Always Reinventing Russian Studies
I am not a fan of big disciplinary conferences, of which the English-speaking world is so enamoured. It is always a hit-or-miss experience. Mostly the latter. Although you can reconnect with some acquaintances rarely encountered in person and meet new people, most plans you may have fall through. What is more, of almost two hundred panels and other events crammed parallelly into two days and a half, you can attend only a tiny fraction. This leaves you dissatisfied. Despite all the meticulous planning, in the end the event is highly disorienting, though extroverts well revel in it.
For the first time, I attended the annual conference of BASEES (British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies) in 2016, when it was then held in Cambridge. I had no intention of a repeat. However, this year (2026) I relented on the request of two young Ukrainian scholars, one based in Kyiv and the other in Oxford. I agreed to serve as the chair-cum-discussant for their panel to flag up their research and to make Ukrainian studies more visible during the conference.
To make more sense of this confusing experience of participating in the BASEES conference, I chose to attend the general round tables on the state of the discipline. Despite rhetorical bows to decolonizing and de-centering the field, brought about by Russia’s imperialist war on Ukraine, the discussion was devoted mainly to ‘challenges.’ In the course of the meeting, it turned out that nowadays ‘challenges’ is a code word for Russia and Russian studies. The leading ‘problems’ identified are that the war deprived researchers and doctoral students of access to archives located in Russia and prevents British universities from sending students of Russian departments for their typical year abroad to Russia.
Instead, they are despatched to ‘inferior’ Russian-language programs in Kazakhstan or the Baltic states. Is it a genuine problem or succumbing to prejudice and stereotypes? After all, learners of English happily attend language courses in Britain, Malta, North America, South Africa or India and do not complain that not all are held in England. By the way, the EU country with the largest number of Russian native speakers, numbering 3 million, is Germany. It is just a short hop across the Northern See from Britain. One can master Russian in Berlin, if a need be.
How much does the lack of access to Russia’s archives hurt research? Thanks to technology, online portals with digitized Soviet and Russian newspapers and periodicals are ubiquitous and fantastically easy to use, some even free of charge. After the breakups of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, multiple Russian and Soviet archives and libraries found themselves in numerous successor states outside today’s Russian Federation, be it in Finland, Moldova or Uzbekistan.
Hearing this complaint about access to Russian archives made me wonder whether any western scholar managed to write a worthwhile monograph in Russian studies during the Cold War when westerners were usually barred from doing research in the Soviet Union and across the Soviet bloc. Do scholars nowadays discount Richard Pipes’s 1954 monograph The Formation of the Soviet Union, Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923 as worthless because the author did not research it with the use of Soviet archives?
The times are what they are. It is not in scholars’ gift to decide how things political should be. Their role is to make most of what is available at present and analyze the material in an innovative manner for a deepened insight into a given subject. Many an important topic just wither in plain sight, the sole task being to, at long last, take note of it. For instance, the shock of the 1940 Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania was such that numerous histories and studies of the three countries in the then Kremlin’s captivity were produced during the Cold War period.
Yet, no attention of this kind has been lavished on the independent nation-state of Tannu Tuva that Moscow grabbed in 1944, despite the fact that its territory equates to all the three Baltic states’ areas combined. To this day, no critical overview article, let alone monograph, has been devoted to the history of independent Tannu Tuva. It is not a problem of access to sources or archives but that of western myopia. A European country invariably appears to be more important and larger than one located in the midst of Asia.
Last but not least, the round table’s participants complained about inadequate funding that leaves many Russian studies specialists in precarious employment. But why on earth should Britain or other western states loosen the strings on their tight budgets to fund Russian studies? Russia’s population amounts to less than 2 percent of the globe’s inhabitants. Yes, in area the Russian Federation remains the world’s largest polity. But the shape of things to come is ironed out now in China, India, America and Europe, not in Russia. Meanwhile, the current highest demographic growth is observed in Africa, where the population doubled in the first quarter of the 21st century and is predicted to double again by the mid-century. This is happening at Europe’s southern doorsteps.
The BASEES catchment area of study is understood as composed of all the post-Soviet countries, alongside postcommunist ones in Europe, including Albania and the post-Yugoslav states for a good measure. The currently 29 countries’ combined populations amount to 410 million. The Russian Federation’s ethnic Russians total at best 104 million or a mere quarter of the number. That is the genuine size and importance of Russian themes. Yet at the conference the Russian and Russia-related subjects underpinned a plurality of events, while most panels—one way or another—referred to Russia, even if not directly devoted to a Russian topic.
