Slavic field

[George Fowler]

Ernest Scatton wrote:

>I'm sure by the time this is posted, many will have had a chance to see
>the long article on Slavic field in today's NYTimes (B section). This is
>the clearest expression that I've seen of what we're facing and what
>administrators are thinking.

For those of us who don't regularly get the NY Times and would like to
avoid seeking it out just for this article, I'm taking the liberty of
pasting in the text below; it is copyrighted material, so don't mirror it
to your own web site. (But perhaps they'd give permission to AATSEEL to
post it--because of the need to be a registered subscriber, you can't
simply link to it.) No, I didn't type it out! I connected to
http://www.nytimes.com and downloaded it. Took about a minute once I set up
my (free) subscription to the electronic NY Times.

George Fowler

March 13, 1996

Russian Studies Are Suddenly Outmoded and Unfunded

By WILLIAM H. HONAN

[W] ith breathtaking suddenness in 1991 the cadre of academicians popularly
known as Kremlinologists -- pampered and privileged by years of federal,
foundation and academic patronage -- found themselves outmoded.

The Soviet Union had collapsed, the cold war was over, and despite their
vaunted scholarship, linguistic proficiency and esoteric reporting skills,
they had utterly failed to foresee one of the turning points of the 20th
century.

Hand-wringing and mea culpas echoed from the pages of the liberal Nation to
the neoconservative National Interest, with the latter asking, "Why did it
take virtually everyone -- and especially most of the supposed experts --
by surprise?"

There has been no shortage of answers. One of the more ingenious came from
Vladimir Kontorovich, a Haverford College Sovietologist, who argued that
had it not been for Yuri Andropov's weak kidneys the Soviet Union would
still be in business today. Andropov's death in 1984 made possible the
ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev.

Now, five years after the Soviet collapse, the effect on the profession has
been profound. Subsidies from both the government and the private sector
are rapidly drying up. Students look elsewhere for more promising careers.
Academic departments shrivel by attrition and sometimes by more drastic
means.

"It's a classic case of restructuring taken from the corporate world," said
Jay Oliva, president of New York University and a professor of Russian
history. "You have people who are experts on a vanished age, and so the
question is how do they retool?"

Many have given up and retired. Some are turning their attention to Eastern
Europe and Latin America or issues with international scope, like
protection of the environment.

And there are indications that post-Soviet regional studies are proving
attractive to a new generation of scholars excited by the fact that the
field is now liberated from the static ideological clashes of the cold war.

"Three of my students are organizing a conference on private life in
Russia," said Jane Burbank, on sabbatical as director of the Center for
Russian and East European Studies at the University of Michigan at Ann
Arbor. "That's something we could never have done in the past when we were
preoccupied with the cold war."

On the other hand, not a few ex-Kremlinologists are fighting the trend with
warnings that Russia, even shorn of the newly independent states, is still
the world's largest nation with plenty of nuclear power.

Further, they say, the rise of the ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky,
who has evoked comparisons with Stalin, suggests the possibility of a
rising tyranny that could threaten world peace.

And the general public has lost interest. Mark Von Hagen, director of
Columbia University's Harriman Institute, calls the new attitude
"triumphalism -- the arrogant belief that we won the cold war because we
were right and nothing more needs to be said about it."

The institute was one of the chief centers of Kremlinology but now concerns
itself broadly with the study of Russia, the Soviet Union and the successor
states.

Congress has sharply reduced federal grants for postdoctoral research, area
studies and training in the languages of former Soviet-bloc countries. Even
more striking is the fact that most private foundations have virtually
abandoned the field.

"The ostensible object of our study no longer existed," said Hillel
Frandkin, vice president of cultural and international programs at the
Bradley Foundation, a Milwaukee institution that until recently supported
Soviet studies at Harvard University and the University of California at
Los Angeles.

Shepard Forman, director of international affairs programs at the Ford
Foundation said that since Russia seemed to be on the way to becoming an
open society, it was time to support Russian studies by Russian scholars
working inside Russia, and that in order to explore such prospects Ford
opened an office in Moscow earlier this year.

Bucking the trend, the Russian Research Center at Harvard announced last
month that it has received a $10 million pledge from a longtime supporter,
and in gratitude will change its name in April to the Kathryn W. and Shelby
Cullom Davis Center for Russian Studies.

"It couldn't have come at a better time," said Marshall Goldman, associate
director of the center. "After the end of the Cold War, we lost the support
of Mellon, Ford, MacArthur and Bradley."

Post-Soviet scholarship also suffers from a lack of interest among
university presses. "It used to be that they would take just about anything
we had to offer, but now they shy away from us," said Alvin Rubinstein, a
specialist on Soviet foreign policy at the University of Pennsylvania.

