David Engerman's excellent new book analyzes the origins of Soviet Studies in the World War II intelligence services and the impact of that continuing close connection on the development of the field as a whole. Engerman shows how programs at Harvard, Columbia, MIT, Berkeley, and Stanford were built on the basis not merely of receiving U.S. government funds administered by academic recipients, not just of classified work stints at the highest reaches of power, but also of whole programs' research agendas being shaped by government needs and contracts. When Engerman quotes Harvard Dean and later National Advisor McGeorge Bundy (p. 3) to the effect that “the first great center of area studies” was the OSS (Office of Strategic Services—the wartime intelligence service that was the precursor to the CIA), it is as part of a larger argument about path dependency for the field as a whole: that the roots of Soviet Studies, and indeed of many area studies, were anchored in service not to academia but to government. His argument, interestingly, is not that this produced research that was ideologically slanted in a particular direction—since he correctly shows that there were deep splits in both academia and government along the left-right continuum—but that the direction, focus, and methods adopted for these projects were constrained by government interests.

Funding, importantly, was shaped by persistent demands that U.S. government funds be allocated for projects that had direct policy relevance, a requirement that persists up to today. As Engerman writes, while every source of outside funding (whether from foundations, corporate sponsors, or federal contracts) has the potential for redirecting the field, funds from “operational agencies” (State, Defense, CIA) brought with them the potential for the “distortion of scholarly objectivity” (p. 254). Clearly, the U.S. government supported scholarly research for its own purposes, not simply to expand knowledge. In funding academic projects, it also recognized the desirability of independently verified factual knowledge about communist countries from open sources as a balance to the product that was coming from within the U.S. government. The government also sought to directly fund stints by academics in the U.S. government itself, with the Soviet–East European Training Act of 1973 setting aside funding for “advanced research by highly trained and experienced specialists, available for service in and out of Government.“Footnote ¹ Intelligence money thus funded the lion's share of all Sovietological fieldwork, large research projects, and policy leaves for scholars in government agencies for the entire Cold War period.

Engerman demonstrates that this funding had three major effects. First, because the government largely wanted policy-prescriptive pieces, focused on the here and now, scholars who received funding inordinately eschewed advanced quantitative methods in their careers. Instead, their scholarly network was policy oriented. They read Foreign Affairs before they read (if they read) American Political Science Review. At a time when political science was embracing quantitative and large-n comparative studies, Sovietologists were well funded but funded in a way that deformed their subfield's relationship with the academy.

Secondly, when Sovietologists—using what were, in any case, considered by “real” political scientists to be the archaic and antiquated methods of Kremlinology—failed to foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union, the writing was on the wall for Soviet Studies as a field. In one political science department after another, scholars were not replaced, and new hires were not made.

There was a third and most important effect: The methods used to discern changes in the Kremlin shaped the field's inattention to those deep-rooted maladies that eventually produced the collapse. And these methods were not even successful in helping to predict the outcome of the endless rounds of succession struggles that occurred up to and after leaders' deaths. Engerman's discussion (pp. 49–51) of the early 1950s Soviet Vulnerability Project is illustrative here. The project was meant to be a broad study of Soviet society in the period after Stalin's death, but it ended up, under the authorship of W. W. Rostow, being a top-down analysis of Politburo activities to shape and control what was seen as an inert society.

Contemporary archival, sociological, and anthropological work challenges the view of Soviet society as having had no agency, but in the absence of access to archives, or permission to do in-country fieldwork at that time, there was no scholarly basis for challenging this most fundamental of all aspects of the totalitarian paradigm.Footnote ² Even when Soviet dissidents began to predict the collapse of the system, as in Andrei Amalrik's Will the Soviet Union Survive to 1984? Footnote ³ or Konstantin Simis's work on the pervasiveness of corruption within Soviet society,Footnote ⁴ American Sovietologists were more prone to see the USSR as fundamentally robust, unitary, stable and expansive. The major debates continued to range along the binary of whether the USSR and the United States would be able to find accommodation or not, and whether they could both be understood as different variants of the same form of modernizing, industrial societies that might at some point converge, subjects ably dealt with by Engerman in Chapter 7.

