by John English
Trudeau was subsequently denied a visa to travel to China via Tashkent, but he did manage to obtain permission to visit Tbilisi, Georgia, after obtaining some extra rubles from British economist Alex Cairncross. When he arrived at the train station in Moscow, he met a beautiful young woman who addressed him in excellent English and shared his mixed-sex compartment for the three-day journey. She was, of course, a spy, but a welcome one. To know a country, Trudeau later wrote, one must take a long voyage on a train …
Farther away from Moscow, the Soviets became “nice and friendly, they walk around in pyjamas every day, exchanging jibes with the vendors in the train stations, before buying their roast chicken and their cheap wine; they could not care less about the propaganda being spouted out all day, but rush in to hear the football scores. In short, it’s a normal society, with the normal sampling of swindlers, drunks, beggars and loose women. They’re human, in other words.”20 Trudeau visited the grave of Stalin’s mother, where his interpreter wept. He returned to Moscow and tried to travel to Leningrad, but his activities, notably his throwing snowballs at Soviet monuments, had caught the attention of the authorities. One early morning there was a bang at the door and “these burly policemen came in,” told him to go, packed his bags, took him to the airport, and placed him on a plane. Leningrad would await a later journey.21
On his return to Canada on July 23, 1952, Trudeau declared publicly what he had told Ford privately: “I felt that people must use every possible means to get to know each other better. For, on either side, it is precisely the fear of the stranger which is at the root of this pathological hatred that is bringing us relentlessly closer to the third and final world war. So at last I would be able to throw a little light on this stranger …”22 And in a later broadcast he denied that the secret police were terrifying. He mentioned how a Bolshevik Party member told a joke that mocked the police and the military, who, Trudeau claimed, seemed too preoccupied with exchanging salutes “to have the time to terrorize the population.” He also ridiculed those in the West who claimed he was “followed” at every moment when he was in the Soviet Union.23
Trudeau’s reports quickly brought criticism, most notably from Father Léopold Braun. The priest had been in Moscow during the purges and famines of the 1930s and he now condemned Trudeau’s articles in Le Devoir and other Catholic publications as hopelessly naïve, ill informed, and even dangerous. Trudeau reacted with surprising vigour. He told André Laurendeau at Le Devoir that Father Braun was “an imbecile” and demanded full right of reply. “If Le Devoir does not give me a half page, I will pay for it,” he threatened.24 Braun pointed out that he had lived in the Soviet Union, endured the persecution of the Catholic Church, and witnessed church members disappearing into the Gulag.25
Trudeau responded strongly, but his tone was too harsh. The editor of Le Droit told him that although Braun might be wrong, he should treat the issue seriously, not dismissively and crudely. In the journal Nos Cours, where Braun and Trudeau exchanged attacks, the editor, J.-B. Desrosiers, took Braun’s side, telling Trudeau that if he had damaged his reputation, it was his own fault. Trudeau again demanded a right to respond and approached Archbishop Paul-Émile Léger (soon to become a cardinal) to assist him, even though his articles in Cité libre, quite apart from the Soviet trip, had upset the Catholic hierarchy. Others, including the respected Université de Montréal economist Esdras Minville, said the Braun attack on Trudeau was a “serious” matter. With some desperation, Trudeau wrote to a Father Florent, a priest with whom he had enjoyed long discussions about the Soviet Union in Paris in 1947, and enclosed his exchanges with Braun. He told Father Florent that his reputation had been hurt in Quebec, and he asked him to openly declare his support. It would, Trudeau declared, be “an act of charity and justice.”26
Braun then went too far and labelled Trudeau a Stalinist mouthpiece, which he definitely was not. Trudeau’s reaction to Braun reflects his deep opposition to clerics using their position to pronounce on political affairs. This reaction was consistent with his writings in the period. Yet Trudeau too readily dismissed Braun’s descriptions of Stalinist atrocities. Solzhenitsyn, Khrushchev, scholars of the Soviet regime, and history itself have all revealed the enormity of Stalin’s crimes. Appalled by the exaggerations and excesses of Senator Joe McCarthy and the use of anti-Communism by the Duplessis government against its opponents, Trudeau in response found some virtue on the streets of Moscow. In the Université de Montréal Quartier Latin report of his visit, he permitted himself to be called “Comrade Trudeau.”
