ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author proposes to his new chairman that the Association should offer to give evidence to the Select Committee. Prior to the author’s appointment as the director of a Foreign Office funded association dealing with the Soviet Union, he had been running the Russian department at Marlborough College. This had brought him into contact with a wide range of people amongst the parents, from high fliers in the foreign service to tycoons like Robert Maxwell. The adviser to that Select Committee was Sir Curtis Keeble, who had recently retired from the diplomatic service after his final appointment as British Ambassador in Moscow. It was to be expected that the author would come into confrontation with the natural hostility of the Soviet apparat towards the association’s efforts to identify and earn the trust of opinion-formers in the USSR, people who might be on his wavelength intellectually, or brought onto it.
