This conference, which had at its heart questions arising from the period of mutual suspicion during the Cold War, was a fascinating moment in the recalibration not only of US–Russian relations, but also of area studies itself as an academic activity with clearly strategic implications. Some of the most interesting discussion initiated by the American participants reflected on Russia's declining importance as an object of study in the US, and the shifting economics of area studies. The Russian scholars were a reminder that American studies in Russia had been a strategic necessity but also a conduit by which a liberalizing American culture was mediated in the Soviet Union. The conference was hosted by RSUH, a notably dynamic and forward-thinking institution, with funding from the US Embassy, the Fulbright Commission, and the Kennan Institute (part of the Woodrow Wilson Center, named I think after George Kennan the explorer rather than George F. Kennan the unwitting originator of the Cold War). That funding pointed up the still-strategic nature of scholarly activity, and highlighted a fascinating undercurrent concerning the question of what it might mean to overcome methodological and professional differences across a range of disciplines as between Russian and “Western” scholars.

History was the dominant discipline, but with substantial representation from philology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, communications, cultural studies and other disciplines. The majority of those present were from all areas of Russia, and simultaneous translation between English and Russian was provided.

In some ways the conference had straightforward scholarly roots. A recent essay collection edited by Victoria Zhuravleva (RSUH), the conference organizer, and Ivan Kurilla (Volgograd State University) featured contributions mainly in Russian but each with an English synopsis, and vice versa for English-language contributions, a pattern now occasionally found in collections by Americanists. Russian–American Relations in Past and Present: Images, Myths and Reality (Moscow: RSUH, 2007) was the product of an earlier conference which had tight focus on the history of mutual representations in textbooks in the Soviet Union and the United States. One strand in the present conference continued this theme but others broadened the cultural remit. Of the two main strands, one dealt with sovietology in the United States and amerikanistika in the Soviet Union, under the rubric of “enemy studies”; the other dealt with aspects of the longer narrative of Russian studies in the United States, and American studies in Russia from the nineteenth century to the twentieth, thematizing contrasts of imaginary and objective knowledge.

Of the plenary speakers, Anthony Koliha, director of the Fulbright Program in Russia, gave an acute and carefully articulated account of the institutional structures which had formed Russian studies in the US. The form of area studies as such, Koliha noted, is basically intact. Its creation was given impetus by the 1957 Sputnik launch, given form by the 1958 Defense Act and solidified by the Higher Education Act of 1965. In the last two decades, the perception is that area studies has failed to fulfil its strategic purpose, notably by failing to anticipate in any way either the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall or the September 2001 attacks on New York. The perceived crisis has led to a review of area studies in a 2010 report as yet unpublished. Koliha had read the report and noted among its principal findings that area studies tended to work in terms of its constituent disciplines and did not tend to produce interdisciplinary models of regions. However, area studies had shown some flexibility in the redefinition of its objects according to strategic necessity, although Koliha was not the only US speaker to indicate that the decline in the strategic significance of Russia for America would certainly mean that resources would be switched to other emergent areas and problems. Another US speaker bluntly told the conference that Russia and Russian studies were basically of no importance to the US, which, he said, had a short attention span, had forgotten the Cold War, and had other fish to fry.

Speakers in the rest of the conference dealt more broadly with the history of American sovietology and of Russian American studies. One emergent theme was the significance of the Russian diaspora in shaping American academic life, not least Russian studies as such. Some speakers pointed out that American Russian studies were pre-Cold War in origin and had a fascinating genesis. Military historians such as Soviet naval expert Aleksei Kilichenkov (RSUH) provided a grounding in the practical aspects of the “representation of the other” outside questions of textbook or cultural representations. While some speakers seemed to think in terms of a thaw in relations, there were one or two dissenting Russian voices which seemed still to distrust the US.

Mark Kramer, director of the Cold War Studies Program at Harvard, presented a detailed account of “The State of American Sovietology,” which gave a synopsis of some of the principal institutional imperatives of Soviet studies as was – such as the creation of the Kennan Foundation, or the influx of Soviet Jewish émigrés in the 1970s which led to the “Soviet Interview Project.” Kramer noted that Soviet studies had sometimes focussed too much on models such as totalitarianism in ways which had limited its validity, or had later, in the work of Sheila Fitzpatrick and others, concentrated too much on social history and underemphasized the Terror. While admitting such problems, Kramer's point was basically to defend US sovietologists against the charge that they had been off-base in 1989: they had done a good job especially given the difficulty of obtaining information which often did not exist even in Moscow, let alone outside.

