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21 And Those Who Could Not Travel
- Penn State University Press
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21 AND THOSE WHO COULD NOT TRAVEL The problem was not so much who came but who did not; there were many brilliant scholars who were deliberately forbidden to travel abroad because of their political views or because they did not have connections. There was not even the semblance of a fair selection system in the Communist countries, let alone open competition for the few opportunities for scholars and scientists to travel abroad. — . ,“Scholarly Exchanges and the Collapse of Communism” Many outstanding Soviet scholars, scientists, and writers traveled to the West, but many others, equally or even more outstanding, were not permitted to travel beyond the Soviet bloc, having failed to receive the approval of the Foreign Travel Commission, a body that decided which citizens were sufficiently reliable to travel abroad. The sad story of George I. Mirsky is illustrative. Mirsky, an expert on the Middle East and developing countries, an Arabic speaker and Iraq specialist, had worked more than forty years at IMEMO. His doctoral dissertation was on the history of Iraq between the two world wars, but he had never been there, not because of the Iraqis but because of the Soviet authorities. As Mirsky tells the tale: “Until the age of sixty-two (!) I was a ‘nonexitable ’ [nievyezdnoi, i.e., not allowed to leave the Soviet bloc], and unable to travel further than East Berlin or Budapest. Over the course of thirty years invitations to visit various countries, including the Arabic, had piled up but each time the Lubyanka [KGB headquarters] ‘cut’ me for various phony reasons.”1 The reason, explains Mirsky, was his “indiscreet tongue” as a youth. Years later he learned that his KGB dossier contained a report that in , while on a smoke break as a student, he had expressed his opinion of Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito, noting that no matter how bad a role Tito was playing then—as seen by the Soviet Union—it was difficult, from a psychological point of view, to believe that during World War II, when he was commanding the Yugoslav army of liberation, he had also been an agent of the German Gestapo as charged by Soviet authorities.2 The irony of it all was not lost on Mirsky: . George I. Mirsky, “A Half Century in the World of Eastern Studies,” Vostok (Moscow), no. () (author’s translation). . Ibid., . Orwell could have sized up the situation: a man who all his life had been studying “third-world” countries, holding a position as section chief and then department head in an institute of the academy, a professor teaching the history of the East at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations, was unable to visit, even as a tourist, even one of the countries which he studied and about which he wrote not only books and articles but also reports for the Central Committee of the Communist Party and Ministry of Foreign Affairs. That could only be possible in a country of victorious socialism.3 Mirsky could not travel to the United States during the Soviet years but many of his students did, and he describes their change of views as “truly profound,” not so much in the sense that they were struck by the material standards of the West but rather in regard to Western mentality and social surroundings: Before the exchange, people believed that Western society, no matter how wealthy and affluent, was narrowly materialistic, devoid of any humanism and spirituality, selfish and arrogant, indifferent to moral, cultural, and artistic values, full of hostility for Russians and of anti-Communist crusading spirit. What amazed them was American hospitality, warmth, willingness to oblige, civility and politeness, lack of ethnic prejudices, care for disabled, richness of artistic life, pluralism of opinions, abundance of associations. The Soviets were able for the first time in their lives to see a functioning civil society. This was a great surprise.4 One of Mirsky’s former students reported how he was speechless when he saw disabled people in America crossing the streets and boarding buses in their motor-driven wheelchairs. Other students told him that in no country in the world could they hope to encounter such friendliness for foreigners as in the United States. And all of them were fascinated by the opportunities for scholarly research, the computers in libraries, and the unbelievable number of publications and magazines. “That was the main impression,” concludes Mirsky, “and the exchange visitors would never be the same again.”5 Mirsky’s sad story, however...