Apart from English used during this conference, Russian de facto served as its unannounced second official language. Last but not least, the round table’s concern was for Russian students and difficulties they ‘suffer,’ due to the western sanctions on Russia and because of the Kremlin tightening the screw on the freedoms of speech and travel. It was a shocker, leading the audience to doubt who is the victim and perpetrator in Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine.
The attention of this type should be rather paid to Ukrainian students, not Russian ones. The former face existential danger, while the latter a mere inconvenience. Ukrainian students’ relatives back home die and are mimed under Russian bombs and on the front, while Russian students’ kin and kith remaining in Russia either support or keep silent on Russia’s imperialist war. Furthermore, these inconveniences experienced by Russian students at western universities are incomparable with the difficulties a student or scholar from the Soviet bloc used to face when aspiring to travel to the west, let alone to do research there before 1989 or during the first decade after the fall of communism.
Are what matters just well-paid permanent jobs for russianists, ample funding for their research and a more lenient scrutiny for their Russian students? Does the decolonial and de-centering rhetoric sizzles down just to that? Has Ukraine and its plight already been so easily forgotten? Has what Russia is doing already ceased to be an existential danger to democratic Europe? Should now Europe and the west open themselves even more widely to the Russian influence and threat for the sake of preserving Russian studies?
Russian Studies: A Reminder
The Russian studies did not exist in the west as a field of study or research until the founding of the Russian Institute at Columbia University in 1946. It was the beginning of area studies that initially did not aspire to do much more than research ‘Soviet Russia,’ as then the Soviet Union was popularly referred to in English. When the Cold War broke out with the 1948 Berlin blockade, the field was formalized with the establishment of an American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. It continues to this day under the acronym ASEEES (Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies). Despite the catch-all name for the Soviet Union and its empire in Europe, sovietology’s focus unabashedly rested on the Soviet central government in the Kremlin and Russian-language imperial culture in Moscow and Leningrad. In reality Soviet studies meant just Russian studies.
Britain jumped onto the area studies’ bandwagon only a decade later with the formation of BUAS (British Universities Association of Slavists) in 1956 and, then, of NASEES (National Association for Soviet and East European Studies) in 1967. Like the United States’ ASEEES, these two associations became the mainstay of sovietology in Britain. The overarching purpose of establishing area studies centers, programs and research across the west (Japan included) was not a charitable concern with Russian students or underemployed teachers of Russian. The goal was political and strategic, namely, to contain and roll back the worldwide communist threat posed by the Soviet Union and its initially junior partner, China.
Scrambling for ‘saving the field’ began when it lost its rationale with the collapse of communism in Europe in 1989 and the splintering of the Soviet Union two years later. For all practical reasons the west won the Cold War and significantly parred down communism, so that it survives as an ideology of statehood legitimation only in China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam. But even these remaining communist states adopted capitalism as the form of its economy, with the sole exception of North Korea.
Sovietologists’ subject of research, fears and desires gone, they fell back on post-Soviet Russia and its uncertain future. The Russian Federation was made into the core subject of their research, while the Kremlin’s dominion in postwar Europe was typically tagged with the clunky add-on of ‘(Central and) Eastern Europe’ to the names of various university centers of de facto Russian studies. No one was sure what to do of the post-Soviet states, especially in Asia. This led to longish, enumerative monikers of organizations and teaching programs that aspired to catch whatever previously belonged to the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc, with the additions of Albania, Yugoslavia, and at times, of Mongolia.
The name of Birmingham University’s CREES (Centre for Russian and East European Studies), originally founded in 1963, lacked any mention of post-Soviet Asia. Hence, in 2014, it was renamed as a Centre for Russian, European and Eurasian Studies, which allowed for retaining the unchanged acronym. In the same year, Japan’s premiere area studies center, originally established at Hokkaido University in 1956, followed the same route, morphing from the Slavic Research Center into the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center. Meanwhile, in 1989, Britain’s BUAS and NASEES joined forces to better withstand the winds of rapid geopolitical change and merged into a British Association for Soviet, Slavonic and East European Studies (BASSEES). Unfortunately, two years later the Soviet Union evaporated from the political map of the world, prompting the dropping of the adjective ‘Soviet’ from the organization’s name, and thus yielding BASEES.
These post-Soviet Russian studies 2.0 found their new tentative rationale in the research on ethnic conflicts (be it the wars of Yugoslav succession, the Nagorno Karabakh war or the Tajikistan civil war) and on the systemic transition of the postcommunist states from totalitarianism to democracy and from centrally-planned to market-oriented economy. The move toward teaching about other countries than Russia and their languages was sluggish at best. A hike in this regard happened when most postcommunist states joined NATO at the turn of the 21st century and the European Union during this century’s initial decade and a half.
