In the span of 12 minutes, Kimberly Marten smoothly explained why Russia’s takeover of Crimea was a bad idea, the concerns of its neighbors and trading partners, and why the conflict is unlikely to end in a large-scale war.
“Let me tell you something,” said a visibly impressed Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show. “You should be a professor!”
Well, she is. But in her nearly 25-year academic career, Ms. Marten, a political scientist at Barnard College, has never received quite this much attention for her knowledge of the former Soviet Union. Since the uprising in Ukraine began, she has been writing, speaking, and otherwise explaining international security and geopolitics to formerly inattentive American audiences.
“I’ve dreamed about this,” she says from her home, catching up on academic work she put aside to handle the daily media onslaught.
Her experience is hardly unique. Russia scholars have been in print and on the airwaves like never before in recent years, asked to explain the mind of Vladimir V. Putin or the likelihood that the United States is about to get sucked into another war.
But Russia has rarely been on the lips of most Americans, nor was it at the center of academic study after the breakup of the Soviet Union, in 1991, and the end of the Cold War.
“That led to a very hasty disregard of Russia as an important player in the world,” says Yana Hashamova, director of the Center for Slavic and Eastern European Studies at Ohio State University, a disregard that “has permeated Washington and the media and the general public.”
With renewed attention to Russia has come worry about the state of Russian studies. In a recent essay in The Washington Post, “Why America Doesn’t Understand Putin,” Angela E. Stent, director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies at Georgetown University, mourned the decline of the field.
“Instead of embracing a deep understanding of the culture and history of Russia and its neighbors,” wrote Ms. Stent, “political science has been taken over by number-crunching and abstract models that bear little relationship to real-world politics and foreign policy. Only a very brave or dedicated doctoral student would today become a Russia expert if she or he wants to find academic employment.”
Refashioned Scholarship
Yet other Russia experts have a more positive view.
While they, too, are disheartened by the decline more generally of area-studies programs and centers, the study of Russia—albeit with a smaller number of people, and within a broader political or economic framework—remains vibrant, they say.
“It’s a false dichotomy that advanced methods can’t be applied to Russia studies,” says Ms. Marten. “People are doing it quite well.”
Ms. Marten uses her own history as an example. Her first book, written as her dissertation before the fall of the Soviet Union, was on Soviet military innovation. But she then applied her knowledge of security policy to other regions of the world, studying, for example, the security sector in weak states like Afghanistan.
She has returned to studying former Soviet states in recent years and is deputy director for development at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute of Russian, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies.
Stephen E. Hanson, vice provost for international affairs at the College of William & Mary, had to similarly refashion his scholarship. “I became a tenured junior faculty member at a time when interest in Russia went from very, very high to toward the bottom,” he recalls of his first job, in the political-science department at the University of Washington in 1990. But in a way, he says, that waning interest forced him and his peers to become creative, benefiting the field today. “We became early specialists in globalization.”
Some studied the former Soviet states as part of a broader look at health, energy, or migration issues. Others examined Russia’s relationship to the Middle East or the European Union. “We became a group of people who were quite innovative in understanding the legacies of the past,” says Mr. Hanson.
The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, of which Mr. Hanson is president, became one of the scholarly forums to bring those interested in the former Communist world together. The Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia—a network of scholars in the United States and abroad—is another.
Broader Talent Pool
Those groups also reflect developments that could have come about only in a post-Soviet era: the active participation of scholars in Russia and neighboring countries.
“The talent pool of people who know a lot about Russia has grown because you can hire Russians or people born in Russia,” says Richard K. Herrmann, chairman of the political-science department at Ohio State. “I don’t know if Russia specialists have fully absorbed that.”
Mr. Herrmann was once a scholar of the Soviet Union but broadened his research into security and conflict studies and the politics of the Middle East and South Asia. “By moving to a higher, broader, theoretical level,” he says, “all of us who did that who were Soviet specialists survived OK.”
To be sure, the number of specialists has shrunk. At the peak of Soviet studies, in the mid-1980s, Ohio State had eight Russia experts across five disciplines. Now it has three scholars with an interest in Russia, and Mr. Herrmann is the only political scientist on the campus with such expertise. “I could never persuade my colleagues to make a national search for a Russia specialist,” Mr. Herrmann says. But if someone came to them who studied democratic regimes, say, or energy policy, with a focus on Russia—"we’d hire them.”
Money also continues to be in short supply. Federal funds for centers and programs that encourage the study of the cultures, languages, and history of other countries have been cut significantly in recent years. Mr. Hanson notes that his early career depended heavily on such federal support. A Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship, through the Education Department’s Title VI program, paid for his first trip to what was then Leningrad. He received a Title VIII grant from the State Department as a junior faculty member to help finish his first book. And he ran the Title VI-supported Herbert J. Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies at the University of Washington.
But the Title VIII program, which provided about $3.5-million for research and language training for the study of Eastern Europe and Eurasia, was not funded this year. And Congress cut the Education Department’s Title VI program, which supports language training and area-studies centers, by 40 percent.
What will this next generation of scholars have to support them? Mr. Hanson wonders. “Because of 20 years of sustained commitment we’ve been reasonably all right,” he notes. But to develop a deep understanding of such a complicated region “takes 20 years.”
Corrections (3/24/2014, 6:52 a.m.): This article originally spelled two scholars’ names inconsistently. A professor at the College of William & Mary is Stephen E. Hanson, not Hansen, and a professor at Ohio State University is Richard K. Herrmann, not Hermann. The article has been updated to reflect those corrections.
