Area Studies

Area studies have not always been made by area studies experts. Harvard's Russian Studies was especially influenced by sociologists, some of whom, like Talcott Parsons, could never claim area studies expertise, while others, like Alex Inkeles, might have had area studies expertise, though he did not think of himself in those terms (p. 55). Those at Harvard who knew Russia better—Merle Fainsod, Michael Karpovich, and Pitirim Sorokin—were not part of the founding story of the Russian Research Center (RRC) (p. 46). In fact, Parsons appointed Clyde Kluckhohn, an anthropologist specializing in the Navajo, as the first RRC director. Thus, the origins of Russia's area studies complicate simple distinctions between disciplinary and area studies expertise. In fact, while non-area-studies experts helped to constitute ideology around a foundation of “linguistic competence and cultural knowledge” (p. 6), this was done, at least in the beginning, in service to broader social scientific ambitions, and not as an end in itself.

Of course, Soviet Studies also was developed with national security in mind, but it was carried off in ways that could hardly be thought of as determined by narrowly defined security interests. Instead, these interests were themselves defined by broad notions of a “need to know.” National security depended on having a better sense of Russian economy, culture, society, history, and politics on their own terms, and scholars played a large role in defining how those should be understood. Area studies could even moderate ideological extremes with its complicated stories woven with sophisticated theories that compensated for limited data. And if some scholars were considered too far on the “pro-Soviet” end of the spectrum, others were considered too “anti-Soviet.”

Area studies, like politics, is also personal. This history of Russian Studies gives us enough to know just how important the Parsons marriage was to Harvard's Russian Studies. Engerman's stories about Bob Tucker, Stephen Cohen, and Barrington Moore will intrigue those who knew them or have read their work,Footnote ¹ as will his inspiring account of Loren Graham's heroism in defending the independence of American fellows in the USSR. And his discussion of the informal ties establishing the Kennan Institute and the National Council for Soviet and East European Studies (NCSEER) illuminates the challenges facing all academic institution builders.

Engerman did his homework, both archivally, focusing on the founding centers at Harvard and Columbia, and through interviews with those having ties there and beyond. As he acknowledges, his story is shaped by the paucity of the Columbia archive and the richness of Harvard's. He did not get as much from the CIA or Soviet archives as he would have liked. But he very nicely supplemented these with living history, for example, consulting senior scholars like Brown's Tom Gleason and meeting with University of Michigan scholars in Ron Suny's parlor. He was selective in his interviews, he reports regretfully; more unfortunate, however, is that we do not have a full list of those whom he consulted, nor how they were chosen. Knowing the patterns of data collection, we could understand better the relationship between data collected and uncollected, and theorize the implications of those choices for the narratives he tells. Indeed, while Engerman offers a compelling narrative history, a question perhaps more germane to social scientists presents itself: Would it have been possible to systematize these stories in ways that retain the pleasures of biography while simultaneously allowing us to better understand the articulation of biographies, disciplinary and university priorities, and policies? This is especially important as we move beyond tales of origins.

Engerman describes the dispersal of Soviet Studies beyond Harvard and Columbia, but that is when the limits of intellectual history become more apparent. How do we know which debates are important to highlight, which biographies are critical, which institutions deserve focus? When I recently attempted a current historical portrait of area studies and disciplines to inform the assessment of 50 years of Title VI funding,Footnote ² I found little in common across disciplines and regional studies, either in terms of scholarly exemplars or critical questions. But recognizing diversity is a good place to start, and one that Engerman helps us appreciate.

Disciplines

Different disciplines engaged Russian Studies in very different ways. The disciplines potentially closest to area studies ideology—linguistics and literary studies—did not fare well in the intellectual development of Soviet Studies, even if a number of faculty were hired to extend language learning. Roman Jakobson was clearly an intellectual giant, though he was underappreciated in the elaboration of Soviet Studies as a field. And while the semiotic approaches he pioneered anticipated much contemporary discourse analysis, cultural analysis in Soviet Studies was more concerned with understanding “the Russian mind” and Soviet values than it was with theorizing about the virtual structures of action. Economics was initially considered crucial, because Soviet economic capacities—of great geopolitical and military importance—were so little understood. Yet, at the same time, because its disciplinary debates were so preoccupied with methodology and the esoterics of available econometric data, the field of Soviet economic studies was exceptionally small and easy to erase, even before the Soviet Union disappeared. Russian history, by contrast, remained at the core of Russian Studies throughout the Cold War and afterwards because archives and collaborations became more broadly accessible and the area's turn toward social history converged with developments in the disciplinary mainstream. It is also because history has occupied a central place in area studies more generally.

