Shortly
after brother Jeff headed back to the ‘world’ via the Army’s labyrinthine bureaucracy
– late spring ’64 – I was departing Moscow, metropolis of the mighty Soviet
Empire, to return home by way of the Continent. During the ‘50s, I had served
in the military in West Europe, but those carefree days as a Cold War soldier
were well behind me.†
Jeff’s
return began from a remote American base about 60 miles below the 17th
parallel, the line then nominally dividing North and South Vietnam. He had been
dispatched to Vietnam in August ’63; I had reached Moscow a month later.
He
was soldiering, I was studying. We were both preoccupied with Communism – he
with the North Vietnamese military across the
border, I with the Marxian legacy of its patron, the USSR.
Each
of us had gone abroad with some political baggage, but as a result of our
respective experiences – mine with the ‘enemy’, Jeff’s with our Vietnamese
allies – on return, we were traveling much lighter, more enlightened.
For
Jeff – a Vietnamese linguist – becoming familiar with the country’s culture and
seeing the war up close tended to blur the US image of saving South Vietnam
from what would become its ultimate fate. He found that the average soldier or
simple peasant had far less enthusiasm for Saigon’s war and the US effort to
help them ‘win’ it, than reflected through the prism of Washington policy.
As
for me, a year of studying with Soviet professors and living among their
students had begun to subtly alter my image of the great East-West divide. Few
of the Soviets I got to know well were as hard core Cold War as portrayed in American
media. Then meeting Communist East Europeans on my journey homeward changed my
perceptions even more.
My
closest Soviet friend, the late Avgust Alexievich Mishin, the USSR’s leading
specialist on ‘bourgeois constitutional law’, saw me off from Moscow with the
better part of a bottle of scotch.
Avgust
had lost an arm fighting outside Moscow in the late ’41 counter-offensive that
saved the capital. His empty left sleeve (Soviet prosthetics were primitive),
was a vivid reminder that WWII was still living memory for millions of Soviet
citizens.
Professor Mishin
(l) at the 50th anniversary commemoration of the Battle of Moscow, 1991
My
journey west, first to Poland, began from the Belorussky railroad station. Nina,
the department secretary at Moscow Law School; Valery, a Russian grad student
friend; and my Soviet academic adviser came to see me off. Nina brought a bouquet,
Valery, a box of chocolates. We exchanged farewells on the platform.
At
the conductor’s signal, the professor helped me aboard with my luggage. Once in
my private compartment, he quietly asked if I had enough Soviet currency for the
long train ride across the steppe – he knew foreigners weren’t permitted to
leave the USSR with rubles.
I
had held back a ten-spot, which Anatoly Grigorevich didn’t feel was sufficient.
To my astonishment, he reached into his pocket and discreetly handed me more
rubles. I was deeply touched – not merely by his generosity, but by the trust
and courage it took to pass money to an American in the middle of Cold War Moscow.
If anyone had witnessed him, he would have been in serious trouble.
Belorussky
Station, Moscow
Reaching
Warsaw, I momentarily had the crazy illusion I was back in the West – the atmosphere
was ‘lighter’, more open – it was a livelier place, more on a human scale than
Moscow. But in fact, I was in the capital of the USSR’s largest and most
important East European satellite.
The
Ford Foundation of New York had given me funds to head home via Communist East
Europe. I would be interviewing legal scholars in several countries starting in
Poland.
Arriving
at my hotel, I thought perhaps I had stepped through a looking glass into West
Europe. Though of course a state-run concern, the lobby was inviting with
many stylish people coming and going, but the biggest surprise was an inviting,
well-stocked bar with polished mahogany paneling.
The
barkeep was an attractive young blonde with a décolletage that would have
shocked puritanical Moscow. Stepping up to the
bar, I ordered a beer not knowing what to expect. With a flourish she pulled a
tap and set before me a cold beer with a nice head. I marveled – I hadn’t been
served a cold beer in a year.
Sure,
they had beer in Russia – pivo – but it was not readily available. In what
passed for cafés in Moscow, the main beverages on offer were Russian vodka,
Armenian cognac, or Georgian wine. Once in a blue moon I’d see an announcement
at the university that beer would go on sale, two warm bottles per person until
they ran out, so I’d arrive early, and then let Russian winter chill the beer
on my window ledge.
I
bore letters of introduction from Moscow, and my first interview the next day
was with the top Polish legal theorist, a law prof at Warsaw University. Professor
Ehrlich, a tall, slender man in his late 40s, received me at the Journalist’s Club located in an elegant 19th century
palace.
Before
going in for an excellent lunch, we sat in the garden having an aperitif – a
small stemmed crystal glass of Polish vodka. I waited to see how he would drink
it – in Russia vodka was downed by the tumblerful – but to my relief my host
sipped his drink.
Over
the next few hours Professor Ehrlich took all my questions, answering each
fully and with refreshing candor. I was accustomed to Soviet academics
responding cautiously, especially with a foreign scholar asking questions and
taking notes.
Soviet
academics never uttered criticism of a fellow scholar. Ehrlich quite freely
evaluated his colleagues as well as my Soviet interlocutors. He didn’t have a
high opinion of the legal philosophers to the east.