There was also a fledgling effort by a group of former sovietologists to reinvent their field as the study of nationalism. In 1990, an Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism (ASEN) was founded in London. It emulated its American counterpart, established as early as 1972 under the name of Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN). It had been possible due to Ukrainian émigrés’ efforts, and as such had been an early attempt at de-Russifying sovietology. Yet the ASN took off in earnest only after the fall of communism. All in all, despite its global-wide ambitions of extending beyond the geographic area of Soviet studies, the study of nationalism began faltering in the 2010s. In contrast, Russian studies 2.0 gained the upper hand, whereas in Europe nationalism studies bifurcated into the study of populism and right-wing extremism, especially after the 2008 financial crisis and the 2015 migration crisis.
Simultaneously, al-Qaeda’s 2001 attacks on America reverted the narrowing stream of funding away from Russian studies 2.0 to the formerly neglected Arabic and Islamic area studies for the sake of propping Washington’s global war on terror with badly lacking expertise. With the bloody suppression of Chechnya in its quest for independence, Russia joined America in the war on terror, much to Washington’s delight. Seizing the moment, the Kremlin redefined Chechen freedom fighters as ‘terrorists,’ while Uncle Sam nodded in agreement. Under this useful pretence and cover offered by the United States, the Kremlin’s imperial grab of Georgian territory in 2008 and 2014 annexation of Crimea went almost unnoticed in the west. Russia tore up the Helsinki Final Act, on which the postwar peace and stability rested in Europe. Hardly anyone took note, while western condemnations of Moscow’s imperial resurgence were muted and rare. Neither did Russia’s continuation war in eastern Ukraine (2014-2022) manage to focus minds or to secure a reversal in funding streams for area studies. The Middle East has continued to be favored in this regard to this day.
Unexpectedly, a life-saving financial injection to Russian studies 2.0 came from Vladimir Putin’s new Russia. The country was economically rejuvenated with booming hydrocarbon revenues and basked in its unprecedented alliance with Washington. In 2007, the Russian president established a Russkii Mir (Russian World) foundation. In emulation of China’s Confucius Institute organization (established three years earlier), Russkiy Mir was tasked with spreading soft and not so soft Russian influence and propaganda under the guise of scholarship and language teaching. Many a western university or scholar involved in Russian studies 2.0 was elated to take up the offer of Russkii Mir money, no questions asked about its—invariably, murky—origin. Russian studies 2.0 starved of funding and purpose for the lean two and a half postcommunist decades proved an easy target for the Kremlin.
The Russian annexation of Crimea hindered the honeymoon for not longer than half a decade. In 2019, to the Ukrainian deputies’ fury, Russian parliamentarians were readmitted to the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly. Taking bribe money offered by the Kremlin became once again acceptable, in fashion even. Corruption continued, alongside with the reset of Russian Studies 2.0. The field’s renewed focus zoomed in squarely on Russia and the country’s culture, language and interest, to the again growing neglect of other post-Soviet and postcommunist countries. Oxford University’s Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre (RESC) weaned itself off the Kremlin’s money already in 2014. But other centers did not, for instance, Edinburgh University’s Princess Dashkova Russian Centre. This Dashkova Centre severed its last ties with the Russki Mir only eight months after Russia’s 2022 attack on Ukraine.
Diversification or Ruzzian Studies 3.0
Russia’s imperial war of choice on Ukraine compelled another reset in Russian studies, not so well concealed under the loose cloak of clunky enumerative names of the field’s organizations that feature a clutch of post-Soviet and postcommunist states and territories. These enumerations serve well the Kremlin’s propaganda claims that even western scholars and universities ‘recognize’ Moscow’s ‘right’ to a Russian sphere of influence in Europe and Asia.
Even better: for instance, in Britain the term ‘Eastern Europe’ remains in widespread use across the mass media, research and public discussions. In an unreflective Cold War fashion this concept embraces two-thirds of Europe, or the eastern half of the European Union, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus and European Russia. As a result, the British public opinion became vaguely convinced that Russia has a good claim to these territories and that the Kremlin is right protesting that the eastward enlargement of NATO and the EU stepped on its (imperial) sphere of influence in this area.
In the early 2010s, the Kremlin’s proposals of carving up Eurasia and the world into neoimperial spheres of influence between America, China and Russia sounded ridiculous and fell on deaf ears. Not any more after 2022. Russia now acts on this plan, emboldened by Washington’s robust embracement of such a geopolitical vision of the coming future. Clueless and unreflectively pro-Russian westerners even protest against helping Ukraine as the best way to establish and preserve peace on the continent, that is, by allowing Russia to occupy the country. No need to wait for Washington to lead the west, given the incumbent American president’s erratic behavior and unwavering pro-Russian stance. On top of that, he wages an ideological war on the US universities, and throttles the disobedient ones into submission by funding reductions and massive fines.