With the drying up of publishing contracts as well as government and
foundation grants, it is not surprising that students seek other career
paths.

David Maxwell, director of the National Foreign Language Center in
Washington, D.C., said that a recent survey shows that college- and
university-level study of Russian in the United States has declined by 30
to 50 percent in the five years between 1989 and 1994.

"Today, more students want to study Japanese and Swahili than Russian,"
said Kermit Hall, the dean of humanities at Ohio State University at
Columbus who anticipates sharp cuts in the Department of Slavic and East
European Languages and Literature there. Already the department has lost
about a third of its faculty.

And professors who retire from the field are not being replaced. At the
University of Pennsylvania a few years ago, three members of the history
department devoted themselves to Soviet studies. Now two have retired, one
is on long-term leave and almost no one expects any of them to be replaced
by Soviet or Russian specialists.

Independently endowed centers like the Hoover Institution on War,
Revolution and Peace at Stanford and the Harriman Institute at Columbia are
much less vulnerable to intellectual trends and fashions.

Yet Hoover, which is cushioned by its $165 million endowment, still has to
raise about $5 million a year and nowadays finds it much easier to come by
that sum for domestic rather than international studies.

Despite their ideological divisions, post-Soviet Russian scholars are
united today in their belief that they -- and the problems of that part of
the world about which they have special knowledge -- have been written off
prematurely.

Richard Staar, a former U.S. arms negotiator and now a senior fellow at the
Hoover Institution, which gained a reputation during the cold war as a home
for hard-liners, is one of a minority in the field who argue that
post-Soviet Russia is still a potential military threat.

"It may take a generation, but they'll solve their problems and emerge in
the big league of world politics," Staar cautions. "We like to say their
fleet is rusting at Vladivostok. Well, their new submarine, the Akula-II,
is quieter than ours, and fires a nuclear-tipped missile. They're
developing a new ICBM, the Topol-M, which had two successful tests over the
last several months. They have five new types of military aircraft under
development."

James Billington, the librarian of Congress and an authority on Russian
history, recognizes many risks but is generally optimistic. "Rational
self-interest should dictate our continued study of Russia," he said.
"There's a chance it could become another United States with huge national
resources and a highly educated workforce."

William Potter, a defense expert and director of the Center for Russian and
Eurasian Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies,
dismisses the notion of Russia as a military threat as "paranoid," but
agrees that the region bears close watching because of frighteningly lax
safety standards at more than 50 nuclear power plants throughout the former
Soviet Union.

Many of these scholars comment on the paradox that at a time when Soviet
archives are open as never before, there are fewer American students and
scholars able to study them. The Hoover Institution is busily engaged in
microfilming records of the Soviet Communist Party in an arrangement with
the State Archival Service of Russia. Nearly 8 million documents have been
copied.

Another striking feature of post-Soviet Russian studies is that the old
ideological rift is gradually giving way to a generational divide.

Senior members of the profession who maintain their deep suspicion of
Russia are typified by Myron Rush, an emeritus professor of Soviet affairs
at Cornell University whose tour de force of Kremlinology in 1955 revealed
to the world that Nikita Khrushchev had become Stalin's successor.

Rush noticed that the official Soviet press sometimes capitalized the words
"first secretary" of the Communist Party in rendering Khrushchev's title.
But sometimes the title was not capitalized.

Being a microscopic reader of the Soviet press, Rush recognized that the
variation was not a matter of typographical carelessness but reflected
Khrushchev's shifting fortunes in the Kremlin power struggle.

Within a few days Rush saw that the word "first" in Khrushchev's title
began to be consistently capitalized, and then -- like an astronomer
discovering a new planet -- he was able to announce Khrushchev's
ascendance.

Younger scholars express respect and admiration for the feats of scholars
like Rush but say such work has little in common with their own.

"Back when you didn't have any information, you had to impute a lot," said
Von Hagen, who at age 41 is a member of the rising generation of historians
of the Soviet Union. "Today we adhere more to professional scholarly
standards. Let's just say there's less room for creative speculation."

Professor Michael McFaul, a young Stanford political scientist, said: "The
isolation of the older generation of Sovietologists sitting here in
California was probably not a good thing. They looked at Russia as
totalitarian, but it isn't that any more. It may be more like what you have
in Latin America. We need to have more people go there and see what's
happening."

Still, the old and the new guards have at least one thing in common. "Today
we are afflicted with a great humility," said Arnold Beichman, a research
fellow at the Hoover Institution. "We were all wrong. And we know it."

Copyright 1996 The New York Times Company

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George Fowler                    [Email]  gfowler at indiana.edu
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