Political science has also been at the core of area studies' interdisciplinary array, but sociology is surprisingly central to the founding story of Soviet Studies: The Soviet Union was the “other” modernizing society whose convergence with America had to be theorized and measured. Engerman's portrait of sociology's relative decline within Soviet Studies is reasonable, but also does not recognize how some parts of sociology, from demography to the comparative/historical, carried forward that disciplinary influence. In fact, comparing political science and sociology can help us understand not only relative disciplinary influence within area studies but also degrees of disagreement about area studies within each discipline.

Political science has had many more heated debates about the value of area studies than has sociology. Maybe it is because sociology did not have such strong personalities as political science—Al Meyer's direct assessment of his discipline's limited value in understanding the Soviet Union is a good example (p. 255).Footnote ³ But the more compelling explanation rests in the social organization of knowledge production. Simply put, political scientists enjoyed career opportunities that sociologists did not have. Those with degrees in political science could go back and forth between government and particular institutes, like George Washington University's Institute for Sino-Soviet Studies, thereby enabling an autonomous field of political science/Soviet Studies to be established, one that did not have to attend to qualities of the discipline as much as to a certain kind of policy-relevant knowledge (pp. 257–58).

Of course, political scientists were not alone in moving between the academy and the policy world. In 1976, historian Richard Pipes helped constitute a team of Russian experts and pundits that fueled a new approach to the Soviet Union. This “Team B” (p. 277) included two future leaders of neoconservatism, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. Zbigniew Brzezinski preceded Pipes's entry into the world of “policy and punditry” (p. 263), but his disciplinary origins in political science made that move more typical. In such movement between power and academy, relatively absent in sociology, we also see reasons why the contests about the value of various kinds of expertise may be sharpest in political science. Who, after all, is the arbiter of professional responsibility when there are two very different institutional worlds claiming ultimate authority in that judgment? As we consider the implications of this book for contemporary debates, we should consider that credentialing question very seriously. But before we leave Brzezinski and Pipes, their very example raises another question of difference that Engerman insufficiently addresses in this volume.

Russia and Other Soviet-Type Societies

Although Philip Mosely, one of the founders of Soviet Studies, apparently wanted “Americans” to do the work (p. 40), East Europeans were aplenty in the field. Some of them are part of Engerman's story—Brzezinski, Pipes, Gordon Skilling, Rene Wellek, and Severyn Bialer among others. Even those with Russian imperial origins—Isaiah Berlin and Michael Karpovich—came from Riga and Tbilisi. Many of those central to understanding Soviet power came from the borderlands of the Russian and Soviet empire.

One might be inclined to think that borderlands produce skepticism toward the claims of greater powers and their ideologues, but I do not want to make Berlin the exemplar, especially when Pipes shows a very different way of expressing borderland pasts. I do think that Engerman, while mentioning these backgrounds, misses an important part of the story of Soviet Studies by not following it through here. For example, the University of Michigan's Center for Russian and East European Studies (CREES) was profoundly influenced by non-Russian data and insights—Roman Szporluk, Al Meyer, Ron Suny, Zvi Gitelman, Bill Zimmerman and other figures central to Michigan's CREES engaged not only Russia but other parts of the Soviet sphere of influence as well. And even those who focused on Russia, like historians Bill Rosenberg and Jane Burbank, were attentive to variations across Russia and beyond.

When the Soviet Union broke up, and when communism's negotiated collapse in Eastern Europe happened a couple of years earlier, these University of Michigan CREES faculty were not caught wondering what they had done wrong in their powers of prediction. If Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and the Baltics were part of your concern, your debate was not just about the reality of Mikhail Gorbachev's reformism. You were discussing the social, cultural, and institutional conditions of reproduction and transformation of different Soviet-type societies, informed but not determined by what was happening in Moscow. It mattered whether one's Soviet Studies was Russian Studies alone. And that suggests something important not only about the history of Soviet Studies but also the future of policy-relevant scholarship.

The Future of Policy-Relevant Scholarship

Perhaps the most important lesson to be drawn from the book is to beware of knowing one's enemy by focusing only on one's enemy. One of the principal failures of Soviet Studies was its disproportionate focus on Moscow and other Soviet power centers, at the expense of attention to the relationships between Moscow and what it considered its peripheries. Ironically, Engerman reproduces this problem by focusing his narrative on Russian Studies debates and saying little about the broader enterprise of comparative Communist Studies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Would the Soviet Union have collapsed without dramatic East European transformations, from the rise of Solidarity in 1980 to the momentous events of 1989? Would it have dissolved without the mobilizations from Lviv and Tallinn to Baku and Tbilisi? The question of Gorbachev's reformism was of course critical, but to end the tale of Soviet Studies with the debate about Gorbachev misses a crucial point: The field was too focused on the center and not enough on the relationships between that center and its peripheries, and among those peripheries.

