Roads not taken:  ITT’s offer of frozen meals for the Soviet school lunch program 14 June 1978, Moscow 2.30-3.45 Meeting at the Ministry of Meat and Dairy with Deputy Minister Kroha presiding, Savchenko from the Meat Institute, the director of the experimental frozen food factory in Moscow (with production of 20,000 meals per shift or one-quarter of the Morton plant in Crozet, Virginia , plus protocol officers Syroezhkin and Bessonov. For ITT: Georges, Herbert, Luigi.  After a word of introduction by Georges, I do the entire presentation: film slides and brief talk. There are a number of technical questions – we discuss plate/tunnel freezers, temperature of storage, freezing time, whether ordinary gas ovens or some special oven like infrared or microwave is necessary.  They show considerable interest in the production speed– see the film twice for this purpose. Are really convinced that given this speed the work is truly highly automated, and are very impressed when I say that direct labor costs in production are only 7%. They ask about the school lunch program – particularly like the idea of feeding 500 persons this way. Kroha sees application for long distance trains, Aeroflot, shops, for major cities like Moscow, Leningrad, etc. Says that they are less interested in chickens, more interested in meatballs, ground meat, combination meat products, hot dogs. I mention that the patties are extended to 25% with soy and they seek more information – is this isolate?  (yes, Purina 500E). Kroha and Savchenko are especially warm to me; Tsygalnitzky generously tosses bouquet, explaining that the food plant was outside their area of activity, at the same time makes it clear that the point of contact for the future is their Country Manager, Luigi. We ask their impressions of the Morton food samples I delivered. Kroha says very good products – that they were especially impressed by the doughnuts, pastries which were so fresh and tasty upon defrosting. We ask about seminar – Kroha agrees to October/November schedule, says they can have 100 present (how many do you wish?). Evidently prefer to use the Trade Council as venue. Says they will take it upon themselves to bring the Food Ministry people to participate. Says to work closely with Syroezhkin ‘who reports directly to me.’ Feeling upon leaving very positive: clear what is to be done now. It is incumbent on the company to bring to the seminar not only a technical presentation but rudimentary commercial proposal which should be twofold: 1) sample project including separate pricing school lunch, dinner and confectionary (donut) lines. This either cut to suit Russians or reproducing exactly what they have in Crozet or Russelville. Show price for equipment and technology – all just for orientation. Not to include building, training, freight, supervision or installation – just price to do it as if in the USA. 2) project sales of product – to test market acceptance, e.g. to supply school or hospital in Moscow for 1 year.  Technical presentations: might focus on product development, considerations underlying the food technology; also nutritional considerations in US school lunch program; some information on school lunch implementation.  Should tell of company’s projects abroad:  Nigeria licensing of bakeries, Egypt, school lunch sales in Mideast and Japan, supply to US Army, etc. Georges seems satisfied with the results. Herbert had hoped for request on proposal. All see great deal of work ahead that Morton staff is ill-prepared to do and that exceeds their usual role. In the evening I join Luigi and Herbert for dinner at George’s apartment, 3^rd floor of the Metropole Hotel. Marvelous museum piece, with 4 plaster/marble columns, large formal dining table at center of the room, television and lounging alcove to the left and sleeping alcove behind curtains to the right. Unretouched mid-19^th century, only concession to our era being a Japanese air conditioner and color television. The occasion of our repast is the transmission of the FRG/Italy soccer match from Argentina, where World Cup match is proceeding. Dinner chat affable, roams.  Georges calls himself insistently French, while probing the background of others. Luigi is an Italian stationed in Austria. Herbert is of Czech descent; though he speaks 5 languages, Czech is not among them. He grew up in Italy, moved to Sweden in childhood. All share lively humor, zest for life, politically acute minds. Take great pleasure in the very international status of the company and personal lives. The game is a marvelous excuse for national jokes, for venting their hyperactive wits. I leave with a feeling of well-being and fraternity that has overcome even the depression of two days ago over the arrest of the International Harvester representative. This good-humored sophistication is a real delight – camaraderie that leaves the feeling it’s very good to be alive; all the while the chain of authority is not forgotten. ©Gilbert Doctorow, 2020 [Memoirs of Russianist, Volume I: From the Ground Up in now in print and available on all national websites of Amazon.com, as well as from other leading online retailers including Barnes & Noble, and http://www.bol.com.]

Death throes of détente, June-July 1978

First seizure, Tuesday, 13 June 1978, Moscow

I visit the U.S. Commercial Office, pick up telexes. Office Director Farrand calls me and one other aside to tell about yesterday’s worrisome incident: the unexplained arrest of an International Harvester representative, who was taken from his car in downtown Moscow and has been held incommunicado despite embassy protests. Clearly retaliation for the arrest of Soviet commercial agents in New Jersey two weeks ago. Very significant, they are turning the screws. The alarm I read on Anatoly Yarilov’s face at our last luncheon in New York was quite correct: their people really were shaken by detention of persons not protected by diplomatic immunity and now we are going to feel the heat.

How well justified was my visceral foreboding; indeed, Chris’s [Purina] question about how Mr. Brzezinski’s behavior was affecting business was well placed. The impossible has finally occurred: they are touching businessmen; and the fact that they have started with IH, which has been here so long and was one of the pioneers of the Nixon policy was carefully considered. They have stepped on the tail of a firm which they hope will yell loudly at Washington to proceed more cautiously.

In the midst of this horror, our unknowing tourists complain at the Rossiya Hotel about poor service, that just the caviar they seek is not available, that the soup is cold!  And communications personnel bitch that the export control board drags its feet on their high technology orders! 

How did the Cold War begin?  As witnesses to its re-emergence we cannot doubt its ways. The wild language, uncompromising stance of Mr. Brzezinski has helped immeasurably. The other side has done its part in overt adventurism. And we are hissing at one another all over again. 

Dear Henry, now all that you built from the China Sea to Central Europe is coming undone and the culpability of shallow personalities and dilettantes in foreign policy is clear enough. The repugnant behavior of the other side is obvious, but that was always there. Adventurism in Africa! Well, since when has fishing in muddy waters been excluded? Were the meetings in Moscow when we bombed Hanoi not proof enough that peace can endure if there is a deep enough commitment to that cause?  There is a point where recriminations so spoil the atmosphere that the exchange of charges becomes self-generating, sustaining a vicious cycle of deteriorating relations and frustration.

Feeling rather defeated, I go to the ITT office for lunch – pass along the ill-tidings to Georges, who tries to show no emotion, but appears to know, admits that he too has known paranoia.  We are served a very elegant lunch, but the mood is subdued. 

A word about the new office within Brown&Root : about three other companies share this half-floor which Brown & Root has leased – each with one room office, each will have own telex, dining room for entertaining guests. The fact is that ITT has never officially applied for accreditation, because the process would take several years just for the company to resolve to take that step.

The New York Times, 14 July 1978

“President Deplores the Russian Trials as Blow to Liberty. House also condemns them. White House Reported Reviewing Exchange Plans With View to Cutting Some Off,” by Martin Tolchin. 13 July 1978

President Carter condemned the trials of Anatoly B. Shcharansky and other Soviet dissidents today as ‘an attack on every human being who lives in the world who believes in basic human freedom and is willing to speak for these freedoms or fight for them.’

A senior White House aide said that the Administration was reviewing all trade, technological and scientific exchanges with the Soviet Union, with a view toward ending those most beneficial to Moscow.

There is a growing debate within the Administration over whether the United States should cancel export deals with Moscow in retaliation for the trials, and an aide to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the President’s national security adviser, sought to advance the idea by urging Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, to raise the matter publicly.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2020

[Memoirs of Russianist, Volume I: From the Ground Up in now in print and available on all national websites of Amazon.com, as well as from other leading online retailers including Barnes & Noble, and http://www.bol.com]

Diary entry, visit to Leningrad on invitation visa from Vladimir Illarionovich Zalesov, July 1987

17 July – Helsinki to Leningrad by train

The Soviet train is waiting. Alongside are Finnish trains bearing on their sides some warning about AIDS. The Soviet train has 7cars, 300 passengers –mostly American teenagers taking part in a People to People exchange program. Alone in the compartment, we are joined at last minute by two quiet Norwegians. As the train pulls out of the station, we sit down in the dining car. A very Soviet menu of sturgeon fish soup, then отбивное мясо or fried sturgeon for the main course (tiny, greasy), with nondescript Georgian wine by the glass and Nescafe in an expresso cup. Service is friendly and efficient – and the only irritant is that the foreigners ignore the non-smoking signs and light up, nearly every one. 

Finnish landscape – the alternating bright yellow alfalfa and green pastures with pine and birch forests – is pretty if one and the same. After three and a half hours, we reach the Soviet frontier. We stop for 20 minutes at the Finnish border town, then enter no man’s land, where Soviet customs officials board and start their detailed search. Our neighbors have, as it turns out, a religious bent and the officer finds 15 Russian language bibles in one of their bags. Then the hunt begins. Our compartment is thoroughly investigated. However, the inspection is perfunctory with us after going through my suitcase. He asks if we have gifts and I point out the cassette recorder we have for Vladimir. If that is all, he says, it’s all right. His expression is to say: ‘that’s the least you can bring your father on an invitation visa.’

The train crawls along, windows are sealed and despite the low air temperature, it quickly becomes unbearably stuffy in the train. Time starts to go very slowly as well. The landscape becomes still more monotonous and dizzying low of pine and birch trees, many of which appear to be dying from some pollution or another.

Finally we reach Vyborg, where the train stops from 18.40 to 19.00. Larisa and I leave the train and pass through the station to the street and then to the lake. The town looks neat, cared for, with well-trimmed trees adorning the shore. However, the people in the street waiting for the bus are so poorly dressed – look like the 1950s. And the buses themselves, those pitiful local buses made in L’vov, look like they were hand riveted in someone’s back yard. Here is where Larisa’s uncle Misha lives. We may look him up on the way out.

From Vyborg to Leningrad we pass through very poor and miserable region till we reach the near suburbs of the city at Repino and things improve with dacha territory. The coastal road, which I remember from excursions to the Zelenogorsk country house of the U.S. consul  in 1972, is in good shape. As we approach Leningrad’s Finland Station,  it all looks so pitiful, depressing.

Volodya is waiting for us on the platform. We are only 15 minutes late but he is in horror that we have been so delayed. The man evidently has been in an anxious state for more than a month awaiting this visit.

On the way to the house, we learn that our arrival in mid-July has certain liabilities – many of Larisa’s friends have already left town or are about to leave for vacation. All the theaters are closed, including the ballet.

