Cuba Dispatches – The View from Moscow

In the fall of ’62, brother Jeff and I were each doing our thing. He was reluctantly learning Vietnamese – he had wanted Russian – at the Army Language School (ALS) in Monterey while I hunkered down in Bloomington feverishly preparing for my PhD exams at Indiana University (IU).

One day in October I was surprised to find the Cold War swirling around me. I had thought that day-to-day reality was behind me when I finished my tour on the front lines of the great East-West conflict in Europe four years earlier. However, the Soviets had secretly begun their build-up in Cuba during late summer. First, ground troops were sent by sea from Leningrad. To avoid detection by US and British aircraft routinely surveilling Soviet shipping out of the eastern Baltic, the troops were kept out of sight below decks by day.

         

Even when the literary-minded infantry commander requested permission to go topside as the ship was passing through the narrow strait off the Danish coast – just to glimpse the legendary castle at Elsinore where Shakespeare’s Hamlet was set – the ship’s captain turned him down. To all intents and purposes, the vessels that NATO overflights observed were just ordinary Soviet freighters routinely carrying cargo to Cuba.

         

Not until early October when Soviet missile launchers had been emplaced in Cuba and the defensive ground force was encamped ashore did the US detect Khrushchev’s near fait accompli. The ominous ’13 days in October’ ensued with National Security Advisor Bundy convening an ad hoc ‘executive committee’ (Ex-Comm) chaired by the President and his brother to cope with the crisis.

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During the crisis, anticipating missile strikes on their bases, the Strategic Air Command dispersed 200 bombers with nuclear loads to civilian airports.

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Meanwhile at normally placid IU, a fellow grad student in Soviet Studies, the left activist George Shriver had done his political work well. Although he had withdrawn from grad school in the spring of ’62, moved to New York, and opted for a career as a Socialist Workers Party (SWP) staffer, George left behind at the university a solidly organized, albeit small SWP affiliate, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), and its off-shoot, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC).

         

Coming to the end of my time at IU that fall semester, I was unaware of those small campus activist groups. A typical liberal, left politics were not my thing. My PhD coursework completed, I was intensely studying for the doctoral exams in November.

The exams loomed large in a grad student’s life. If one passed successfully, one was admitted to ‘candidacy’, meaning you moved on to researching and writing a dissertation – in effect, a book-length manuscript – toward attaining a PhD degree and beyond, an academic career.

For me then, nothing had higher priority in October ’62 – not even the hair-raising confrontation between the United States and the USSR over little Cuba just 90 miles off-shore. Likewise, the unfolding Cuban Missile Crisis made barely a ripple in the routine at ALS on the California coast. Jeff and his fellow GI students continued to attend language classes six hours a day while the Kennedy (JFK) Administration was quietly building up its assets for the low-key but escalating war in Vietnam.

Meanwhile off the Florida coast, tensions were rising. Soviet anti-aircraft missiles brought down an American U-2 over Cuba while another US spy plane, actually on a high altitude weather mission, accidently strayed into Soviet airspace, a provocation even at the best of times. Soviet MiGs scrambled, US fighters rose to meet them, and the errant U-2 pilot barely escaped, not to mention that an aerial dogfight was avoided.

Serious people in the States feared the possibility of full-scale armed conflict between the superpowers, one that could rapidly escalate into nuclear war. They weren’t far off the mark as we subsequently learned. In the Ex-Comm meetings in the White House, shielded from public view, the generals were strongly pushing JFK to attack Cuba and take out the Soviet missile batteries soon expected to be ready to threaten American cities and military installations.

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The protestors – Fair Play for Cuba stalwarts – were trying to march down a 

broad avenue amidst several thousand shouting and cursing fellow students.

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Anticipating missile strikes on Strategic Air Command (SAC) bases, the Pentagon dispersed 200 bombers loaded with nuclear bombs to civilian airports from Portland to Philadelphia. In turn, the Army mobilized a quarter of a million troops for an invasion of Cuba – my parents living in Miami told me the roads south to the sea were clogged with military vehicles. Even inexperienced, first-year student nurses in training at hospitals across the country were put on alert for casualties from a nuclear attack.

