AC_1965_Web

76 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 Russian and East European Studies. Within weeks of my taking up this job, the Communist world began to implode.Workers in Donetsk went on an unprecedented wildcat strike, Polish Solidarity reached a “round- table” deal with that country’s Communist government,Hungary al- lowed East Germans free passage to the West, and by the fall the Warsaw Pact governments were toppling like dominos. For anyone trying to study these countries, all doors were sud- denly open. In my role as Director, I was able to launch exchange, study- abroad, and internship programs in various countries (all more or less inspired by Antioch’s). I brought vis- iting scholars, including leaders and ex-leaders of the various states, to Toronto. And I helped to organize a massive initiative to explore the now-open archives of the Soviet era. My own studies within that collab- orative project concentrated on the demographic history of the 1930s— the era of agricultural collectiviza- tion, starvation and mass repression, the history of which was only then starting to be written in Russia as well as abroad. The archives project ran for al- most a decade. It helped subsidize documentary publications, sup- ported travel to Russia and the post- Soviet states by students and faculty, brought leading researchers from those countries to Toronto to share in the collaborative work. The one thing that troubled me was that most of our efforts were reaching a fairly narrow circle of specialists,while the subjects we were studying were— as I saw it—of vast importance to a much wider world. I tried to address this problem by producing a series of radio documentaries for the CBC. The first,“In the StalinArchives,”was broadcast in three hour-long seg- ments in 2003. It featured interviews with leading scholars, both Russian and NorthAmerican, plus a few con- versations with elderly Russians who lived through those years. It was followed in 2006 by “The Cold War Declassified,” in which I spent three hours reviewing some of the key moments in the Cold War, high- lighting the deception and self-delu- sion that so distorted those events while they were in progress.These programs drew on the famousWhite House tapes of the Kennedy, Nixon and Johnson administrations, which at that time were becoming available on the Internet.My radio journalism continued in 2013 with a two-hour series on revising history, which fo- cused on controversies over the his- tory of World War II in Russia, and over the VietnamWar. Two years ago, at age 69, I of- ficially retired but I continue to teach and have taken on some new academic responsibilities as well. At Massey College, an extraordinary community of graduate students and scholars within the University of Toronto, I have become the senior journalism fellow—in effect faculty advisor—to the Southam Journalism Fellowship Program. It brings mid-career journalists to the university for a one-year sab-