head and Trudeau, The Canadian Way, 249–50. 23 Ford, Our Man in Moscow, 123. 24 Ford to dea, 14 June 1971, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. 25 Ford to dea, 1 September 1971, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. 26 Ford, interview with the author, 3 June 1994. 27 Ibid. 28 This was Geza Matra, a Hungarian immigrant. He was sentenced to three months in jail. 29 Head and Trudeau, The Canadian Way, 252. This observation oversimplifies developments in the ussr-usa relationship. Both sides had for several years been groping toward a new relationship. Nixon had come to office early in 1969 proclaiming that a new era of negotiations had replaced that of confrontation. Brezhnev’s announcement of a policy of “peaceful coexistence” with the West at the 24th Party Congress in March 1971 increased the willingness of both the ussr and the usa to reach agreements (Larson, “Learning in U.S.–Soviet Relations: The Nixon-Kissinger Structure of Peace,” 350–99). Nixon used the famous “back-channel” contacts between Henry Kissinger and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to expedite negotiations. 30 Ford to dea, 23 November 1971, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. 31 11 and 17 November 1971, avp rf, 99/033-Ka, sheets 28–30. 32 Kozyrev meetings with Halstead and Ritchie, 8 June and 22 September 1972, avp rf, 99/031-Ka, sheets 15 and 27. 33 Ford to dea, 10 April 1972, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. 34 Ford to dea, 7 April 1972, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. 35 Ford, Our Man in Moscow, 120.

Notes to pages 124–30

283

chapter eight 1 Ford took exception to Soviet uncooperativeness during Judd Buchanan’s visit. 2 Ford, interview with the author, 3 June 1994. 3 Meeting with Suslov, 10 May1977, avp rf, 43/4/67, sheets 5–6. 4 Meeting with Zemskov, 5 August 1977, avp rf, 43/3/67, sheets 1–2. 5 Ford commented further: “But what he did do, and what I was highly critical of, was this foolish business of visiting a number of countries to try to convince them to end the cold war” (Ford, interview with the author, 3 June 1994). This is a reference to Trudeau’s foreign trips in the closing months of his period as prime minister. 6 Barnett J. Danson to the prime minister, 29 April 1971, lac, rg25, vol. 9357, “Ukrainians in Canada,” vol. 7. 7 V.G. Turner to J.H.Taylor, 12 May 1971, lac, rg25, vol. 9357, Ukrainians in Canada,” vol. 7. 8 Ford to dea, 27 March 1972, lac, rg25, vol. 9357, “Ukrainians in Canada,” vol. 7. 9 Sharp visited Moscow in November 1973. 10 dea to Ford, 31 July 1974, lac, rg25, vol. 9357, “Ukrainians in Canada,” vol. 13. 11 Ford, “Canadian Policy towards the Soviet Union,” 11 March 1975, dea, 20-ussr-1-3 vol. 31. 12 External to Ford, 31 July 1974, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 3. 13 Gelman, The Brezhnev Politburo and the Decline of Détente, 123. 14 The reference is the “Basic Principles of Relations between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” 29 May 1972. 15 Ford to dea, 16 April 1974, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 2, no. 17. Another major agreement signed in Moscow was the so-called salt i, setting limits for the two powers on warheads, intercontinental ballistics missiles, and slbms (submarine-launched ballistics missiles), culminating four years of negotiations. The secret visit of Henry Kissinger to Moscow in April 1972 and the Nixon negotiations with the Soviets in Moscow are described in Kissinger, White House Years, chaps. 26 and 28. 16 Ford submitted a paper to Ottawa to be passed on to the Americans just before Nixon’s visit to the Soviet Union. He thought that the “U.S. leadership may find useful” the Canadian “approach” to dealing with the Soviets and Soviet objectives in seeking close ties with Canada and other Western countries (Ford, “Canadian-Soviet Relations: Evolution and Implications,” dea, 20-usa-9-Nixon).

284 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40

Notes to pages 130–8

Ford to dea, 29 December 1970, dea, 20-ussr-1-3. Ford to dea, 12 December 1972, dea, 20-ussr-1-3. Ford to dea, 2 June 1972, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. Ford to dea, 29 November 1972, dea, 20-ussr-1-3. Ford to dea, 3 October 1972, dea, 20–1–1-ussr. Ford to dea, 21 June 1972, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. Ford to dea, 4 April 1972, dea, 20-ussr-1-3. Ford to dea, 28 December 1970, dea, 20-ussr-1-3. Ford to S.P. Kozyrev, deputy minister of foreign affairs, 12 December 1972, avp rf, 140-Ka, sheet 150. Ford, interview with author, 3 June 1994. Ford to A.E. Ritchie, 4 April 1974, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 2. Ford, “Conversation with the Prime Minister,” 16 April 1974, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 2, no. 2. The ambassador was Alexander Yakovlev, with whom the press thought Trudeau had particularly good and ongoing relations. Ford’s comments would suggest that at this early stage of Yakovlev’s tenure in Ottawa (he took up his post in 1973) he was still an unknown. Ford, interview with the author, 3 June1994. Ford, Our Man in Moscow, 124. Ford “Canadian Policy towards the Soviet Union,” 11 March 1975, dea, 20-ussr-1-3, vol. 31. Record of the visit to Suslov by Marshall, 27 October 1976, avp rf, 42/3/54, sheets 55–6. Record of the conversation of 17 June 1978 is in avp rf, 44/3/69, sheet 29. Yakovlev to A.A. Shishkov, 22 April 1974, avp rf, 40/10/62, sheet 141. Two aides-memoire of 2 August and 10 October 1974 spelled out particulars (avp rf, 40/2/61, sheets 41, 42). Ford to Suslov, meeting 10 October 1974, avp rf, 40/3/61, sheets 22, 23. Announcement of Donald Jamieson, secretary of state for external affairs, and Roméo LeBlanc, minister of fisheries and the environment, 2 November 1976, avp rf, 42/2/65, sheet 108. Record of Ford meeting at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 30 March 1977, avp rf, 43/4/67, sheets 1–2. This nine-page document in Russian is entitled “Soviet-Canadian Relations” and dated February, 1977 (avp rf, 43/10/68, sheets 13–21). Its purpose is to show the accomplishments of the relationship, with emphasis on the Trudeau-Brezhnev meetings of 1971, and to conclude