While
in town, I wanted to meet other Polish jurists, and it just happened that the
leading jurisprudence professors from Poland’s major law schools were in the
capital for a conference. The Warsaw law faculty was conference host, so I was
invited to an informal gathering the following day – a picnic on the sandy
banks of the Vistula, Poland’s main river.
It
was a great opportunity since I couldn’t otherwise have met jurists from far
corners of the country during my limited stay there. The conference was
wrapping up, and one of the best-known of the group invited me to visit him at
his law school where he also happened to be rector of the university.
I
took a train to Lublin and spent a fascinating day and a half with Grzegorz
Leopold Seidler, a prolific scholar of Polish legal thought as well as the
history of political ideas. We became good friends and later had occasion to
collaborate.
Portrait of Rector
Seidler of Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin, Poland
A
Communist patriot, the rector insisted on showing me an important historical site
before I left. His chauffeur drove us to what looked like a small, well-tended
park in a birch forest. We entered, and I soon realized I was in a cemetery, a
very special military burial ground.
There
was an obelisk in the middle but no tombstones, just raised markers inscribed
in Russian at the center of dozens of grassy mounds, each framed by low stone
borders.
Lublin
was the region where the Soviet Army had first crossed into Poland in pursuit
of the Germans forces. Total Soviet losses on that front had been staggering, far
too many for a fast-moving army to set individual markers. So unit by unit, the
dead were buried in large graves.
Accordingly,
markers, for instance, read, here lie with eternal honor men of the 1st
battalion, 8th Guards Army, or troops of the 5th
squadron, 7th Cavalry, and on and on. I felt the emotion of the
place, and as we left Rector Seidler said, “You understand now how much we owe
the Soviet Union.”
I
took a train south to Prague. I had written my Master’s thesis on
Czechoslovakia and knew a good deal about the country, but wasn’t prepared for
an encounter at the main railway terminal. Until the Communist coup in ‘48,
Czechoslovakia had been the only democracy in interwar Eastern Europe.
A
line of porters identifiable by their caps was awaiting my train; one took my
bags. As we walked toward the taxis, we talked – he spoke English well and told
me that up to ‘48 he’d been a successful Prague lawyer pleading before the
Constitutional Court. After the coup, the new regime had sent all the ‘bourgeois’
judges and lawyers packing.
Since
then, working as a porter was the best job he could hope for. Learning of his background
and misfortune, I felt somewhat abashed that this distinguished-looking older man
was carrying my luggage.
Meeting
the senior Czech legal philosophers, I found that I was something of an
anomaly, the rare American not on the left who came to Prague. Other than the
off-limits diplomats at the US Embassy, the only Americans resident in the city
were Communists on the run from McCarthyism and the FBI. Prague, a strikingly
beautiful and livable European city, was their favored place of exile.
One of many
bridges in Prague, Czech Republic
The
scholars who received me were politically and theoretically divided. Those at
the Law Faculty of Charles University, the Harvard of Czechoslovakia, tended to
be uncritically pro-regime and conservative in their intellectual tastes.
Other
jurists, research scholars at the Czech Academy of Sciences, were less
enthusiastic about the prevailing neo-Stalinist status quo, and far more
venturesome. They read any foreign books on democratic political theory they
could get their hands on, and discussed Western ideas.
Of
the latter group, most memorable were Zdenek Mlynar and his wife Rita along with
their interesting and lively circle of academic friends. They took me to dinner
at Prague’s French restaurant, and afterward we strolled the city center. I was
shown where a monumental statue of Stalin had once stood.
Following
Stalin’s death in ’53, and especially after Khrushchev’s public denunciation of
the tyrant in ’56, the East European satellites were expected to eliminate
Stalinist excesses. Removing offending statuary was the symbolic first step.
By
’64, the former site of the statue in Prague was marked only by a very large empty
plinth, although beyond that the regime had dragged its feet on more
significant changes.
Zdenek
and his wife, an economist, were interested in Western ideas about government, particularly
the role of interest groups in politics, discreetly suggesting that permitting them
could provide a more pluralistic direction to the hidebound Czech Communist
system. I silently reflected that such a change would be a radical departure
from the centralized Soviet model.
Zdenek Mlynar during
the Prague Spring, 1968
I
didn’t realize at the time, but what I was hearing was part of the sub rosa
ferment that would lead to the dramatic emergence of the 1968 ‘Prague Spring’,
a major reform program led by the new Communist Party leader Alexander Dubcek.
Under
Dubcek, Mlynar rose rapidly in the party hierarchy, becoming a high official
and one of the leader’s principal advisers. He became the key idea man behind
the startling reforms, including the emergence of non-communist interest groups.
The
Soviet leadership, ever watchful of their satellites, had become increasingly
uneasy with Prague’s political direction. In August ’68, Soviet and Warsaw Pact
forces invaded Czechoslovakia, shutting down the reform movement.
