Russia’s War Comes for Academia

Before the war, Ivan Grek would take the train to the provinces bordering Russia and Ukraine. Researching Russia’s remembrance of its past wars, he would stop in small towns to visit friends of colleagues from the United States. The climate of cultural and academic exchange was a “fun time,” recalled Grek, who was educated in St. Petersburg, Russia, and completed his Ph.D. at American University in Washington.

Those borderlands are now a minefield, thousands of miles away from the muggy parks of Foggy Bottom, where Grek currently works as a director of George Washington University’s Russia program. But out of sight is not out of mind. “Russia will still be there,” he said. Despite mounting challenges to studying Russia, including the war, university boycotts, and broken-down academic exchanges, it is still the same riddle wrapped inside a mystery.

The first year and a half of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sundered bonds between Russian and U.S. institutions, and academia is no exception. U.S. universities have canceled study abroad programs and ended research partnerships with their Russian counterparts even as they offered protection to Russian students and scholars—threading the needle between moral and logistical challenges against a backdrop of tension. Today’s environment is reminiscent of the Soviet era, Grek said. “Everything has been broken.”

As academics adapt to a new reality, specialists in topics from economics to cultural history are concerned that the taps are closing on one of the United States’ most important fountains of understanding Russia, past and present.

The United States’ foreknowledge that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the mercenary Wagner Group, would launch an abortive mutiny against Russian President Vladimir Putin shows that, when push comes to shove, Washington still has a read on Russia. But U.S. academics’ ability to understand the culture that gives birth to these kinds of events has taken a pounding from which it will struggle to bounce back. For those working on—and in—the field, this profound loss of knowledge has strained decades-long friendships and relationships with colleagues to a breaking point.

The opening of the Soviet archives was “exhilarating,” Cold War historian Melvyn P. Leffler wrote in 1996, ringing in a new era of access to information with the potential to change the West’s understanding of Soviet society. The Soviets were, like the tsars before them, first and foremost pragmatic, not ideological crusaders. “Realpolitik held sway in the Kremlin. Ideology played an important role in shaping their perceptions, but Soviet leaders were not focused on promoting worldwide revolution,” Leffler concluded.

Archive peeping could show that, in fact, Soviet leaders thought “communism fit Poland like a saddle fits a cow” and were more concerned with preserving hegemony in Russia’s backyard than they were with expanding Marxism-Leninism. Access to new information, it seemed, had the potential to change strategic understanding.

What else could it do? Regardless of the direct impact of the opening of the Soviet archives on U.S. policymakers’ knowledge of Soviet priorities, academics shared Leffler’s enthusiasm over the access boom itself. Open archives came with an exponential increase in open discussions, cultural exchanges, study abroad programs, and professional cooperation with Russian counterparts, all of which improved not just Kremlinology but the quality of U.S. academic knowledge of the region, from Leo Tolstoy to tea drinking. While some of those opportunities already existed during Soviet times as a calculated game of U.S.-USSR cultural diplomacy, after the 1990s studying Russia became much like studying any other country.

For social science, the past three decades have been a “golden age,” said Timothy Frye, a professor of post-Soviet foreign policy at Columbia University. Despite being an autocracy, post-Soviet Russia was unusual in that “you could do high-quality research there” in a way that is not possible in China or Saudi Arabia. Russia has an exhaustive public polling infrastructure; with relative ease, social scientists could tally reliable information about public opinion and socioeconomic trends.

In the early 2000s and through the 2010s, it was normal for Russian scholars to publish high-quality research in international, peer-reviewed journals; Frye himself co-wrote pieces with Russian counterparts. In 2011, he became a co-director of the International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development in Moscow, which for a time he led with a Russian economist, Andrei Yakovlev.

Things started to change in the wake of Russia’s illegal 2014 annexation of Crimea. The Russian government began cracking down on dissident voices, whether in parliament or within universities. “People really started to notice that working conditions were getting much more difficult,” Frye said. Among Russian social scientists, there was a growing concern that surveys were becoming less reliable and government officials were “unwilling to speak up.” The increasingly repressive environment was hurting their ability to do their job as well as the quality of their findings.

