For the first decade of my Directorship of the Great Britain-USSR Association its Chairman was Sir John Lawrence, a man with the historian’s feel for the undercurrents in the Soviet world. It had all begun for him in 1942 when he left the BBC European Service to become Press Attaché in Kuibyshev (as Samara was then called) and later in Moscow. Of that period he would later write that Russia had entered his blood and he could not get rid of it. Rather than the politics and officialdom, it was the Russia of the Orthodox Church, of literature and the arts that most fascinated him. The Association benefited for years from his contacts in those and other fields. As far as Soviet officials were concerned, his motto was ‘love the sinner; hate the sin’. Occasionally his opinions and attitude brought him (and sometimes the Association) difficulties with the Soviet authorities. Nor did British opinion at large always share his views, particularly his conviction that the Russian people in their so-called atheist state remained deeply spiritual, or that the communist system was inherently doomed. ‘There is no prophet without honour, save in his own country.’

The Association was indeed fortunate when the distinguished retired diplomat, Sir Curtis Keeble, agreed to succeed the charismatic Sir John as Chairman in 1985. Russia was changing. Mikhail Gorbachev had first visited London the previous year as head of a Soviet ‘parliamentary’ delegation. This, incidentally, was the upgraded return leg of an exchange which had its origins in an agreement I negotiated on behalf of the Association in February 1981 for reopening low-level political dialogue after the freezing of relations caused by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The year when Sir Curtis took over as Chairman was, more significantly, the year when Gorbachev succeeded Chernenko as General Secretary of the KPSS, jokingly known as the Committee Against Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. It now seemed possible to discern the potential for change in the USSR, long predicted by Sir John. During the years of Soviet political stagnation, he had been the right person to lead the Association, encouraging me and, through me, the membership at large to engage with creative elements and opinion-formers in the USSR. Now, however, there could be opportunities for the Association to contribute more to the development of political dialogue. Thus Sir Curtis Keeble, with his enormous experience, was the ideal person to take over our Chairmanship at that juncture.

He and Sir John had both been introduced to Russia in grim times, and both, by curious coincidence, in maritime circumstances. Sir John’s ship taking him to Murmansk was torpedoed off Spitzbergen. It sank, but he survived. For Sir Curtis, a keen sailor and from sea-faring stock, the first sight of Russia was from the deck of a British troopship headed for Odessa. He was a young army officer escorting a couple of thousand unruly Russians being repatriated, a good proportion of whom against their will. By his own account, what struck Sir Curtis was not so much the ‘men with bandages round their throats’ but the immaculate young Soviet officer who boarded the ‘Staffordshire’ at Naples and quickly established order, ‘a frightening example of the power exercised by one young man with the might of the Kremlin behind him’. That, he said, was what left him with a determination to see more of ‘this extraordinary, frightening country’, to quote from one of the obituaries. Although thirty years would pass before that ambition could be realized in depth, he must have gathered some knowledge of Soviet reality in the mid-seventies as Britain’s first Ambassador to the German Democratic Republic.

I first encountered Sir Curtis in 1978 when he called on me at the Association prior to taking up his post as our Ambassador to the USSR. The following year we were to meet again in Moscow and Novosibirsk. This was in the context of the Association organising a British Week in the latter city. It had been a long struggle to make the Soviet side honour its reciprocal obligation after the Association had hosted a Soviet Week in Leeds in the Sixties. A very slight thaw, combined with our continued pressure, had made the Novosibirsk event possible that September, just before relations returned to ‘deep freeze’ a few weeks later, when the so-called ‘limited Soviet contingents’ invaded Afghanistan, and Sir Curtis, as he expressed it, was put into a kind of diplomatic black hole. Years afterwards Sir Curtis would say to me that our British Week remained one of the few enjoyable memories of the bleak period of his ambassadorship.

Perhaps understandably, and unlike Sir John or myself, he never went to Russia other than on official business, whether as our Chairman or otherwise. Nevertheless, despite his many other commitments, he was constant in his support of our work. I owe him a particular debt of gratitude for helping us realize our British Month in Kiev in 1990, said by the Russians to be the largest Western ‘shop-window’ ever to be staged in the USSR. His analytical and negotiating skills were again invaluable to our organization when it came to keeping the ship on course through choppy waters before and after the collapse of the Soviet system.

I believe that Sir Curtis, as a very experienced diplomat, preferred to engage with the ‘powers that be’, rather than seek out and give heart to those who longed for fundamental change. He never said anything about it to me, but I know, for example, that he had misgivings about my engagement with the brave politician and academic, Galina Starovoitova, who in the end was brutally ‘liquidated’. However, if his views on ‘what to do’ occasionally slightly diverged from mine, that never led to the difficulties I had with the Association’s one-time President, Sir Fitzroy Maclean, who for his own reasons tried to undermine our aim to operate beyond the limits which his friends among Soviet official ‘purveyors of friendship’ sought to impose on us. But that is part of another story.

Margaret Keeble has told me that her husband, of all the places where they served together, had most enjoyed Washington and, despite everything, Moscow. That accords well with my memory of a remarkable man, balanced, dispassionate, cerebral, exactly the necessary mix of qualities for his times. Sir John’s very different chairmanship was a hard act to follow. In changing circumstances Sir Curtis was more than equal to the challenge. I salute his memory.