Notes to pages 139–54

285

by showing that there were a number of issues that the Canadians needed to address. 41 Ford met with Suslov on 16 March 1978. The record is in avp rf, 44/4/69, sheet 3. 42 Ford met with Suslov on 4 March 1974; see record of the European Section in avp rf, 40/3/61, sheet 4. 43 Record of meeting between V.N. Myshkin and Canadian businessmen, 7 January 1974, avp rf, 40/10/62, sheet 126–34.

chapter nine 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Ford, A Moscow Literary Memoir, 51. He devotes chapter 18 to Lili. Ford, “Meeting with Lily Brik,” 11 December 1967, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. Ibid. Ford, A Moscow Literary Memoir, 229. Ford, “A Conversation with Lili Brik,” 21 July 1978, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. Ford, “Meeting with Lily Brik,” 11 December 1967. Ford, “An Afternoon with Soviet Writers,” 17 May 1976, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. Ford, “Meeting with Lili Brik,” 11 December 1967, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. Ford, “An Evening with Lili Brik,” 21 February 1973, dea, 20-ussr-2-1. Also in A Literary Memoir, 231–2. Ford, “A Talk with Yevgeny Yevtushenko,” 29 May 1973, dea, 55-14-1-ussr; A Moscow Literary Memoir, 176–80. Ford, A Moscow Literary Memoir, 180. Ford, “Intellectuals in the ussr,” 21 September 1970, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. Ibid. Ford, “Talk with Andrei Voznesensky,” 15 April 1975, dea, 55-2-ussr. Ford, “Talk with Andrei Voznesensky,” 14 July 1978, dea, 20-ussr–2-1. Ford, “Talks with Soviet Writers,” 30 June 1980, dea, 20-ussr–2-1. Ibid. Ford, report to dea, 14 July 1964, to dea, 20-ussr-1-4, pt. 7. Ford to External, 18 February 1965, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. Ford to dea, 30 November 1967, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. Ford, “Contact with Soviet Citizens,” 21 March 1972, dea, 20-ussr-2-1. Ibid. Ford “Cultural Politics in the ussr,” 2 February 1977, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. Ibid. Ford to Lillian Hellman, 28 May 1975, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 5, no. 19. Ford, A Moscow Literary Memoir, 10–11. Hellman, American playwright and author (1905–84), had a record of sympathy for the ussr.

286

Notes to pages 155–61

chapter ten 1 Ford, interview with the author, 3 June 1994. 2 Ford to Lillian Hellman, 13 June 1981, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 5, no. 19. 3 “Conversation between Mrs. Ford and President Kekkonen of Finland, 5 October 1976, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. 4 Embassy to dea, 31 January 1974, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. 5 Embassy to dea, 31 December 1976, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. 6 Ford to dea, 29 November 1972, dea, 20-ussr-1-3. 7 Ford, Our Man in Moscow, 296. 8 Ford, “Reaction of Intellectuals to Détente,” 15 August 1975, dea, ussr 20-1-1-1. 9 James Oberg attributes this disaster to an oxygen leak in the spacecraft (Red Star in Orbit, 102). 10 Ford to dea, 17 May 1976, dea, 20-1-2-ussr; C.F.W. Hooper, director of the Eastern European Division, to Ford, 18 May 1976, dea, 20-1-2-ussr; Ford to Hooper, 19 May 1976, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. 11 Ford to dea, 16 July 1976, dea, 20-1-2-ussr. 12 Ford to under-secretary of state, 30 April 1976, lac, rg25, vol. 9217. 13 In January 1976, while Ford was in Ottawa, Soviet painters, long on order, had appeared to repaint the outside of the embassy. They took a long time outside the ambassador’s office, arousing the suspicions of embassy officials, who discovered an “extraordinarily sophisticated” listening device in the wall that required only a hole the size of a pinhead into the ambassador’s office. Ford explains that all embassies were subject to bugging attempts, and to counter them the Canadians swept the facilities repeatedly with anti-bugging devices and installed a “safe” room in the basement. When confronted by Ford with the hard evidence, Soviet officials blandly denied any knowledge of the episode and insisted that countries hostile to both Canada and the ussr must be responsible. 14 Ford to Klaus Goldschlagen, assistant under-secretary of state for European affairs, 5 October 1976, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 2. 15 Ford, “Soviet Foreign Policy after the Vance visit,” 19 April 1977, dea, 20-ussr-1-3. 16 Signed between US President Gerald Ford and Leonid Brezhnev in Vladivostok in November 1974, this interim agreement, part of the salt ii process, limited the number of strategic bombers and missile launchers on both sides. It also limited the number of launchers that could be fixed with multiple warheads.