A second lesson is that policy-relevant scholarship is better when the disciplinary array is wider, ceteris paribus. Russian Studies thrived when not only political science, literary studies, and history were part of the package but also sociology and economics. Sociology's return to the region's study, fueled by its interest in property, value, and markets in transition, has made Russia a critical field in the discipline's growth. With the abundance of ethnographic opportunities, anthropologists have been especially important, too, in the revival of Russian Studies. Indeed, one might consider the implications of this area studies' experience for international studies. For example, the entry of anthropologists to interdisciplinary security studies has enhanced reflexive capacities to address the promise and pitfalls of engagement between the worlds of scholarship and policy.

A third lesson is the centrality of philanthropic foundations, such as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, to the story of the growth of Soviet Studies as a field. In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in how foundations can invest in higher learning's ability to engage major global challenges. And here, the Social Science Research Council's own reformation and history is illustrative. The SSRC was critical to the making of Soviet Studies through its work with the American Council of Learned Societies in the Joint Committee on Soviet Studies (p. 38). It was also part of the decline of Soviet Studies, as the SSRC pulled away from area studies starting in the 1990s, reflecting an emerging consensus among social science scholars and foundation leaders that area studies had become too descriptive and had failed to recognize sufficiently the value of comparative and global studies.

In fact, as Engerman's account makes clear, this is a complicated matter. Area studies at its inception was deeply entwined with the global and comparative ambitions of the modernization framework. But with the rebellion against that paradigm's ethnocentrism and its bald links to American imperium, area studies was left without good comparative methodological and theoretical foundations. World systems theory, modernization's successor in many sociology quarters, did not find a place in area studies; comparative and historical sociology was mainly European in its accent, and thus helped area studies less than it might have done; and postcolonial studies straddled that tough balance between cultural studies and area studies, but only in some regions. Further, these successors to modernization theory did little to inform political science, the traditional hegemon in area studies theory and methodology, which became embroiled in methodological debates about rational choice versus statistics versus interpretation. As a result, the demise of the Cold War area studies paradigm left a vacuum in global studies. But this gap is beginning to be filled, and the time is ripe for a new interdisciplinarity in which political science can play a prominent role, and to which foundations might contribute powerfully.

As this new interdisciplinarity takes shape, it should keep in mind the failures of Sovietology. Engerman writes: “The failure to predict or explain Gorbachev was not the result of a fundamental flaw in the structure of Soviet Studies nor in the political or intellectual influences upon it. The failure was instead due to the growing tensions of the field in the 1970s and 1980s, themselves the result of changes within and beyond the academy. At the very moment that its subject faced existential crisis, Soviet experts were unable to explain it” (p. 332).

I am not sure that Engerman really substantiates that claim, but I think he is right to argue that the academy is not set up to establish scholarly priorities based on the anticipation of pressing political questions. Disciplinary debates make us more narrow than questions about system failure typically require, and our commitments to scholarly rigor typically put us out of sync with the kinds of scholarship that help us anticipate what is likely to happen tomorrow.

Beyond Knowing One's Enemy

If research funding is focused on putative enemies, rather than on the relationships in which enemies and not-quite-enemies and allies and not-quite-allies are embedded, we are likely to miss the most important dynamics of global transformations. The single-minded focus on Gorbachev and the question of his reformism is a lesson that ought not to be repeated. What is necessary is an appreciation of the complexity of relationships across space and time; the limits of conventional boundaries and forms of governance; and the ways that ideas and tactics diffuse transnationally, whether they be the repertoires of nonviolent resistance that produced a wave of “colored revolutions” in post-Soviet Eurasia or the methods of international terrorists. Equally important are more complex linkages between seemingly disparate developments, such as the Green Movement in Iran, struggles over environmental degradation in the Baltic Sea, flows of economic investment in and out of Brazil, and debates about the place of Tibet in the world.

If the reader sees these last four issues as random, the importance of investing in their mutual translation is only made more obvious. Those involved in energy futures would connect those dots immediately, for the dynamics of transformation in each of these instances have implications concerning whether energy resources and their modes of distribution will be understood as commodities to be traded or weapons to be wielded in realizing political outcomes. Energy is one medium of translation, but there are many others, each with its own problematics, temporalities, identifications, and media. A relevant social science needs to figure out how these various global flows relate to one another. Connecting those dots requires an interdisciplinarity that has not yet been realized. But such an ambition is not without precedent, as Engerman makes clear.

The rise of America's Soviet experts showed what could be done at a time when the Cold War animated our vision of global challenges and our imagination of how knowledge could be relevant. I have suggested that we should avoid repeating the “failure” of Soviet Studies by moving away from a preoccupation with “knowing the enemy.” At the same time, we should take to heart the inspiration of Soviet Studies' interdisciplinarity and its quest for collaborative learning, alongside its relationship to academic and political authorities, as we anticipate the successor to Soviet Studies in mobilizing knowledge for global public goods.