Volodya pulls our heavy bags, pushes us to the head of the taxi queue over shouts of those waiting and we fear he will have his stroke here and now. The trunk of the car, already half filled by liquefied gas tank, accommodates only part of our luggage. Volodya sits in front, sharing his seat with Alexa’s suitcase. We carry hand luggage on our knees. The rattle-trap Volga jumps and bumps along the streets, reaching Vasilevsky Ostrov at last. Chetvertaya liniya, dom 59 – we stop before the garbage barrels, the local landmark. Enter the courtyard, which looks like an excavation site as a crew have dug up little water pipes to insulate them. We walk along planks, over trenches to Volodya’s entrance, then up 4 flights of stairs. Paint is peeling off the walls. By U.S. standards, it’s a regular slum tenement. Apartment 30. 

Double doors. Into the corridor. Living room is first to the left, followed by bedroom and kitchen on the left, WC and bath at the end. It’s about as I remember it, perhaps larger and better decorated. Wallpaper may be fresher. Stuffed penguin sits atop a bookcase in the corridor, a tortoise shell on the wall of the living room, where there is also a wall-mounted display case of corals and two Indonesian paintings on wood, two dark wood sculptured faces on the wall. In the living room and bedroom, there are well hung carpets and the impression generally is of layer upon layer of coverings on the walls and floors.

His apartment is like a ship’s cabin – every inch has been put to use. The kitchen also has been ‘built in’ in the Russian manner – with boards or planks. The stove is grimy. The fridge is an ancient monster. The only new item is the Nova Miniwash we gave him last November. Plates and silver are all mismatched, remnants. Larisa and I take a brief walk outside, in the twilight of White Nights; it is still unseasonably cold.

Saturday, 19 July 1987  Leningrad

We all rise very late. After an enormous breakfast consisting of sausage and cheese, rich leftovers from last night’s supper and boiled coffee, we go into town. It is a bright but cool day, with temperature in the 16 – 18 degree C range.  Together with Volodya we go in search of police for registration (local OVIR is closed today). Then we go looking for the валютный гастроном, which was situated at the start of Nevsky Prospekt, near Herzen street but now is closed, with references to other non-existent addresses. We are finally sent to the Beryozka department store near Hotel Pribaltiiskaya, where the food section, consisting mainly of liquor, tea, chocolate, coffee is closed for inventory. So we have to settle for the Hotel’s Beryozka where he unloads $120 to stock up on liquor and I get cigarettes for taxi drivers. In a word, there is nothing to buy for cash. No fresh food at all, only Danish canned ham and sodas. There are video cassette recorders, color televisions and hair dryers in the electrical goods section of the department store. But refrigerators or miniwash machines, such as we saw with Volodya in the Vneshposyltorg shop near the house this morning on the Makarova Embankment are open only for sales in ruble certificates that are available to Soviets who have worked abroad. A Soviet with dollars might as well have play money, for all it is worth to him. The only new thing in the system is that the bulldogs are at rest – there is no apparent effort to keep ordinary Soviets away from the certificate stores. And the closed shops generally are being cut back. The валютный гастроном in Moscow at the Mezhdunarodnaya complex was closed for alleged corruption and the same happened here in Leningrad – when they will reopen no one can say.

 Sunday, 26 July 1987   Leningrad

Start the day with a jog around the stadium. Larisa joins in. Then the usual heavy breakfast of oatmeal and boiled coffee.

Alexa has been spending the past several nights at Valya’s recovering from bug bites. Her first words in Russian now are :  клопы и комары. I pick her up from Valya and walk her and Vlad down to the Neva embankment so they can watch the official part of today’s Navy Day exercises. Per Alexa’s request, Vlad wears his uniform, heavily bedecked in medals. I photograph them both by the Sphinx. They return some 40 minutes later having watched the brass in a cutter salute the ships parked in the river. At noon the 4 of us take a taxi to the Metro stop Gorkovskaya to meet Valya. It is here, she says, that on weekends for the past few months young professional artists have gathered to sell paintings directly to the public. Nothing today, though (we later learn that the market has moved to another location). We next take the metro out to the apartment of the Zotovs for a name-day party.  Besides us four, there are the old architecture friends of the Zotovs. We start up a conversation with this couple straight away. The wife, with henna-dyed hair, has a very ‘Soviet’ Russian face, matronly build. He has sleepy Jewish face. Their marriage came evidently in mid-life as each has their own grown children – all, it seems, living abroad. He came from Riga, where he was a top architect. She has a daughter living in Slovenia, in a small town near Maribor, married to a local party boss. They both have visited there several times, say they were tempted to cross over into Austria to have a look, or to Italy. I say they must go to Venice by boat from Istria next time. His sons are living in the States. One is a very successful artist who gets commissions to travel around the world; the other is a furniture restorer in Boston, whom by weird coincidence, we may have met at the store of Lanska when we were in Back Bay last September. I take the Polaroid and all are stunned and delighted to have photos. 

We have brought Spanish white wine which Larisa imported from Poland and this is greatly appreciated.  On both points, we had resisted Vlad and it is a good thing. Only pity is we didn’t take some whisky, because Zotov would love to try it –never has. This get-together has a pall of sadness. Though Larisa flares up into heated dispute with Katya over Reagan, this subsides quickly as it starts. In the kitchen, Larisa tells Katya of the details of [her mother] Lydia’s death and burial, then at the table Katya offers a toast to her memory, which even Vlad reluctantly drinks to. 

All these crows are dying off. Katya tells Larisa most of their circle of architects has gone. Zotov himself looks a weak and old man – doubtful we will ever meet again. But he is lively today – puts favorite records on the record player. He recites his own seditious poems from 1937. He is enjoying having lived long enough to witness the unmasking of Stalin. Our gift digital watches and alarm clocks were received with gratitude – I put them in running order.

None wants to believe that the unmasking should go further than Stalin. It’s unthinkable anyone would attack Lenin, take the crimes back to his door. They have read Solzhenitsyn but this aspect of his work has not registered. They have read Дети Арбата about Stalin’s murder of Kirov and all are overjoyed. All have seen Покаяние. All read the papers, Огонек, Комсомольская Правда. The real action is going on in Moscow.

The meal itself is classic Russian: start with red caviar sandwiches. Table is set with cold perch, sliced roast beef, radish salad, potato salad, cabbage filled pies. There is Armenian cognac and a carafe of grape juice. No main course, instead straight to splendid dessert of a rich torte and tea with lemon. The party turns best with the tea – when everyone is relaxed, sated, and eager to talk. We talk about religion, about how the Church is making a come-back. Larisa went this morning to a service at the church where she had gone once upon a time with Lydia Danilovna. The choir was excellent, a tenor from the Mariinsky Theater. There is talk of restoring some churches to religious use. Even Katya, the Bolshevik warms up to the religious talk – says how church weddings now are shown on television, in films.

The couple of architects remain interesting for us. They let slights roll off their back. They have seen it all and survived it all.

In the evening we go out to see Lena, another old friend of Larisa’s from the geology days. She has just moved into an apartment in the harbor on Vasilevsky. It’s raining as we arrive in this dim and desolate part of town. I wonder how in hell we will get out. We climb to the 4^th floor – past pails of smelly garbage. A thin blond man in his early 30s opens the door and beckons us inside. There are boxes and disorder. We go straight to the little kitchen, where Seryozha prepares tea and instant coffee. He is Lena’s son by her first marriage – has returned after marrying a Bulgarian and spending several years in Sofia. Left wife and child for reasons we don’t know and now works at the Mining Institute as a professor while living with mom and half-sister. He is attractive – a very Russian guy, classic интеллигент. He is related to Tolya in Moscow , who came up recently to join a celebration for passing the кандидат degree. About life in Bulgaria Seryozha is not a great enthusiast – saw Sofia as a provincial hole. Agrees with me that the only solidly built building in Varna is the Roman ruins. Says the place to see is Veliki Trnovo. Says Bulgarian feelings about Russia are ambivalent; one shouldn’t take their apparent love and loyalty at face value: see the rubbish they ship to Russia in two-way trade. A level-headed, attractive guy. Slim, athletic.

The apartment is a complete slum. I pretend not to notice the bedbug like insects climbing the walls. The pride of their possessions is the library – 100 packing boxes containing perhaps several thousand volumes. The furniture is dark, heavy and 19^th century Russian.

Lena walks in. Heavy set, with a broad face. Thin, stringy dyed black hair, grandmotherly look. She has changed so much that Larisa at first scarcely recognizes her.

I try to be controversial, to draw them out. I say how there are no standards here any more. In Poland the artisan, craft goods can be beautiful even if industrial goods are ugly. Here, too, all which comes from factories is shoddy, ugly to behold. The only models of refinement and taste are from tsarist times. Why do they at once revile and at the same time lovingly preserve this. Our hosts are speechless. I give them my anti-museum talk: how museums are cemeteries for art, removing fine arts from the milieu in applied arts, decoration, furniture, fashion, amidst which they were created and placing them in a sterile void. I explain what is being done these days at Versailles to break up groups, to create spectacles outdoors for their amusement and so to spare the place unnecessary traffic of bored and ignorant visitors. Only when I get to say how we were amazed to see how the Hermitage has so few guards and how every fool can approach paintings and lean all over Empire furniture – only then do they begin to react.

Lena works as a guide and knows very well the level of these visitors: are the statues of angels her life? The talk become lively on the subject of Gorbachev and perestroika. It’s amazing to read the paper these days. Talk of Stolypin has disappeared, but there is nearly complete rehabilitation of Bukharin.  Lena and Seryozha have flattering words for Deti Arbata, for Pokayanie, for Moi Drug Ivan Lapshin. See the revival of the Church. Church hierarchs are shown on televised events.  Lena: Perestroika because the economy is at a critical point. The idea is to revive NEP. The pressure of the intelligentsia for democratization is at last being heeded. Seryozha: dissidents and intelligentsia have nothing to do with de-Stalinization. It is Gorbachev’s policy in order to put his team firmly in power, nothing more. Leningrad is a very conservative backwater even after the departure of Romanov. The local party boss continues to be obstructionist. Local press is drab compared to Moscow papers and journals.  The multi-candidate elections confused people.  The old-timers refused to ballot secretly: won’t the loser be offended? Though dissidents have been freed, the amnesty has not benefited nationalists and religious internees. Now the hot issue is the Tatars. Regarding farms: all talk now is on re-creating the peasant farm, i.e. the хутор, turning over cattle to private hands. The bureaucrats are in dismay. When the Ministry of Agriculture and Ministry of Food Industry were merged to form the Ministry of Food Complexes, there was a wholesale review of the bureaucrats’ credentials and removal of persons who do not hold diplomas. Reportedly the whole Leningrad KGB was fired, half of Moscow’s. One shouldn’t worry about the chaps, though, because all found new nests in local administrations and industry. Bribery and corruption had reached gigantic proportions: all 3 cotton republics were completely rotten, withhundreds of millions of rubles of product diverted. The scoff-laws get around the ‘dry law’ today by stealing industrial spirit – see the weak liquor. Glasnost means all of society’s ills are now coming into the open: drugs, prostitution.