Notes to pages 161–7

287

17 Ford, “Soviet Foreign Policy after the Vance visit,” 19 April 1977, dea, 20-ussr-1-3. 18 Ibid. 19 Ford to dea, 14 April 1977, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 3, no. 26. 20 Ford, “Soviet Foreign Policy after the Vance Visit,” 19 April 1977, dea, 20-ussr-1-3. 21 Ford to dea, 26 April 1979, 20-ussr-1-3 vol. 30. 22 Ford, “East-West Study: The Soviet Union in the 1980s,” 9 August 1977, dea, 20-ussr-1-1-1. Ford was one of three senior nato ambassadors (with the British and Danish ambassadors) designated to pull together the contributions from all nato countries. External’s leadership thought Ford’s paper exceptionally good. It was “relatively short and this would seem to be an essential characteristic if the study is to have any hope of being looked at by heads of government” (C.J. Marshall of the East European Division to dea, 16 September 1977, dea, 20-ussr-1-1-1.) 23 Ford, interview with the author, 2 June 1994. 24 Ford, “East-West Study: The Soviet Union in the 1980s,” 9 August 1977, dea, 20-ussr-1-1-1. 25 Ibid. 26 Ford to dea, 1 June 1977, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. 27 Ibid. 28 Ford, Our Man in Moscow, 312–15. 29 Ford, interview with the author, 3 June 1994. The Pershing was an extremely fast and accurate missile with a single warhead. From launching pads in Europe, it could reach Soviet targets within minutes – so quickly that it would overwhelm Soviet air defences. 30 Ford, interview with the author, 3 June 1991. A recent assessment of the Brezhnev arms buildup, joining a large body of work on the subject, argues that the general secretary, aiming to reach an accommodation with the United States, believed that he could negotiate successfully with the Americans only from a “position of strength.” This book, A Failed Empire by Vladislav Zubok, gains authority from the archival and published memoir material consulted by the author. William Hyland, in the fall of 1979, had emphasized that military spending could mean that the balance of power was “in danger of shifting to the ussr” and provided “a basis for continuing expansion.” See Hyland, “Brezhnev and Beyond,” 60–1. 31 Ibid. 32 Ford gives a fine summary of the conditions leading up to Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan in the chapter “The Afghan Blunder and the Southern Approaches” of Our Man in Moscow, 231–49.

288

Notes to pages 168–74

33 Ford, interview with the author, 3 June 1994. 34 Ford, Our Man in Moscow, 242. The decision to intervene was poorly discussed in Moscow at meetings of the Politburo. It was strongly favoured and pushed by Andropov, Ustinov, and Gromyko, who brought Brezhnev along. See Zubok, A Failed Empire, 263–4. 35 Ford to dea, 30 June 1980, dea, 20-Afghan-1-3. 36 Ford to dea, 29 December 1979, dea, 20-ussr-1-3, vol. 31. 37 Ford, Our Man in Moscow, 231. 38 Ibid., 320. 39 Ford to dea, 2 January 1980, 20-ussr-1-3. 40 Ford, Our Man in Moscow, 231. 41 Ford to dea, 3 January 1980, 20-ussr-1-3. 42 Ford to dea, 19 June 1979, dea, 20-ussr-1-3. 43 At a meeting in the Polish capital with Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the French president. 44 Ford to dea, 3 June 1980, dea, 20-ussr-1-3. 45 Ford to dea, 20 November 1972, dea, 20-ussr-1-4. Brezhnev’s translator, Victor Sukhodrev, describes an automobile and a speedboat ride when Henry Kissinger was visiting in May 1972, with Brezhnev at the wheel pushing the vehicles to high speeds. The speedboat, especially, was “not for the weak-nerved.” Later, Sukhodrev said he understood that Brezhnev would appear “sleepy and as though he had a hangover,” and needed a “shaking up” and “sharp sensations” in order “to return to normal.” He took strong medication to accomplish the same effect. Brezhnev would then return to negotiations “collected and fully in command of himself” (Sukhodrev, Iazyk moi drug moi, 289–90). Sukhodrev’s observations show how little even those close to Brezhnev understood that he was very ill, and his condition was marked by the worsening of sclerosis of vessels in his brain and the weakening of his muscles. The Kremlin doctor Evgeny Chazov gives an extensive account of Brezhnev’s physical condition and the measures taken to conceal it from members of the Politburo and from the world. See Chazov, Zdorov’e i vlast’, especially chap. 6. 46 Interview with the author, 2 June 1991.

chapter eleven 1 Occupying Russian territory in 1943, the German army discovered the remains of thousands of Polish officers in Katyn Forest near Smolensk. They had been executed by the Soviet nkvd. The Soviets denied

Notes to pages 174–9

2 3 4

5 6

7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17

289

responsibility for the massacre for years, but finally admitted it under M.S. Gorbachev in 1989. It was subsequently revealed that there were two other burial sites and the three together contained over 25,000 remains of Poles shot on Stalin’s orders. Andropov to the Central Committee, 10 September 1976, Archives of the Central Committee (akhsd), 87/37/50, sheets 1–3. 9 July 1972, akhsd, 89/17/41, sheets 3–4. “On the direction of information to the fraternal parties in connection with the fabricators of anti-Soviet propaganda,” 14 January 1976, akhsd, 89/25/42, sheets 3–6. This document was copied to the Politburo. “Instructions to the Soviet Embassies about the Furor in the West on the Rights of Man,” 19 May 1977, akhsd, 89/25/50, sheets 2–4. Narodnoi-Trudovoi Soiuz (nts; People’s Workers Union) was an emigré organization based in Paris built up by the Soviets as a threatening, powerful enemy. It was no such thing. Possev was an emigré publication based in Germany, and Radio Liberty was an American government radio station broadcasting into Russia from Western Europe. Report of V. Skofenko, first secretary, avp rf, 42/9/66, sheets 120–1. The documents are dated 13 and 21 May 1970. There is a record of a conversation on the subject with Kashtan in the Sovetskaia Hotel, 28 April 1970, akhsd, 89/17/24. The Kashtan letter and supporting documents, 24 July and 20 August 1965 are in akhsd, 4/18/894, sheets 139–41. The favourable decision of 4 November 1975 by the International Department is in akhsd, 4/22/1821, sheets 101–4. Letter from A. Cherniaev, International Department, Central Committee, cp, 2 February 1973, akhsd, 4/22/1739, sheets 33–4. The documents are dated 12 and 30 August 1976, akhsd, 4/24/313, sheets 34–6. The relevant documents are dated 24 June and 15 July 1969, akhsd, 4/20/569, sheets 74–5. Documents dated 21 April and 23 May 1966, akhsd, 4/20/32, sheets 2.5, 2.6, 49. The Organizing Committee of the Executive of the Association prepared a report on the complaints dated 30 June 1966, akhsd, 4/20/887, sheets 151–4. The two documents in question are dated 6 and 25 August 1966 and are in akhsd, 4/20/887, sheets 146–50. The archival copy of the letter is undated, but the archivist has dated it 17 June 1968, akhsd, 4/20/1066, sheet 2.

