Shulgan.com

Speech Therapy

Photo: Gorbachev (l) and Yakovlev

Last week I gave my first book-related presentation. It was a rainy Friday afternoon at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for a talk sponsored by the Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies. Because it was the last day of classes I wasn't sure how many people were going to show up. It turned out I needn't have worried. Or perhaps I should have worried more. Not many students showed up. Instead, it was a crowded room of about 30 academics and journalists. As rooms go this one was probably the most intimidating crew I possibly could have faced.

CERES director Jeffrey Kopstein was there, as was former CERES director Peter Solomon. Robert Bothwell, the historian and expert on Canadian foreign affairs, was sitting to my left. I'd used many of Bothwell's books and notes during my research, particularly his Pirouette, which is by far the best book I've come across on Trudeau-era foreign affairs. Next to Bothwell were the CBC producers Alex Shprintsen and Dan Bjarnason, who did a documentary on Yakovlev in 2002. Also in the audience was Sergei Plekhanov, the York University expert on Russian affairs who actually knew Yakovlev, back when Plekhanov was a young and democratic-minded scholar in Moscow at the Institute for the Study of USA and Canada.

My intent with this lecture, and others I'm planning on conducting for anyone who will invite me to speak, is to tell the story contained in my book, The Soviet Ambassador. The central thesis of my lecture is that Canada contributed to changing Aleksandr Yakovlev's thinking about the Cold War during the decade that Yakovlev was Moscow's ambassador to Ottawa. At the time, many in the West believed it was best to isolate the Soviet Union and senior Communist Party officials--the foreign policy equivalent of the silent treatment, in other words.

However, when Yakovlev was exiled from Moscow by his enemies in the Communist Party in 1973, many of the highest-profile figures in the Canadian establishment developed friendships with him. Rather than isolating Yakovlev, many Canadians sought him out and explored his thinking about politics and world affairs, including such figures as former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, McDonald's of Canada founder George Cohon and Trudeau's foreign policy advisor, Ivan Head. Over the course of his decade in Canada, Yakovlev grew convinced that the Soviet Union needed to reform itself to become more democratic and free. My lecture argues that Yakovlev's relationships with Trudeau, Cohon and Head, among others, contributed to Yakovlev's growing convictions. And it suggests that engagement and dialogue always are better in dealing with enemy states than such tactics as isolation and violence. I'm anti-silent treatment, in other words.

The lecture's premise went over really well -- in fact, after I finished talking, Alex Shprintsen, who has read an early draft of the book, piped up and told the room how much he enjoyed what he read. "I thought I knew everything there was to know about Yakovlev," he said. "But I couldn't put it down." Such words are nice to hear, particularly in the early days before the book's  release.

I was anxious about the Q&A session, but it turned out that was the part that I most enjoyed. After roughly two years spent researching Yakovlev's story, mostly in solitude, I find myself craving opportunities to speak about it with others. And speaking about Yakovlev's story with others who know about it, and who are equally fascinated by his ideological conversion, was particularly satisfying.

I have a lot of work left to do on the lecture itself, however. It is a challenge to distill the gist of a 360-page book into an informative, captivating lecture. On Friday, I spoke for about 80 minutes, which is way too long -- my target time is about 40 minutes. Clearly, I have a lot of cutting and refocusing ahead of me. Also, I put together a PowerPoint presentation to go along with the lecture, and I found that most of it didn't work. People responded to the photos, less to the slides with text on them. I'm planning on radically cutting back on the use of PowerPoint. I also have to practice until I have this thing down cold. I am passionate about Yakovlev's story because it's a remarkable testament to one man's intellectual courage, an underdog story about a guy whose mind-change ended up changing the world. And I have to refine and improve my lecture until it accurately reflects just how remarkable a story Yakovlev's is.

Friday's presentation was a first draft. Time to get working on the second, and then the third.

History of Folly

I'm a big fan of Richard Rhodes. I thought Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb was an absorbing, fast-paced book, a tough trick to manage when you're detailing atomic physics and its political ramifications. And his first book on matters nuclear, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, won the Pulitzer Prize.

Rhodes' latest, Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race, isn't nearly as good as his earlier works. The topic seems evident from the title: It's a history of the arms race. And that's right, a bit, but the book also seems to be about Rhodes' apparent hate-on for Richard Perle.

There's nothing wrong with having a hate-on for Richard Perle. Given his role in some of the most aggressive moves America has made over the last two or three decades, having a hate-on for Perle probably is a rational response to historical fact. However, Rhodes' lets his anger get in the way of what could have been a fascinating story.

Arsenals of Folly starts out pretending to be a good book about the last 50 years of the 20th century, when policy makers on both sides of the Cold War decided it would be a good idea to spend trillions of dollars to make enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world. Then they decided to spend many more trillions of dollars making even more nuclear weapons. And then, as though they hadn't already made the Cold War dangerous enough, they started doing insane things like invading Afghanistan (the Soviets) and conducting threatening military training exercises (the Americans, which likely played a part in a Soviet jet shooting down an off-course passenger airliner in September 1983, killing 269 people).

My first indication Rhodes' book had serious problems was his' reliance on Gail Sheehy's Gorbachev biography, The Man Who Changed The World. Not many great books about Gorbachev have been written. Sheehy's biography, however, is down at the bottom of the pile. It is full of the sort of biases that dominated American perceptions of Moscow during the Cold War. And since it was published in 1990, seventeen years ago, it is brutally out of date. Rhodes should have quoted from the umpteen later books written by Gorbachev's firsthand associates, or the wealth of academic literature. In other ways, particularly when he's writing about Soviet politics, Rhodes's prose feels tentative and inexpert, as though he's strayed out of his comfort zone.