Naturally I was deeply concerned – who wouldn’t be – and I had to make a very fundamental decision. Time was short before my PhD exams, but so was the nuclear fuse lit between the superpowers. With WWIII waiting in the wings, should I hang it up – forget about studying day and night and have a final fling before everything came to an end – or should I push on. I voted for a future.

As the missile crisis deepened, I was walking across campus to the library one afternoon to collect more books and saw a clutch of people – perhaps eight in number – carrying signs critical of the President’s naval blockade of Cuba. American warships were on station to prevent Soviet freighters from delivering the missiles, the final step in the dangerous contretemps underway. The protestors – FPCC stalwarts – were trying to march down one of IU’s broad avenues amidst a huge crowd of several thousand shouting and cursing fellow students.†

Occasionally a hostile student would dash out of the crowd, snatch a protester’s sign, and tear it up to stormy cheers. Farther along the march route,

another onlooker ran out, threw a punch, and a brief scuffle ensued – the marcher slugged was trying to shield the two women at the center of the group.

Throughout the ordeal, campus security and the city cops stood by impassively as the FPCC folks struggled on, advocating at that moment as the nation was rallying around the flag probably the most unpopular position imaginable. As I walked on, I thought, ‘God, those people are brave’.

Fortunately for the world, cool heads prevailed in the Kremlin and at the White House, and the crisis came to a peaceful resolution. We all breathed a sigh of relief. It might have been otherwise if JFK had not fended off General Curtis LeMay and other hawks on the Ex-Comm pushing for a preemptive air and land attacks on Cuba.

After the USSR collapsed in ’91, it was revealed in Moscow that the Soviet combat brigade in Cuba had been equipped with tactical nuclear weapons, and the commander was authorized to use them if American forces came ashore.

Castro was furious the Soviets had backed off and pulled their missile batteries, leaving revolutionary Cuba high and dry. He was well aware of the CIA’s attempts to assassinate him and assumed the ‘imperialist’ United States would not stop at taking him out, but would launch another invasion of the island.

At IU, but for a few bruises, IU’s pro-Cuba contingent survived its ordeal to protest another day. Jeff finished at the language school and shipped out to Vietnam, and I passed my PhD exams and headed for Moscow late summer ‘63 for a year of dissertation research for my doctorate.

I had been selected for the official US-Soviet graduate student exchange designed to encourage better mutual understanding to help avoid war. The idea was that each side’s young scholars would get an up-close experience in their respective societies. I was assigned to the law school at Moscow University. It was to be a remarkable year.

My arrival at Moscow Law School in September ’63 was preceded by Castro’s state visit to the USSR that spring. Khrushchev wanted to make amends to the unhappy Cuban leader for the Soviets’ abrupt retreat from Cuba. Castro had agreed to go to Moscow to discuss a very generous Soviet aid package as a kind of reparations. The trip was organized around the May Day celebrations, the second most important holiday in the Soviet calendar.

It was the most elaborate welcome ever extended to a foreign head of state. A red carpet was laid out from Lenin’s Tomb to Swan Lake. Castro reviewed the gala May Day parade in Red Square from atop Lenin’s Mausoleum along with the Soviet leadership – a rare honor for a foreign leader.

Castro & Khrushchev, May Day parade, 1963

Soviet crowds were ecstatic over the charismatic Cuban leader, a genuine revolutionary hero. In the late ‘50s American media had lionized the guerrillas for their daring forays against the Batista regime, so one can easily imagine the exuberant Soviet press adulation that preceded Castro.

For Khrushchev, the visit was of the utmost significance as it helped repair the damage to his image with his comrades after the humiliating withdrawal from the Caribbean. It also shored up his flagging leadership position in the international communist movement – for the time being.

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Soviet crowds were ecstatic over Castro, a genuine revolutionary hero.