His writings and his associations with the many “fellow travellers” soon caught the eye of various intelligence agencies and their media colleagues.27 In March 1954 Trudeau was denied entry to the United States—as were other eminent individuals at the time, including Graham Greene and Charlie Chaplin. He moved quickly to remedy the problem. Questioned about his visit to Moscow, he responded that he had gone to the conference to see if international trade would break down the Iron Curtain. On March 9 he learned that he was temporarily excluded because his entry might be “prejudicial to the interests of the United States.” But after an appeal to American consular officials, the decision was soon reversed. He was allowed to travel through the United States on his way to a Commonwealth Conference in Pakistan, which he attended at the invitation of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs. Still, Trudeau’s trip to Moscow, his favourable comments about the Soviet Union, and his other journeys behind the Iron Curtain and to China made him a target for extreme anti-Communist groups such as the Canadian Intelligence Service. Henceforth he also drew the ire of fierce nationalist journalists and writers such as Duplessis supporter Robert Rumilly in Quebec, and the militant anti-Communist Lubor Zink in the conservative Toronto Telegram.
A close reading of Trudeau’s many reports on his visit reveals his scepticism about the Soviet system and its accomplishments and his commitment to Western democratic values. Unfortunately, his tendency to shock and to provide “colour” often grabbed the attention of his readers and distorted his meaning. As ever, he enjoyed being a contrarian and, when pushed, he would defend his position passionately. Still, the analytical portions of his travel accounts yield a more subtle and balanced view. For example, he probably attracted the attention of the student audience at the Université de Montréal when he praised the Soviet educational system and, bizarrely, Soviet architecture. Nevertheless, his remarks strongly criticized the “capitalism of the state” created by Soviet Communists, and he contrasted the proletariat’s control of political parties and unions in the West with the closed system in the Soviet Union.28 Although he lavished praise on the Bolshoi Ballet and on Soviet support for the arts, he recognized that the government there supported the “extérieur” of artistic expression but suppressed the internal spirit—the composers Shostakovich and Khachaturian, for instance, were reduced to writing mere melodies, while the great film director Eisenstein had simply been tossed aside. “Perhaps,” he wrote, “it is not wise in the USSR to cast a glance inwards. There is a warning at the frontier of the world of the spirit: Do not enter.”
Trudeau told a Soviet Communist acquaintance that he should not be surprised that the Catholic Church was opposed to Communism. He too was opposed to a system that was anti-religious. Although he ridiculed the claims of the extreme “anti-Soviet camp”—Rumilly and Zink—that the great Russian authors were banned in schools (he had seen Dostoevsky in the libraries, he said), he commented in his writings on the void at the core of the system, one where the brilliant Russian composer Stravinsky and the great Russian painter Chagall were as unknown as Maynard Keynes and Alfred Marshall. And, he said, there was no doubt in his mind that “the worker has, in effect, more importance and much more influence in our democratic countries than in the USSR.”
The strongest indication of his views is Trudeau’s description of the evening in a popular Moscow restaurant where he met three Russians. They recognized him as a foreigner, and
two of the three spoke with him. They left, and the silent one remained for a moment. Then, in a voice “which did not tremble in spite of the danger, this perfect stranger told me that he was neither Bolshevik nor Communist but a democrat.” The effect was electric: “He seemed to have released a truth that had long been buried in his heart, for he shot up and strode to the exit like a visionary. If poetry is this man’s art, I thought, this evening he will write his greatest poem, because his inspiration has just been set free.” In Russia as in Canada, Trudeau knew, liberty was the most precious individual good.29 These were not the words of a duped fellow traveller.
Trudeau’s travels were fundamental to his broader purposes throughout these tumultuous years, and reflected both his ambitions and his doubts. First, he believed, correctly, that his journeys—especially to remote and challenging regions—provided him with the intellectual capital on which he could draw for his analysis of his own society. In some ways he resembled other intellectuals in the early years of that decade who “welcomed the television rays that illuminated the integration of Quebec into North America.”30 While welcoming assimilation into a more “efficient” and “modern” society, Trudeau recognized that francophone Quebecers had to learn about the world beyond North America. More specifically, they had to locate their own experience within the context of the “winds of change” that were quickly sweeping away the old colonial empires in the postwar decades.