290

Notes to pages 179–89

18 The telegram was signed by A. Beliakov and copied to Boris Ponomarev and Gromyko, akhsd, 4/19/313, sheet 56. 19 From F. Ovcharenko, 17 June 1968, akhsd, 4/20/1066, sheets 79–80. 20 Documents are dated 9 and 28 August 1979, akhsd, 89/31/13 and 14. 21 Ford, Our Man in Moscow, 135. 22 As quoted in Dodor and Branson, Gorbachev: Heretic in the Kremlin, 48. 23 Yakovlev, Sumerki, 336. 24 Ibid., 340. 25 Ibid., 342. 26 Ibid., 346. 27 Ibid., 346. 28 Head and Trudeau, The Canadian Way, 260–2. 29 Yakovlev, Sumerki, 347. 30 Ibid., 355. 31 Ibid., 356. 32 Ibid. 33 Yakovlev, Omut pamiati, 218. 34 All were prominent dissidents except Rostropovich, the conductor and cellist, who refused to return to the Soviet Union because of the cultural policies of Brezhnev. 35 Yakovlev, Omut pamiati, 218–19. 36 Gorbachev describes his impressions of Canada in Memoirs, 148–50. 37 Head and Trudeau, The Canadian Way, 261.

chapter twelve 1 Ford to Allan Gotlieb, under-secretary of state, 27 December 1978, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 2, no. 13. 2 Ibid. 3 Ford, “Strengthening the Department of External Affairs,” 19 February 1979, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 2. 4 Ford to J.H. Taylor, under-secretary of state, 21 July 1987, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 5, no. 15. Trudeau had introduced unfamiliar principles of management into the operation of External; they were unwelcome to many “traditional” diplomats, and these changes combined with the seeming downgrading of External as the prime minister took greater control over foreign relations are the circumstances that obviously inspired Ford’s reflections. Details of the changes taking place in External can be found in Andrew, The Rise and Fall of a Middle Power. See especially 104–8. Andrew writes (108) that by 1974 the Department of External Affairs’ “preoccupation with administration and budgetary

Notes to pages 189–93

5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16

17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

291

process was taking priority over its now altered role in the management of the government’s foreign policy.” Ford to William C. Heine, 29 June 1983, Heine Collection, arcc, box 28. Ford to Marcel Massé, under-secretary of state, 5 October 1983, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 2, no. 16. Ford to Gotlieb, 30 July 1980, in a covering letter for the paper “Integration in the Moscow Embassy,” lac, mg31 e73, vol. 2. Ford, “Integration of the Moscow Embassy,” 30 July 1980, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 2. Ford to Malcolm Toon, 14 August 1980, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 3, no. 19. Georgy Kornienko was was an official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The final report lists twenty-one persons, including commissioners, consultants, experts, and the executive secretary. The complete name was the Palme Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues. Ford to Lillian Hellman, 2 September 1982, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 5, no. 19. Ford to Holmes, 20 October 1980, Holmes Archive, cic. Ford to Holmes, 13 January 1981, Holmes Archive, cic. Ford, interview with the author, 1 June 1994. It is unclear who Ford has in mind. Japan is not listed among the participating counties. Neither Ford nor Arbatov seem to have had a very high opinion of the other’s views. Arbatov reported to Moscow after one meeting of the Palme Commission that Ford was one of two members who “presented the viewpoint of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization” (Arbatov’s report is in akhsd, 84/46/63, sheet 21). Hans Dahlgren to Ford, 17 April 1989, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 5. Ford was also unable to travel to London in November 1989 for the review conference of the Palme Commission. The report was published as A World at Peace: Common Security in the Twenty-first Century (Stockholm, April 1989). Ford to Heine, 14 January 1983, Heine Collection, arcc, box 28. Ford to Holmes, 1 and 21 October, 7 December 1983, Holmes Archive, cic. Voznesensky, interview with the author, Peredelkino, 10 June 1990. Ford to Holmes, 7 December 1983, Holmes Archive, cic. Ford, interview with Alain Robert, 27 July 1991. Ford to Holmes, 27 April 1984, Holmes Archive, cic. Ford to Holmes, 28 June 1984 and 4 July 1985, Holmes Archive, cic. Ford, “The Legacy of Yalta,” Maclean’s, 11 February 1985, 16–17.