When Andrei Sakharov published his 1968 essay Reflections on Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom Footnote ⁵ before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the possibility of the two systems converging at some point seemed feasible. After that invasion, however, and Sakharov's and other dissidents' long struggle with the Soviet regime, that hope ended. Yet, even after Sakharov and others had been sentenced to prison, internal exile, or forced psychiatric treatment, Western sociologists continued, as with Daniel Bell, to insist that “[t]he Soviet Union is an industrial society, and it is likely that post-industrial features will appear in that country as well.”Footnote ⁶ The “end of ideology” had seemed like a real possibility in the mid-1960s when Sakharov had published his original texts, mirroring the hope that ideology would fall away in favor of a postindustrial and non-class-based economy focused on merit, service, and intellectual production. But the sharp conservative turn of the Soviet system in the 1970s showed that political repression could, for a time, trump societal pressures for change; and having failed to appreciate the depth of political repression, sociologists in the West practically abandoned the study of the USSR by the 1980s.

What is also absent from Chapter 7 because it was practically absent from American political and sociological study of the USSR was any sustained study of nationalism as a force that could threaten the stability of the entire Soviet system. The view of the USSR as an empire certainly did not gain currency until the late 1980s when the emergence of national fronts in the Baltic states, Ukraine, and the Caucasus forced a reevaluation. “Captive nations” lobbies may have been politically omnipresent in Washington, DC, but they really did not have much influence in changing U.S. foreign policy's focus on arms control and détente. Nor did they ever succeed in impressing upon academics that there was, in fact, something pretty important going on in the USSR outside the capital. Washington and the Sovietological community were divided on the issue of whether the USSR was or was not totalitarian, was or was not modern, was or was not reformable, but no one looked much beyond the Kremlin walls or the Moscow-based academic and political elite for data. This failing, however, was a product as much of Soviet-imposed visa restrictions as of any nefarious aspect of the relationship between the U.S. government and academia.

Thus, this obsession with what was happening in the center was caused both by a practical restriction on the fieldwork that could be conducted and by an ideological predisposition for seeing the center as controlling the destiny of the country. Watching the Kremlin for any signs of leadership changes became a major pastime of Sovietology, particularly in the period after Leonid Brezhnev's death in 1982 and Mikhail Gorbachev's rise in 1985. Sovietologists became more obsessed with the endless succession struggles than with the deeper trends within Soviet society. Even the most political science oriented scholars in the field engaged in punditry about these struggles, and, unsurprisingly, were simply unable to predict who would succeed whom inside the Kremlin.Footnote ⁷ The Gorbachev succession and the changes it augured were missed by the Sovietological community in the West, including in DC. When Engerman states (p. 327) that “Western Sovietology had failed in the 1980s because it did not develop a framework to understand what actually was happening,” he is only partly right. Sovietology did have a framework, one that was favored by the government, one that had been used since the 1950s and that focused on conflicts in the Politburo. It was just the wrong framework.

This obsession with Kremlin politics assumed that society was inchoate, anomic, repressed, and stagnant. All that mattered was kto kovo—who was doing what to whom inside the Kremlin. Therefore, when Gorbachev came to power, and began campaigns that called for the restructuring of Soviet society, for the lifting of press freedoms, for the democratization of party debate, Sovietologists were unprepared for the flood of reaction from within the USSR. And here American academic circles, because of old left-right divisions, not only did not speak with a single voice but, in fact, faltered. At a time of change inside the Soviet Union so profound that it was to produce the collapse first of communism in Eastern Europe and then of the USSR itself, academia was split and the U.S. government had its own political problems. There were a lot of meetings and symposia, but no resolution on the issue of whether Gorbachev was just another communist leader, only younger and smarter, or whether his policies represented a break with the totalitarian past. At a time when academia and government should have been in a deep and urgent dialogue about the domestic situation in the USSR, they could not overcome the fundamental left-right splits that had dogged them for decades. Engerman ably documents what one reviewer called academic “food fights,” but does not go into sufficient depth on the impact of what was going on inside the Reagan administration at this time. This was the era of Iran-Contra, of the neoconservatives, of the Committee on the Present Danger; and these groups inside the administration allied with their supporters outside (most notably Richard Pipes) simply tried to close the door to the dialogue between academia and government.

