Brief overview On the Midnight Train: Moscow to Leningrad begins with two chapters of international memoirs, written over time about our American team's conflict resolution teaching and learning overseas during crucial earlier change points in the U.S. relationship with Russia and Cuba. At those times, 26 years ago for Russia, leaders of both countries believed that the Cold War was apparently coming to an end. National leaders and media agreed. Regarding the Soviet Union and Russia, here was a time of fast-improving communication between our two countries and, on all sides, a growing feeling of hope for the future. Our conflict resolution team, from Tacoma's National Center Associates, Inc., and the Conflict Resolution, Research, and Resource Institute, Inc., led by Bill Lincoln, had been invited to come to Leningrad (historically the capital city, St. Petersburg) to work hand-in-hand with a Soviet team to create a first week-long full-time seminar on democratic ecological conflict resolution. This first course of its kind there was to be for Russian professionals working in a number of disciplines, all concerned for how to work together to negotiate solutions for crucial ecological dangers. Our Russian counterparts, with whom we would work to build this cooperative seminar, worked in Leningrad at the country's largest Planning Institute, which was responsible for the civic planning of about 500 cities. Ecological dangers were fast emerging there in ferocious and highly confusing dimensions. Our work there lasted several years and, in spite of the odds, led to creation of conflict resolution academic programs at quite a number of Russian universities. In 1995, our conflict resolution firm went to Cuba to co-develop in partnership with Cuba's Diplomatic Corps a full-time seminar week with Cuban diplomats to cooperative in interest-based democratic conflict resolution for use in their negotiations with other countries. The seminar was to be held with nine American conflict resolution experts and about 30 members of the Republic of Cuba's Diplomatic Corps, related Ministries, and diplomacy academics, as the Cuban Foreign Ministry prepared itself for deepening international change. In the midst of these memoirs, I have included five illustrative poems written on site during our work in Moscow, Leningrad, and Havana. --- On the Midnight Train begins with a poem written for the award-winning book, An Eye for An Eye Makes the Whole World Blind: Poets on 9/11. Then the first two chapters lay out the territory through memoir of our American negotiation training team's experience with our counterparts first in Russia and then Cuba as we searched together for clues about how to lessen and eliminate conflicts together. After building perspective by reading through the Russian and Cuban memoirs, the Midnight Train then provides three reflective chapters on many ways to develop a more systematic and skillful approach to resolving conflict with deeper dialogue through wider skills. Thoughts in these essay chapters point to more skill building in a systematic and interest-based approach to healing of conflict and suffering. In psychology, it explores how knowledge in contemporary humanistic, transpersonal, and democratic methods can contribute to a durable resolution. These chapters also compare critical differences between methods of traditional adversarial negotiations and newer cooperative skills-building and perspective-building approaches to healing negotiation. In this newer and more hopeful mix, a number of leading scholars and practitioners in conflict work and in psychology briefly share their helpful understandings. - Finally, we can remember that the yearning for peace lies so deep in all of us, and this yearning can guide our way home.
About the Author: Dr. Robert (Skip) Robinson's B.A. was in English and Theatre from the University of Illinois, his Graduate Internship in Teaching was at U.C. Berkeley, his M.A. was in Psychology from Sonoma State University and his Ph.D. was in Humanistic, Transpersonal, and Clinical Psychology from Saybrook Graduate School, San Francisco. Over decades, he has published in a number of fields. He is now retired. As a youth, singing in the University of Illinois men's chorus, his group represented the United States at the Brussels World's Fair and on European tour. His singing continued for years with the San Francisco symphony chorus, the San Francisco Chorale, and the Oakland Symphony Chorus. For several years, in the late 60's, he worked in editing, taught English and drama, and studied charitable employee benefits, particularly for non-profit organizations and public jurisdictions. He taught psychology at Sonoma State University for over 20 years and was a principal in the health care and conflict resolution consulting firm of Robinson, Wallach, and Amodeo, Inc. (RWA), Oakland. For over a decade, he taught the psychology of conflict resolution internationally, primarily with an American conflict resolution teaching team, Conflict Resolution, Research & Resource Institute, Inc., led by Bill Lincoln, in such countries as the Soviet Union/Russia, Poland, Cuba, and Guatemala. With RWA principals, he consulted on health care system development for destitute Tibetan monks and nuns and senior teachers for the Tibetan Government in Exile, through the Gere Foundation. He was primary consultant on three television series, one on a history of poetry readings through the San Francisco Poetry Center and two carried by PBS on staying centered in the midst of working in social action, "How Then Shall We Live?" and "Reaching Out". He has recently been made part of ScholarWorks, which has gathered a number of his books and chapbooks into digital format for a long-term university digital archive. Dr. Robinson has three grown children. He lives in retirement in Northern California, in southern Sonoma County.