How the tentacles of the Russian octopus “occupied” Western academia

The three pillars of Russian dominance are money, centers and agents of influence that promote a Russia-centric agenda and cultivate the loyalty of Western societies to Russia.

When I was working on this text, the Ukrainian Institute in France signed a memorandum with the Sorbonne “for the development of Ukrainian studies programs.” Ukrainian studies at the famous French university was closed in 2012. But students had the opportunity to study for... a master's degree in Russian studies. Ten years of Ukraine’s non-presence in France during the turbulence that is shaking all of Europe today. A decade during which generations grew up learning Russian instead of Ukrainian.

Ukraine was replaced by Russia long before this. Or rather, we must admit: we were almost not on the academic map of the world. The question was only about “does Ukraine have a history?”, as Mark von Hagen asked in 1995.

Of course, this is an argument for a discussion about the unreflected colonial optics of former empires, their weak interest in the peoples on the eastern flank of Europe “under the wing” of Russia, which seems to have grown little since the time of Kundera’s “The Tragedy of Central Europe.” But in the thirty years of Independence, we too have found something to think about. Especially about whether we can hope for support where the only people who know about us are the facts of our kinship with Russia, which Russia dictates.

Instead of an introduction: the tentacles of the Russian octopus

At least three official soft power organizations are promoting Russia in the world, particularly in the Western academic world. These are the “Federal Agency for the Affairs of the Commonwealth of Independent States, Compatriots Living Abroad, and International Humanitarian Cooperation (Rossotrudnichestvo)”, the sanctioned fund “Russian World” and the “Fund for Support of Public Diplomacy named after A. M. Gorchakov”, whose very names bear flair of aggressive imperialism. Relying on colossal funding, they work for the political and military ambitions of the empire.

Now Rossotrudnichestvo, this many-headed dragon (more than a hundred international representative offices), is fighting against the abolition of Russian culture in the West. Putin’s Russkiy Mir Foundation previously financed anti-Ukrainian campaigns among the Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, the project of the “Rusyn movement” in Transcarpathia, Russian World conferences in Kharkov and Donetsk, having cells throughout Ukraine before the Revolution of Dignity.

Together with the Gorchakov Foundation, he is currently developing an internship program for young political scientists and international affairs specialists InteRussia20 and has a program of scientific visits “New Generation”. The Gorchakov Foundation directly feeds from the hands of Putin’s sanctioned oligarchs. It has a large list of events for foreign scientists, for example, the Russian-Slovak forum and the Russian-German conference “Postdam Meetings”. Competent promotion, work with young scientists, flows of propaganda and disinformation and, of course, money do their job.

Russia maintains a privileged position in Western academia both in relation to other regional studies, whose countries and peoples it declares to be the Orthodox “Russian world” and terrorizes with war in case of resistance, and in relation to Western research itself. Suddenly it became clear that they were saturated with Russian propaganda and colonial tradition, and that Russian studies shamelessly replaced Sovietology, Slavic studies, Caucasian, Eastern European and other studies, including Ukrainian studies, for Western institutions.

Ukrainian studies and other regional studies in the West

Two years ago, the Ukrainian Institute counted more than 160 centers of Ukrainian studies in the world (together with Crimean Tatar studios). We are talking about university centers, departments and programs, the map of which covers more than 30 countries (out of 195 currently existing). An analysis of the Ukrainian Studies Go Global project showed that Ukrainian studies are represented in only 57 universities out of a global list of two hundred leading universities, and seven offer full programs... Few of them are full-fledged academic centers.

Under the USSR, studies of the region focused on Russian studies and Sovietology. In 1957, Ukrainian scholar Clarence Manning, then head of the Department of Slavic Studies at Columbia University, wrote about the Moscow-centricity of Western Slavic studies. Ukrainians who escaped the Soviet concentration camp were expected to build careers in Russian studios, like Asya Gumetskaya, the recently deceased daughter of the writer Sergei Pilipenko and sister of the sculptor and poet Myrtala. In the 1960s, Gumetskaya began teaching Russian at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, and during Independence she translated sister poems from Russian into Ukrainian. At first, both knew the language poorly, having seen the period of Russification of Kharkov and wandering around the USSR in fear as the family of a repressed person.

During the Cold War, the United States invested in the development of Sovietology - on the principle of “know the enemy by sight.” Gradually, the industry slipped into rebroadcasting Kremlin propaganda—or it immediately became one. When the Soviet Union unexpectedly collapsed, as Oksana Zabuzhko wrote, “professional Sovietologists insidiously “demoted” by fate” hoped that this would not last long.

