Compared with federal budget cuts in the tens of billions of dollars, the recent elimination of a program that supports Russian studies barely registers. The program, which was run by the U.S. Department of State, provided a relatively tiny $3.3-million to organizations that finance research on Russia and other former Soviet-bloc countries. It also supports language study.
Some scholars in the field, however, say the consequences of the cut could be enormous.
The program began in 1983, in the midst of the cold war, and since that time has backed the research of some of the United States’ most prominent policy makers. Madeleine K. Albright and Condoleezza Rice both received support from what’s known as the Title VIII program when they were political-science professors. So did the current U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, when he was a political scientist at Stanford University. In fact, it’s hard to find a researcher in the field whose work hasn’t been supported in some fashion by Title VIII grants.
Scholars like Stephen F. Cohen, a retired professor of Russian and Slavic studies at New York University, are still trying to make sense of the decision. “Why just whack Russia out of the program? There had to be something political or careless about that,” Mr. Cohen said. “It’s a screw for a cruise missile in terms of what the government spends. But in terms of the field and what’s supposed to be the purpose of this field, it’s a big deal because there isn’t much money in Russian studies.”
The move also seemed baffling to Serguei A. Oushakine, an associate professor of Slavic languages and of anthropology at Princeton University and director of its program in Russian and Eurasian studies. “I don’t understand what the government is doing,” he said. “It’s not that much money. This is one of the cheapest forms of research, and the type of expertise that these people provide is just irreplaceable.”
Mr. Oushakine said his own work would probably be affected. He said he and other scholars might have to rely on library research in the United States rather than traveling abroad and conducting on-the-ground interviews.
‘A Relic of the Cold War’?
According to the State Department’s website, the mission of Title VIII was to provide “open source, policy-relevant research to the service of the U.S. government.” Even those who bemoan the program’s demise acknowledge that some of the more culturally oriented research grants Title VIII had come to support probably wouldn’t fit neatly in that category.
But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worthwhile, according to Robert Bird, an associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Chicago. “What we lose when we lose a dissertation on Latvian art is intangible, and we are making that kind of work impossible,” Mr. Bird said. “The potential benefits of that work are difficult to predict and define in any specific way.”
Among recipients losing Title VIII funds are summer language programs at Arizona State University and at Indiana University at Bloomington, along with research-grant programs run by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the American Council of Learned Societies.
A spokesman for the State Department told The Moscow Times that the program’s elimination was in response to overall budget reductions demanded by Congress.
The cuts were not entirely unexpected, according to Alisha Kirchoff, associate director of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ms. Kirchoff said the prospect of the program’s elimination had been fretted about for years. “There is a feeling in the field that it is a relic of the cold war and that it was only a matter of time until someone realized it was still there,” Ms. Kirchoff said. “I think that, to an extent, that is what happened.”
She has mixed feelings about the loss of the program. While some of the research that received funding had perhaps strayed from the program’s original mission, she said, other work, like the Slavic Reference Service at her university, was valuable to both scholars and policy makers. “It would have been nice to have the opportunity to rethink the program,” she said.
