Россия и США: познавая друг друга. Сборник памяти академика Александра Александровича Фурсенко / Russia and the United States: perceiving each other. In Memory of the Academician Alexander A. Fursenko

On a dark Moscow evening in 1987 with distinctively orange Soviet streetlights transforming a light swirling snow into an unnatural color, I sat in my room at the Academicheskaia Hotel trying to figure out what I would eat, the phone rang. An acquaintance on the other end of the line informed me that just hours before Alexander Fursenko had been elected a Corresponding Member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He probably still would be in Moscow and, if so, would be at the second building of the hotel across the way. After checking with the front desk, I was connected to Alexander’s room. He was, needless to say, surprised to receive warm congratulations from me so quickly after his election. We would joke about the call for years ahead.

I first met Alexander while I was working as a young researcher at the Kennan Institute in the late 1970s. He had been one of the first Soviet scholars to be in residence at the Institute just months before I had begun working there after having completed my doctoral degree a few weeks before. Alexander remained a strong supporter of the Institute throughout his life, and visited from time to time whenever he would be in the US. We had met during one of those visits and had remained in touch. We shared a natural bond as I had conducted my dissertation research in Leningrad a few years before.

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 Kennan Institute, Alexander became one of the first colleagues to congratulate me.

Beginning in September 1991, I became involved in a number of initiatives to try to integrate now-St. Petersburg academic life into the international social science community. I found myself meeting with Alexander on almost every trip to his city. These conversations helped me to appreciate how much both Russian and American social science and humanities research could be enriched by expanded contact with one another. Alexander had similar goals and we cooperated in these ventures.

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 connection to the lively intellect and assiduous archival research habits of the Alexander Fursenko whom I was coming to know. Such contrast raised so many different questions in my mind that I never felt fully comfortable asking. Did Alexander transform himself as he saw new research opportunities? Or, was the Alexander whom I knew always lurking within the author of Struggle for Partition? His magisterial 1967 Dynasty of the Rockefellers suggested the second but, as with so many enigmas of Soviet life, no one probably knew, least of all Alexander himself.

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.