Dubcek
and his chief advisers, including Mlynar, were arrested by Soviet troops and
hustled off to Moscow for political ‘re-education’. When Mlynar was allowed to
return to Czechoslovakia, he had no choice but to fall back on his avocation, entomology,
to earn a living working at a Prague
museum.
By
1970, he had been expelled from the Communist Party, and in ‘77, after
co-organizing ‘Charter 77’, an emerging dissident group, Mlynar was forced into
exile.
A
few pleasant weeks in the company of sophisticated, urbane East Europeans had
had a lulling effect on me. But enroute to my last stop, Yugoslavia, a minor encounter
jolted me back to reality. When I politely questioned a border guard’s order on
the train passing through Hungary, his hand immediately went to his holster,
reminding me what part of the world I was still in.
Crossing
the Yugoslav frontier, I had entered an independent Communist country – the
USSR and Yugoslavia had broken off relations in ‘48, and, although ties had
later been renewed, the Yugoslavs continued their separate ways.
The
US even provided foreign aid to encourage the country’s independence from
Moscow’s orbit. I was headed for Belgrade, the capital, for the final leg of my
three-week swing through East Europe.
My
credentials again opened many doors: a letter from the chair of Jurisprudence
at Moscow University, travel under Ford Foundation auspices, and that I had
been a former student of Jerome Hall, a premier American philosopher of law.
The
academic legal elite of Belgrade were more open to the West.
A
number of research institutes had intellectual ties to West European institutions,
while several were closely associated with Strasbourg in northeastern France,
the international center for the study of comparative law, a subject not
welcome in Moscow.
The
Yugoslav capital was a relatively relaxed city compared to where I’d been living
the past year. There were a number of nice looking restaurants where service
and food were a departure from the Soviet culinary model. Like all large cities,
there were many movie theaters, but it was refreshing to see quite a number of
good foreign films on offer, including several well-regarded American feature
films.
Three
of the jurists with whom I spoke – Tadic, Pasic, and Lukic – reflected the
intellectual diversity of the Yugoslav theory establishment as well as its
generational structure. Tadic, the youngest, had been a Marxist since boyhood
and was philosophically closest to the utopian aspects of the Marxian
tradition.
Pasic,
who was middle-aged, had completed his legal education in the late ‘40s and, at
the time of the Soviet-Yugoslav split, became a principal critic of the Soviet
system. By the time I met him, he was quite interested in American political
and legal theory. He was fairly well read.
The
grand old man of the Yugoslav scene was Lukic, who had earned a PhD in the
Sociology of Law in Paris during the interwar period. He was head of the
jurisprudence section at the University of Belgrade Law School.
I
found Professor Lukic, who resembled the older Mark Twain, in his well-appointed
office behind a massive desk. After I introduced myself, his secretary brought
in demitasses of Turkish coffee, as black and thick as anything I’d ever seen.
Faculty of Law,
University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia
We discussed the new Yugoslav Constitution – he had been a draftsman. Although
a far cry from constitutional charters in the West, the document was light
years ahead of Soviet Bloc constitutions.
However,
I noted a puzzling paradox in a key clause. In its basic law, Yugoslavia
repudiated the use of force in international relations, but with a major caveat
– except for ‘wars of national liberation’. Professor Lukic merely nodded
without comment.
It
was a familiar Soviet concept that included the war in Vietnam Jeff had just
left behind. So while Yugoslavia was beyond the pale of the Soviet Bloc, there
was still clearly ambivalence about the country’s independent path.
It
was time for me to move on, so I booked a sleeper train, a descendant of the
old Orient Express, and awoke the next morning in Paris where I had spent a
leisurely week during my army days in ’58. I stayed a few days with a French
girl, a fellow grad student I’d met in Moscow, before flying home to New York.
I
came away from my long sojourn in the East with a more nuanced and subtle sense
of the Cold War than the prevailing black & white view in the US. At Moscow
University, a great many of my fellow Soviet students never knew their fathers who
had died in the war. Most of the law profs were veterans, and several were
missing limbs. None of those people were anxious to see international tensions
heat up.
By
the time I left Moscow, the well-defined shape of the Cold War had begun to
soften. My travels through Communist East Europe left the notion of a
monolithic Soviet Bloc somewhat tattered. Compared to the ideological
certainties in the USSR, East Europe was relatively alive with diversity in the
realm of ideas.
The
region may have been subject to Soviet control, but it was not marching in
lockstep with Moscow. On the contrary, the tolerance of a strong Catholic Church,
the repository of nationalism, clearly set Poland apart. In Czechoslovakia,
just below the surface, critical intellectual ferment which subsequently
surfaced in the Prague Spring, was bubbling. Then there was Yugoslavia, the
outlier astraddle the Cold War frontiers between East and West.
Finally,
Communist East Europe in no way reflected Soviet ideological rigidity. In fact,
I found much admiration for America. Yes,
I of course heard the de rigueur criticism of ‘capitalism’, but I also noted appreciation
for our open society.
I
was headed for my first college teaching position. There would be much to talk
about. For me, the Cold War had become a diverse and multi-hued phenomenon.
Détente lay ahead.
_________________________________
† For the relaxed atmosphere of my military
tour in West Germany of the ‘50s, see
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