292

Notes to pages 194–202

26 Ford to Holmes, 18 March 1981, Holmes Archive, cic. 27 Ford to Lillian Hellman, 15 July 1981, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 5, no. 19. 28 William C. Heine, in nominating Ford for the Royal Bank Award, 1984 (Heine Collection, arcc, box 28). 29 Ford, interview with the author, 3 June 1994. 30 Ford, interview with the author, 1 June 1994. 31 Ford to dea, correspondence, 1 July 1980 – 28 February 1981, dea, 20-ussr-1-3, vol. 33. 32 “Latin-America, Left Wing Movements and the ussr,” 16 March 1982, to be found in the file with Ford to de Montigny Marchand, deputy minister, dea, 10 June 1983, lac, mg31 e37, vol. 2. 33 Ford to dea, 15 July 1982, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 2. 34 Ford, “The Growth of Soviet Naval Power – Soviet Intentions,” 2 April 1982, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 2. 35 Ibid. 36 Admiral S.G. Gorshkov outlined his thinking on the “oceanic strategy” of the ussr in his book The Sea Power of the State (Annapolis, md, 1979). 37 This was the conclusion in a paper written for Ford’s meeting with US Secretary of State George Shultz in Washington, dc (Ford, “Assessment of Developments in the Soviet Union,” September 1982), lac mg 31 e73, vol. 3. 38 Ford, “The New Soviet Leadership and Its Strategic Implications for East-West Relations,” 2 February 1983, lac, mg31 e73 vol. 2. A similar paper, “The New Soviet Leadership: Implications for the West,” was written for a March 1983 meeting of the Trilateral Commission in Rome. This paper is in the Holmes Archive, cic. 39 Ford to Heine, 12 June 1982, Heine Collection, arcc, box 28. Konstantin Chernenko and Andrei P. Kirilenko were both top Party officials and members of the Secretariat. At the time Ford wrote, both were seen as possible successors to Brezhnev. 40 Robert A.D. Ford, “The Soviet Union: The Next Decade,” Foreign Affairs, Summer 1984, 1132–44. 41 Holmes to William F. Bundy, 13 September 1983, Holmes Archive, cic. 42 Bundy to Ford, 1 November 1983, Holmes Archive, cic. Bundy was right on Ford’s view of Arbatov. At the time of his retirement, Ford wondered who would defend his successor, Geoffrey Pearson, from the influence of Arbatov. John Holmes was similarly minded. He wrote to Bundy: “I was much interested in your comment on Dobrynin’s view of Arbatov. You confirm what would have been my guess. I am not sure whether you saw George [Ignatieff] after his return from his visit to the Institute [of the United States and Canada, headed by Arbatov] in Moscow. What Arbatov

Notes to pages 202–53

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

293

and company say seems to be exceedingly interesting provided one uses all the right filters” (Holmes to Bundy, 14 November1983, Holmes Archive, cic). Holmes to Bundy, 14 November 1983, Holmes Archive, cic. R.A.D. Ford, “The Soviet Union: The Next Decade,” Foreign Affairs, 1144. Ibid., 1136–7. Ibid., 1141. Ford, interview with the author, 2 June 1994. Ford to John Holmes, 17 February 1988, Holmes Archive, cic. Ford to Holmes, 27 August 1987, Holmes Archive, cic. Ford to Holmes, 10 September 1987, Holmes Archive, cic. Ford to Joe Clark, “Account of a conversation with former president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing,” 7 August 1987, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 5.

appendix a 1 A Soviet Province” and the next three appendices, which are travel accounts of Ford’s journeys around the ussr, can be found in the R.A.D. Ford Collection, lac, mg31 e73, vol. 3, no. 12. In the fashion typical of diplomatic dispatches, they are written in numbered paragraphs. I have eliminated the numbers and shortened the accounts considerably. In some cases, I have opened paragraphs where none existed in the original text.

appendix b 1 mvd is an abbreviation in Russian for Ministry of the Interior and mgb for Ministry of State Security.

appendix c 1 The full records of the travel accounts in this appendix can be found in lac, mg31 e73, vol. 3, no. 12.

appendix d 1 Complete travel accounts of three trips excerpted in this appendix can be found in lac, mg31 e73, vol. 3, no. 12. Four others are in dea: “My Trip to Southern Ukraine,” 20-ussr-1-4; “Report on Trip to Leningrad and Chudova,” 20-ussr-1-4; “Impressions of Germany, Poland, and Byelorussia,” 20-ussr-2-1; and “Small-Town, ussr,” 20-ussr-2-1.

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Bibliography

archives canada Archives and Research Collections Centre, Weldon Library, University of Western Ontario, London Canadian International Council, Toronto Department of External Affairs Archives, Ottawa Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa The Department of External Affairs (dea) is now called the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (dfait). The series of archival documents cited as located in dea have largely been transferred to Library and Archives Canada. There, they have the same file numbers but with rg prefixes. russia Archive of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the ussr, Moscow Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, Moscow

printed sources Andrew, Arthur. The Rise and Fall of a Middle Power: Canadian Diplomacy from King to Mulroney. Toronto: J. Lorimer, 1993 Arbatov, Georgy. Chelovek sistemy: nabliudeniia i razmyshleniia ochevidtsa eë raspada. Moscow: Vagrius, 2002