Lena:  our industry in Leningrad brings only pollution and financial losses. The town should be turned over to tourism. Architects are at a loss over what to do with the big 12 room apartments in old buildings. By law families can receive no more than 1 room per person even if they buy in a cooperative building. How to get around this?  Meanwhile restoration work on Old Petersburg proceeds at a snail’s pace, falling behind the decay. No money for investment, no sense of what to do with the old buildings now that communal flats are no longer acceptable to the population. How can the policy of real incentives for economic performance be put into effect when such an important area as lodgings is in the hands of levelers? 

We talk about Alcoholics Anonymous, which was greeted for the first time with interest here, about other questions, about everything except AIDS.  It’s the only discussion we’ve had in this city which didn’t in one way or another touch that problem.

We talk about nuclear power and Chernobyl. Seryozha mentions the much worse calamity in the 1950s in the Urals when a nuclear dump entered a chain reaction. Chernobyl itself is an example of wanton disregard for the safety of people by the authorities. Fire brigades were sent to the scene wearing no protection. Volunteers were sent to a certain death. The capping with sandbags was entirely unnecessary. Now the ‘clean-up’ is coming at vast cost – and is more for the sake of Public Relations than anything else. It would be preferable to simply declare a dead zone for 30 years and wait. I mention what our Poles found in Kiev: the contaminated furniture, the need to bring in food from Kishinev. This is news to them.

On museums:  there were so few guards not because the administration is easy going but because there is no allocation.

On Afghanistan:  mothers are terribly afraid for their sons. However, the boys themselves seek adventure there and fast track military careers for officers. Move to head of the queue for cars and apartments when they return. Veterans of Afghanistan get the same privileges as WWII veterans.

Lena opens a tin of sprats, puts out Edam cheese and Roquefort. We refill the tea and coffee cups. Talk goes on till 3.30 am.  Daughter, half-sister to Seryozha by Lena’s second husband, the poet, who died 5 years ago, joins us. She is a student at the philology faculty at the university, but her real passion is horse riding. She holds a master of sport title as an equestrienne, won first prize at a jumping competition in Sestroretsk. She spends at least two hours a day in the stables; she trained the horse from the start as a colt. Saddles are the weak point in equipment – only one factory exists in Moscow. Her group takes 90 minute promenades starting at 7.30 am, but do the beach only off season.

Seryozha himself has put in walls, reorganized the inner space of this rather large apartment to give greater privacy. Has been working since December. He moved  books and furniture with friends using a rented truck without laborers in order to avoid pilferage.

At 3.30 am we walk out into the drizzle. To our surprise we easily catch a taxi several blocks away. Crawl into bed at 4am dazed and exhausted.

Monday, 27 July 1987, Leningrad

Heavy rain and cold, perhaps 8 degrees C. No taxis to be found, of course, especially when you follow Vladimir’s idea of catching one at an official taxi stand.

We rise late, leave the house at half past 10.

I join Larisa at [university professor] Yekaterina Belokon’s communal flat, which is situated just around the corner from Zhelyabova and the Evropeiskaya. She has lived in this bel-etage apartment for the past 40 years. A wreck of a building, but there is a hint of past pre-revolutionary glory in the half-coffered ceilings. Her room is about 25 square meters – there are several large wardrobes and a table. The typewriter stands on a pedestal. Belokon lets me in by the back entry which I mistakenly take. We pass through the kitchen and down the corridor to her nest. She is agile and sexless – has strong, masculine face, walks energetically. Has a small but firm body. She is nearly 90, somewhat hard of hearing and with vision impaired by cataracts. As I sit down next to Larisa, she gives a very warm, carefully composed greeting. At our departure she urges us to cherish one another, to keep clear consciences. Surprising spirituality and lively mind. She still walks several miles a day and until last year took grueling bus trips across Russia for vacation. She now has stopped, because she fears being a burden to others. Says very confidentially to us, on pledge that we will not repeat it to others – so as not to endanger those who are close to her: there will be a буря, a storm, here if the reforms don’t go through. The shortcomings of the system have reached a critical point. Then she swings into a monologue on 1907-08, how she lost her father to the terrorist movement – he died of TB in prison transfer, a kind of self-willed death to save his wife and family from further persecution. Father had entered the conspiratorial SR’s, because he had witnessed solders’ reprisals against the peasants. He was imprisoned, released, then re-imprisoned after running some revolutionaries to freedom.

He was betrayed by Azov, the police informer while a member of the SR executive committee and so had unwittingly given away colleagues. Then she skips to her other passion – the Siege of Leningrad. Relates with burning pride how even in the depths of misery Leningraders had not cut down the trees in the Summer Garden. How she had offered warmth to a frozen visitor by setting afire her copy of Pushkin. Talks about the defense at…about Zhdanov’s stupid and criminal leadership, which cost so many lives needlessly. How all the food stores had been concentrated so that German precision bombing in one raid left the defenders completely without food stocks. Tells how in the good old days they were so terrorized that only slept peacefully in their beds on May 1, November 7 and New Year’s, when no arrests would be made. About the limits of Glasnost: officially today the regime plays down the siege of Leningrad because of the huge losses and wanton waste of human life.

I interrupt her extended monologue to say that people are different everywhere and we do have different mores and concerns, that while we try to be open-minded, we do have to make judgments also. Each generation has to fight for justice and truth and one generation cannot do this for all time or ensure its successors from evil, for evil comes from within us. I say the crimes of the siege are not the end of it, that there have been many, as recently as Chernobyl, and that any of these gross crimes could have been sufficient grounds to overturn the government in a normal state. It’s unclear how much of my speech reaches her, but she seems a bit hurt.  We change the subject. She presents recent signed photos for Larisa. Says she hopes to hold on for another couple of years. We exchange presents , give her a folding umbrella which pleases her especially and a digital watch.

Belokon’s gravely voice is even, steady. Her words are gentle, coming from another age. There is kindness and a certain elegance here. Only her revelations are rather empty. Despite herself, she is still terrorized by the shadow of Stalin.

At the door Belokon assures us that she will take care of herself and when she feels she no longer can do so, she will just die, she will not linger. We are deeply affected as we step out into the bright street.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2020

[Memoirs of Russianist, Volume I: From the Ground Up in now in print and available on all national websites of Amazon.com, as well as from other leading online retailers including Barnes & Noble, and http://www.bol.com.]

Diary entry, June 1984 – Poznan Fair

Steady drizzle. My shoes are drying in a corner of my cell at the Hotel Mercury. Luigi promised a bordello and instead a prison was what I got. A dusty carpet on the floor. A miserable view of a busy, noisy traffic intersection below my window. Girls – none, save the one semiprofessional with whom I struck up a conversation this afternoon out of deathly boredom. When have I slept so much? Hard to remember. If I had a slight weakness for drink, I would be dead drunk here all the time.

My appetite has been voracious. The sight of the niggardly portions at all restaurants alone makes me vulpine. There is that hidden fear that if I do not stuff myself to satiety, I may go hungry next meal. The luxury category guest is not spared that gnawing worry here.

The city is ugly. All right, I concede that the Old Market square is a pretty sight, but the thought that it is all a make believe reconstruction of a past destroyed utterly during the war spoils my enjoyment.

The goods in the stores are ugly. The people look mostly ugly. Men are boorish, women are unadorned, plain. The pushing and shoving of the crowds is hideous. I can think of no greater mundane misery than to be stuck here in Poznan for any length of time above one day. Of course, there are always exceptional miseries which are outside the competition.

Warsaw, June 17, 1984 – Election Day

Posters in many shop windows with electoral lists. Newspapers full of news of electoral preparations. Yesterday in Kielce I was unable to buy wine in the Kielce Pewex because all liquor sales have been suspended in anticipation of election day. Last night at the Victoria the night club was closed and the restaurant could offer no liquor for the same reason.

And what of the people? Despair, complete despair. They had hopes that government would make available foodstuffs or consumer goods to brighten the mood, but nothing was delivered. In Kielce Lydia Danilovna’s friend Pani Danusja and her husband, who are well to do, spent six and a half hours in line at a meat store to get their meat quota against coupons. From 4.30 in the morning, the line formed. The couple took turns. But as pani Chrystina said in disgust: ‘it is macabre.’ Christina has returned two days ago from the F.R.G. where she spent a month with relatives near Braunschweig hoping to pick up something in inheritance from an aunt who recently passed away. She got only four suitcases full of old rubbish; the house and property went to nearer kin. Pani Christina is chastened, a bit like a beaten dog. The poor are not much loved. And even she came back with the proper appreciation of the way things stand: ‘There (in Germany) people live and grow; here we vegetate. How are we supposed to raise healthy children in these conditions?’ Deep feeling of disgust, that things are not getting better, perhaps are getting worse.

But Lydia Danilovna looks well. She has some optimism….She reads me her latest poem……In general I should pick up something, anything for her each time at that bookstore [in Warsaw]. The woman desperately needs some distraction, entertainment. The whole country is bored out of its mind.  The slightest entertainment is enjoyed for all it is worth. No wonder one becomes a voracious reader…

The feeling of doom and gloom is heightened by the weather, which has been as miserable as in Brussels. Overcast, rainy day after rainy day.

The only striking thing about Poznan is the monument to the uprisings. Two immense monolith crosses, about 30 meters high, bound together by a large symbolic iron chain, like the crown of thorns. On the first pillar is marked only 1956, the revolution that brought Gomulka to power. On the second is a column of dates from 1960 to 1980. The monument has pride of place on a major intersection at the start of the park that runs parallel to the railway line. Nearby is a massive official monument to Mickiewicz. There are beacons to illumine the monument at night. Before it lies a bed of fresh cut flowers. The traces of Solidarity which even this regime does not dare to stamp out.

The American tourists are arriving in force. At Hotel Victoria in Warsaw, a large group has a bus outside the hotel with the sign “Happy Louie – Poland tours.”  All seem to be Polish speaking. At the cashier’s desk a couple in their late 50s, early 60s change $100 bills into zloty. (don’t they know about the black market?).  At the Forum during lunch Friday two tables away are three Polish-American teenage girls with the Polish boyfriend of one. Kids straight out of suburbia. …They don’t look like university exchanges. ..

The Happy Louie group at the Forum are all wearing bright yellow pins (3 inch diameter) with the legend in English and Polish “Have a nice day”. Grotesque! Who in hell has a nice day in Poland?

On the way out to the airport Wojciech tells me he may be too busy today to go to the polls. ‘It’s not a very important election, just for the local administration. Just a test.’  He enjoys his irony.

The Poznan Fair itself was unexpectedly boring, low-key. ..

We have only one semi-interesting business meeting with rep of UNITRA/DIORA factory who need modern style foil-type keyboard switches for front panels of stereo component systems, of which they make 40k sets a year.

On the Polish side, the only interesting exhibition is by Coopexim, with traditional Christmas tree decorations, wicker baskets and furniture, rocking horses, children’s carnival costumes and leather saddles.

The Poles’ problem is that they understand exactly what they have and what they don’t have.  And that embitters them, so that whereas Russians can have less, they are content. Poles have more and they are wretched. Their frame of reference is the West and their past freedom. They have traveled, they have relatives in the West. They are not brain-washed like the Russians. They know how to interpret life in the West when they are there. True, Soviets do not travel under normal conditions: they are shepherded by chaperones who police them and frustrate ‘erroneous’ conclusions about what is seen. ….

