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

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 Kennan Institute in early 1996. By the time Tim arrived at the Institute he had begun collaborating with Alexander on what would become their 1997 classic co-authored work “On Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958–1964; which was followed in 2006 by their Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary.

No such successful outcome was assured at the project’s beginning. Tim and Alexander had different temperaments, had emerged from different intellectual traditions, had different initial assumptions about what the crisis was really about, and had collected archival documents which often directly contradicted on another.

Tim and Alexander separately raised the possibility of their working on the project together at the Kennan Institute. I immediately understood that we needed to make it happen so that these two increasingly important scholars would have an opportunity to collaborate productively. Eventually, I managed to clear away the usual administrative and bureaucratic underbrush and, for several exciting weeks in 1996, Tim and Alexander shared an office, shared their documents, and shared their commitment to serious disagreement based on evidence.

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.

Now, when I hear that it is impossible for Russian and American scholars to work together or learn from one another – or for Russians and Americans more generally to have any reason to even bother with one another – I think back to the small scholar office in downtown Washington, where Alexander and Tim disproved nearly every conventional belief about Russian-American relations simply by their stubborn mutual refusal to accept what everyone else told them to be true.

I remained in touch with Alexander ever after, though we both were often too busy to spend the time we would have wanted. We enjoyed evenings with mutual friends in Washington and in St. Petersburg; we even watched a lunar eclipse together on the front steps of a senior American official’s home in a Virginia suburb. But life began to pull us in different directions.

Throughout my time knowing Alexander, I came to greatly admire his scholarship, and his dedication to the cause of knowledge. I came to understand the depth to which glib Cold War era characterizations of colleagues “on the other side” were misguided. Alexander, for his part, never missed an opportunity to support what I was trying to accomplish at the Kennan Institute.