But Rhodes' book commits a worse sin: It is boring in a way that his previous two atomic histories were not. For example, when it comes to the most important meetings, the Gorbachev-Reagan battles that saw the two world leaders negotiate the end of the Cold War, Rhodes relies on archival sources taken by eyewitness note-takers. That's a good thing, usually, unless you just transcribe them into your book, as Rhodes seems to have done.

This is particularly evident as Rhodes recounts the Oct. 10-12, 1986, meetings between Gorbachev and Reagan at Reykjavik, Iceland. There is some great stuff in here, such as the fact that, because of space restrictions, the American negotiators took to meeting in a bathroom in the building that housed the summit. Reagan sat on the toilet while his aides debated over the fate of the world's nuclear arsenal. Others sat in the bathtub. Unfortunately, Rhodes doesn't edit these accounts to the extent that he should have. The reader doesn't need to know every piece of dialogue that Reagan said to Gorbachev. Give me the gist of it, keep the story going so that you still have my attention for the important stuff.

Around the time that Rhodes gets to the Reykjavik summit, what the book actually is about becomes clear. Rhodes is really mad about the second Iraqi war. And he really wants people to know that many of the same neo-cons responsible for the arms buildup of the early '80s also were responsible for the second Iraqi war. We're talking the usual suspects -- Richard Perle, Dick Cheney. And OK, we get it, the guys used bias in their reasoning. They were blind to the facts in the '80s, and they were blind to the facts in the post-9/11 rush to get into Iraq.

Rhodes is so busy trying to indict Cheney and Perle that he forgets about his history and the whole book wanders into the territory of an anti-neo-con essay -- a wholesale statement against war, nuclear or otherwise. "Fear was part of the program, the psychological response to threat inflation that delivered reliable votes," Rhodes writes on p. 298, toward the book's end. "How did we come to such a pass? I was raised to believe that Americans were a courageous people. Weren't you?"

This sort of editorializing isn't Rhodes's strength. It feels shrill. It feels obtrusive. And it feels trite. (Naomi Klein makes a similar point in her latest book, The Shock Doctrine. And Columbia University's Richard Hofstadter argued along similar lines way back in 1964, with his seminal essay, The Paranoid Style In American Politics.)

Rhodes is so angry about Perle, Cheney et. al. that he has lost his objectivity -- which is what seems to have troubled Rhodes about his enemies in the first place.

Don't Write Off Russia's New President

One aspect of Tuesday's Democratic debate that few people noticed was the trouble both Clinton and Obama had naming Russia's incoming president, who will be confirmed in an "election" this Sunday. There are a number of reasons for this; Obama is seen as weak on all things foreign, and while Clinton does have some interesting ideas on Iraq and Afghanistan, Russia's presidential changeover hasn't attracted much attention from the American electorate.

Western media coverage on the Russian election has been almost unrelentingly negative. The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and our own Globe and Mail have all painted affairs there pretty bleakly. Reporters quote mostly anonymous sources describing the way Putin has stomped on democracy--factory managers monitoring their employees' voting, under threat of firing, and school children being assigned to report how their parents voted. Western media have fallen all over themselves to depict this as backsliding toward the Cold War era when Russia was controlled by the all-powerful Communist Party.

And yeah, all this is pretty egregious. But also reeking of the Cold War is Western media's coverage of Russian affairs. The attention has been unrelentingly negative. English media such as The Guardian at least have an excuse—Russia and England are still bickering over fallout from the Litvinenko affair. Still, the negativity seems so strident it verges on propaganda. This rush to condemn Russia would benefit from some nuance. (The exception to this rule has been CBC Radio, which featured some great context on Wednesday morning from the Russian-born York University academic, Sergei Plekhanov.)

Obama and Clinton had trouble naming Russia's next president because he is seen as irrelevant -- because it's thought that Putin and his ex-KGB cronies will retain their iron grip on Russian affairs. The name of the next Russian president is Dmitri Medvedev, of course. Very few Western pundits have bothered to point out that Medvedev stands to represent real change for Russia.

Discounting the short reigns of Andropov and Chernenko in the '80s, every Russian leader since Lenin has been underestimated by those around him. After Stalin's death in 1953, Khrushchev was thought to be only a doorstop holding open the corridor to the leadership while more powerful competitors like Beria and Malenkov sorted out the succession. Likewise, Khrushchev's successor in 1964, Brezhnev, was dismissed as a buffoon whose opinion was so easily spun by his peers that he was nicknamed "the Ballerina." But Khruschev dispatched with his enemies and went on to rule for 11 years. Brezhnev bested that -- he ruled for 18.

Time and time again in Russia, the newcomer is thought to be a weakling, an inconsequential figurehead. Then, once he's officially assumed the leadership, the Kremlin's power brokers reorganize themselves into new factions. The smart ones align themselves with the new guy, who, with their help, gradually begins exerting his increasing influence. And eventually, the new guy, the figurehead, no longer looks so inconsequential.

The same thing will happen with Medvedev. This is good for the West, where, despite most media ignoring such signs, Medvedev has been indicating plans to open up the Russian economy. He's also signaled his intention to push Russia toward genuine democracy. This will happen gradually, but I'm betting it'll happen all the same. One thing is certain -- a year from now, American politicians will know Medvedev's name.