It is consciousness of his state which makes the Poles so miserable. Russians are blissful in their ignorance and not wanting to know.

Even in Kielce the foreigners are felt. When I checked into the Hotel Centralny Lysa Gora, opposite the train station, I came without a reservation, trudging with my two suitcases. The receptionist looked at me, as upon a camel, I thought. The first white man in decades. But no..[I was wrong]

The only place in Poland where you can feel some sense of human dignity is in concert halls…and the churches, which are open to all without queuing. No wonder the churches are full. They alone work as in the good old days. Theater, diversion in a country that is bored out of its mind.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2020

[Memoirs of Russianist, Volume I: From the Ground Up in now in print and available on all national websites of Amazon.com, as well as from other leading online retailers including Barnes & Noble, and http://www.bol.com.]

Western electronic media have reacted with skepticism and sharp criticism to President Putin’s announcement yesterday that Russia’s first Covid-19 vaccine has been officially registered and will soon enter industrial production.

Many of the skeptics we see on the air are more generally Russia-bashers and detractors. They often know little about the country and have no idea about Russia’s scientific community and its achievements over the past decade precisely in the area of immunology and combatting infectious diseases.

This thumbs down reaction may be characterized as a case of “sour grapes” – meaning a combination of envy and embarrassment that Russia has proven itself far bolder than the global, especially U.S. and European competitors in addressing directly the threat of the virus to human health and to the economy while wasting no time on protocol niceties that will give little practical benefit other than to allow officials to cover their asses should the final results of the immunization program be less than perfect.

With respect to television and cable coverage, the judgment also may be the consequence of lack of time to get into the complexities of the given case. I make this argument with a sideways glance at today’s feature article in The Financial Times, a publication which surely is editorially not soft on the Russians but has given a far more nuanced account of the Russian registration of their Sputnik-V vaccine and planned start with vaccination of medical workers in the coming weeks prior to widespread immunization of the civilian population later in the year.

“Russia to start mass use of its Covid-19 vaccine” by Moscow-based journalist Henry Foy and others sets out nearly all the relevant facts and opinions in the case, both pro and contra, without taking sides. (https://www.ft.com/content/219b973f-c50a-4071-994f-cc4592d43e1b?segmentId=6bf9295a-189d-71c6-18fb-d469f27d3523 )

This seeming balance may result from the fact that the FT reporters are themselves unable to agree on who is right, the Russians or their Western critics.

The FT article opens with the remark on “Moscow’s desire to rush the vaccine through testing and trial procedures at breakneck speed in an attempt to beat western pharmaceutical companies.”  Without a doubt there is an element of this in the Russian decision to proceed with registration and start  civilian immunizations at once. Naming the vaccine after the 1957 Sputnik, which catapulted the USSR in the minds of the global public from a primitive, brutal society to scientific and engineering powerhouse, clearly points in the direction of status seeking by winning the Covid-19 race hands down.  However, the judicious selection of front line medical workers and teachers as the first to undergo immunization, months before the general public, shows that the Russian policy-makers are also motivated by humanitarian concern to cut infections, cut deaths and restore normality to our lives as soon as possible. Period.

The article mentions that 500 million doses of the vaccine will be produced abroad and that 20 countries have signed up to receive the vaccine, including the Philippines, where it will be shipped free of charge – all of this should indicate that Russia is going beyond the glory to do good in the world on behalf of medicine.  These 500 million doses are half of the planned production run, the other 500 million to be produced in Russia, it appears. Meanwhile, the fact that Russia has signed with AstraZeneca to procure doses of its vaccine when it is released is another demonstration that Russia is not just a spoiler but a good faith participant in the medical quest to tame the virus.

There are two faces of any vaccine which undergo testing through a series of trials. They are safety and efficacy.  Given that none of the vaccines now being developed in the West and in Russia contain actual corona virus, but all have been synthesized, the question of safety is surely the lesser concern all around.  The Russian vaccine, like the one being developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca uses the harmless human adenovirus to carry genetic material from Covid-19 and build immunity. Unlike several vaccines in preparation in the USA, in particular, by Moderna, there is nothing revolutionary about the technology such as might raise questions about its safety.

As for efficacy, meaning the effective production of antibodies in those immunized and the time such antibodies will protect, that is something which will indeed require six, eight or more months to prove. Moreover, what no one is talking about at the moment, efficacy is a very relative concept.  The seasonal flu vaccine, which we in the older generation all take without a moment’s hesitation every year, has, depending on the latest strain of influenza, an efficacy rate perhaps no greater than 50%.  But no one would think for a moment of not taking the vaccine because protection is not assured.

In the midst of this pandemic, time is of the essence.

So the real question today is do you have the confidence and boldness to proceed with immunization and do what you can to curb the virus’s propagation while it is presenting a deadly threat to our societies, do you proceed with the best you have and administer it first to those in greatest need, namely front line medical workers and teachers, as Russia is today planning to do and then, with some delay offer the vaccine to the general population.

I think the Russian decision deserves applause rather than the jeers we see in so much of the Western press today.

At the same time, it must be stressed that whatever vaccine is invented, effective treatments of those infected with Covid-19 is a matter of primary interest to us all – to save lives and to prepare the way for an eventual return to normal living.   In this regard, it is very regrettable that here in Europe no EU member country has sought to procure quantities of the proven Russian medicines for treating early Covid-19 infections Avifavir or the drug they have brought to market for late stages of the disease which are life threatening.  Given that the US drug similar to Avifavir in its effect, Remdesevir, is in short supply, with production capacity of the manufacturer Gilead, nearly completely booked by the US government, Europe is currently left naked. Both the US and Russian drugs are in fact repurposed existing antivirals. It is high time to turn to Moscow and find a solution there.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2020

[If you found value in this article, you should be interested to read my latest collection of essays entitled A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs, published in November 2019 and available in e-book, paperback and hardbound formats from amazon, barnes & noble, bol.com, fnac, Waterstones and other online retailers. Use the “View Inside” tab on the book’s webpages to browse.]

In the past several months, I have posted on these pages diary excerpts from my career doing business with Russia in the 1970s which will appear in Part III of my soon to be published book of Memoirs.  I offer here a further “teaser” to convey the style and substance of the narrative.

* * * *

At several key junctures in my career, I made changes of direction which left colleagues, mentors, sponsors furious.  I abruptly abandoned long developed plans and went off with scarcely an apology.  Nor do I apologize now, because I see no alternative to the boldness and risk-taking that these moves signified.  For the most part, the ships I abandoned sank before my eyes not long after.

One such turning point came in 1976 when I left an academic career that was stagnating on the launching pad and, to my mind, was running into insuperable problems of a market for entry level university instructors that had gone sour.  A second such turning point came in the spring of 1977, when, after ten months working in a small marketing consultancy, I walked out, and together with the number two officer set up a new company to compete directly with my employer.

The third such case was in early 1980, when I abandoned an appointment as Project Manager within Chase World Information Corporation, a subsidiary of the Chase Manhattan Bank, which had been more than a year in negotiation and had introduced me to its chairman, David Rockefeller, when I was being vetted.  And a fourth turning point came in 1987, when I opted out of ITT Europe, where I had been on the payroll since April 1980 and once again went off to start my own company, partly with the ambition of picking up a subsidiary or two that were being hived off in the downsizing that followed merger of its telecoms business with the French giant Alcatel.

 Each of these career changes was formative in preparing the two focal periods of doing business in Russia that are the main subject of this book. Moreover, a certain agility in moving from employment to self-employment and back at the drop of a hat turned out to be a critically important skill in the 1990s. When I finally was based in Moscow, the business environment was highly volatile, and managers like myself who were hired from outside major corporations to fill a specific need in the company’s entry in the market were highly expendable. We were compensated accordingly, for which I have no regrets or rancor.

For my part, my abandoning an academic career was not irrevocable when I made it. I did not break off correspondence with a publisher over my proposed book on the Tsarist prisons system. And I told myself that my new direction might run for five years or so.

My sponsors at Harvard may have been resentful of my seeming apostasy. I think the word is apt, because in many ways the fraternity of academics was and surely is today a sort of religious order.

But as I maintained correspondence with some and as I rose in stature within Russian business in the 1990s, then attracting a lot of attention on campus, I was eventually invited back to the Russian Research Center to deliver a talk and share impressions of life inside the monster. Associate RRC Director, professor of economics at Wellesley Marshall Goldman was my main contact person and our paths crossed from time to time. At one reunion, I was introduced to outsiders by Ned Keenan as someone who ‘had gone straight.’

To be sure, at the moment of rupture in June 1976 my immediate peers among the aspiring new Ph.D.’s were envious and at times bitchy. For that reason, I told no one exactly who my new employer would be. One fellow RRC nestling who was sailing off to a junior faculty appointment at Southern Methodist University in Texas, a relative plum of a job at that time of meager pickings, took consolation in the fact that I would be earning in my business job virtually the same as he, around $12,000 per annum. Others said it was too bad I had not landed something in the banks, because that is where the big money was to be made. 

Meanwhile, several friends from the graduate school years at Columbia remained with me for life.  One, a Greek American who had done an excellent dissertation on French police control of public opinion during World War One, also could not get off the launching pad and was advised by his highly regarded faculty mentor, Istvan Deak, to consider leaving teaching because of the hopelessness of job placement. Yani eventually moved sidewise into university administration, where he remained to retirement.  Another Landsman, Echeal Segan, moved across to publishing, where he got a coordinator’s position within the Great Soviet Encyclopedia translation project at Macmillan, from which he passed along some casual translation assignments to me. Echeal eventually moved to proofreading at Manhattan law firms.  In short, many of my former classmates found jobs to pay the rent; few made careers.  We stayed in touch and got together at intervals of several years forever thereafter.

Meanwhile, back in 1974-76 the rejection letters in answer to the dozens and dozens of applications that I made for vacancies in full time teaching positions all over the US and abroad, as far afield as the Australian Outback, wore down my nerves.  With Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf on our minds, my wife and I asked ourselves whether we really would want to live in some of the awfully remote and presumably provincial locations to which I was applying and getting rejections.  

In the face of these depressing realities, and considering the ‘publish or perish’ ironclad rule, I decided to turn a number of chapters from my dissertation into articles for the professional journals rather than hold out for the book that could take several years to see print given the also troubled state of the university publishers.  Indeed, a string of my articles did appear very quickly and I was quite proud.  I even went beyond the dissertation manuscript proper and prepared a ground-breaking essay on the 1906 reform of Russian censorship based on the cache of official Russian documents of archival nature that were in the Law School stacks; this was later published in shortened form in the Solzhenitsyn-backed émigré journal Kontinent. However, these achievements did nothing to help me secure a position. Nor did they endear me to my sponsors, who waited for the book.