Among the conference papers were some attractive presentations of local and individual histories of the kinds of transnational experience by which international relations whether academic or political are often shaped. Yulia Khmelevskaya (South Urals State University) gave an account of the Russian emigré Frank Alfred Golder, who became a leading authority on Russia in the US. Marina Bulanova (RSUH) discussed the influence of three Russian sociologists on Russian studies in the US, notably that of Pitirim Sarokin, author of The Sociology of Revolution (1925) and the groundbreaking Social Mobility (1927). Such histories reveal the significance of the relationship between the transnational movements of individuals and larger collective processes, be they institutional or national, and offer an important counterpoint to questions of propaganda and misprision.

The final event of the conference was the presentation of a joint work of US and Russian anthropologists which had resulted in a collection of essays edited by Michele Rivkin-Fish (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) and Elena G. Trubina (Ural State University), Dilemmas of Diversity after the Cold War: Analyses of “Cultural Difference” by US and Russia-Based Scholars, published by the Kennan Institute. Unlike collections such as that of Zhuravleva and Kurilla, this volume is presented wholly in English as the international language of scholarship. The study was sponsored by the Centre for Advanced Study and Education (CASE) of the Kennan Institute, which has established nine thematic research centres at provincial Russian universities with the stated objective of integrating Russian scholars into the international research community. As with the conference itself, the funding of this project was an interesting example of a type of small-scale intervention by the US in Russian academic culture. Fulbright scholarships, much coveted in Russia, are perhaps the main example of this kind of intervention, with the difference that while Fulbright scholarships simply take individual scholars out of Russia, this aspect of the CASE program more ambitiously seeks to enter Russian academic establishments in active collaboration. The essay collection includes work on nationalism, the erasure of history, the politics of communal representation, the symbolic politics of ethnic diversity, literature and diversity, the concept of nationality and ethnicity in school textbooks, and the teaching of tolerance. The role of nationality was, of course, central to the history of the Soviet Union – Stalin was a specialist in the nationalities question – and the breakup of the former Soviet Union prompted a series of studies of this question. This book, then, is the outcome of a bold and impressive foray into fieldwork in some of the outlying areas of Russia – Tatarstan and the South Caucasus – but is perhaps of most interest for its methodology, which was discussed at length by the two editors and some of the contributors. Here there were two questions, one of methodology, the other of scholarly presentation. The theme of diversity is unfamiliar to Russian anthropologists, and several withdrew from the project during its course, feeling uncomfortable that their own methodologies and working assumptions were being challenged. Those Russian scholars who remained part of the project presented written submissions for the book which did not match US academic publication standards. This is likely because Russian academic reports tend to be fairly summary and sometimes lack the dimension of refined, essayistic elaboration expected in the US. Rivkin-Ryan described in detail the processes by which both of these issues were dealt with. Questions of presentation and aspects of intellectual orientation which had arisen in the writing-up process were dealt with by committed editorial work and repeated revision; earlier questions of methodology, in which “diversity” was settled as the theme of the work and its methodology, seem to have been less a matter of negotiation than of assertion. The lengthy closing discussion of this project left a strong impression, not least because it represented the current state of play in US–Russian relations where the stated conference theme seemed really to reflect a past situation and express a symmetry (or mutuality) which has been replaced by a very asymmetrical relationship. For a British scholar, there will always be reflections on the role of US academic culture in the English-language context, since the integration is so complete. Indeed, for a scholar of literature – so often considered a national resource – questions of US intervention and appropriation arise with particular force. The history of American studies in Britain as US-sponsored political agent is a further reminder of the nature and structure of transnational academic intervention. In its assertion of “diversity” as a universal – the point on which some Russian researchers left the project, even though the funding existed, and a point on which those who remained continued to signal resistance – it was hard to escape the impression that US culture (which produced “diversity” in the dialectical context of the defeat of socialism) is more hegemonic than even the most able and committed of its talented liberal academics would care to think. Yet the project of Rivkin-Fish and Trubina does authentically embody the difficult and grainy process by which Russia and the American or Western scholarly worlds are in the process of being brought into relation.

This final item enabled the reflection that while area studies looks both dated and strategically ineffective, forms of transnational scholarly community – with the attendant risks of anglophone, US hegemony – are increasingly the form which the encounter with supposed “otherness” will take now that the Cold War has been more or less left behind.