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Balawyder, Aloysius, ed. Canadian-Soviet Relations, 1939–1980. Oakville, on: Mosaic Press, 1981 Black, J.L. Canada in the Soviet Mirror. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1998 Cadieux, Marcel. The Canadian Diplomat: An Essay in Definition. Tr. Archibald Day. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962 Chazov, Evgenii. Zdorov’e i vlast’: vospominaniia ‘kremlëvskogo vracha.’ Moscow: Novosti, 1992 Doder, Dusko, and Louis Branson. Gorbachev: Heretic in the Kremlin. New York: Viking, 1990 Ford, R.A.D. A Window on the North. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1956 – “Cuatro poemas ecuatoriales.” Tr. Pedro Gomez Valderrama, Revista de la Universidad de los Andes, June 1959, 2–5 – The Solitary City. Toronto: Hounslow Press, 1969 – Holes in Space. Toronto: Hounslow Press, 1979 – Needle in the Eye: Poems New and Old. Oakville, on: Mosaic Press, 1983 – Russian Poetry: A Personal Anthology. Oakville, on: Mosaic Press, 1984 – Doors, Words, and Silence. Oakville, on: Mosaic Press, 1985 – Coming from Afar: Selected Poems, 1940–1989. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990 – Dostoevsky and Other Poems. Oakville, on: Mosaic Press, 1988 – A Moscow Literary Memoir: Among the Great Artists of Russia from 1946 to 1980. Ed. Carole Jerome. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995 – Our Man in Moscow: A Diplomat’s Reflections on the Soviet Union. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989 Gelman, Harry. The Brezhnev Politburo and the Decline of Detente. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984 Gorbachev, Mikhail. Memoirs. New York: Doubleday, 1995 Granatstein, J.L., and Robert Bothwell. Pirouette: Pierre Trudeau and Canadian Foreign Policy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990 Gromyko, Andrei. Memoirs. Tr. Harold Shukman. New York: Doubleday, 1989 Head, Ivan L., and Pierre Elliott Trudeau. The Canadian Way: Shaping Canada’s Foreign Policy, 1968–1984. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995 Hilliker, John. Canada’s Department of External Affairs. Vol 1: The Early Years, 1909–1946. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990

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Hilliker, John, and Donald Barry. Canada’s Department of External Affairs Vol 2: Coming of Age, 1946–1968, Montreal & Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1995 Holmes, John W. The Shaping of Peace: Canada and the Search for World Order. 2 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982 Hyland, William G. “Brezhnev and Beyond.” Foreign Affairs. Fall 1979, 51–66 Ignatieff, George. The Making of a Peacemonger: The Memoirs of George Ignatieff. With Sonja Sinclair. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985 Kissinger, Henry. White House Years. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979 Larsen, Deborah Welch, “Learning in U.S.-Soviet Relations: The NixonKissinger Structure of Peace.” In Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy, ed. George W. Breslauer and Philip E. Tetlock. Boulder: Westview Press, 1991 Mackenzie, Hector. “Purged … from Memory: The Department of External Affairs and John Holmes.” International Journal 59, no. 2 (2004): 375–86 Nossal, Kim Richard. “The pm and the ssea in Canada’s Foreign Policy: Dividing the Territory, 1968–1994.” International Journal. 50, no. 1 (1994–95): 163–88 Oberg, James E., Red Star in Orbit, New York: Random House, 1981 Painchaud, Paul, ed. From Mackenzie King to Pierre Trudeau: Forty Years of Canadian Diplomacy, 1945–1985. Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1989 Pearson, Lester B. Mike: The Memoirs of the Right Honourable Lester B. Pearson. Ed. John A. Munro and Alex I. Inglis. 3 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973 Roberts, Peter. George Costakis: A Russian Life in Art. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1994 Somerville, David. Trudeau Revealed by His Actions and Words. Richmond Hill: bmg Publishers, 1978 Spencer, Robert, ed. Canada and the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Toronto: Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, 1984 Starnes, John. Closely Guarded: A Life in Canadian Security and Intelligence. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998 Stewart, Walter. Shrug: Trudeau in Power. New York: Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, 1971

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Sukhodrev, V.M. Iazyk moi drug moi: ot Khrushcheva do Gorbacheva. Memuary. Moscow: Olimp-ast, 1999 Thordarson, Bruce. Trudeau and Foreign Policy: A Study in Decision-Making. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1972 Tucker, Michael. Canadian Foreign Policy: Contemporary Issues and Themes. Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1980 Volten, Peter M.E. Brezhnev’s Peace Program: A Study of Soviet Domestic Political Process and Power. Boulder: Westview Press, 1982 Watkins, John. Moscow Despatches: Inside Cold War Russia. Ed. Dean Beeby and William Kaplan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987 Wolfe, Robert, ed. Diplomatic Missions: The Ambassador in Canadian Foreign Policy. Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Development, 1998 Worthington, Peter. Looking for Trouble: A Journalist’s Life … and Then Some. Toronto: Key Porter, 1984 Yakovlev, Aleksandr. Omut pamiati. Moscow: Vagrius, 2001 – Sumerki. Moscow: Izd. “Materik,” 2003 Zubok, Vladislav N. A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War, from Stalin to Gorbachev. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007

Index

Afghanistan, 162; Soviet invasion, 167–71, 194, 201 Akhmadulina, Bella, 146–7 Andropov, Yuri, 181,183, 200, 201, 203; uses of Soviet psychiatry, 174 Aragon, Louis, 143–4 Arbatov, Georgy, 191–2, 292n42 attachés, incidents involving: Captains Bovey and Madsen, 57; Colonel Greenleaf and attaché Hearn, 56–7; Lieutenent Colonel Watson, 79–82 Austrian State Treaty, 271n21 Bahr, Egon, 191, 192 Baltic Canadian groups, 128 Becker, Carl, 7, 16, 25 Bertrand, Jean-Jacques, 74–5 Boguslavskaya, Zoya, 10, 16, 146, 154; on Fords, 18–21 Boris the Gypsy, 90–1 Brandt, Willy, 105 Brezhnev, Galina, 91 Brezhnev, Leonid, 47, 55, 60–2, 64, 76, 83, 85, 88, 93, 119, 125– 30, 132, 155, 161–6, 168, 176, 180, 199, 183, 200; Brezhnev

doctrine, 169; on Canada, 117; on economics, 87, 106, 164, 274n39; on elections, 55–6, 117; health effects of Czechoslovakia crisis, 88,163; honours, 157; illness, 93, 155– 60, 165–6, 170, 172, 282n25, 288n45; missile deployment, 166; mistakes, 166–7; and Nixon, 130–1; peace program, 113–14, 129, 132, 170; as politician, 202; publicized in Canada, 176; Trudeau’s view of, 113, 134; on United States, 134, 161, 169 Brik, Lili, 142–4 Buck, Tim, 177, 179 Bukovsky, Vladimir, 161 Bulganin, Nikolai, 35 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 162 Bundy, William, 201 Cadieux, Marcel, 11, 96 Campbell, Ross, 99–100; on Gromyko, 103–4 Canadian Embassy, Moscow, 17, 20, 23, 124–5; on diplomats’