Although he later had a reputation for inattention to Canada’s role in the world, his articles and media appearances in this period certainly focused more often on international than domestic events. He also realized that the rise to celebrity of René Lévesque came from Point de mire, a television series in which the irrepressible Lévesque, hands darting and smoke billowing, introduced viewers to the cascade of international changes in those times. The shrewd Gérard Pelletier, who knew Lévesque well because his wife also worked for Radio-Canada, recalled how, in their meetings together, Trudeau would cast a sceptical and mocking glance at Lévesque as he started “on one of his usual long tirades, riddled with hasty judgments, brilliant, profound or superficial.”31 Trudeau was convinced that his analysis of international affairs had a profundity that Lévesque’s stream of consciousness lacked—yet both knew that events outside Quebec now mattered more than ever.
Second, Trudeau knew that his own comparative advantage in the intense debates among Quebec intellectuals came from his far-ranging education, now bolstered by the layers of exotic detail and intriguing anecdote he had gleaned through his travels. The stunning Russian on the train to Tbilisi, the mysterious dark monastery on a Chinese hill, the bandits on the ziggurat of Ur provided the colour that listeners and viewers would remember. His articles and Radio-Canada presentations are crammed with stories to illustrate his arguments, and, as radio broadcasts of his world tour indicate, he did not mind embellishing his tales for dramatic effect. In a remarkably insightful article on Trudeau, Jim Coutts, his longtime principal secretary, pointed out that, contrary to general opinion, Trudeau “did and said little publicly that was not carefully rehearsed in advance.”32 His presence and his charisma were carefully constructed; his “cosmopolitanism” was a fundamental building block. At times he went too far, secure, perhaps, in his wealth and independence. Gérard Filion, publisher of Le Devoir, believed that Trudeau occasionally hurt rather than helped his cause, and he sometimes refused to publish his letters, even though he had visited Moscow himself soon after Trudeau did, and they agreed on the need for reconciliation between East and West.
Third, Trudeau’s cosmopolitanism reflected the unease he felt about Quebec and Canada in the early fifties. He felt more assured about his beliefs on international relations than on domestic Quebec and Canadian politics. And his return home brought a hard landing. His romance with Helen had burnt out suddenly, although he had tried to relight the flame during his months in Europe in the spring of 1952. Then he told her in late summer that he had no permanent work in Montreal. Tip, who was a precise but not very profitable architect, was leaving to live in Europe, and he would follow if things did not work out in Quebec. “Have you left Canada,” she asked on December 18, 1952, or had he made a final commitment to “Quebec’s social issues?” Trudeau was grumpy.33 Things were not working out well in Quebec, he replied, especially for one who had “social causes.”
On July 16, 1952, exactly a week before Trudeau returned to Canada, the Duplessis government had been reelected, even though the Liberals under their new leader, Georges-Émile Lapalme, had initially led in the polls.34 Duplessis, as always, had campaigned brilliantly, albeit often demagogically. His biographer Conrad Black describes the raucous election day, when the mayor of Quebec asked for the intervention of the Royal 22nd Regiment to protect a Liberal victor in Lévis from a mob and, later, to prevent the assault on Liberal committee rooms in Montreal by gangs armed with “bottles, brickbats and revolvers.” In one case, hooligans threw a Liberal campaign worker and a police constable out of a first-storey window.35 In a later broadcast on the election, Trudeau declared that democracy is a form of government that works when everyone agrees on counting heads, not breaking them. In Cité libre, he warned:
Our deep-seated immorality must be explained. After all, we claim to be a Christian people. We subscribe to ethics that rigorously define our duties towards society and our neighbour. We do not fail to respect civil authority, and we generally live in a climate of obedience to law. We punish treason and assault in the name of the common weal and of natural law; we explain Communism in terms of the faltering of faith; we consider war to be the ransom of sin.
