But even without being substantially a scholar, Toumanoff is Olympian in a bureaucratic way. His parents were Russian nobles who left the country in 1919, and his father fought in the White army against the Bolsheviks. He is able to tick off his accomplishments in an oh-by-the-way manner: author of the SALT memo, an originator of the ban on nuclear arms in space, and the author of Ambassador Llewelyn Thompson's appeal to the Soviets, in 1967, for a collaborative effort" to solve "world problems of food, population and energy," as he puts it.
Most members of the center are neither Harvard faculty members or post-doctoral researchers or fund-raisers, however; many more or less permanent members are drawn from other Boston area social science faculties, while visitors for one or two-year periods come from other universities--usually during a paid sabbatical since the center's finances allow few stipends to visiting scholars, no matter how expert or promising. For their travelling the visitors are rewarded, occupying cubicles right down the corridor from luminaries such as Abram Bergson and Marshal Goldman, experts on the Soviet economy, and even Ulam himself.
Joseph Berliner, professor of Economics at Brandeis University, does not have to travel very far. He is able to make the trip from Waltham every Wednesday, to great benefit: all his work on a forthcoming study of economy and society is done at the center. A graduate of Harvard's first Soviet Union program in 1948, Berliner gravitated toward Soviet Studies in the 30s, searching for alternatives to capitalism. He attended the City College of New York at night and in the late 30s was an organizer for the shipping clerks union. White-haired, soft-spoken and reasonable, he seems the center's representative of the depression-bred Jewish radical, now gentled by time and more liberal: the Commentary intellectual, before those types talked against welfare and for invading the Arabs.
Studying the Soviet Union has moved him rightward, except he says it a different way, with a question: "The main problem for my generation was, 'How do you have socialism without falling into tyranny?' For me, acquaintance with the documents of Soviet society was a gradual process of disabuse."
And the professor still hopes, which makes him seem heroic, sitting back in a chair in a neat office at a new building in Brandeis called the "International Building," done in the I.M. Pei style and festooned with flags of different countries. Quietly, without wanting to make too much of it: "I am very strongly drawn toward decentralized, nontyrannical political systems like Yugoslavia"--although he later qualifies this, worrying about the resurgence of Stalinism and some lack of democratic institutions in Titoism.
Berliner is a scholar, with a distaste for power in politics. Do people at the center have power--what about Richard Pipes, professor of History, now engaged in advising Sen. Henry Jackson (D-Wash.) on Soviet policy? Berliner smiles at the question and is perhaps thinking of Ulam's last time in official Washington, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about a year ago: "You get the ear of an important congressman--among fifty others." And his smile says more, something that other members say openly: Would we be in this financial shape if the centers of power really cared?
For David Powell the center is something of an escape from official power and its uses: "As an academic you have a great deal more freedom than in a bureacracy...My inclination is just to write more." Powell should know--he has taught courses to senior Pentagon officials and been consultant to the U.S. Information Agency. The "nuke the Chinks" expressions that led him to leave Defense were "obviously racist slogans." That opinion wasn't majority feeling even at the Pentagon, Powell says, but it made him more aware that "every bureaucracy has its share of lunatics"--and he chose, after 1966, to work in a bureaucracy where lunacy was at least isolated, and perhaps less dangerous.
Powell--voluble, light-haired, and looking like he just stepped out of a hotel barber shop--is now associate professor of Government at the University of Virginia, a tenured position. His inclination is to leave it and stay as long as he can get grants, as a research fellow at the center, which he describes as "exhilarating." Right now he is in the second and final year of work on alcoholic abuse in the Soviet Union--which has the highest per capita consumption rate in the world--courtesy of a National Institute of Health grant. A book will follow, with a companion volume written by Boris Segal, now a member of the center and an exiled dissident who was the Soviet Union's foremost expert on alcoholism, Powell says. (Every one at the center is said to be foremost in something by somebody, like Harvard's freshman class).
Along with Ulam and a possible majority of the center's members, Powell views detente as a "splendid idea," but so far a trading of something-for-very-little by Kissinger. Unlike more conservative center members like Doctorow, however, Powell can quickly respond to a question like "what's good about the Soviet Union": "a very extraordinary success in eradicating poverty and ignorance and disease--their infant mortality and life expectancy rank above the U.S."
Exhilaration aside, the money problems remain. Everyone is aware of them, if only uneasily--members constantly mention the center's financial crisis, usually attributed to the out-of-fashion intellectual character of Soviet studies, exacerbated by having to share a building with two other area-studies institutes now much in vogue and financially free-and-easy: Far-Eastern and Middle-Eastern Studies. "We don't have Japanese businessmen or sheiks to support us," Ulam says.
The foundation and industry fund-raising attempts are difficult. Industries doing business with the Soviet Union, the main recipients of center requests for support, may listen politely to arguments about needed information on Russia that only the center can provide. But corporate executives may not want to risk their profit lines by supporting an institution whose members have been labelled "bourgeois falsifiers of history" by Izvestia.
Foundations like to be "seed money"--the first supporters of a new field of study. Soviet research is hardly new, and it is time, say all the center's God-parents, from the Dean's office to the Ford Foundation, to walk on your own. The center, after 27 years, must go out into the world for itself.
If $750,000 can be raised between the center and Columbia's Russian Institute, says the Ford Foundation, it will grant an additional $250,000--all together, far more than enough for an endowment. Ulam says that the center may go under. If it does, everyone there knows, the pain will not be felt by an institution at all, but by an arrogant generous and above all, critical, collection of individual scholars.