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75 AN T I OC H CO L L E G E C L A S S O F 19 6 5 5 0 t h A N N I V E R S A R Y B O O K A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z J O H N S O N JOHNSON ROBERT THEN AND NOW 4 B.A. History 4 M.A., History, Cornell FAMI LY 4 Wife, Laura (Climenko) 4 Two sons ADDRESS 4 374 Sackville St. Toronto, ON M4X 155 Canada CONTACT 416 925-5886 johnson@chass.utoronto.ca I ’ V E S P E N T M Y career as a teacher/scholar/administrator, 40+ years at the University of Toronto, where my main responsibilities have been in history and Russian/ East European studies.This was my way of carrying what the late Steve Straker, a much-missed friend, used to call the Cross of Horace Mann. Trying to understand and interpret what was happening in Russia has been my main preoccupation, with the idea that a) most of the people around me knew little about that part of the world, and b) that every- thing that happened (or happens) there had/has great significance for the future of the world. Looking back to my Antioch days, I think that for me the over- shadowing event of those years was the Cuban Missile Crisis. I felt, as most of the people around me did, that the future of the world was hanging by a thread. I sensed or sus- pected that much of what we were hearing from the American and the Soviet leadership was either untrue or misconceived—these suspicions have certainly been amply con- firmed by the archival revelations of more recent times. Back then I convinced myself that, whatever I might study, I needed to engage with these problems and issues. I wanted to understand and explain, to help in whatever way I could to prevent the dreadful possibilities that we all were contemplating during those thirteen days. Another formative moment came when I spent a co-op term in 1963 at the famous Current Digest of the Soviet Press , whose editor, Leo Gruliow, was married to a woman who had once (as I recall the story) worked at Antioch in the co-op pro- gram. Leo had been a journalist dur- ing the 1930s and ‘40s, and had been one of the few who predicted, in the early summer of 1941, that the Red Army would hold Moscow and Leningrad against the German inva- sion.At the Digest, he drew on a staff of translators and a wide network of experts to track key developments in the USSR. This was a time when east-west contacts were tightly restricted, and U.S. foreign policy experts had to read between the lines of Pravda and Izvestia to guess what was re- ally going on in the country. My own role was to proofread the translated copy before it was printed and I had the misfortune to hold this job at a moment when the Digest was featuring the turgid, three- hour speeches of Nikita Khrushchev as he tried to reinvigorate Soviet ag- riculture. Turgid or not, the work piqued my curiosity, and convinced me there were interesting and im- portant things to do in this field. At graduation, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship allowed me to begin graduate study; I chose to go to Cornell where I studied Russian history. I spent the academic year 1969–70 in Moscow and Leningrad, doing dissertation work in the Russian archives. In those days, the archives of the Soviet era were al- most entirely off-limits to foreigners, so I had to choose a prerevolutionary topic—labor unrest in 19th century Moscow. I spent a follow-up year in Helsinki, which has extraordinary li- brary resources on Imperial Russia, before returning the the U.S. in the winter of 1971.A few months later I was offered a job in the history de- partment at the Mississauga campus of the University of Toronto. I went there expecting to move on in a year or two, but ended up staying. Over the years I’ve taught many subjects other than Russian history, including demographic history, statistics, and numerous topics in European,North American and world history. Russia has remained my cen- tral interest and I’ve returned to the country and its archives more than twenty times over the years. My most exciting and produc- tive years were 1989–2000, when I was Director of the Centre for