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Fidel understood the great leverage he had and extracted a huge political, economic, and military aid package. On the symbolic side of the state visit, the USSR heaped honors and laurels on him, including an honorary Doctorate of Laws from what would shortly become my Soviet alma mater, Moscow University (MGU). The degree was conferred in the Great Hall at MGU’s Lenin Hills campus high above the River Moskva. The citation noted Castro’s contribution to the “application of the Marxist-Leninist doctrine to State and Law.”

In his acceptance remarks before the throng of students, including my soon-to-be fellow law students, Fidel told them that his first big mistake in life was to study law in a capitalist society with its main emphasis on commercial, property, and real estate law, “laws of a society doomed to disappear.” He assured his audience to rousing cheers that Marxism-Leninism would guide the solutions to all of Cuba’s constitutional, legal, and institutional questions.

Castro went on to tour the length and breadth of that vast country from Murmansk near the Arctic Circle to ancient Samarkand in the Soviet Central Asian desert. At every stop he was enthusiastically feted by the local establishment and the general public. After more than 40 days, he returned triumphantly to Havana.

Castro and Soviet sailors in Leningrad, 1963

I arrived in Moscow for my research year in early September. The university was still on summer break so I had time to look around. I made a point of going to several Soviet movies – nothing remarkable, ordinary fare – primarily to ‘tune up’ my Russian language ear. The only one I recall was a WWII drama which, given the country’s staggering losses of 27 million dead, was in ’63 still well within living memory of nearly all.

The scenario followed a predictable plot line – first the Soviet forces suffered serious reverses, but then regrouped and through great heroism exacted a terrible toll on the enemy. What surprised me though was that all around me in the theater older men were weeping.

A few weeks later I was no longer the only occupant on my floor of the dorm – the law students had come back for fall semester. Most had been working in Kazakhstan, one of the Soviet Union’s Central Asian republics, performing their pro bono ‘social duty’ helping bring in the harvest. Moscow Law School soon came alive, and it was time for me to present myself to my Soviet advisor.

The law school was near the city center, lodged in a time-worn 18^th century building not far from the Kremlin. It was a rather ornate structure and must have been at one time the grand residence of a wealthy merchant.

At the appointed hour, I climbed the stairs to the Jurisprudence Department on the second floor. The door stood open, and I entered the cavernous room with elaborately ornamented flourishes along the high ceiling, décor I’d never before seen in an academic office.

My advisor, Dr Professor A I Denisov, a nationally known jurist, chaired the department and had assembled his faculty to welcome the American visitor. For me, a rookie in Russia, it was somewhat daunting as they all rose to greet me with customary handshakes. Andrei Ivanovich introduced me to each colleague, several of whose names I recognized from having read their books.

Everyone was cordial, but it was still little overwhelming since the huge windows overlooking the street below were open – AC not an option – and noise rising from passing buses and trolleys sometimes drowned out the chair’s deep hoarse voice. Finally, an ice-breaker of sorts as I was introduced to a junior docent about my age.

He asked where I lived in the States. Told him my parents lived in south Florida, at which he lit up with a big smile and said, “I’ll be flying over there in a few days.” He was bound for Havana for the academic year to lecture at the law school through simultaneous translation on Soviet administrative law.

The docent was part of the vanguard of the big Soviet aid package negotiated by Castro during his spring visit – one of a number of law profs being dispatched to Cuba, effectively to transmit the Soviet legal model. Coincidentally, a generation earlier when East Europe fell behind the Iron Curtain, Professor Denisov, as a young scholar, had performed the same function in Communist Bulgaria as the new regime there struggled to put a Soviet-style system in place.

As had been the case in Communist East Europe earlier, by the late ‘60s most of the textbooks used in the Cuban law schools were verbatim translations of Soviet texts into Spanish.

I soon settled into a routine in Moscow – research at the Lenin Library, classes at the law school, and occasional forays into the impressive world of Soviet high culture, music, ballet, and theater. One evening that fall I was at the Bolshoi Theater with a group of fellow American exchange students. We had gone to see the Russian opera Boris Godunov. As foreign visitors in the USSR, we were privileged to have excellent orchestra seats at nominal cost.