While “our ideas on the order of society are shaped by Catholic theology,” Trudeau continued, there was one exception. In the case of the state, “we are really quite immoral; we corrupt bureaucrats, we blackmail members of the Assembly, we put pressure on the courts, we cheat the tax-collector, we turn a blind eye when it seems profitable to do so. And when it comes to electoral matters, our immoralism is absolutely appalling. The peasant who would be ashamed to enter a brothel sells his conscience.” With a glance to his own experience only a decade earlier, perhaps, he wrote: “We have to admit that Catholics, collectively, have rarely been pillars of democracy. I say that to our shame, and without seeking to prejudge the future … In countries with a large Catholic majority … Catholics often avoid anarchy only by means of authoritarian rule.” He went on to express a theme he expanded on continuously in future years: pluralist societies do not turn to authoritarianism, but there was a danger that they might devote too much of their civic energies “to the pursuit of the Catholic weal.” The product of this pursuit was a narrow nationalism that created immorality and undermined the greater “public weal.”36 Trudeau had travelled far along the liberal democratic path since those nights on the streets in 1942.
Despite these views, Trudeau did not bother to rush back from Europe to work in the coming election campaign. His absence betrayed the weakness of the intellectuals opposed to Maurice Duplessis, and of the Quebec labour movement, which had failed to build politically on the Asbestos Strike. Gérard Pelletier, Jean Marchand, and others had briefly considered running labour candidates in working-class ridings in 1952, a policy that would have broken the traditional policy of formal neutrality espoused by the Confédération des travailleurs catholiques du Canada (CTCC) while, at the same time, “punishing our enemies and rewarding our friends.” To that end, Pelletier wrote to Trudeau, asking him to consider being one of the labour candidates. Trudeau replied from Paris on March 16, 1952. Yes, he said, “it would interest me because I have never in my life felt so unattached, physically and morally; because I am ready to commit the greatest follies; and because, all in all, I am in a rather pitiable state.” Perhaps he was still recovering from Helen’s rejection. Whatever the cause, he told Pelletier that he had intended to “vegetate in the Sicilian sun,” but he would consider a candidacy if certain conditions were met. His conditions were impossible but app
ropriate: such a “labour” campaign would need organization, money, a platform, and “total support of the unions.” However, the unions were split; there was no platform; and no other candidates had yet been chosen. Wisely, Trudeau declined. Yet he was intrigued by the offer and, tellingly, asked if his candidacy would exclude “the possibility of my becoming a ‘technical adviser’ to the CTCC (the job Marchand offered me)?”37
Trudeau never took the job, but, the following year, he did become more directly involved in the labour movement. In a broader sense, his focus began to shift from international politics, the subject of most of his writings since 1949, towards domestic politics. He had proudly told Helen back in the summer of 1952 that he had been asked to speak at the prestigious annual Couchiching Conference of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs on the topic “The Adequacy of Canadian Foreign Policy.” Of course, he found it inadequate.
What is striking is the self-confidence of his presentation at Couchiching, and the consistency of his views. With some revisions created by current events, the ideas he expressed on the shores of Lake Simcoe that summer remained his opinions throughout his life. He was publicly and scathingly critical of Lester Pearson, who, he said, thought the role of Canadian policy was to interpret “London to Washington & vice versa, as if they needed a despicable mouthpiece.” To confirm his point, he mentioned a recent speech Pearson had given in New York where he said that Canada’s tutors were the United Kingdom and the United States. He suggested that Pearson sounded like an Albanian speaking in Moscow. Trudeau agreed with Pearson that Canada’s foreign policy should follow from Canada’s “Anglo-Saxon political thoughts and institutions,” but he held that it should also reflect our “bi-ethnical and bi-lingual character” and the fact that Canada was a young, small, but economically powerful country. Yet Anglo-Saxonism “drowned” out everything else. There was no independent Canadian public opinion. Ottawa read and heard only American and, to a lesser extent, British news. Why not read Le Monde or even the Paris Herald Tribune? Canada needed to develop a public opinion that truly reflected its bicultural and bilingual character and to build a foreign service that could “construct” truly Canadian policies in those many areas where there was not “a determined U.S.–U.K. axis.” How could that be done, he asked, when “we had not formulated political theory about Canada itself” and when Quebec was not integrated into Canada’s international presence?38