300

Index

stores, 148; on harassment, 59, 121, 132, 169, 250; on integration, 189 Canadian-Soviet Protocol on Consultations, 114, 120–1 Carter, Jimmy, 160–3, 169, 170, 194, 195 Castro, Fidel, 97 Chernenko, Konstantin, 201, 203 Clark, Joe, 125, 205, 281n8 Dahlgren, Hans, 192 Daniel, Iulii, 62–4 Daniyalov, Avdurakhman, 70–2 Danson, Barnett, 126 demonstrations at Soviet Embassy, 83, 108, 125, 128 Department of External Affairs: Ford’s criticism of, 187–8 détente, 42, 72, 82, 86, 88–9, 101, 103, 113, 129, 131, 136, 158, 161, 166, 170, 171, 201, 203 Diefenbaker, John, 68 Dobrynin, Anatoly, 202 Dubcˇek, Alexander, 83, 84, 87, 132 Dupuy, Pierre, 74 Eisenhower, Dwight, 43 Estevé family, 3, 205 European Security Conference, 104, 121, 125, 136; Helsinki Final Act (Accords), 158, 162, 175, 184, 201 Falin, V.M., 66, 79, 80, 81 Falklands War, 196 Farmakovskaya, Olga, 81 Ford, Arthur R., 3–5 Ford, Gerald, 159, 160 Ford, James E., 4 Ford, Joseph, 4

Ford, Lavinia Scott, 3–4 Ford, Robert A.D.: ambassador to Colombia, 42–3; ambassador to Egypt, 44–5; ambassador to Mongolia, 133; ambassador to Sudan, 44; ambassador to Yugoslavia, 42–4; appraisals of, 13–14, 20–1; appraised by Helmut Sonnenfeldt, 15; Brazil, posting to, 9; on Canada’s role, 130, 189–90; as head of European Division, 25, 26, 33; illness, 6, 11–12, 17–18, 19, 193, 269n37; on intellectuals, 55, 77–9; on Marxism, 27, 29– 31, 35, 42, 43, 55, 78, 82, 84, 104, 110, 130, 162–4, 166, 198, 200, 202–3; on Palme Commission, 190–2; on poetry, 14, 15–16; as reporter, 7; in retirement, see chapter 12; on Russian characteristics, 15, 27, 55, 78, 85, 169; on South America, 196; on SovietCanadian relations, 130–1; on Soviet conditions, 31–2, 55, 77; on Soviet duplicity, 78, 85, 86, 90–1, 105; on Soviet economics, 27–32, 56, 60–1, 165, 170; on Soviet officials, 15, 27–32, 56, 60–1, 64, 78, 83–8, 104–8, 110, 119, 132, 157, 162–71, 203, 206; Soviet reaction to Jimmy Carter, 161; Soviet sense of inferiority, 31, 161; on Soviet system, 27–30, 55, 79, 81, 105– 6, 163–5; as special adviser on East-West affairs, 190; as student, 5–7; on Trudeau, 133–4; on Trudeau’s, policy toward ussr, 135; on Trudeau’s visit to

Index Moscow, see chapter 9; on us, 130–1, 204; on us mistakes in Afghanistan, 167, 169 Ford, Thereza Gomes, 10, 15, 17–20, 44–6, 112, 117, 124, 143, 150; conversation with Mrs Gromyko, 46; conversation with Urho Kekkonen, 155–6; illness, 187, 192–3, 202, 205; influence on Ford, 17, 29; on ministers from Canada, 124; on Polyansky’s visit, 64–76; on Soviet conditions, 20–5; on Soviet officials, 24–5, 29, 64–77, 108, 160 Furtseva, Ekaterina, 149–50 Germany, 28, 30, 38–40, 41, 105, 120–1, 129, 158; agreement with ussr, 132 Giscard d’Estaing, Valery, 171, 205 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 191, 194, 195, 204; assessment by Ford, 204 Gotlieb, Allan, 18, 189, 191 Gotlieb, Sondra, 18 Gouzenko, Igor, 10, 59, 183 Green, Howard, 44 Greenleaf, Colonel C., 56–7 Grenada, 195 Gromyko, Andrei, 46, 89, 92, 100– 1, 106, 122, 156, 168; criticism of, 102–3; defends ambassador to Canada, 181; and Ottawa visit, 101–3, 105, 107; Ottawa visit opposed, 280n19 Gromyko, Mrs Andrei, 46 Halstead, J.G.H., 107; on ussr, 103–4 Head, Ivan, 95, 96, 101, 102, 183; on Ford, 116–17; on Kosygin