Gorbachev came to power at the wrong time—he should have had Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton as interlocutors. Conservatives would probably agree that had he had a better reception in Washington, DC, the Soviet Union might have survived. Instead he had to deal with Bill Casey, Richard Perle and Bud McFarlane. The neoconservatives believed that the USSR had to be confronted by force, that the Soviet system was immutable to internal pressures, that negotiations could only be conducted from a position of strength, and that the ultimate objective was not accommodation but the collapse of the system.

Therefore, Gorbachev's critique of Brezhnev-era stagnation was not, in itself, seen as proof in DC that the USSR would be more accomodationist in domestic or foreign policy. Indeed, many neoconservatives feared that Gorbachev's energy and ideas would make him a more formidable adversary than his doddering predecessors had been. Even Margaret Thatcher's statement that Gorbachev was someone whom the West could “do business with” did not provide much reassurance.

There were, of course, differences among them, but neoconservatives generally shared a core view that the USSR was an evil empire and the hydra head of terror. Any negative action was scrutinized for a Soviet hidden hand, and conflicts were viewed through the prism of gaining advantage for “our” side against “theirs.” Engerman focuses on the real splits within the academic community during this period, and he gets the story of the feuds and disagreements right. What is missing in his account is a discussion of the profound and deep political maneuvers that were occurring inside the Washington establishment to exclude and defeat anyone with a divergent analytical perspective.

This included academics with long-standing relationships with the U.S. government. For example, Lincoln Gordon, a former Harvard professor who at that time was president of the Atlantic Council, recounted that he had been a member of President Carter's Senior Review Panel at the CIA charged with overseeing agency estimates. He worked with the agency's Soviet Analysis Division to develop a national intelligence estimate on “Soviet Support for International Terrorism.” At a meeting with incoming CIA chief William Casey and U.S. Secretary of State Al Haig in May 1981, the panel was encouraged to work harder to find Moscow's hidden hand. When they protested that no such proof could be found, they were handed Claire Sterling's book The Terror Network Footnote ⁸ and told to look harder. When they subsequently reported that many footnotes in Sterling's book had been CIA disinformation in Italian newspapers, Casey and Haig told them to include the material anyway. Casey told them, according to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward: “Read Claire Sterling's book, and forget this mush…. I paid $13.95 for this and it told me more than you bastards whom I pay $50,000 a year.”Footnote ⁹ This was an example of “blowback,” where disinformation placed abroad by U.S. intelligence services comes back to influence the intelligence community's own analysis. It was a big feature of policy analysis during the Casey tenure and was used to trump findings by analysts and academics alike.Footnote ¹⁰

The head of the Soviet Analysis Division, Melvin Goodman, and others later left the CIA in protest, but Goodman has maintained that Soviet analysts were “aware that there was no good evidence of Soviet support for international terrorism in Western Europe and the Middle East. What we didn't know was that Haig and Casey had read … The Terror Network, and that no amount of factual information would disabuse them of their notions about Moscow and terror.”Footnote ¹¹

This was an era when intelligence was manipulated to serve political ends, and while Engerman references political disputes, he does not adequately reflect on what the actual manipulation of intelligence did to the relationship between government and academia. During this period, if there was no actual Soviet activity in Iran, no secret Soviet sales to Angola or Nicaragua, then that interest and those sales were simply manufactured to suit political ends. This was not just about political disagreement over agreed facts; this was about two sets of facts, one real and one fictional. In testimony before Congress, Goodman reflected on how they had used academic sourcing and input, but to no avail:

