My past and thoughts (with apologies to Alexander Herzen)

Abstract

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR Canadian Slavonic Papers occasionally publishes documents of historical significance, and we are happy to include among them memoirs and personal accounts of remarkable experiences that might not otherwise find an outlet. Ten years ago Norman Pereira, an emeritus professor of Russian history at Dalhousie University and long-time member of the Canadian Association of Slavists, published a first installment of his recollections in CSP (“Confessions and Professions”). We are pleased now to present Prof. Pereira’s expansion on that earlier work. Readers of this engaging text will see that our distinguished colleague has led a remarkable life; his gripping anecdotes about his youth in revolutionary China, education at Berkeley in the 1960s, arriving in Moscow just days before the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, and organizing Dalhousie’s famous study abroad program in the Soviet Union bring colour and ethnographic detail to the events, mentalities, and everyday life of worlds we have lost.