For thirty years, the peoples and regions around Russia have remained without due attention, and the centers of Russian studies and Soviet studies in some places give the impression of inclusion. The more specialized departments and institutes were opened, the more the network of Russian soft influence increased - but knowledge about numerous peoples and the characteristics of the regions did not become deeper. Moreover, this knowledge was often preserved and overgrown with stereotypes, like a boat on the seabed with shells.

This is the answer to why, in the ninth year of Russia’s hybrid war against Ukraine, Western scientists were shocked by the full-scale invasion, and even more so by the Ukrainian resistance. And why experts, who have been making money from their expertise on Russia for decades, predicted Russian sympathies for Nazism and genocides.

In the descriptions of the Slavic departments, in the third year of the war, I find uncritical admiration for Russia. On Facebook they are just advertising a course on Leo Tolstoy at the Ivy League University of Bravna, whose Slavic studies website is decorated with a photo of the Kremlin.

My question to them remained unanswered: exactly how the lectures discuss the horrifying, inhumane pictures in Anna Karenina, as well as Tolstoy’s colonial behavior, the facts of his violence against his wife and numerous illegitimate children from recent serfs, which prompt the assumption of rape and garrasment .

I find confirmation of the conclusions of Vox Ukraine: descriptions of Russian courses at US universities are characterized by stiltedness, stereotypes and propaganda of Russian “greatness”. Other peoples are often brushed off like an annoying fly with one or two courses, a “statement” on a website, or an ethnographic workshop.

I’m studying Slavic studies at Yale University, another Ivy League university we know by the name of Ukraine’s friend Timothy Snyder. Of the fourteen professors on the staff, twelve (!) are Russian specialists. One researcher graduated from Lviv University, translates Ukrainian literature, but went into Russian studies - perhaps due to the lack of career opportunities in Ukrainian studies, although this is also a matter of taste and choice.

Master's courses at the department concern Russia, and until recently dissertations in Slavic studies were defended either in the program on Russian literature and culture, or in the history of art and Slavic studies, which focused on... Russian art and literature. Why then does the department claim the name “Slavic languages ​​and literatures”?

The network of Russian influence is extensive and sticky. It is not surprising that after February 24, 2022, scientists started talking about rethinking the Moscow-centric approach and the long-term neglect of non-Russian cultures. It is surprising how long the academic community has avoided these sensitive issues.

But it seems that again the most concerned are the Ukrainianists and the least concerned are the Russianists, Sovietologists, the Russians, the boundaries between whom are sometimes blurred. Their second concern concerns discomfort and obstacles in the usual course of life. In an interview with Radio Liberty, Russian specialist Mark Steinberg from the University of Illinois said that the debate about decolonization is not new, but something will have to change, because “now people are dying because of it” (I leave the level of cynicism without comment).

This is the Steinberg who, together with the late Russian emigrant Nikolai Ryazanovsky, wrote a mega-popular textbook. Their “History of Russia” begins with the great imperial twist of Kievan Russia. Steinberg promised reporters to change their “simple assumptions” about continuity between Kiev and Moscow. I dread to think how the propaganda narrative of a textbook that has taught generations of American students a distorted history of the region will become more complicated.

In the end, when during the war there was a need to add something from Ukrainian studies to the curriculum, Russian specialists, who spent their entire lives writing about Tolstoyevsky’s novels, took up the matter. This is due to the hegemony of Russia, the sluggishness of the academic system, and probably the lack of personnel - but in Ukraine there are enough competent professors who lost their jobs due to the war. And they could strengthen the ability of Western universities to teach about Ukraine and the region. For example, at the all-Russian Russian & Slavic Studies at the University of Arizona, a Russian professor, the author of the only book on Russian chanson, now teaches about Ukraine and explores the “memory of the past” of Russia and Ukraine.

Why on earth can some Russian specialist participate in a discussion about Ukraine only, so to speak, on default settings? From a detached perspective, it is an example of a colonial approach, perhaps mental laziness and even academic arrogance. In such situations, it would seem that it is enough to use the transference technique: imagine that this is not a Ukrainian or Russian woman, but, for example, a dark-skinned American woman whose experience a white American woman wants to describe.

A similar thing happened in 2018, when the American magazine The Nation published poetry by a white author written in the language of African-American neighborhoods. Very quickly the editors had to apologize. I will return to this magazine later, but the fact remains: in the West, many people still find it difficult to mix Ukrainian and Russian experience, history, culture and identity.

Scientific achievements of Russian intelligence services

The KGB used scientists for its operations and no doubt had agents among them. The Soviet Committee for Cultural Interaction with Compatriots was actually engaged in “fighting enemies”: that is, emigrant national and cultural organizations. We find examples in the KGB manual published five years ago, to which Texts was the first to draw attention.