Bolshoi Theater, Moscow

We arrived early and waited for the curtain, which was delayed a few minutes. I had noticed that the theater’s first three rows were empty and cordoned off by ushers. Finally, some 75 Cuban Army officers trooped in and filled the seats as honored guests of the evening. They doubtlessly didn’t know Russian, so what they might have thought of that melodramatic opera – a dark tale of royal intrigue in the 17^th century Kremlin – we’ll never know.

During intermission in the lobby, the officers kept to themselves. Just as the US trained allied Latin American military personnel in our higher command schools, the Bolshoi’s guests were also part of the Soviet aid program to revolutionary Cuba. They were in Moscow for advanced tactical training in Soviet Army schools.

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North Vietnamese students posted a large sign in our dorm lounge gleefully  welcoming Kennedy’s death; Russian students tore it down in a fury. _________________________________________________________

During my Moscow sojourn, I became aware of Cuba for the last time in late ’63. I was in my room in the Lenin Hills dorms when the terrible news arrived that JFK had been assassinated in Dallas just an hour earlier on the other side of the world.††

There were just a few Americans in the dorm, and we were desperate for information. From what we could glean from special Soviet news announcements interspersed with funereal music, Voice of America shortwave broadcasts, and phone calls to the embassy, the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had a possible Cuban connection. He was married to a young Soviet woman and had lived for a time in the USSR. Once back in the States, he identified himself with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

My Russian dorm mates greatly admired Castro and were quite upset at the suggestion that Cuba might be involved in the death of the President. Paradoxically, they also thought well of JFK even though he was the chief adversary of their country.

Sub rosa they appreciated JFK’s youth and vigor as a leader. Unspoken, but well understood, was an implicit comparison with their own sluggish, geriatric leadership. When North Vietnamese students from the floor below posted a large Russian-language sign in our dorm lounge that gleefully welcomed Kennedy’s death, the Russian students tore it down in a fury.

Two days later, when Jack Ruby shot Oswald before the cameras of the world, the Soviet public was shocked and dismayed by our gun-crazy culture, and nothing further was heard of a Cuban link. For me, dissertation research beckoned, and Cuba fell off my radar screen.

I returned to the States the following summer, and several months later Khrushchev’s comrades ousted him in a bloodless coup. The bill of particulars against him included a number of his policies dubbed ‘harebrained schemes’, among which the USSR’s Cuban debacle loomed large.

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† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2013/12/for-better-world-lives-of-new-left-iv_18.html

†† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/11/moscow-thanksgiving-63.html

         

         

         

         

High Road From Moscow

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 19^th 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 1^st battalion, 8^th Guards Army, or troops of the 5^th squadron, 7^th 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.

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† For the relaxed atmosphere of my military tour in West Germany of the ‘50s, see

http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-good-life-in-cold-war-europe.html

Back to the ‘World’ – Return from ‘Nam

For a year my brother, Jeff Sharlet, and I were on different ‘fronts’ of the global Cold War. It was 1963-64, and Jeff was soldiering in Vietnam while I was studying in Moscow. I had learned Russian for my sojourn to the Soviet Union. Jeff had been taught Vietnamese for his Southeast Asian tour.

He was a translator/interpreter in the semi-secret Army Security Agency (ASA) while I was grad student on the official US-USSR Cultural Exchange. We’d both been carefully vetted for our encounters with the Communist orbit – Jeff to assure his political loyalty since his work was highly classified.

Conversely for my program, any connection to the American intelligence community would have been a disqualifier. University authorities took great care to protect the integrity of the academic exchange. Jeff and I both passed muster and shipped out to our respective destinations.

In the Moscow State University dorms in the former Lenin Hills, I shared a suite of rooms with a Soviet law student. Jeff was billeted with five other GIs in a large field tent at a US military outpost in South Vietnam, a small base not far below the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and the border of Communist North Vietnam. As he wrote home, “we are completely out of contact with the outside world here.”

Jeff’s ‘accommodations’, South Vietnam, 1964

By the ‘60s, the Cold War between the superpowers was approaching mid-point with Washington leading the West, Moscow dominating the East. Fortunately it was not a head-to-head military confrontation; instead, the Cold War was waged in the realm of ideas, propaganda, covert action, and proxy wars in the Third World.

