Interview with Vladimir I. Toumanoff

Library of Congress Interview with Vladimir I. Toumanoff The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project VLADIMIR I. TOUMANOFF Interviewed by: William D. Morgan Initial interview date: June 18, 1999 Copyright 2002 ADST CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTIONFamily history; early personal history; education andprofessional history prior to Foreign Service. Q: This June 18, 1999 interview, with Vladimir I. Toumanoff career Foreign Service Officer at about the same time as I was, and we knew each other, is conducted at his home in Georgetown in Washington, DC. It is under the auspices of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. Vlad, let's start off with, obviously, your background because you have a name that sounds like there's some association with Mother Russia. TOUMANOFF: It's very closely associated with Mother Russia, and I probably should start a good deal further back than just when I was born because it all affected my life and, certainly, my career in the Foreign Service. Let me go back to the early 1800s, when Russia proper, under the Czars, conquered Georgia, then an independent kingdom. The family ancestors, my ancestors, were part of the elite, part of the ruling apparatus of Georgia, and in a tried and true ancient tradition (still practiced widely in the taking of hostages) the Russians divided the ruling families of Georgia and took some parts of those families, some members of those ruling families, north to St. Petersburg. They kept the Interview with Vladimir I. Toumanoff http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001188 Library of Congress hostages at the royal court to watch and control them and to ensure that their relatives, who remained powerful in Georgia, behaved according to Russian wishes. Provided the native relatives behaved, the treatment of the hostages was quite kind - in fact quite generous, even to the point of granting that part of my family which was at the Court a Russian title of nobility, and estates. The Russian title was Knyaz, which translates into English as 'Prince' but unrelated to the Royal Family. In Russian practice it was hereditary, passing through all the male line, but including wives and daughters for their lifetimes. So my ancestors became titled members of the Russian aristocracy, and over time they Russified, abandoning the Georgian version of the name for the Russian, and Tumanishvili became Toumanoff (the French spelling adopted by the family for transliteration to the Latin alphabet of the Russian, Cyrillic Tumanov). It was a title which I never used or mentioned. But my parents did. That background becomes relevant later. Down through the generations some of the male members of the family joined the military, and by the time the First World War broke out a century later my father was a young officer in the Imperial Guard, eventually rising to the rank of Colonel. In the course of the Russian Revolution and the following civil war he fought, quite effectively, against the Bolsheviks and their Red Army, joining the White armies early and fighting to the bitter end. Thus, as a titled Czarist aristocrat he was not only, by definition, a mortal class enemy of the communists, but one who had cost them much blood. He and his family faced certain death if captured, and so, when the White armies were finally defeated, my parents escaped to Turkey and eventually reached Constantinople, where I was born on April 11, 1923. Turkey had gone through a revolution and the leader of the new government, Kemal Ataturk, made Ankara his capital, established diplomatic relations with Soviet Russia, and was gradually extending his sway over all of the country. In the summer of 1923 Constantinople was still occupied by the British, and nominally under a Turkish Governor of the old regime. There was still a Czarist Embassy issuing documentation to Russian Interview with Vladimir I. Toumanoff http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001188 Library of Congress refugees, and my parents and their now two sons were thus reasonably safe. However, one fine day an order came from Ankara to the Turkish Governor to arrest the Toumanoff family and ship them off to Ankara, where they would be turned over to the Soviet authorities. Everyone understood it would be the end of the family. The Governor agreed to delay the order for 24 hours, so we had to escape from Constantinople very quickly. With the help of some American friends my parents managed that, and within 18 hours we were off in a freighter heading for New York City. That's how I came, five months old, to the United States, in September 1923. Q: And you had some American connection? TOUMANOFF: Yes. Well, okay, here are the details, and I'll try to tithem into the Foreign Service at the end. My mother, it turns out, was something of a feminist. She graduated from the Law Faculty of Moscow University in the first class to which women were finally admitted. She was also fluent in French and English, and familiar with German and Italian. In Constantinople she was giving language lessons to children of the Turkish Governor. It was he who received not one but two orders from Ankara for our arrest. At the first, he invited my mother to coffee after the language lessons, an invitation one could not refuse although my mother, an attractive 26 year-old, wasn't sure what to expect. He turned out to be a very cultured gentleman, expressed his pleasure at the progress his children were making, discussed literature and history over coffee which was something of a social ritual, and only at the end mentioned that he had some bad news and revealed the first arrest order. He then offered to hide us in one of his jails, unlocked, where he thought Ankara's agents would not find us, and he could report to Ankara that we had disappeared. So we moved in and, true to his word, the doors were never locked and life and lessons went on as before. At the second order he told my mother, again after coffee, that he could delay the order for 24 hours if the family could leave the country by then. After that he would have no choice but to execute the order. Interview with Vladimir I. Toumanoff http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001188 Library of Congress My father was a gifted violinist and accomplished performer on several other instruments. As I understand it he had worked for, and through his music came to know, the American Director of the Near East Relief Organization based in Turkey. That organization was providing food and other relief to people facing famine and other desperate conditions in the region. The Director had a supply freighter leaving for New York in eighteen hours. With his immediate and effective help (he vouched for the family) we received visas to emigrate to the United States, and sailed out of the harbor on his freighter. Equally critical was the fact that my mother, through her legal training, knew that if I were born on Turkish soil I would be, legally, a Turk. She therefore had arranged to give birth at the Czarist Diplomatic Mission in Constantinople, i.e. on extra-territorial Russian ground. Had I been a Turk the vastly oversubscribed U.S. Immigration Quota for Turks would have excluded me from the United States, and my parents would have faced the dreadful choice of abandoning me in Turkey, or staying, facing arrest and execution by the Soviets. Which brings me to the Foreign Service. At the end of my tour in Embassy Moscow (1960), Ambassador Thompson called me to his office, and in farewell gave me the following advice. “Remember, Vlad, that when you become ambassador it is too late to study, to research, to train. You will have no time for that. You must work with whatever talents, skills and knowledge you already have, with what you bring with you to the task, little more.” I thought of my parents' survival and escape in Constantinople. Q: This had nothing to do, though, if I understand it correctly, wityour being a “refugee,” as we think of them today - or has it? TOUMANOFF: Well, yes. We were traveling on documents issued by the Czarist Diplomatic Mission in Constantinople at a time (1923) when the Czarist government no longer existed and the Russian (Soviet) Government was unrecognized by the U.S.. We Interview with Vladimir I. Toumanoff http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001188 Library of Congress were, in effect, stateless persons in desperate danger, to whom, as to so many others after that War and since, the United States gave refuge. Q: I was thinking of the ideological overtones, that someone coming as a refugee from the Soviet Union - that wasn't an existing criterion yet. Q: No, whatever were the rules then, they were generous and practical in that we arrived, as I have been told by my parents, with a kind of tarpaulin tied at the corners containing all of our possessions, and $24 in our pockets. So- Q: -you were a refugee. TOUMANOFF: We were refugees in the truest sense of the word. We certainlywent through Ellis Island, that whole process. How would you like to go on? Q: You got there with the drama, but without the knowledge, because you were but five months old. Why don't you jump ahead, aiming, if you will, for the university details and education unless you have some more stories like that? TOUMANOFF: Well, there are lots of stories. Every #migr# family goes through a very difficult time unless they're privileged and reasonable wealthy.

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