An employee of the Estonian Department of the Committee for Cultural Interaction, commissioned by the KGB, went to Sweden to establish connections with local scientists. For example, he kindly helped with materials to a professor of political economy who wanted to work in Estonian archives, and contributed to his trip to Tallinn. It seems that Russian intelligence services have always been interested in Western political scientists.

In the Estonian capital, a well-informed historical agent was assigned to a naive professor. Later, the “historian”, at the invitation of a colleague, left for Sweden, receiving cover for an operational mission. The professor never found out about these vicissitudes.

The KGB carried out operations against Ukraine, and there should have been many more of them than is known. For example, in the early 1980s, the KGB began a campaign in the West to discredit the memory of the Holodomor in order to undermine trust and silence the voice of the Ukrainian diaspora, which was preparing for the half-century anniversary of the genocide. On May 19, 1983, a message appeared about the organization of a scientific symposium at the universities of Quebec and the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta, which is now the main center for Holodomor research.

A month later, agents informed the first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Shcherbitsky, that Yemelyan Pritsak, director of the Ukrainian Scientific Institute at Harvard, wanted to found a center for Holodomor research following the example of Yad Vashem.

There they were supposed to collect evidence, lists of victims, organize scientific events and, most importantly, develop educational programs and courses about the Holodomor. The KGB archive message contains two resolutions: Shcherbitsky - on the order to create a counteraction strategy, and the chairman of the Ukrainian KGB of the Ukrainian SSR Mukha on the approval of such a plan. This was a link in a long chain of KGB activities to desecrate the topic of the Holodomor.

The center planned by Pritsak, which is known only from the KGB archives, did not appear. But in October of the same year, Pritsak and Israeli historian Shmuel Ettinger organized a conference in Canada “Ukrainian-Jewish relations in historical perspective.” There, a scientific collection of the same name was founded and the modern direction of Ukrainian-Jewish research was actually approved.

Another Operation Pharisees discredited Robert Conquest's influential work, Harvest of Sorrow. Soviet collectivization and terror by famine." For this purpose, they created a pseudoscientific commission and promoted publications with well-known narratives about “Ukrainian nationalists”, for example, in the New York Times Book Review. KGB messages contained resolutions on the development of plans to counter, “promote” discreditable materials in the press, but the efforts of the diaspora gradually brought the hidden to the surface.

In 1987, the US Congress approved a report with the results of an investigation into signs of artificial famine. This was an informational victory for the Ukrainian diaspora, and at the end of the year Shcherbitsky had to mention the fact of the famine in his report. We cannot pretend, however, that the campaign of denial and silence is over.

Russia continues to put pressure on governments to block recognition of the genocide, successfully promoting KGB narratives in the academy and the media: for example, that all Soviet peasants starved due to Stalin's harsh management style. Despite Ukraine's efforts over the years, only a full-scale war broke the ice. During the two years of war, the Holodomor was recognized as genocide by 15 countries, including the Czech Republic, Moldova, Germany, Bulgaria and France, which were traditionally inert due to strong Russophilia. This avalanche confirmed that non-recognition was political, a declaration of which side you were on, and not a matter of academic debate, as it was presented.

In 1984, Yuri Bezmenov, an ex-KGB agent who fled to the West, gave an interview about the ideological sabotage of the USSR. To destroy a country, you need to level out quality education, intervene in the institutional system, public life, politics, economics, culture and the defense system. For a quarter of a century, the operation turned the target country into an obedient dog of the Soviet Union.

It is clear that such goals cannot be achieved without influencing the academic environment. Therefore, the KGB worked intensively with “progressive intellectuals”: ​​foreign expert(s), professor(s), journalist(s), writers and writers.

Bezmenov mentions in this cohort the “useful idiots” of the Kremlin who have made a career on the topic of Russia. Among them are Henry Kissinger, a politician with enormous authority and a mouthpiece for the Kremlin narrative about Ukraine; New York Times editor and Pulitzer Prize winner for reporting from the USSR Gadrick Smith, who lived in Moscow for years; Robert Kaiser, who worked as a reporter for The Washington Post for half a century, is the author of five books about the USSR.

The role of Russian intelligence services and their information operations in Western academia has yet to be reflected upon. Particularly important are distant vibrations, waves after an earthquake, which continue to pump science from the inside. This is propaganda implanted into the flesh of academic discussion, anti-Ukrainian narratives, emotional attachment that forms the loyalty of Western scientists to imperialism and Russian political hegemony in the region.

