Word: toumanoff
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...only research Toumanoff is involved in now is for the snaring of State Department contracts, and all those population and resources materials are feeding into grant proposals. This will be, says Toumanoff, "short-term stuff"--money to help tide the center over until an endowment can be built up with corporate and foundation support. Still, Toumanoff's future offers to State--if ultimately accepted--will mark something of a new direction for the center, involving some of its members in pragmatic research on Soviet environmental and urbanization problems...
Already there has been some success--but a steady trickle, not a deluge. In June 1974 State contracted with the center for a set of studies and Washington seminars to be prpared by five of the center's Scholars, Ulam and Keenan among them. This year, Toumanoff says, State has accepted a contract extension that will engage about five more scholars on issues like U.S.-Soviet trade, Soviet agriculture and long-range economic thinking, and guesses on Soviet succession (Kremlinology--who's sitting next to Brezhnev at what state dinners...
This hasn't brought in all that much money--$90,000 with the contract and its extension, but most of that, Toumanoff says, is absorbed by costs. The center's scholars seem hardly thrilled by the lure of government power Ulam seems to speak for the center's members when he says "We don't want to study for the twentieth time the Soviet succession." Doctorow, typically, puts it more harshly: "The center can't get money precisely because of their isolation from the 'evil' centers of power, which I don't think are particularly evil. We ought...
...Toumanoff is perfectly suited to act as the go-between with the government. A clinical psychologist by training and a Foreign Service officer in Washington and Moscow for 25 years, he seems to express the reverence the practical, experienced man holds for intellectuals. He speaks of Harvard's research facilities, which have been the center's main bait in drawing Soviet scholars from most U.S. state universities and many European schools: "In terms of source material, it's better than anything outside of the Library of Congress--and it's more accessible...
...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...