I have to go back in time, mentioning those who helped me to understand Russia and its people. My interest dates back to my childhood, but about this later on. My training in this field was incomplete and unorthodox. When I arrived, a seventeen-year-old student in Jerusalem, which at the time was in Palestine not long before the outbreak of World War II, I went to see the one and only professor of history, a nice man and a native of my hometown, expressing the wish to study Russian history. He asked me whether I had read the four volumes of Vasily Klyuchevsky’s history. My answer was in the affirmative (which was only half-true), whereupon he said that being an expert on early medieval English history, he could not be of help. I joined a kibbutz, where two years later I happened to break my leg while shaving, which I was told was a very rare occurrence in medical history. I was incapacitated for almost two months. When this happened to young women in our collective settlement, they were given socks to mend, but for young men there was no such work.
A neighbor, the mother of a fellow member, Mrs. Pickman, a native of Nikolaev on the Black Sea shore, had been a teacher and was happy to find a pupil. I read Russian with her for many hours a day. After a month, I could read Pravda, which I believe at the time had to confine its vocabulary to about eight or nine hundred words so that millions could read it. After two months, I could read Alexander Pushkin’s Kapitanskaya Dochka. In the months that followed, I found yet another group of teachers. Being a mounted policeman at the time, I spent long nights around a campfire in the fields or on a mountain. My comrades, most of them at least twenty years older, most of them natives of Siberia, quite a few of them the offspring of Christian sectarian families who had converted to Judaism, taught me Russian songs mostly of the katorga i sylka (prison and exile) variety, many of which I remember to this day. These men came from little places in Siberia with unlikely names such as Balagansk (“Balagan” in Russian means a state of utter confusion and disorder). They also enriched my vocabulary with many words and phrases not normally found in dictionaries.
In the years that followed, I worked as a writer and journalist, but one of my main interests was still in the Russian field. In 1956 in London, I became the founding editor of Soviet Survey, later Survey, a quarterly (later a bimonthly) covering political and cultural trends in the Soviet Union. I came to know most of the people working in this field in the United States and the United Kingdom, but also on the European continent. It would take a long time and much space to mention all of them (they were my teachers at this time), but I should single out Jane Degras, who helped me enormously with my early work. She had been with the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow but moved on to Chatham House in London.
I spent some time at the Harvard Russian Center in the 1950s but had no formal education. I stayed with Survey for a decade and then moved on to another position that led me in very different directions—European and Middle Eastern affairs. This I did not regret because I felt about Russia what Kipling had written about England: What do you know of Russia who only Russia know?
All these years I suffered from an obvious handicap. I had read about Russia, I had talked to Russians, but I had never been to the country. This was soon to change. The parents of Naomi, my late wife, lived in a resort in the Northern Caucasus. Her father had been a professor of medicine at Frankfurt, specializing in the history and philosophy of medicine. He had to leave Germany rather quickly in 1936, and the only country that wanted to have him was the Soviet Union. He was a wholly apolitical being and therefore very surprised, and even shocked, when he arrived in Moscow and no one pretended ever having heard of the Narkomzdrav (Ministry of Health), his deputy, and the others who had invited him. In the end, a receptionist took pity on the bewildered foreigner and told him, first, to get as far away from Moscow as he could (these were the days of the purges and the Moscow trials) and, second, not to learn the local language. He followed this advice and found himself and his family in one of the resorts in the Northern Caucasus. We went to visit them first in the 1950s, and then for a while we visited them almost every year. At that time, it was not easy to get a visa to Russia, especially not for visits outside Moscow. I did not quite trust our good luck, fearing that one day someone would ask us to pay for this privilege. But the day never came; they may have never heard of Survey or of me. It taught me a lesson about Russia and bureaucracies in general: never to underestimate the role of accident and never to assume that the left hand would be aware of what the right was doing.
I have written in some detail about this chapter in my life in my autobiography (Thursday’s Child Has Far to Go) and do not wish to repeat myself. I came to like the Caucasus (at the time, Switzerland without the tourists), and these frequent visits and prolonged stays gave me insights most visitors and tourists did not have; we seem to have been for years among the first foreign visitors in that area. Friedrich Richardovitch, my brother-in-law, was an excellent guide.
However, the anticlimax came one day when driving in the mountains. This was in the early Leonid Brezhnev era, and it occurred to me that while in years past Russia had been very interesting, since apparently about anything could happen, it had now entered a period of stability, or rather immobility (Russians called it zastoi). As far as I was concerned, it had become boring, and I had learned what I could in the circumstances, and so the time had come to pursue other interests.