One of those proxy wars, the hottest one, was in Vietnam, a country split into North and South by the Geneva Accords following the French colonists’ defeat in 1954. Backed by the Soviets and Communist China, North Vietnam was supporting a low intensity guerrilla war in the south. The aim was to overthrow the Saigon government and unify Vietnam under the Communist flag.

Jeff was assigned to ASA’s Detachment J, 3^rd Radio Research Unit (RRU) at a place called Phu Bai. His work included electronically eavesdropping on North Vietnamese Army communications as well as liaising with South Vietnamese commandos being infiltrated north through the DMZ and over the border.†

My academic tasks in the capital of the Soviet Union fell under the heading of Khrushchev’s slogan of ‘peaceful coexistence’, the idea that capitalist and socialist countries could coexist amicably and avoid fighting each other.

Implicit in the cultural exchange was the hope of mitigating international tensions through people-to-people programs. Hence, while I was researching Marxist legal theory for my PhD dissertation as well as studying Soviet law, my Soviet counterpart was studying at an American university.

In late spring ’64, Jeff and I had both coincidentally finished up our time abroad and were ready to head home to the States. For Jeff, it would be back to the ‘world’, as Vietnam GIs were wont to call the journey. The road back would be a long one for each of us, not just in sheer distance, but in the psychological gulfs we’d be navigating.

Reverse culture shock was just part of it – Jeff would be returning to college, quite a remove from the secrecy-shrouded atmosphere of the place  he was leaving, an area of scrub foliage and low sand dunes characterized by a National Security Agency (NSA) official as  ‘virtually a Viet Cong camp ground’.

The transition would be easier for me although, by definition in those days, an American living in Soviet society got used to being ‘watched’ and had to be careful what was said and to whom. Hence, returning to the States would be a radical change from living in a high vigilance, closed society, but that’s a story for the next post.

Jeff had gone to Asia, if not positive, at least open-minded about the US mission in Vietnam. But in the course of being involved in ill-conceived and fouled up political and military operations while simultaneously getting acquainted with ordinary Vietnamese and their culture, he had become increasingly disillusioned.†† On his return to the ‘world’, he’d have to sort out his thoughts and feelings about the war – what he had experienced ‘over there’.

Jeff’s road home began from one day to the next at the tiny base at Phu Bai. One day he was at work amidst the great heat and humidity in the working ‘uniform of the day’ – shirtless, shorts, and flip flops; the next day he was dressed in Class A’s heading for the airfield with his gear.

He was very glad to be leaving, writing presciently in a last letter just weeks before the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident in August ‘64, “I hope I get out of the Army before anything blows up in Southeast Asia.”

Jeff caught a hop on a C-123, a large cargo plane that made two scheduled trips a day in and out of Phu Bai. The plane headed south toward Saigon, making a single stop on the coast of the South China Sea at Danang.

A C-123 taxiing for takeoff

Arriving at the military side of Saigon’s vast airport/air base, Jeff took a taxi over to nearby Davis Station, home to ASA’s 3^rd RRU. He bunked there for his week’s leave in Saigon before moving on. He had many friends among the linguists (lingys) and cryptologists (crypts) there from his previous duty station in ’63 at Phu Lam, not far from the Davis base.

After a merry time drinking with good buddies at favorite bars and restaurants in Saigon, then known as the ‘Paris of the East’, it was time for the next leg of Jeff’s journey. That meant flying from Saigon to his home base, the 9^th ASA battalion located at Clark Air Base in the Philippines.

In a kind of tradition when a lingy finished his tour and was headed home, his friends would see him off – Jeff’s friends from as far back as ’62 at the Army Language School (ALS) on the California coast did just that – among them John Buquoi, Harvey Kline, Dave Gustin and, if he was in town, Fred Baumann.

The drill was an informal farewell party in the upstairs lounge at the airport – tasty toasted ham and Swiss sandwiches with lots of Dijon mustard and, of course, plenty of ’33 beer, Vietnam’s cheap brew – before Jeff shoved off for the flight line.

