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Blair A. Ruble. Recollections of Alexander Fursenko
On a dark Moscow evening in 1987 with distinctively orange Soviet streetlights transforming a light swirling snow into an u
I first met Alexander while I was working as a young researcher at the Ke
The 1980s were a difficult period to sustain professional contacts across the Cold War divide, and I can’t say that Alexander and I were more than aware of one another. He enthusiastically lent support whenever he could to my effort to write a history of postwar Leningrad (which eventually appeared in 1990 under the title Leningrad. Shaping a Soviet City). We exchanged greetings – such as my 1987 congratulatory call – and we read one another’s publications. Once perestroika blossomed, we began to correspond more regularly. When, in May 1989, I was appointed as Director of the Ke
Begi
Meanwhile, I found myself increasingly impressed with Alexander’s expanding professional horizons. I began to realize how much the changes taking place in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period liberated his mind and his writing. Around this time, I stumbled across a copy of his first book published in 1956 – Struggle for Partition of China and the American Open Door Doctrine – at a bookstall in New York’s Union Square. The Alexander Fursenko who wrote that book had no visible co
As Alexander’s administrative responsibilities grew I admired his prodigious efforts to secure a sound future for Academy institutions, especially in St. Petersburg. He assumed these obligations at what was probably the most difficult moment in recent history and he deeply cared about protecting all whom he could protect. Simultaneously, he took every opportunity to steal away to the archives and make up for lost time in repositories that once had been closed to him. Alexander was a man on fire with new possibilities; with far greater energy than I had even though I was decades younger. Watching Alexander taught me a great deal about what it means to be responsible for an institution and for the human beings whose fates are linked to it; and about what it means to be a dedicated scholar. If, during the 1980s, Alexander was something of an interesting-though-detached Soviet colleague, by the 1990s he had become a role model.
Around this time I had gotten to know a young historian of the Cold War then working at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, Timothy Naftali. Tim, a Canadian-American, would move to the University of Virginia, eventually directing the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, and presently serving as the Director of the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives at New York University. Trained at Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard, Tim had impeccable academic credentials. For me, however, he was more interesting for his time in his native Montreal where he once worked as an aide to one of the very few politicians I have ever admired as human being, Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa. Bourassa served during some of Quebec’s and Canada’s darkest days – including the infamous October Crisis of 1970 – and, as I would later discover when I encountered him while he was teaching in Washington, always retained a rare humanity. Tim very much shared the core values that I appreciated in Bourassa.
Tim had begun working on a volume about the Cuban Missile Crisis and had earned a grant to work at the Ke
Tim and Alexander separately raised the possibility of their working on the project together at the Ke
I made a point during these weeks to walk by during the course of each day to judge the temperature of the room as Tim and Alexander worked their way through their evidence. When I sensed that there might be more heat than light, I would enter and start a conversation about some or other trivial subject. Other times, I would take one or the other out for tea or coffee. I realized that their shared respect for each other, for their sources, and for the participants in the drama of the Missile Crisis was going to produce a landmark work; which, of course, it did.
This account elevates my role in the saga far too high for I was the student. First, I really didn’t know the story of the Crisis other than having been a scared teenager when it happened. Second, I learned from them about what dedication to scholarship really meant. Here were two scholars from societies and backgrounds that were far apart, with political views that did not align except in disagreement, who were struggling with linguistic and generational divides that few ever bother attempting to cross. They worked as hard as they did because both firmly believed that together they could generate greater knowledge and insight than either could have done on his own. They were not only correct in that belief, but they acted on it at no small cost to everything else that they did.