All this occurred at the very time that Gorbachev had just come to power. The role that Soviet specialists could play would normally have been quite significant. And indeed there was great activity. But their ability inside and outside the government to frame the debate in terms of verifiable factual knowledge was limited by neoconservatives who were blocking this work and manipulating intelligence for political purposes. Engerman's statement that “[w]hile Gorbachev was able to stir the U.S.S.R. out of its Brezhnev era stagnation, his policies did little to stir Sovietologists out of theirs” (p. 312) is an arresting sentence, but belies the deep ideological splits that were driving the debate, so deep that fundamental intelligence was simply made up.

The politicization of intelligence produced tectonic fissures in the bureaucracy at the very time that Gorbachev was trying to garner Western support for his reform efforts. Inside the State Department, Secretary of State George Shultz had expressed distrust of the CIA's estimates and tried to use his own agency to counter these estimates. He was regarded among his staff as a breath of fresh air after Haig, and as someone who understood facts and demanded arguments based on them. His own analysts in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research were complaining that their efforts to get contrary views included in national intelligence estimates were being stymied. As an outside academic specialist working in the State Department on a Council of Foreign Relations fellowship in 1986–87, I was simply stunned by this manipulation of intelligence.

Academics' views were mere cannon fodder in this process. Perhaps they provided an occasional corrective, capable of influencing the public sentiment to a certain degree. Perhaps their opinions while on a policy stint in the government helped to shape a broader view. An op-ed from Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski would certainly have been commented on throughout the U.S. government during this time, but not a piece written by most of the other Sovietologists who are the subject of Engerman's book.Footnote ¹³ The pace of work and the mountain of data, combined with neoconservatives' exclusionary efforts and the fights within academia, doomed the broader Sovietological community to irrelevance.

Engerman draws a fascinating portrait of the divisions within the Sovietological academic community. The truth is, however, that it does not matter at the end of the day whether one group was right or not if neither was listened to by the government whom they sought to serve. Engerman's message is that Sovietologists failed, but my perspective is that academic Sovietologists were not allowed to succeed, either because of restrictions imposed on fieldwork by the Soviet Union or because of political infighting in Washington. The need for interaction between government and academia is obvious and great, but the forces arrayed against that interaction were unbelievably powerful.

With the Soviet collapse, Sovietologists reoriented their work. They became interested in democratization, in cross-national trends, in statistical modeling, in public opinion forecasting, in electoral studies. They were normalized and joined the political science mainstream. The government also became interested in placing the study of trends in Russia alongside similar trends elsewhere. Russia was at last going to be studied as a normal country by well-trained political scientists.

All that, however, was before Vladimir Putin started stealing elections, oppressing nongovernmental organizations, and curtailing freedom of the press. Once more, Russia is being removed from cross-national studies of democratizing countries.Footnote ¹⁴ Our efforts to study Russia as a country with transparent political debates, an open society, a working legal system, and a stable and effective party system cannot continue if Russia itself does not continue down that path.

When a system is lacking in transparency, there is always an increased opportunity for those with classified information to state that they have data showing the “truth” about Russian intentions. Academics are doubly constrained in these situations: If archives and political discourse once again become closed in Russia, this only increases the chances of a repeat of the situation we faced in the early Reagan years when claims about the Soviet Union based on classified information could not be refuted by open sources. This is not a game for the faint of heart, and now that DC is full of think-tank specialists on Russia, academics beyond the Beltway have less and less influence. But, in fact, the less academics worry about how their message spins in Washington and the more they focus on the quality of their scholarly work, the greater will be the opportunity for serious studies of Russia to be proved correct over time. Engerman's fundamental view that the government gained more from the exchange with academia than vice versa, and that in fact true scholarly work was impeded if not poisoned by this relationship, is a profound one that provides a salutary lesson for the field as it looks to the future.