Soon after I was first hired at Northeastern, my new colleague Professor Minton Goldman invited me into his brick-walled corner office on the third floor of Meserve Hall. He had a prodigious collection of books and stacked files, reflecting both his research on the Soviet Union and his punctilious attention to student papers. But research and teaching were not the main topics we would broach at that private, inaugural welcome. It was rather two personal bonds that we shared: I had now joined him as (I erroneously thought) the only other political science department member who was Jewish. But much more salient was membership in a much more arcane club: alumni of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
Minton did love to talk about his research and teaching about the Soviet Union. Only five years after he welcomed me to the department, however, the Berlin Wall fell; in short order, so did the Soviet Union. Like most non-specialists of the region, I embraced the presumed end of the Cold War and wondered how Minton would retool his career, now that its main object was no more. But Minton was adamant that the erstwhile remnants of the Soviet Union were indeed critical to scholarship and US policy interests, and he never lost sight—as many of us woefully did—of the looming presence of the wounded Russian bear, lurking in the not-so-Post Cold War era.
With the war in Ukraine slogging on, and renewed fears of nuclear weaponry or accidents, the expertise of Minton Goldman will be sorely missed. Minton taught me all sorts of lessons, from the grand, Eurasian historical to the miniscule departmental administrative (document every service activity you perform). Most of all, he personified to me the teacher-scholar, for whom enlightening students about his chosen region of focus was more than a vocation: it was a mission, one which demanded at least as much of him as it did of them. That dedication, both to subject and to students, has made a life-long impression on he who still sees himself as Professor Goldman’s junior colleague.