In view of the situation, no additional—let alone, increased—funding for Russian studies should be expected in Britain and across Western Europe. It is not needed; there are millions of native and heritage speakers of Russian in the European Union and the United Kingdom. In addition, tens of millions of people of my age (50-70) from the postcommunist countries were compelled to learn Russian in the Soviet bloc. Hence, whichever educational needs or positions appear with the fluency in Russian as a requirement, they can be easily filled in with candidates from these pools.
What is urgently needed, however, is teaching provisions of Ukrainian and other state languages from the eastern half of the EU and NATO, be it Bulgarian, Estonian, Polish or Romanian. Another necessity is to un-lump Russian studies. Neither Germany, nor Italy, nor Spain are taught together as part of some ‘Western European studies.’ Even in the case of ‘small states,’ accepted fields of area studies are smaller, like that of Scandinavian studies or Benelux countries studies. Why not to follow the same course in Central and Eastern Europe and in post-Soviet Asia? I dare say that Kazakhstan, Poland or Ukraine each easily constitutes a separate field of study in its own right, whereas Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are already customarily bunched up as the field of Baltic countries studies.
In the desperate defence of Russian studies and their relevance, some claim that without learning Russian first it is impossible to do sensible research on Czech, Latvian or Ukrainian history. Is that so? How would it sound if I proposed that neither Western European nor German history can be studied without mastering English first? That English (Anglophone) studies are not properly funded? Absurd, isn’t it? But exactly such a ‘logic’ is accepted in claims about Russian studies. Yes, the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union impacted numerous states and their populations, but typically not for long. On the other hand, it was the Americans and British who won World War II in Western Europe. Both countries’ military bases have been present there for much longer than the existence of the Soviet bloc. And until the early 1990s, (West) Germany had to clear all its bilateral and international agreements with the American, British and French embassies in Bonn.
What lacks even at the level of tentative reflection is how to teach languages, cultures, histories and politics of the nations under Russia’s colonial yoke. Going by the yardstick of the recognized republican and regional languages in today’s Russian Federation, there are at least 50 such nations. They account for a third of the empire’s population, but their ethnic homelands amount to the staggering four-fifths of neoimperial Russia’s territory. Someone opined at the BASEES that the nations would deserve scholarly attention only after gaining independence, which does not seem to be on the cards. It is like saying that Czech or Estonian history and language did not deserve any attention before Czechia and Estonia became independent nation-states in 1993 and 1991, respectively.
As an example of good practice in this regard, let me cite Hokkaido University’s Slavic-Eurasian Research Center (SRC). At present this center boasts a specialist in Chukchi history and language, alongside researchers focusing on Ukraine, Central Asia and Central Europe. This mix of experts gathered at the SRC in reply to the current times’ needs and challenges is commendable and that could be usefully replicated across the west.
Thanks to ramping up their defence budgets to 5 percent of GDP, Europe’s NATO member states (will soon) have ample funding for relevant research and for teaching needed skills. Furthermore, in 2025, Britain and Ukraine signed a 100-year partnership agreement. I am sure the coming torrent of funding will rightly not be spent on teaching Russian. What counts as the most urgent task is teaching Ukrainian language and history, alongside those of the countries in the EU’s eastern half. This is the basic way to ensure interoperationality between the countries’ armies, administrations and intellectual elites for ensuring that Ukraine stands and NATO’s eastern flank is secured against Russia from the High Arctic down to the Mediterranean.
Other tasks include innovative engagement with AI and machine translation for compiling, sorting and searching high volumes of research material in multiple languages and scripts. The immediate goal is to stem the inundation of the west by Russia’s automated polyglot propaganda. The subsequent step is to turn the tide back by breaching Russia’s own internet blockade with an eye to flooding the Russian population with relevant and evidenced information in the country’s multiple languages. For this purpose, heavy investment is needed for developing online translation facilities and large language models in these languages. For instance, when Russia pounced on Ukraine in 2022, Google Translate featured then only one republican language of this type, namely, Tatar. Two years later, Google Translate—not any Russian studies—added 12 such languages, among others Chechen and Sakha (Yakut).
I could continue with the enumeration of further tasks and challenges posed by the current political and military developments. That is not the point. I have embarked on this essay to signal how rudderless Russian studies have been for the past three and a half decades. Now, instead of complaining about funding and diminished significance, it is up to the field’s practitioners to respond creatively to their countries’ broader needs in these precarious times or face irrelevance. Letting Russian studies to walk further as a zombi risks turning the field into the Kremlin’s free-of-charge instrument of influence, indeed, the Ruzzian studies 3.0 of useful idiots from the west.
Illustrations: AI-generated at the author’s prompts.