This, then, was what I did for the next twenty years, until suddenly, under Mikhail Gorbachev, history began to move very fast, a new period of change dawned, and events in Russia became exciting. This coincided with an urge for professional change. I had been teaching in the United States but had no wish to do this full-time; I had left the London Institute I had been heading in competent hands. We moved to Washington, D.C., and I owed much to Ambassador David Abshire, head of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in that town, who let me do more or less what I wanted. A great deal had to do with Russia and the people in government, the academic world, and elsewhere, following events there.
But where to look for the early origins of my interest in Russia? This is another strange story. When I was a boy, my parents told me that one of my ancestors had been the physician of the Russian empress. They did not specify which empress. I dismissed this as sheer fantasy even at that early age. But years later, my interest was suddenly reawakened. I began my research, and the following emerged: The story was not quite right, but neither was it entirely wrong, and as is so often the case in such family legends, there was a grain of truth. Around 1800, my family lived in a little place in Silesia. My great-great-grandfather was a rabbi and in his spare time wrote undistinguished poems in Hebrew. His brother Moritz (born 1787) wanted to study medicine, but this was impossible because the family was very poor. One day a missionary appeared and made Moritz an offer he felt he could not refuse. He would be given the means to study if he would convert to Protestantism. This he did, and a number of years later he graduated in medicine (and rhetorics; medicine was apparently not a full-time subject) from the University of Dorpat (now Tartu) in what is now Estonia. The job he got was less than exciting. He was made head of the quarantine station at Taganrog, at the Black Sea. Moritz became Boris, and since Russian has no umlaut, the name was now Lakier. This would have been a dead-end job, but the unexpected happened: The czar (Alexander I) visited southern Russia, came to Taganrog, and died there in 1825. The government of the day feared (rightly, it would appear) that there would be allegations of foul play and therefore tried to get as many physicians as possible to sign the death certificate. Having come from abroad, Boris was in particular demand, and his name appears on the death certificate. This meant that he became a nobleman, belonging, alas, to the landless nobility. The family moved to Moscow, and among his three sons one, Aleksander Borisovich (1825–1870), was of particular interest to me. He was a well-known writer in his day, author of one of the first serious full-scale Russian books on the United States (it was published in English by the University of Chicago Press more than a hundred years after it had appeared in Russian). Before, he had been secretary of the government committee dealing with the liberation of the Russian peasants from the prevailing form of serfdom. He was also the author of the first Russian work on heraldry (republished in Moscow a few years ago) and provided a rather ugly coat of arms of the Lakier family, which can be found on the Internet. He married the daughter of P. A. Pletnev, friend of Pushkin’s and rector of St. Petersburg State University. The lady died in childbirth. After a number of years he married again, this time a lady of the Komnenos Varvakis clan in Taganrog. Anton Chekhov, a native of Taganrog, wrote that there lived only three or four honest people in his hometown; I am sure my uncle three times removed was among them. The Komnenos family had been the royal house of Byzantium. So I found myself (albeit by considerable distance) related to all kind of historical figures, some distinguished and interesting, others of doubtful reputation.
However, there was a little problem: Boris, the doctor and master of rhetoric, had found it necessary following his arrival in Russia to acquire a “legend,” as it is known in the world of intelligence services. According to this version, he was not born a Jew in Silesia, who having been married there had left a daughter behind; his background was purely French aristocratic. They hailed from Toulouse, and he had arrived in Russia with Napoleon’s army. I can understand the need for a cock-and-bull story of this kind in Russia at that time, but he should have concocted something more plausible, for it was not widely believed. He died in Moscow and is buried in the cemetery for foreign religions. I have met some of his descendants.
These, then, were the Russian connections of my family.
There could have been no better research assistant than Christopher Wall. I am grateful to David Boggis and Michael Allen as well as Joshua Klein and Irena Lasota for help with editing this book and also to Misha Epstein and Michael Hagemeister for helping me to understand certain specific points. It goes without saying that the opinions expressed are my own. The literature on contemporary Russia in Russian and English has grown immensely in recent years, and some of the essential sources are listed in the bibliography at the end of this book. The number of relevant Web sites is increasing even more rapidly and has become almost unmanageable. Johnson’s Russia List and Paul Goble’s Window on Eurasia, published daily, are of particular help as far as access is concerned. Russian Web sites, too many to mention, have also been of great assistance.