By Gilbert Doctorow, Website, 2/8/24

A day ago I was invited by the editor of a daily digest on Russian affairs to comment on the President’s Speech to the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) that was delivered on 3 December 2023 at the Association’s annual conference. See

https://www.aseees.org/news-events/aseees-blog-feed/2023-presidents-address-de-centering-russia-challenges-and

As Political Science professor Juliet Johnson of McGill University remarks in her text, at the conference of the ASEEES during the preceding year there were 175 sessions that explicitly addressed the theme of ‘Decolonization’ of Russian studies in some way, accounting for more than 30% of the sessions overall. Either with intent to blaze new trails or just to employ a less emotive term, Johnson has renamed the subject at hand ‘decentering.’ The intent and the content remain the same.

The speaker further notes that one scholar at the year earlier conference said the following from the podium: “The conference program for ASEEES23 may have more occurrences of the word ‘decolonization’ than any other I have read. Take that, Putin!’’ Regrettably that puerile final point brings to mind the blather of German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock when in the early months of the Russia-Ukraine war she admonished Germans to give up showers in favor of washing the three strategic body parts, saying ‘Take that, Putin!’  Baerbock is widely acknowledged to be a fool’s fool. The academic cited by Johnson is no better, nor are the recommendations set out by Johnson herself to achieve decolonization or decentering.

But my intent in this brief essay is not to take readers’ time with those pointless recommendations which only would direct research funding and teaching positions to peoples of the Former Soviet Union and of Eastern Europe who carry no weight in the world, never did and so hold little interest for normal people wherever they live. As we say, only their mothers could love them.

Instead I take issue with the speaker’s fundamental notion that Russian studies were ever carried on by academics in the USA or elsewhere who had the slightest empathy for Russia and whose disregard for everyone else in that part of the world was due to some inexplicable Russia-centrism. At their best and most relevant, these studies were conducted by people who were paid to inform U.S. military and diplomatic officials of the real challenges posed by the USSR and then by its successor, the Russian Federation. Period. Everthing else, like studying Russian literature, arts, economy, etc. just came along for the ride.

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My first point to develop is that Russian studies for most of the 20th century were the domain of everybody except Russians. Going back to when I was a graduate student in the 1970s and 80s, the field was almost exclusively taught by immigrants from the MINORITY, borderland peoples of the Russian Empire all of whom had an anti-Russian axe to grind.

Curiously, when new ethnic and nationalities studies were added to university programs in the 1970s and later, it was argued by those who had a vested interest in securing appointments that only blacks could properly teach Black History, or only Ukrainians deserved posts in the newly founded Ukrainian Studies Centers.  No one ever bothered to extend that logic to who was recruited for Russian Studies, perhaps because the field was not expected to generate positive feelings about the nation under the magnifying glass.

Who were the big names when I was at university? I point to my undergrad thesis adviser Richard Pipes at Harvard, a Polish Jew. He would comment on his weekend trips down to Washington to provide advice to Senator Jackson, best known to the broader public as the sponsor of the Jackson-Vanik amendment which aimed to knee-cap the Soviet economy over its emigration policy for Jews. Pipes later served for a little more than a year in Reagan’s National Security Council, where he fought tooth and nail against détente and against arms limitation agreements. Still later he was a key member of the Neocon dominated Committee on the Present Danger.

A few years later, when I was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Russian Research Center, now the Davis Center, its director was the Polish Pole Adam Ulam who was no less a Russophobe than his colleague Pipes.

During my years at Columbia doing my doctorate, the lead professors were Leopold Haimson and Marc Raeff, on the one side, which perhaps we may call the ‘side of the angels,’ notwithstanding their religious and ethnic affiliation, but they were outdone by the Russia-hating Polish Pole Zbigniew Brzezinski on the other side. I do not have to explain who he was because since the start of the Ukrainian troubles back in 2014 even the broad public knows about his textbook for reducing Russia to a small box in the European region, Grand Chessboard. What they would not necessarily know is that Brzezinski advocated and even helped to implement the ‘pipeline wars’ against Russia’s hydrocarbon exports that logically and ultimately led to the destruction of Nord Stream I at the orders of Joe Biden. And let us remember that Madeleine Albright, the champion of NATO expansion which has brought us to the present day near-war with Russia was a student and protégé of Brzezinski.

 I do not present these few professors as constituting the majority of specialists in Soviet – Russian affairs. But they were the most important academics of the age. Perhaps a larger percentage of instructors was drawn from native-born WASP and other non-Slavic extraction candidates, but when the study programs at Harvard and Columbia were formed just after WWII, they drew heavily on ex-US intelligence officers whose views of Russia were certain to be less than empathetic.

I have little doubt that that the demographics of Russian studies changed somewhat in the 1990s when American universities generally closed down foreign language programs, including Russian. Consequently Russian speaking immigrants from the Russian Federation were suddenly very welcome. But they brought with them, whatever their personal ethnic or religious label, a loathing for the country they left behind which was very suitable for teaching the courses they were expected to give.

My second point is that the problem with Russian studies goes back to Russia itself, where the most influential historian of the last quarter of the 19th century, Vasily Kliuchevsky, set out views that suited very well the Anglophile Russian self-haters whom we know as Liberals. It was he who emphasized Russian expansionism and wars under the tsars which gave us the notion that when it stopped expanding Russia would implode. This view of Russia, the autocratic and aggressive, was carried forward and abroad by Kizevetter and then Milyukov, and their continuator at Harvard Mikhail Karpovich. It was then was picked up by our very first native born American historian of Russia Geroid Robinson, founder of the Russian Institute at Columbia to which he recruited alumni of the OSS (wartime US intelligence).

The consequence of the foregoing two points is that Russian studies were ever financed in the United States for reasons of the strategic challenges this particular country and people posed. That fact has not changed. And if a policy of ‘decolonization’ or ‘decentering’ is pursued by the association which is the professional torchbearer, they will only marginalize their field and condemn themselves to irrelevancy and unemployment.