Bruce Clark (OS)
Bruce Clark (S 1971-75) is an experienced author and journalist who worked in the field of international news for top world media outlets such as Reuters, the Financial Times, The Times and the Economist, with postings in Paris, Athens, Moscow and Washington. His books include “An Empire’s New Clothes: the End of Russia’s Liberal Dream” and “Twice A Stranger” a prize-winning study of the Greek-Turkish population exchange.
He has also written a comprehensive history of Athens, telling the story of one of the world’s longest inhabited cities; and a personal and family memoir which is due for publication next April.
In his talk Bruce will recall the extra-ordinary navigational feat accomplished by his late brother Miles Clark in 1992, during what turned out to be the last full year of Miles’s life. In the space of only a few months, he sailed the family boat Wild Goose, a ten-ton wooden yawl built in 1936, north from the Irish coast and around Norway to the Russian White Sea, including the fabled Solovetsky Islands which have witnessed some of the most horrific, and heroic, moments in Russian history. From there he became the first Western seafarer to penetrate the White Sea Canal, built by Stalin at a cost of tens of thousands of lives, and hence enter the internal waterways of Russia: the Volga, the Volga-Don Canal and the Black Sea.
Miles’s voyage through Russia coincided with Bruce’s stay in Moscow as one of two staff correspondents working in that city for The Times of London. To the greatest extent possible, Bruce helped Miles with preparing and executing the voyage and shared with Miles his wide range of Russian contacts.
Bruce will reflect on the extraordinary travel opportunity opened up by the fluidity and uncertainty of life during Russia’s rocky transition from communism to some new form of governance. While Bruce observed the high politics of a collapsing superpower by attending debates in the Kremlin, Miles saw a different side of Russian reality in the country’s deep interior.
Our contrasting experiences beg the question: did we, the westerners who descended on Russia at that time, get something wrong? Were we too optimistic - or even too pessimistic? The question remains as topical as ever.
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