But this is not the whole story. In general, coming back to Harvard as a postgraduate was an entirely different experience from what I had in the College, and not in the positive sense.  The College was the apple of the eye of the University Administration. The graduate faculties in the arts and sciences were, by comparison, poor relations. Instructors were the intellectual proletariat. And the professorate was arrogant and remote.  Social grace was not the strong suit at the RRC. Its director, Adam Ulam was a bear of a man both physically and by temperament.  Other faculty was not particularly more outgoing.

Finally we put on our glasses, read the handwriting on the wall and decided to clear out.

The result of my redirecting my attention from university postings to the business world was stunning.  I had spent the greater part of three years pursuing illusory opportunities at universities.  In two months I found myself a job in boutique consultancy assisting blue chip U.S. companies to do major industrial projects in the USSR. My wife and I quickly moved down to New York City to an apartment that I rented on the Upper West Side just ahead of the first birthday of our daughter in August 1976.

How do I explain my newfound good fortune?  First, by the ongoing American business interest in entering the Soviet market for which I had very relevant skills. And second, by the opportunism that guided the business decisions of the lady entrepreneur who hired me, as often is the case in small enterprises tightly controlled by the founder.

If I may expand on the first point, it bears mentioning that one of the key elements of Richard Nixon’s policy of détente with the USSR was for American business to develop broad relations with their Russian counterparts. The White House led the way.  To be sure, 1976 was already a bit late in the game.  Stories of deception and losses by the pioneering American companies had already graced the pages of the national business journals.  And the passage of the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the trade bill by Congress in 1974 created a strong obstacle to improved commercial relations with the USSR insofar as this discriminatory legislation made normal commerce dependent on levels of Jewish emigration, a premise which the Soviets rejected publicly even as they compromised over it on the quiet.  Nonetheless, there are always late comers to a party, and even as political relations steadily worsened as the decade wore on there were companies keen to make news and please their shareholders by succeeding in the big emerging market that the Soviet Union represented.

As to the second point, I owed the employment offer to personal chemistry between myself and the charming, strong-willed lady, Bettina Parker, who ran the shop. Here is one of the exceptions to my rule of Harvard having been an obstacle on my way in business.  It was precisely my outstanding academic credentials which motivated her decision to take me on board, not because it spelled competence but because it had snob appeal for the captains of industry among whom she circulated. That and my willingness (read desperation) to accept a pay package that was at the level of clerical help, so as to get a foot in the door and, hopefully, justify a substantial pay rise six months down the road.

 Parker Associates was a “boutique consultancy” in a qualified sense.  Apart from Bettina herself, staff was limited to a handful of helpers.  First among them was the “Vice President” Norma Foerderer who held the fort in the New York office, allowing Bettina to pursue her globe-trotting in the USSR, later also in China, and always in Chicago and U.S. Midwest more generally where many of her core clients had their headquarters. Norma oversaw the accounts and coordinated relations with the Soviet consulate and embassy over visa matters. She also coordinated translations, the printing of brochures and other work related to the presentations that clients made in Moscow.

Then there was the manager of Parker’s accredited office in central Moscow, Tanya Semenenko. The office itself was a rarity at the time and attested to Bettina’s extraordinary success in cultivating high officials of the USSR State Committee for Science and Technology, which at the time, in the 1970s, vied with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and with the many industrial ministries for developing and controlling relationships with potential cooperation partners from among the world’s biggest corporations.

As you will note, Parker’s operation was run and populated by women. I was in practice the first male to be recruited.  Meanwhile, the entire clientele and in particular the corporate backers who made of this tiny consultancy something of great commercial potential – were all male.  Bettina’s physical presence and European charm opened all doors. She was a Dutch national who came to the United States for a business education and stayed.

An article in the London Sunday Times dated 9 February 1975 entitled “One woman’s way through red tape” set out very well what I saw up close sixteen months later:

“If you had glimpsed Bettina Parker snuggling into the collar of her mink coat at Heathrow on Wednesday afternoon, you could have been forgiven for guessing that film star Liv Ullman was trying to pass incognito. Nothing in her appearance, from lilac suede dress to diamond and sapphire rings, would have led you to think she was well-known in the corridors of the Soviet Ministry for Foreign Trade, especially as she is an American. But at 42 Mrs Parker is the doyenne of a specialised bank of people who smooth the way for western businessmen keen to wrest lucrative or prestigious contracts from the Communist governments….

Bettina Parker’s value to her clients lies in preventing strangulation by red tape and she is very unusual in having the approval of the system.”

Parker Associates was “associated” with America’s largest Public Relations and Advertising firm at the time, Burson Marsteller, which invested a substantial amount in her company equity and brought to her its manufacturing clients who wanted hands-on, customized assistance entering the Soviet market.

Though Bettina Parker’s short list of clients on retainer included a couple of manufacturing companies turning out steel products, most were in the food processing industry or agribusiness and had their corporate headquarters in the Chicago area, which is where my first business trip was made just three days after joining the company and starting going through the case files.

Why food processing?  The choice of concentration was surely dictated by considerations of opportunities on both the U.S. and Soviet sides of the equation. As I later learned when I began reading closely Izvestiya and other Soviet media, including specialized journals, increasing the variety and improving the quality of food products available to Soviet consumers was a priority of the latest Five Year Plan. Special attention was drawn to this issue by the catastrophic harvests of the early 1970s which had given rise to a bilateral agreement with the United States regulating long term grain purchases. Insofar as grain was partly directed to animal husbandry, shortages also impacted beef production in the USSR.

The shortfalls had to be made up by importing meat, at still higher cost to hard currency reserves. These factors combined to put in the foreground of attention two ministries that previously were left in the shadows, along with Light Industry and consumer goods generally:  the Food Ministry and the Ministry of Meat and Dairy. Meanwhile, in this period of the mid-1970s on, attention to food production finally put a spotlight on the vast losses the USSR was experiencing in bringing the harvest from the fields to the groceries and urban markets. Conservative estimates in the print media suggested this was in excess of 25%. It was due partly to lack of packaging materials, partly to lack of suitable refrigerated transport, and more generally to lack of vertically integrated supply chains. Incentives were not the issue: at each stage of production and processing they were ample, but none was aligned with what came out at the end – produce on store shelves.

Insofar as the United States was at the time the world leader in food production at a scale comparable to the USSR, it was entirely logical that U.S. industry was a first choice for seeking partners now that the Soviet government was prepared to invest substantially in the sector.  At issue was both equipment and management knowhow. Moreover, the United States was the global innovator in food production. Consumers there had less concern with quality, more concern with quantity and with reduced prices than was true in Europe where demand was less elastic. For these reasons, the U.S. pursued new technologies, particularly in extension of meat products through substitution by soy proteins, a subject that Soviet researchers and production managers followed with great interest.

On the U.S side, Parker saw an opportunity to bring the conservative mid-Western agribusinesses to Moscow, given that by their nature, apart from grain traders, they were laggards in following Nixon’s urging to go out and do business with the Communists in the interests of state-to-state normalization of relations as well as good, old-fashioned profit.

I note here that the above explanation of the business model of Parker Associates is what I came to entirely on my own. At no point did anyone give me an overarching view of what we were doing and why. All that I was told related to Bettina’s personal rapport with the chairmen and CEOs of our client companies on the one hand, and her rapport with the leading personalities in the State Committee for Science and Technology on the Soviet Side, for whom her extravagant manner hit a chord in the Russia psyche.

To a certain extent, the whole scheme of turnkey industrial projects now seems quaint, a relic from the past when the Communist bloc was closed to Western investment. There could be no operating subsidiaries back then. There could not even be representative offices or agencies in the proper sense. All dealings with the capitalist world were at arm’s length.  And yet, I have no doubt that in parts of the world today elements of what I describe here still are practiced.

If I may resume my narrative, to my good fortune, very early in my employment with Parker Associates, I participated, however modestly, in a Soviet turnkey industrial plant project that did go through to completion in December 1976 and brought substantial rewards to several of the players, including my employer, in terms of success fee. The project in question was the plant to produce the powdered infant formula Similac, which was a market leader in the U.S. and globally. The owner of the brand and the technology was and is Abbott Labs with its Ross Laboratories subsidiary in Columbus, Ohio. For the Soviet side, the commercial negotiations were led by the Foreign Trade Organization (FTO) Tekhnopromimport on behalf of the Meat and Dairy Ministry as end user.

Assisting the Abbott Labs project was my very first assignment at Parker which began just days after I came to work. On 5 August, I flew out to their production facility at the Ross Laboratories subsidiary in Columbus, Ohio, where I was acquainted with the whole manufacturing cycle and spoke with the engineers who had drawn up the papers that underlay the technical part of the offer. Then the next day I flew to Chicago, where I spent some time with the head of their legal team going over the principles of the contract and was taken in to see the boss.

In Part III of my book of memoirs, I reproduce my diary entry from this meeting with Abbott Chairman and CEO Edward J. Ledder. Several noteworthy points emerge from this account. First, it is clear that I was being “hired” to serve as the key Russian-English interpreter in their scheduled negotiations a month later, in September. They wanted a full translation of everything said at the table, not the selective translation they believed they had been getting from Parker’s Russian office manager. And after the meeting, they awaited my thoughts on what was going on. This is to say that from the very beginning my role was on a sliding scale in the direction of genuine collegiality and consultancy. Secondly, I point out that I was taken to the CEO directly in what was intended to be a real vetting, not some mere protocol formality.

As it further developed with other clients of Parker and then later with all of my own consulting clients, I was always working with top corporate officers because they were the ones who had taken possession of the Soviet projects, from which big things were expected.

Succeeding at this level assumed a high degree of self-assurance and poise. In this regard, my experience as ‘a master of the universe’ in my undergraduate years at Harvard College served me well, far better than my time among the academic proletariat as a postgraduate fellow.

* * * *

A word is in order on the milieu in which I operated during my Parker apprenticeship, as well as during the follow-on years when I was captain of my ship. First among these was that the Soviet Union was in the 1970s an intimidating place, where we foreigners were under constant surveillance. I understood this right from my very first visit to Parker’s offices in Moscow.  None of our staff were what they appeared to be.  The two drivers attached to the office, Yuri and Volodya, seemed at first acquaintance like pets. They jumped at Tanya’s instructions. They did shopping for the kitchen and spent relatively little time behind the wheel. The whole arrangement bore a resemblance to the archaic Russian nobleman’s establishment with a steward (Tanya), the two coachmen, and a cook (Vera) at the ready.

However, as I detected one evening, one of our drivers stood guard outside our building; and he slinked away after I spotted him.  For her part, Vera acted the simpleton, but that was pure deception. Her questions about the States were too well focused, her literary tastes too well defined for her to be a cook pure and simple. On the whole, I felt I could live with them by throwing out tidbits of information along the way for them to report onwards, by taking their orders for jeans, and by not letting on I knew they knew too much.

