The Education of a Canadian: My Life as a Scholar and Activist by H. Gordon Skilling (review)

346 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 and over, theorists of metaphor and the sublime. Cotrupi can look over the top of her glasses with the best of us at what other critics have put in print, but a pedagogy based on her example would be one in which all critical positions were potentially cross-fertilized by all others, where our differing views and reading proclivities start to look more like one book with a variety of interpenetrating centres, as this one is. (JEFFERY DONALDSON) H. Gordon Skilling. The Education of a Canadian: My Life as a Scholar and Activist McGill-Queen=s University Press. xiv, 450. $44.95 H. Gordon Skilling, who died in March of 2001, was a rare Canadian academic . A one-time communist, a leading international authority on Czechoslovakian politics, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, he led an intriguing and fulfilling life, clearly recounted in this fascinating autobiography . Skilling=s story will be of greatest interest to students of Czechoslovakian and Eastern European politics during and after the Cold War. Skilling grew up in Toronto and attended the University of Toronto in the early 1930s during the Great Depression. The story of his political radicalization seems familiar. A young, idealistic man outraged by rampant poverty, the arms race, and the rise of European fascism, is inspired by socialist ideas, which are reinforced by his associations at Oxford University where he does graduate work. In a trip to Czechoslovakia, he meets his lifelong marriage partner, Sally Bright, whose history and politics completely absorb him. He joins the British Communist party in 1937. Was it possible for an activist on the far left to forge a successful academic career in the Cold War milieu of the United States and Canada? Skilling had his problems B he was denied tenure at the University of Wisconsin, and for a time lost the work visa that had enabled him to teach at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire for twelve years. But he landed safely at the University of Toronto in 1959, where he began the Centre for Russian and Eastern European Studies and wrote more frequently, and influentially, on Czechoslovakian politics. Notably, during and after the Second World War, he held a number of sensitive posts with the Canadian government and the CBC, both of which made effective use of his fluency in Czech and Russian. Overall, he fared better in his career than other leftwing academics of his generation. Indeed, he cherished the intellectual freedom he enjoyed in Canada, which he believed had avoided the McCarthyite >hysteria= of the United States. Skilling, remarkably, had equally free run of Eastern Europe, where he met often with Communist and dissident leaders, all of whom saw him as a friendly voice in the West. He describes in detail the intellectual ferment before and after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Skilling=s subsequent support of the Charter 77 movement, which promoted HUMANITIES 347 democracy and human rights, led him to a close association with Václav Havel, who, as president of Czechoslovakia, awarded him (in 1992) the Order of the White Lion, the highest honour accorded non-citizens. Skilling=s account of his political journey from communist to reformer and civil libertarian is curiously descriptive and detached, and without much introspection, as though he were writing a biography instead of an autobiography. The change in his thinking seems merely to evolve, evidently without crisis. All the while he maintains his Eastern European links while building his academic reputation. Did he feel traumatized and scarred, or liberated and enriched, by his political and intellectual transformation? In an otherwise informative book, these questions are unexplored, let alone unanswered. How significant was his scholarly legacy? At every stage his political activism infused his writing, including his best-known work, Charter 77 and Human Rights in Czechoslovakia (1981). Earlier, while in the process of rejecting both communism and the politics of anti-communism, he analysed the complexity of the Eastern European systems in a way that he hoped would avoid >demonizing= them. The reader is entitled to ask whether his conclusions then and later were shaped more by his current political beliefs than by...