Yakovlev, the Walrus + the Doukhobors

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Superdad: A Memoir of Rebellion, Drugs and Fatherhood
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(Release: Sept. 30, 2010)
"Turns the urban dad story on its head—and then rights it again. Beneath Shulgan's outwardly loving life with his young family in a hip part of Toronto lurked a darkness; Shulgan was a hard drinker—and something of a crackhead. In an unsparing, but also comic, account of his ventures into the deep woods off the parental path, he explores his own notions of fatherhood. And challenges ours."--The Globe and Mail

"Infuriating, moving, and terrifying, Superdad is a journey into the dark heart of self-destructive hypermasculinty and out the other side into a kind of uneasy truce between the idea of 'father' and 'real man.' As a writer, I found myself awed by Shulgan's tale-teller's facility; as a dad, I found myself wanting to smack him until he stopped destroying his family and his life. Superdad is a brave memoir that humanizes the self-immolating urge of the crack addict." --Cory Doctorow, author of For The Win and co-editor of Boing Boing

“Christopher Shulgan pulls off a cool sort of alchemy; Superdad is an illuminating book about delusion, a wise book about idiocy, a kind-hearted book about acting like a jerk. And then on top of all that, the man makes writing look easy.” -- Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall, author of Down to This and Ghosted

My first book

Shortlisted for the National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.

The Soviet Ambassador: The Making of the Radical Behind Perestroika
How diplomacy and a decade-long exile in Ottawa transformed Mikhail Gorbachev's trusted advisor, Aleksandr N. Yakovlev, into the most potent force for freedom and democracy ever to walk the corridors of the Kremlin.
Published by McClelland & Stewart.

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Doukhobors in Grand Forks, British Columbia. Photo credit: Sherlock77

A feature I wrote about Aleksandr N. Yakovlev is up on the Walrus magazine's website. On one level, the piece recounts the way the punk band D.O.A. and the Doukhobor community of southeastern British Columbia helped me to understand a key component of Yakovlev's life story. On another, it's about the way the Doukhobors disprove the theory of Russian exceptionalism -- that is, the theory that Russia is so different from the West that such supposedly Western concepts as the right to free speech and other tenets of liberal democracy aren't workable in the onetime land of the tsars. Russian exceptionalism often is used to justify Moscow's autocratic rule, in the Soviet era as well as today in the Putin / Medvedev duocracy.

The first paragraph:

It stands as one of the more unusual turning points of the Cold War, thanks mostly to the surprise appearance of several naked middle-aged women. It began with a plasterer named Peter Voykin driving his 1970 Ford Meteor toward the local community centre in Castlegar, in the Kootenay mountains of southeastern British Columbia, on the Saturday before Victoria Day in 1980. As a Doukhobor, a member of a sect of Christian anarchists who settled in the Kootenays after fleeing Russia in the 1890s, Voykin was a vegetarian and a pacifist who championed an ethic of communal living and sharing.

And then here's the nut graf:

If the West is searching for ways to steer an increasingly autocratic Russia back toward functioning democracy, then Yakovlev’s story is a useful case study. And in that case study, one of the pivotal but least understood periods is the decade he spent in Ottawa. As the author of a biography of Yakovlev, I’d set out to understand the man’s ideological journey from anti-Western autocrat to the most potent force for freedom and democracy ever to walk the halls of the Kremlin. I thought his story might provide hints on how to deal with today’s Russian leaders. But as my book deadline approached, there was one aspect of Yakovlev’s story I failed to understand. In his memoirs, he describes the onset in 1978 of a severe depression that was complicated, as the years passed, by an increasingly rancorous Cold War. Then, suddenly, the funk disappeared.

To read the whole story, click here.

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