301

visit, 119, 122; on Protocol on Consultations, 115 Heine, William, 6, 189, 194, 201 Hellman, Lillian, 12, 115, 154–5, 190–1, 194 Helsinki Accords. See European Security Conference Holmes, John, 37, 42, 44, 191, 194, 201, 204–5, 270n9; suggests article, 202 Ignatieff, George, 8, 36–8, 44, 112, 272n3 Jarring, Gunnar, on Ford, 12 Jewish groups, 119, 125–6, 128 Johnson, Daniel, 74 Kalugin, O., 183 Kashtan, William, 176–7, 179 Kekkonen, Urho, 155–6, 165 Kennan, George, 26–7, 39–40, 44, 272n11 kgb (Committee on State Security), 56–7, 58, 65, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 91–2; actions against military attachés, 56; in Czechoslovakia, 86; directing propaganda in West, 174–5; reports on Olympic Games, 182; in Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, 181, 183; spying abroad, 201; on Ukraine, 126–8; on Yevtushenko’s earnings, 145 Khrushchev, Nina, 53 Khrushchev, Nikita S., 19, 29, 32– 4, 38–9, 42–3, 45–54, 55, 61, 62, 64, 85, 148, 157, 199, 200, 204; Ford’s assessment of, 47–53 Kirilenko, Andrei, 201 Kissinger, Henry, 119, 204

302

Index

Kondrashin, Kyrill, 150 Kornienko, Georgy,190 Kosygin, Alexei, 60, 68, 85, 110, 113, 124, 189; and Brezhnev, 202; and Hanoi bombing, 68, 166; as host of Trudeau, 114; illness, 126, 156; visit to Canada, 117–20 Koudriavtzeff, Nicholas, 149–50 Kozyrev, S.A., 121; on Soviet relations with China and US, 131–2 Kraft, Joseph, 147 Kruchkov, V., 183 Kuznetsov, Vasily V., 120, 125, 146 Lenin, Vladimir, 107 Liepa, Marius, 152–3 Macdonald, Donald, 134 Marchand, Jean, 74 Marshall, C.J., 136 Martin, Paul (senior), 10, 68, 69, 76, 82, 117 Massé, Marcel, 189 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 141–3 Menshikov, Mikhail, 148 Molotov, Viacheslav, 36–7 Mongolia, recognition of, 133 Moroz, Valentin, 128 Moroz Freedom Fighters, 127 Mosely, Philip, 7 Munton, Ann: on Ford’s poetry, 16 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 44 nato (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 27, 30 37, 38, 39, 40, 43, 58, 72, 82, 84, 88–9, 92, 93, 94, 166, 169, 188, 190; Canadian attitude toward, 96–8,

100, 104, 169; Soviet attitude toward, 94, 99, 101, 114–15 Nikitin, Anatoly (Anatoly Gorskii, Gromov), 91–3 Nixon, Richard, 102, 110, 117, 119, 129–31, 145, 160; and peaceful coexistence, 204 Norman, Herbert, 35 Novotný, Antonín, 83 Owen, David, 191 Palme, Olof, 11, 190 Pasternak, Boris, 14, 143 peaceful coexistence, 86, 104, 109, 198, 282n29 Pearson, Lester, 26, 35–8, 69, 94, 95, 96, 109, 112, 135, 272n2 Perelman, S.J., 154 Plisetskaya, Maya, 149–50, 152 Podgorny, Nicholas, 166 Polyansky, Dmitry, 25, 64–73, 75, 82 Prague Spring, 83–9 Reagan, Ronald, 147, 199 repression of intellectuals, 78 Richardson, James, 97 Ritchie, A.E., 12, 121, 133; on negotiating with the Soviets, 111–12 Robertson, Norman, 11, 22 Robinson, Basil, 12 St Laurent, Louis, 26, 37 Sakharov, Andrei, 161 Sharp, Mitchell, 127 Shchedrin, Roman, 149–50 Shcherbitsky, V.V., 180, 182 Shelest, Petr, 178 Shpedko, Ivan F., 58, 66, 67

Index Shultz, George, 15, 200 Simonov, Konstantin, 154 Sinyavsky, Andrei, 62–4 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 174 Stalin, Josef, 27, 28, 43, 46, 49, 50, 61, 62, 105, 107, 142, 147, 169, 172, 197; and Lili Brik, 142–3, 204 Stevens, Ed, 154 surveillance, 56–9 Suslov, Mikhail, 88, 136, 157, 183; and Brezhnev, 202 Taylor, J.H., 189 Tikhonov, Nikolai A., 122 Tito (Josip Broz), 27, 30, 33, 42, 44 Toon, Malcolm, 190 trade, 37, 58, 60, 66, 75, 81, 82, 109, 118, 129, 132, 148, 189–90 Tremblay, Paul, 95, 96 Trudeau, Margaret, 97, 115, 134 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott, 92, 110, 159–60, 184, 189, 191; attitude toward Soviets, 108, 114, 120; meeting with Soviet writers, 143, 145; at Moscow press conference, 115; and peaceful coexistence, 204; as perceived in East Europe, 120–21; on visit to ussr, 112–15 Turner, V.G., 101

303

Ukrainian Canadians, 108, 119, 125, 126; kgb influence on issue, 126–7, 128 Vance, Cyrus: disarmament proposals of, 161–2, 169 Voznesensky, Andrei, 141, 145–7, 152, 154; on Ford, 14–15, 19– 20, 46; on Thereza, 19–20, 191 Watkins, John, 36, 37, 92 Watson, Thomas, 15, 170, 194 Worthington, Peter, 81 Yakovlev, Alexander, 128,140; ambassador, 180–6; banished by Brezhnev, 180; commentary on Brezhnev, 183–4; on fishing conflict, 137; Gromyko defends, 181; on hockey as politics, 181– 2; on kgb, 164; meeting with Head, 185–6; meetings with Trudeau, 182, 186; Trudeau’s impression of, 134 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 144–6, 154; on Ford, 20–1 Yezhov, N.I., and Lili Brik, 143 Zemskov, Ivan: defence of Afghanistan invasion, 168 Zemskov, M.N., 125, 136–7