By Gilbert Doctorow, Blog, 2/13/23

I’d love to hear from any recent Russia Studies students who’d like to weigh in in the comments section on this. – Natylie

Back in November 2013, I wrote an essay about the negative contribution of Russian area studies programs in major U.S. universities to the education of their candidates for Masters degrees and ultimately to the formulation of foreign policy with respect to Russia and Eurasia. At the same time, I noted that the fundamental issues which made Russian area studies worthless also were being remarked upon by academic observers in area studies programs relating to Latin America and other regions. These programs all were gutted of substantive knowledge about the lands and peoples of given areas to leave room in the curriculum for honing numerical skills that might be helpful in finding jobs for the graduates in commercial banks or international financial institutions; or to leave room for human rights studies that could provide entrée to jobs in global NGOs.

These changes were not fortuitous. They were completely in line with the universal values and democracy promotion agenda that since the end of the Cold War had almost completely vanquished the Realist School of international studies, with its focus on substantive knowledge.

In the case of Russian studies, already a decade ago the final blow against it was the reduction of the field to generating anti-Putin and anti-Russian propaganda. In effect, the masters of the discipline believed they knew everything there was to know about Russia and there were no questions left to study.

My conclusion in the given essay did not mince words:

“Given the venomous treatment of Russia by the present-day professoriate in the United States, it may not be a bad thing if we lose a generation of Russianists and the field starts over from ashes like the phoenix.”

See Chapter 7 in the collection Does Russia Have a Future? (2015)

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I arrived at these observations not abstractly but quite concretely as a result of spending some months on campus at one of the two original founding centers of Russian studies in the United States, what had come to be called the Harriman Institute at Columbia University in New York. I had accepted an honorary appointment there to do a small research project but also to present to the academic community a book of mine that appeared in print during my stay, Great Post-Cold War Thinkers on International Relations. This was my first venture in scholarly publications following my decamping from university life in 1975 for a career spent mostly in Eastern Europe and Russia as marketing manager and eventually as country manager serving major international concerns.

Indeed the Harriman Institute allowed me to deliver a lecture on my book, which was understandable insofar as the title did not give them a clue about its iconoclastic contents. And subsequently they published in their annual collection of essays an appreciation I wrote of George Kennan, who was then very much in scholarly discussion due to a recent authorized biography of Kennan by a Yale professor. But mostly during my stay at the Harriman Institute during the 2010-11 academic year I kept my eyes open, attended various Institute events and learned what I could about the latest curriculum changes in Area Studies which were stunning.

The atmosphere which I found at Columbia in 2010 was shocking. The anti-Russian consensus in the political direction at the Institute was so dominant that all public lectures were gatherings of the like-minded at which questions from the audience which were out of line immediately brought down upon the head of the questioner accusations of being a “Putin stooge.” In my understanding, Columbia had ceased to be a center of higher learning as regards Russia and was operating at the level of a kindergarten.

Turning from these subjective observations to the specifics of course requirements, I was stunned at the recent decisions taken in the university administration to sharply reduce language requirements for Area Studies candidates. In effect, one could now obtain a master’s degree and not possess the skills to do independent research in the field or even to understand what was going on in the target country(ies) from native language media and other sources.

This may have been understandable in terms of the momentary circumstances of 2010. Ever since the bombing of the Twin Towers and start of the War on Terror, the CIA, which had been a large employer of Russian studies graduates, had been firing not hiring such specialists while it moved to bulk up its Arabic language resources both internally and through outside contractors. Moreover, those in the university administration and in the Harriman in particular could tell themselves that the loss of language training for U.S.-born students would be more than compensated for by admission of native Russian speakers from the large numbers of immigrants from Russia who arrived in the 1990s and later.

Regrettably, that last calculation was plain stupid. First generation Americans from Russia could be counted upon as Russia haters, and that is not a good starting point for the end purpose of Area Studies. In that connection, I thought about the leading lights in the field when I was a student at Harvard in the 1960s and then later a post-doctoral fellow of the Russian Research Center in the 1970s: Adam Ulam, Richard Pipes, Zbigniew Brzezinski all were first generation Americans; all were Russia-haters who poisoned many minds of students and of government policy-makers during their decades at the top. Indeed, the present war in and about Ukraine was well prepared by Brzezinski in his infamous volume of 1997, The Grand Chessboard.

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What I have just described with respect to Columbia’s Harriman Institute in 2010-11 was by no means peculiar to that institution. The gutting of Area Studies was going on across the country. The reduction of federal financial aid to language studies took was particularly stunning in 2013, which prompted me to publish in the same year my essay calling for the whole program of Russian studies to die off and make way for some new shoots and new personalities.

Yet, from the perspective of 2023, the situation of Russian studies at Columbia 12 years ago looks pretty good. I continue to be a subscriber to the online weekly digest of events at The Harriman Institute and I see nothing to be optimistic about, even now that the succession of political scientists as chairman has been broken by the accession of a Literature scholar a year ago. By title of events sponsored, one might easily conclude that the Institute has become a center for Ukrainian studies. Russia and everything related to Russia has more or less been sent to hell.

Given that in a matter of months, Ukraine may disappear from the map of Europe while Russia, like it or not, will be with us for eternity, you have to ask what the value of newly minted Columbia degrees in Russia-Eurasia Area Studies will be – to the students themselves and to the nation at large.