The same dance of tarantulas went on with respect to my ‘regular’ drivers hired from the Service Bureau of the Hotel Intourist, where I was installed during most of my trips for Parker. Proof positive of my suspicions came after I left Parker and returned to Moscow several months later as the head of my own business delegation. As my client and I passed in front of the Intourist, one of these former drivers got out of his car and greeted us, proposing to take us on a free of charge excursion around the city, all the better to overhear our conversations and, surely, have material to file.

Agents provocateurs and spies are one thing. The potential for physical violence was also never far off as I was reminded on one of my early trips to Moscow for Parker when I got to know several members of a Finnish youth group who were staying in the same Intourist Hotel as I. One of their group had his front teeth knocked out by an unknown Russian assailant in the hotel elevator. His attempts to file a complaint with the police were not accepted.  What exactly had prompted this I had no idea, but that it was a sinister warning to stay alert and to keep one’s nose clean was certain.

It was years later when I read Martin Cruz Smith’s 1981 suspense novel Gorky Park that I found the sinister atmosphere in Moscow of the second half of the 1970s perfectly captured.  Moreover, by skillful casting in the movie, one of the villains, the American businessman (here a fur trader), John Osborne, was played by Lee Marvin, who bore an uncanny resemblance to the most featured American businessman in the days of détente, Pepsico’s chairman Donald Kendall.  This match never left my mind, although in real life I was an active participant in Kendall’s various undertakings to rally business on behalf of normal relations with Russia and had occasion to see him up close, as noted in a diary extract of Part Three.

Nonetheless, I emphasize that until the very end of détente in 1978, whatever notion we had of possible threats to our personal welfare while on Soviet soil, the authorities did not touch a hair on the head of American and other foreign businessmen. That changed with the arrest of F. Jay Crawford, one of International Harvester’s service technicians in Moscow in June 1978 on charges of currency speculation. He was thrown into the infamous Lefortovo Prison where he was held incommunicado for two weeks. Following representations from the business community and from American diplomacy, Crawford was released and expelled from the country. But this stark change in direction in relations sent a shiver down the spine of all of us engaged in Soviet trade.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2020

[Memoirs of Russianist, Volume I: From the Ground Up in now in print and available on all national websites of Amazon.com, as well as from other leading online retailers including Barnes & Noble, and http://www.bol.com.]

Sadly, the Kingdom of Belgium was called out by the world press in April – May of this year for having one of the highest mortality rates of all countries battling the Covid19 pandemic. The death toll here subsequently tapered down with the progression of the lockdown that was belatedly instituted, so that by mid-July there were only 3 deaths reported each day nationwide. The total loss of life directly attributable to the infection now stands at about 9500 in a population of 11.5 million. 

To comprehend what this loss means, let us compare it with the situation in the United States, which we all know is the country that has mismanaged the pandemic in every way, starting from confusing and unhelpful messages from the Chief Executive, failures at the local level in a great many states to follow federal guidelines for lifting lockdown, and general disregard for the experience of the rest of the world in combatting this disease, not to mention the experience of New York City and the Northeast, where COVID19 first settled in and created havoc with the medical infrastructure, as well as regional death rates perhaps four times higher than in Belgium. Though the world may be aghast at American failures, the death toll there will have to reach 270,000 to match the per capita mortality of Belgium to date.  The latest figures from the States are at the level of 165,000. 

Regrettably, in the past week Belgium has again been featured on Euronews coverage of the pandemic, as the country has been among the few in the EU to see a very disturbing spike in infections.  At first this was attributed to localized communities. It was noted that half of all new Covid19 infections here have been in the province of Antwerp, where fingers were pointed at the Muslim water-pipe store fronts and at the Hassidic community, known to flout rules on gatherings for weddings and the like.

Here in French-speaking Brussels some of us took malicious pleasure in seeing Antwerp at the center of the pandemic storm. It was a demonstration that the city’s mayor, Bart DeWever, has taken his eye off the ball and ignored warning signs in his back yard while busy negotiating with the Socialists to possibly form a new coalition government at the federal level. We smirked when a curfew was imposed in Antwerp and other curtailment of freedoms was imposed.

However, most recent developments signal that the infections are moving out of control despite the best efforts of tracing and testing nationwide.  French-speaking Wallonia has just been moved from Green to Orange status, meaning extreme caution must be exercised and prospective visitors are put on notice because the daily infection rate per 100,000 has moved adversely to a new plateau well above 20.  And there is talk of the situation in the  Brussels-Capital Region likely to deteriorate as well, because many of the factors behind community transmission in Antwerp are found in the city center of Brussels, namely active socializing of young people in the bars, cafes and similar venues that were the last to reopen after de-confinement.

These developments have arisen with blinding speed.  I think of the medical status quo when I left Brussels for a nine-day vacation in Italy on 20 July compared to what is being reported daily now.  New cases then were roughly 85 per day nationwide, today they are 490; hospital beds occupied by Covid patients then numbers about 125, now they are 250; patients in Intensive Care Units then were then less than 30, today they are the double. The only statistic that has not changed significantly is daily reported deaths, still under three per day. But that is a lagging statistic and surely will rise in the month ahead.

All of this adverse change was easily foreseeable and we were told by the Acting Prime Minister that appropriate steps would be taken if and when the statistics of infection turned against us.  Indeed, some measures have been put in place, most particularly as regards wearing face masks, which now are required not only in public transport and all shops and enclosed public areas but also in designated shopping streets. Moreover, the “social bubbles” of persons with whom a given household may associate have been cut back sharply.  And mandatory reporting has been instituted for all those returning from travel abroad to facilitate tracing in case they or anyone in their near surroundings on planes, boats or other transport proves to be infected.

However, no steps have yet been taken to address the most obvious platform for transmission of the infection: bars and cafes. It is not hard to guess why:  because shutting down these enterprises is a direct attack on identifiable business interests. 

This is not to say that such a measure is not discussable here any more than it is a taboo elsewhere in Europe. In fact, this measure is already being selectively applied in the United Kingdom where some government spokesmen pose the policy choices without any sugar coating: either you close the pubs or you close the schools.

Living as I do in downtown Brussels, just a five minute walk from active shopping streets where bars and cafes abound, I see firsthand how they constitute a cesspool of infection. Tables may now be out on the sidewalks and they may be spaced somewhat apart, but the young clientele sits shoulder to shoulder at one table and turns to socialize with friends at other tables, making utter nonsense of social distancing. The owners and staff of these establishments are also almost uniformly young people who are not about to step forward as enforcers of regulations. 

I have omitted mention of restaurants because both owners-operators and clientele tend to be older, more risk averse, and the capital invested in the establishments is far greater than in the bars and cafes.

There can be no doubt that given the exponential growth of infection we are now seeing in Belgium, the order will eventually go out to shut down these Horeca platforms.  One may only hope that this is done NOW and not after the situation becomes irremediable except by total lockdown as happened in the spring wave of the pandemic.  Some part of the business community must be made to suffer right now lest the economic damage of total confinement be repeated. This is all the more relevant as the opening of schools is less than a month away.

Having made this point, I insist that much more could be done to avert medical disaster.  It is inexcusable that Belgium has done nothing to prepare dedicated hospitals for admission of Covid patients, so as to avert the chaos that prevailed in the first wave when patients were shared out to more than one hundred normal hospitals, many of which had no relevant experience with epidemiology, operation of multiple ICUs and use of ventilators.

It is also inexcusable that Belgium, like all other EU Member States is sitting on its hands with regard to acquiring medicines proven effective against Covid19,  both those that reduce sharply replication of the virus at the start of the infection, thereby reducing time in hospital, and those administered in severe cases to prevent fatal complications.  So far there has only been talk of negotiating a deal with Gilead, the American manufacturer of Remdesivir, although the U.S. government has already bought up much of the company’s production capacity, leaving in question when and at what price Belgium and other EU States will get allocations.  There has not been a word about approaching the Russian Federation for supplies of its Avifavir, which is claimed to be still better at stopping the virus in its tracks than the Gilead drug. 

Avifavir, like Remdesivir, is a repurposed antiviral drug that has been on sale for more than a decade. It was not “invented” in Moscow, but in fact came from Japan, so that the notion of Russians cooking up some wonder drug in a few months is little more than slander from our Russia-bashers in the West. 

The same question may be raised as regards the vaccine which the Russians are registering in the coming days and will be mass producing in mid-Autumn, with doses initially to be made available to medical professionals and first responders; mass inoculations are scheduled for early winter.

Note that the Russians, like their counterparts in the West and in China, have several competing vaccines undergoing testing at various stages.  Also note that the Russians have concluded a deal with AstroZeneca to procure its vaccine when it receives regulatory approval and goes into mass production. They are not relying solely on their own good luck with their distinctive vaccine technology.  Why do we not do the same and reciprocate by taking options on the Russian solution?

If our health professionals in Belgium were truly interested in saving lives and not playing along with Cold War mentality blackout on Russian science, they would be negotiating right now for allocations of the Russian medicines and vaccine.  This is a question for the Prime Minister.  Who will put it to her?

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2020

[If you found value in this article, you should be interested to read my latest collection of essays entitled A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs, published in November 2019 and available in e-book, paperback and hardbound formats from amazon, barnes & noble, bol.com, fnac, Waterstones and other online retailers. Use the “View Inside” tab on the book’s webpages to browse.]

Postscript, 09.10.2020

Today rules issued by the new federal government of Belgium take effect and precisely the recommendations I set out in the essay above are being implemented: all bars and cafes are ordered shut for at the least the coming month while restaurants are allowed to continue their operations. It is a great pity that this order was not issued two months ago when the rates of infection, hospitalization and death were far lower than at present. Today Brussels alone has more than 1,000 hospital beds occupied by Covid patients of which 200 are Intensive Care. As a consequence, normal medical care for patients suffering from other ailments or awaiting operations will soon be suspended. This misery was totally avoidable had our decision makers not dithered all this time.

Today’s New York Times and Financial Times feature substantial articles on the latest political developments in the Russian Far East bearing piquant titles:

NYT  – “Protests Rock Russian Far East With Calls for Putin to Resign” by Andrew Higgins

FT – “Russian governor’s arrest sparks anti-Putin protests. Khabarovsk leader Sergei Furgal is latest detention in post-referendum crackdown” by Max Seddon

Both journalists are Moscow-based, working at a distance of 6,000 km from the scene of the action, which means that everything they have reported is second-hand, gleaned from their usual anti-Kremlin contacts in the capital, from reading Facebook accounts, from the comments of Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov, and, one assumes, from stringers in the Far East.  However, they do their fact-gathering job well-enough to have two or three pages of text, and I will take their facts as accurate for our purposes.

The intended contribution of this essay is to offer an interpretation of what is going on that goes farther and deeper than what these two opinion-shaping newspapers give us: the notion that Putin’s popularity is sagging or that he is using his “new powers” from the referendum on constitutional amendments to settle scores with a troublesome local politician. These factors are undeniably present, but there are other drivers of the arrest and of the protests that merit an airing. Because these factors do not mesh with the belief of mainstream media that Russia has no opposition parties or movements other than those we recognize as such, they are being ignored, even as they are, potentially, very important markers of the general direction of Russian politics today.