‘Mileage’ post at Davis Station, HQ, ASA 3rd RRU

Back at Clark, a sprawling air base, Jeff had an exit physical at an Air Force clinic. His medical report was then sealed along with his basic military file and copies of final orders in a large brown envelope to be hand-carried back to the States.

Separation processing would take place stateside. In military jargon, one was ‘separated’ until a reserve obligation was completed a few years later and final discharge papers issued.

Again, another farewell party before take-off, this one with friends at the 9^th ASA, Keith Willis and others. Jeff boarded a civilian 707, a World Airways charter under military contract, for the lift back to the States. The plane made the same stops as on the way over – Guam and Honolulu – finally touching down late at night at Travis Air Force Base north of San Francisco.

The flight was met by a military bus that took Jeff and the other GIs to a transient barracks on the base. Incoming traffic was apparently heavy because each GI was assigned to a particular bunk in an 8-man room for a specific time slot (about six hours). The following morning Jeff was shaken awake by the next GI assigned to that bunk.

He was directed to a bus for the short ride to Oakland Army Terminal where final out-processing took place. A quick breakfast at the mess hall there and he reported to the ‘Separation Processing’ facility located in a hangar.

At the front of the cavernous space, a podium and several tables were set up. Rows of wooden benches were provided for out-processing troops, a few hundred from bases all over the world. Jeff didn’t know anyone – he may have been the only ASA Vietnam GI in the group.

Separation was typically Army, slow and bureaucratic. At the podium a corporal would call out a name, directing the soldier to one of the tables or ‘processing stations’ – there were nearly a half dozen of them. Jeff would complete his business at one ‘station’ and be sent back to the benches to wait until he was called again – over and over.*

The stages of separation were:

Personnel/Records: Jeff handed over his thick brown envelope. A clerk reviewed the contents and various documents were signed.

Security: A military intelligence clerk briefed Jeff on the ASA secrecy commitment, to wit, if any classified information was divulged he would face federal prosecution, up to 10 years imprisonment, and a $10,000 fine, serious money in those days.

He was also warned against travel behind the Iron Curtain for five years, and there was one additional bizarre caution. If you were to undergo surgery involving general anesthesia, you were to notify ASA in advance so a de-briefer could be on hand in the event of ‘inappropriate disclosures’.

Equipment turn-in: A GI was expected to return all the uniforms issued him except the one he was wearing. A couple of privates unceremoniously dumped Jeff’s duffel bag on the floor and made an inventory of its contents. If any part of the original issue was missing, the cost would be deducted from the soldier’s final paycheck.

Physical Exam/Medical: Essentially blood and urine tests for which the out-processee was sent to an adjoining room.

Payroll: Jeff was given his final ASA paycheck as well as travel funds to cover the flight back to his hometown of record.

Finally at dusk after an all-day laborious process, the GIs were released and bussed to the San Francisco Airport to catch their flights. At the airport, Jeff cut out and headed into the city to revisit the town and see friends.

While in the Bay Area, John Sharlet, our cousin, who was then studying Russian at ALS down the coast in Monterey, came up to San Fran to meet Jeff for dinner. Back east the cousins had gone to prep school together, but hadn’t seen each other for several years.

A few months later in fall ’64, Jeff found himself back in school at Indiana University (IU), a college boy again, to finish his education. He threw himself into the coursework, eager to catch up on his life. Nonetheless he remained unsettled by memories of the war, but couldn’t say a word to anyone. Everything remained secret.

Jeff knew there were many other GIs deeply skeptical about the wisdom of US involvement in Vietnam. Once the war dramatically escalated the following spring of ‘65, the number of disaffected Vietnam GIs would eventually grow and become legion.

Five years later after returning from ‘Nam, Jeff took his secrets to an early grave, although not before founding the underground paper Vietnam GI, which became a rallying point for emerging GI opposition to the war.

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*I am indebted to John Buquoi, Jeff’s Vietnam buddy, for his help in reconstructing the ‘separation’ process.

†  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-mountains-of-laos.html

††  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/05/vietnam-coup-capers.html