Then came last year’s invasion and with it an impossible dilemma. First, the Kremlin put pressure on researchers and officials at Russian universities to support the war, even as some resisted it, and banned Russian researchers from international outreach and publication. Then, many U.S. institutions cut ties with Russian academic institutions and former partners who openly expressed their support for the invasion. Russian scholars seeking refuge in the West often get the cold shoulder.

Russian academics with working ties to the United States, many of which spanned decades and provided Americans with insight into the Russian policymaking process, have been damned if they take a stand on the war, damned if they don’t, and damned if they try to avoid it. The heightened tension has strained personal ties as much as it has strained the pipeline of knowledge of Russian policymaking to the United States.

“People are uncomfortable,” said Frye, adding that “institutional ties with Russian institutes of higher education have been severed because of the war. But the personal ties still remain.” Formal ties are cut. There are furtive Zoom calls and WhatsApp chats and the odd email. There is a “very awkward, chaotic situation out there,” said Grek, adding that academics now “have to build their own networks with Russian scholars in Russia to revive and to conduct studies and just move on.” The United States’ knowledge of the region, in some respects, is hinging on those bonds.

Academics do the spade work that helps U.S. government officials make sense of Putin’s game. A functioning field of Russia studies is needed now more than ever to understand the fallout of the Prigozhin mutiny and unanswered questions about his whereabouts and abject surrender. And whether Russia will go nuclear if the war goes worse for Moscow. And what comes after Putin. And how this all ends.

Unfortunately for Washington, “both the U.S. government and the Russian government know less about Russian society than they did before the war,” Frye said. “I would love to know what’s going on in Russian politics right now. Do I have a great way to study it? Not really.”

For Grek, academic breakdown breeds bad policymaking. “If you misunderstand and misinterpret what’s going on in Russia and push the wrong buttons, we can get closer to the third world war.”

The next generation of Russianists is stepping into a volatile field. Across Rock Creek from Grek’s office, undergraduates at Georgetown University continue to sign up for Russian-language classes; there has been little drop since the start of the war. Part of that, said Lioudmila Fedorova, the chair of Georgetown’s Slavic languages department, is because it’s Washington, and Georgetown is the home of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service—a feeder school to the State Department.

Outside the Beltway as well as inside, Slavic studies departments are reassessing how to teach the region’s languages and cultures. “Historically, bad relations with Russia have been good for business,” Frye said.

This time, those entering the business will face a new set of questions. For regional experts working in the humanities, emphasizing Russia’s character as an empire whose history of conquest cuts to its cultural core is hardly a new approach—though it may become more widespread in light of the war. “We study and teach [Russian culture] as a counterculture, where many writers resisted the pressure of the state,” said Fedorova, pointing to courses such as “Exile and Prison in Russian Literature/Film.” This fall, the school will add a course called “Ukraine and the Russian Empire.”

The theme of the upcoming 2023 conference of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is “decolonization.” The call for papers, which extends to scholars studying the region from universities around the world, notes that “Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has led to widespread calls for the reassessment and transformation of Russo-centric relationships of power and hierarchy both in the region and in how we study it.”

How to teach Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet history—and how to discuss empire in the context of the ongoing invasion—is also at top of mind for U.S. graduate students, as well as how to study it.

Jenny Lhamo Tsundu, a Ph.D. student in Brown University’s history department, spent nine months between 2014 and 2015 living with a host family in Bratsk, Siberia, as part of a Russian-language program organized by Middlebury Language Schools. During Tsundu’s stay there, talk of Putin’s then-recent invasion of Crimea reached the faraway city. “Crimea is ours,” people would say in an “ironic” and “half-joking manner,” she said. Living there, and listening to people there, was as important as hitting the books. Her field studies were interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic and then ended by the war.

Younger graduate students may not be able to follow in her footsteps and visit the region they study. That bodes poorly: Expertise in regional areas is key, and ignorance leads to missteps.

At GW’s Russia program, Grek and his colleagues are looking for workarounds. Online databases and social media offer a stand-in for talking to actual Russians. It’s not ideal.

“I have a small dream,” Grek said. “I hope that one day there will be a world where we can reengage with Western scholars, Russian scholars, and Ukrainian scholars as we did before.”