I do not offer a definitive interpretation here, since the information is still too sketchy, but I will raise questions that hopefully other commentators will also address in coming days, since the blow-up in the Far East is no small matter. As many as 35,000 protesters may have turned out in Khabarovsk to protest Furgal’s arrest. They called for Putin’s resignation and carried signs “Down with Moscow!”

The figure at the center of the scandal, Khabarovsk governor Sergei Furgal was arrested in the past week and taken to Moscow where he is being charged with murders and criminal business activity in his past.  Given the statute of limitations in Russia, the single murder on which the prosecution will likely rest their case must be brought now while it is still actionable.

At the start of his Sunday evening broadcast, Rossiya 1 anchorman Dmitry Kiselyov, who also heads the news services of all state broadcasting, gave the Furgal arrest extensive coverage, starting with an interview with the tearful mother of the alleged victim murdered in 2005. The program sought to demonstrate that this is an open and shut case, with the prosecution having the goods in hand to bring conviction.

Even the Financial Times reporter appears to acknowledge the likelihood that Furgal is implicated in murders, saying they were a widespread practice in business circles from the chaotic 1990s on. He says Furgal’s prosecution now, just before the statute of limitations shuts down, is revenge for being too popular, for beating the United Russia candidate and for failing to bring out the vote in favor of the constitutional amendments at the national referendum last month.  With 62% approval amidst 44% turnout, in Khabarovsk only 25% of the electorate voted Putin’s choice, in contrast to the approval of just over 50% of eligible voters that was achieved nationwide.

One additional fact tossed out at the very end of the FT account bears mention. Seddon remind us that Furgal belonged to the party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the LDPR, for whom he had been a deputy in the State Duma for more than a decade and he caps this with an otherwise unexplained account of Zhirinovsky’s response to the arrest of his protégé:

“Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the LDPR’s leader, threatened to withdraw all its MPs in protest at Mr Furgal’s arrest and said that security services were ‘acting like under Stalin.’”

The FT does not bother to identify the LDPR, but The New York Times does it quite precisely: they are the party of “the nationalist rabble-rouser Vladimir Zhirinovsky,” going on to say that the party is “scorned by Russian liberals as a collection of crackpots and crooks.”

But let bygones be bygones. Though the protesters may be crackpots, the journalist Higgins tells us that the protests themselves have won the endorsement of the one man who stands in for a legitimate opposition in Western eyes:  “Aleksei A. Navalny, a Moscow-based anti-corruption campaigner and Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, cheered Saturday’s protests in the Far East, hailing the street demonstration in Khabarovsk as the ‘biggest in the city’s history.’”

* * * *

In my analysis of the voting results from July 1^st, “Putin’s Referendum: Where are the Numbers?” I remarked on how the Far East had given dismal results for the Kremlin.

“In…particularly the remote Far Eastern regions, where loyalty to Moscow has at times been questionable in past elections, we see particularly low turnout:  Magadan (44%), Khabarovsk (44%). Almost the same comes up in Siberia: Novosibirsk (Russia’s third largest city, 47%), Tomsk (44%).”

This leads to the question:  which party has profited at the expense of United Russia and why?

The first part of this question is relatively easy:  Zhirinovsky’s party LDPR has profited, not the Liberal-minded, European friendly folks that our mainstream would like to see as an opposition that will eventually unseat Putin and bring Russia back to heel.  But ‘why’ is more problematic.

As a first attempt at answering this, I point to the map.  Europe as a moral and political compass is still more remote to your average Khabarovsk resident than Moscow, whereas China is right under his nose.  These LDPR supporters are nationalists, and it would be reasonable to assume that they are less than delighted by the Kremlin’s tilt to Beijing these past few years.  If Moscow liberals may sound off over this because philosophically they prefer a Russia solidly aligned with the West, not in alliance with autocratic, Communist China, the broad population and its political class in Khabarovsk have more concrete reasons to dislike the ever closer ties with the China that they see daily just across the Amur.

It is not just the Yellow Peril issue of 1.3 billion Chinese keen to settle the vast empty expanses of resource rich Eastern Siberia and the Maritime Province.  It is the Chinese who connive to illegally harvest pelts, cut down forests and poach fishing resources within Russian territory and the economic zone offshore. Russian federal authorities have been notoriously slow to crack down on these abuses which directly impact the wellbeing of local woodsmen and fishermen. As regards the fishermen, there is also local anger at the poaching by North Koreans, which even is picked up occasionally on Moscow’s investigative reporting.

The curious thing is that one of the key drivers of the Kremlin’s policy tilt to China has been to develop large scale, modern and highly remunerative employment for the Far Eastern population through massive energy infrastructure projects that serve firstly, the Chinese market, and as a byproduct, serve the population of the Russian Far East, as is the case, for example of the Power of Siberia gas pipeline, that will finally bring natural gas to the Russian cities of the region and also provide feedstock for a massive chemical industry under construction there.

The protests over Furgal indicate that the benefits of the Kremlin’s investments in the Far East have not yet trickled down to the population and alienation remains high.

But there is more to this story that has direct relevance to the nationwide political balance in Russia.

I believe that the crackdown on Furgal is one more move by United Russia to establish a stranglehold on Russian politics ahead of the 2021 State Duma elections.  The leadership of United Russia was surely behind the changeover of the constitutional amendments from a redistribution of power between the three branches of government, the clear intent of Vladimir Putin when he announced the initiative on 15 January 2020, into a ratification of Putin’s eligibility to stand for election again in 2024 and 2030, which is what the 1 July referendum was all about in the end.  Surely the leadership of United Russia was also behind the removal of the leaders of the opposition parties in the Duma from nearly all television and media appearances for approximately three months this spring, till just before the referendum.

Now, the arrest of Furgal is an open attack on Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s party.  The crimes that may have been on record for Furgal did not surface so long as the party leader could ensure protection.  Now that protection has been removed, Zhirinovsky has threatened to pull his party members out of the Duma in protest. For Russia today, that is very dramatic and newsworthy.  It may also reflect the deep disappointment of Zhirinovsky that the sharing of power with the other Duma parties that was promised explicitly in Putin’s 15 January speech, has been ripped up by the President’s entourage to protect their own monopoly on power.

The attack on the LDPR is all the more stunning given that Zhirinovsky had been more royalist than the king in the run-up to the referendum, suggesting that it was unnecessary to hold the ballot given that the reform had already passed both houses of the legislature.  Here he was in stark contrast to the leader of the Communists, Gennady Zyuganov, who alone among the Duma politicians had denounced the constitutional amendments precisely because of the allowance they made for Putin to remain in power forever.

For all of the above reasons, the coming trial of Furgal and resulting political fall-out deserves our full attention in the days and weeks ahead.

 

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2020

[If you found value in this article, you should be interested to read my latest collection of essays entitled A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs, published in November 2019 and available in e-book, paperback and hardbound formats from amazon, barnes & noble, bol.com, fnac, Waterstones and other online retailers. Use the “View Inside” tab on the book’s webpages to browse.]

When Francis Fukuyama used this title for his 1992 book on the road  forward to a post-ideological, non-confrontational world he did so metaphorically, with reference backward to the dialectical philosophies of the mid to late 19^th century.  However, here the title is meant to be understood literally.  Reading the daily news about the destruction of monuments to past heroes in the United States, in the U.K., in Belgium one may conclude that history as a social science has no future. Every effort is being made to erase the public memory.

In the United States, the rewriting of the past to deny the honors given to slave-owning aristocrats and to bring to public attention neglected heroes from among blacks and other minority groups, as well as from among the demographic majority, namely women, has been going on for more than a decade.  For the most part it proceeded quietly and at the hands of well-educated and well-meaning social activists.  I recall how in 2017 when I participated in a college reunion at Harvard, the College president explained to us why the name of a slave-owner benefactor was removed from a building and where plaques had been installed to commemorate the slaves who had inhabited one of the campus buildings back in the early 19^th century. There was a feeling of serving justice and performing morally uplifting deeds in the audience.

However, in the wake of mass nationwide ‘Black Lives Matter’ demonstrations to protest the May 25th killing in police custody  of the 46-year old black man George Floyd,  attacks on monuments have taken on a whole new scale in America.

First to go were Confederate generals in the Southern states where leaders from the Civil War still are venerated to this day. But then the attacks on bronze and stone statues moved on to other targets which may be said to have represented the shared heritage of the entire nation. Statues of Christopher Columbus, the long honored discoverer of the New World were given the heave-ho amidst accusations that he took back with him to Spain a great number of American Indians who were held as slaves. And, of course, in serving the King of Spain Columbus opened the path that was followed by Conquistadores who annihilated whole civilizations in the Americas.

Then attention turned to the Father of the Nation, George Washington, who, together with another Founder and early President, Thomas Jefferson, was like other men of means in his age, a substantial slave owner. So far attacks on both have been only verbal. But there is talk of changing the name of the nation’s capital, which commemorates the First President.

Two other presidents have now also come under attack from the Revisionists. The face of one, Theodore (“Teddy”) Roosevelt is celebrated in stone at the Mount Rushmore national memorial in South Dakota together with Washington and Jefferson.  The site itself was already steeped in controversy before the latest moves to consign the given presidents to the dustbin of history: the hills are considered sacred by the indigenous tribes. Will these sculptures in stone be hammered to smithereens the same way that the Ancient Egyptians destroyed images relating to the reign of the heretic monotheistic pharaoh Akhenaten?

In the case of Roosevelt, whom many revere as the President who took the United States out of its isolation in the Western Hemisphere under the protection of the Monroe Doctrine and made it a global power there is recollection of the imperial acquisitions of his age stemming from the Spanish-American war where he earned the reputation for military daring-do that brought him to the presidency.

Roosevelt’s successor in the White House, Woodrow Wilson is not doing better among the Revisionists leading the assault on American heroes. The former Princeton university professor who led the United States into World War I to ‘make the world safe for democracy’ had been credited with founding the dominant school of international relations in the United States for much of the 20^th century and into the present: the so-called “Idealist School” which believes that human rights and democracy promotion must be the basis of all foreign policy, as opposed to the supposedly cynical pursuit of national interest that underlies the Realist School. Well, we are now told that Wilson was an out-and-out racist who supported the Ku Klux Klan.  In a fit of moralist self-flagellation, Princeton University in the past month decided to remove his name from what had been the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

 

Readers of my essays over the past couple of years know that I am no admirer of the present incumbent in the White House. However, I share his alarm and disapproval of these various acts of vandalism aimed at wiping away the country’s founders and builders in the name of today’s moral values which none of them embraced, for self-evident reasons.

Trump characterized the perpetrators as coming from the “Radical Left” which is nothing more than a guess.  I would see them more as a combination of forces, none of them good, but not falling on a neat Right-Left axis.  What they have in common is moral outrage and smugness as they proceed with dismantling the Establishment.  There are also features of a power grab through mob violence.

Curiously, in an article published in The New York Times on 7 July, the newspaper’s Moscow bureau chief Andrew Higgins chose to consider the toppling of statues that occurred in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The title of his article –  “In Russia, They Tore Down Lots of Statues, but Little Changed”  – says it all.

However, my dissatisfaction with the ongoing Revisionism or, better yet, Nihilism goes well beyond the question of whether the acts of destruction can achieve some durable change in society.  Picking a fight with past heroes who have been dead for a century or for centuries is a cheap way of showing one’s moral superiority. It is problematic, because the way our values have changed in the past is a sure sign that they will change again in the future and that our descendants will have equal claim to righteous indignation over our moral limitations.

But even that is not the point, which is, that immorality, violation of human rights and murder are all around us today. What is worthy of respect is fighting today’s villainy.  I would much prefer to see the same outrage directed against those who organized, promoted and perpetrated the murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq in 2003 and thereafter. Those who should be brought to justice include both the former president of the United States George W. Bush and his Vice President Dick Cheney.

Regrettably so far none of our virtuous fighters for Justice in the United States, in the UK, in Belgium have dared to take on our present day villains, and that is the most appropriate condemnation of their false claims to virtue that I can adduce.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2020

[If you found value in this article, you should be interested to read my latest collection of essays entitled A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs, published in November 2019 and available in e-book, paperback and hardbound formats from amazon, barnes & noble, bol.com, fnac, Waterstones and other online retailers. Use the “View Inside” tab on the book’s webpages to browse.]

Looking over the back cover of the dust jacket on this book, and reading through the six complimentary blurbs by leading specialists in energy and/or Russian matters, you think you know what the book is about.  However, you will likely be mistaken, because the ambitions of the author are clearly to avoid retelling in detail episodes that have been widely covered by others, such as the cut-offs of gas to Europe in 2006 and 2009 amidst Russian-Ukrainian political and economic wrangling, and to provide us with broad background information on the issues in the gas trade between Europe and Russia that we have witnessed over the past twenty years and which, the author clearly believes, have many factors behind them other than the geopolitical considerations that our media daily feed us.

These factors include institutional cultures of the market participants from the business world both in East and West, grass roots political movements like the anti-nuclear parade and Environmentalism that have taken the European establishment, notably in Germany by surprise and the specific educational backgrounds and skillsets of the individuals in government and society who are decision makers in energy matters. Indeed, one of the great virtues of Gustafson as an historian is his filigree work, his tweaking out how men make history to no lesser a degree than economics, technological developments and the other anonymous drivers that are the darlings of contemporary political science.

Gustafson is far better equipped to deliver an expertly written context for Russia’s dealings with its partners in Western Europe because, unlike many if not most Russianists, he is an outstanding linguist, and draws heavily on German and French literature in the field as well as English-language and Russian sources. However, this is not merely an academic masterwork, but a book enlivened by occasional personal asides about his protagonists in West and East with whom Gustafson met during the several decades that he has been a leading global authority in the energy field, gas and oil.

What we get here is a political, economic and intellectual history of Europe and Russia described in parallel.   We learn about not only what directly bears on energy policy such as Environmentalism and the anti-nuclear movement but also about the economic and political theories, one is tempted to say, the neo-liberal ideology that have entirely reshaped the gas market in Western Europe into which Russia sells  over the past twenty-five years.  Indeed, for these reasons the book is heavier on West European history than Russian history.

In his detailed explanation of the role played by the EU’s General Directorate for Competition and the European Court of Justice in setting up the Single Market that was the main achievement of perhaps the  most important President of the European Commission to date, Jacques Delors (1985-95), Gustafson provides insights that surely will be of interest to all students of the European Institutions.  Although I have lived and worked in Brussels off and on since 1980 and have  become fairly involved in the activities of the European Parliament in the past five years, I profited greatly from reading the respective chapters in Gustafson’s book.

As for the narrative devoted to Russia, Gustafson explains where the frame contracts for supply of Russian gas that required so much renegotiation with the EU in the new millennium came from, namely the Groningen model developed by Europe’s first source of cross-border natural gas supply, The Netherlands.  He explains how the industry developed in Europe’s second largest source of imported natural gas, Norway, which had a configuration of state and industry that he compares and contrasts closely with Russia’s.

The last third of the book focuses on the issues we would most expect:  relations between Russia and Ukraine, meaning the legacy of the Soviet era and how it is being gradually erased; the evolution of economic relations between Russia and Germany in the new millennium when, especially after Putin’s landmark speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 challenging the West, political relations headed downhill.

One of the great virtues of this book is the way that Gustafson explains the complexity of politics, material interests and corporate culture within what our less curious and less informed journalists and academic commentators see as open-and-shut cases of monolithic Soviet tradition, like Gazprom or of Putin’s supposed autocratic monopoly of power. The following paragraph from 278 is exemplary in this sense:

“One of the main points of this book has been that the Russian gas industry, despite its geopolitical significance, is a business, and a highly technical and a highly complex one. A state-owned gas company may be an instrument of government policy and even of geopolitical ambitions, but it is also interested in profit and market share as well as its commercial reputation, the implementation of its engineering skills, and the management of such a large and complex system.  Putin is clearly the chief decider in Russian gas policy. But in the everyday conduct of business Gazprom, like any large organization, has the capacity to delay, resist, and reshape the Kremlin’s commands if they run counter to Gazprom’s commercial objectives, business models, and core competences.”

One very important benefit of Gustafson’s setting the frame of his study as broadly as he did is that in the end he can offer a key insight into the question of how Russian supply and the new pipelines like Nord Stream-2 impact on the Continent’s energy security, as we see on page 408:

“As the share of Russian gas in Europe’s gas supply reaches record levels, and as Russia completes a new generation of export pipelines, does Russia not have unprecedented leverage over Europe?

“The revolutionary changes in the European gas market suggest that the answer is no. For all the reasons discussed above – the increasing interconnectedness of the European transportation system, the diversification of import sources thanks to LNG, and the availability of storage – the European gas system is strongly resilient today and will become even more so in the future, despite the decline of Europe’s indigenous sources. Behind this is a simple fact: because of changes in gas technology and market structure in Europe and around the world, the pipeline shipper has less and less leverage compared to the past. This is true not only in Western Europe, but increasingly also in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union.”

 

At the same time, the potential subject matter for this book is still more vast than what Gustafson has addressed here and there are elements still not explored.  In particular, given the importance of the German –Russian relationship as the anchor, literally and figuratively, for The Bridge which is the subject of this book, Gustafson has not explored the German relationship with those new EU members that have been driving the anti-Russian movement within EU Institutions including on issues of gas policy.

To my understanding, the sea change took place not in 2007 but in 2012, still before the whole confrontation over Ukraine but well after the Information Wars began.  It was in 2012 that Germany dropped its definition of Russia as “a strategic partner of Europe” and no longer supported the negotiation of a new EU-Russia Cooperation and Partnership Agreement to replace the long expired agreement dating back to the late 1990s.   In effect, from this time on Merkel’s government turned its back on the Ostpolitik that was forged by former (SPD) Chancellor Willy Brandt and his close adviser Egon Bahr. With one exception, to be sure, gas policy.

I would suggest that the answer is to be found not in the personality of Angela Merkel, as Gustafson seems to suggest, but in divergent interests and mentalities between Germany’s big industrialists, who were committed to big deals with Russia, especially in energy, and even pursued the illusory objective of participating in Russia’s upstream gas industry, and the famous German Mittelstand of medium-sized, family-owned enterprises which is the mainstay of the German economy, of export, and, one may assume, of Merkel’s party, the CDU.

Gustafson does not go into the relationship between Germany and the new Member States of the European Union, like the Czech Republic and Poland, which became from the 1990s the low cost subcontractors, or economic colonies if you will, of the Federal Republic.  German Mittelstand companies surely felt much more comfortable with these East European suppliers, who knew their subordinate place, than was ever possible with Russian industrial partners, who were full cycle producers, not manufacturers of bits and pieces, who had their own pride and, one might say arrogance that was a counterpoint to German Stolz, and very easily makes for uncomfortable relations.

Surely it was this sympathy for the virulently anti-Russian Poles and for their political bedfellows in the EU Institutions, the three Baltic States, which exerted a strong influence on Merkel’s policies towards Russia so that finally she pulled up the carpet of Ostpolitik that she received from the past, except in the highly pragmatic field of gas where Germany was too well served by the Russian supply and had long enjoyed preferential treatment thanks to its participation in the pipelines.

At the same time, Gustafson has also chosen not to get into the question of US pressure on the German positions. There can be no question but that in the summer of 2014, when America was threatening to provide offensive weaponry to Kiev, Merkel did a U-turn and became the main enforcer of Russian sanctions within the EU in order to cool down American passions and prevent an all-out Ukraine-Russia war that would spill over into Central Europe.

 

Finally, a word about  Environmentalism and The Greens, whom Gustafson describes to a limited extent in this book because they may have a significant if not determining influence on how Europe deals with natural gas as an energy source and bridge to the new Green Revolution of the future.

 

Gustafson speaks of the co-founder of the German Greens, later German Minister of Foreign Affairs Joschka Fischer, but not of his alter-ego of the movement in Germany, ‘Dany le Rouge’ Cohn-Bendit.  As co-chairman of the Spinelli Group in the European Parliament Cohn-Bendit has also been a leading voice for Federalism, for the creation of a United States of Europe, which in passing, Gustafson seems to favor. This federalism has aligned him with the neo-liberal leader of the ALDE Group in Parliament up to 2019, former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt. They co-authored a book promoting federalism entitled Debout l’Europe (Stand Up Europe).  And they, together with Fischer have one more cause in common, one which bears directly on Gustafson’s forecasts for the future of the Gas Bridge: ALDE and the German Greens have been the most vociferous Russia-bashers in the European Parliament. If I may allow myself a turn of phrase that Gustafson uses twice in the book: they have never seen a proposed sanction against Russia that they didn’t like. This anti-Russian posturing all has been done in the name of defending human rights, etc. This has set the background noise for confrontation between EU Institutions and Russia over Nord Stream-2, for example.

Given that the Green movement has made great advances in the last European parliamentary elections one year ago, it remains to be seen whether the visceral dislike of Russia of the German Greens will rise with the environmentalist movement that they embody and somehow impact upon Russia’s energy role in Europe.  Anti-gas words may be a convenient cover for anti-Russian thoughts and deeds.

Of course, these cavils bear on where The Bridge may be headed into the 2030s. They have not caused Russia impossible obstacles in its gas trade with Europe to date.  As for the future, time will tell.

 

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2020

[If you found value in this article, you should be interested to read my latest collection of essays entitled A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs, published in November 2019 and available in e-book, paperback and hardbound formats from amazon, barnes & noble, bol.com, fnac, Waterstones and other online retailers. Use the “View Inside” tab on the book’s webpages to browse.]