The discussion started by Swedish-American expert Andreas Åslund after analyzing the “black lists” of Western scientists whom Russia has banned from entering is indicative. He noted that the majority of the list was made up of Ukrainian scholars and employees of think tanks, but there were almost no Russian specialists there. Åslund rightly asks whether this indicates that Russia views academic professors as loyal and “safe”?

That is, in the exact sciences, science, and intelligence services, they were talking about the theft of technologies and developments, luring away scientists, developers, let’s be honest, pilots on Western fighters - everything that in the future today helps Russia kill Ukrainians with hardware. And in culturally oriented humanities, humanities, human souls were hunted. This investment is more promising than the design of a rocket or an airplane: new designs will be found, but it is best to cultivate loyalty.

Recently, a Russian professor of political science was arrested in Estonia on suspicion of espionage. Or should we get used to Russian agents in science, culture and other areas that the civilized world considers civil and humanistic? Is it surprising to see the frivolity of Western universities that continue to invite these “victims of war”.

A month ago, I watched as a respected Russian political scientist in Finland ruined the reputation of a Ukrainian political scientist. The man published a joint photo with the following caption: “[This is] proof that a Russian and a Ukrainian can successfully cooperate and work together on Finnish soil, sharing common scientific views and human values. And yes, peace to the world!”

Due to public hate from Ukrainian scientists, the message later disappeared. I reviewed the available interviews with him (most of which were done by the Russian office of Radio Liberty) and became familiar with the research, and most importantly, his conclusions over these ten years. From year to year, from book to book, this political scientist drags his dead horse: problems in Russia are due to corruption, because different groups strive to earn “rent”.

The thought of Russia’s responsibility for the war and crimes against humanity, of which there are many, has still not crossed his mind; he does not think about how best Russia should pay reparations, and is not concerned with anything other than the declarative Soviet “peace-to-peace”.

I’m already silent that, against the backdrop of the whole catastrophe, Russian political scientists should immediately leave the profession. Instead of applying for every scholarship for war victims.

Loud decolonization of Slavic studies

As the saying goes, an empty cadib sounds loud. Last year, decolonization, perhaps the most popular topic of industry discussion since February 2022, became the theme of the Association of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) conference. This is an organization with an annual conference with hundreds of panels and a lot of people from all over. It was supposed to be about a political reassessment of “Russocentric relations of power and hierarchy in the region and how it is studied.”

ASEEES emphasized how difficult it is to change focus (id est: to begin to reflect on one's own role in strengthening colonialism and the ambitions of an empire that kills scientists and destroys universities in a neighboring country). The good thing is that they finally paid attention to Chornobyl and Odesa, that is, the idea of ​​​​not using colonial place names.

The not-so-good thing is that most of the reports and panels were dedicated to Russia, and it is not a fact that all of them were about critical reflection, much less decolonization. The proposals for papers at the current conference are once again dominated by topics in Russian studies, without a hint of a change in focus.

I also looked at less obvious places to understand how the loudly announced decolonization is happening. For example, ASEEES provides subventions twice a year for the first book - this is support for young scientists who undertake to explore Slavic and Eurasian countries. The 2022-2023 subvention supported eight studies, seven of which were written by Russian scholars, and one by a Ukrainian researcher of Soviet architecture.

This is the work of more than one year: that is, a new generation of specialists wrote about Russian music, Russian labor culture, Russians in Weimar Berlin, “The Russia We Lost” (this is also the title of the book), while real Russia was waging a hybrid war and preparing for a full-scale, — and did not even notice the intensely deepening tectonic faults.

Meanwhile, in the mail there is a letter from ASEEES announcing a scholarship - 25 thousand dollars for the study of Russian history. This program bears the name of Cohen-Tucker, and although it is not the only one in Russian studies, it is worth special mention. It was founded in 2015 by Katrina van den Heuvel and Steven Cohen, a couple known for relaying Russian propaganda about Ukraine.

Due to protests within the Association, the proposal was rejected; but the board later voted yes. Cohen, one of the most respected Russian historians in the United States, became famous toward the end of his life as a frequent guest on Russia Today and a supporter of Putin. Since the beginning of Russia’s hybrid invasion, he has blamed the United States for the “Ukrainian crisis,” stood up for Yanukovych, doubted that the occupation of Crimea was “illegal,” said that it was Ukraine that shot down a Malaysian Boeing over the Donetsk region, and that a “civil war” continues in Ukraine.

Now Cohen's widow, van den Heuvel, a former editor of The Nation, is spreading pro-Kremlin narratives in The Washington Post. I reviewed her columns starting from February 15, 2022: van den Heuvel warns against “NATO expansion” because of Ukraine, demands the start of negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, increases the emotional temperature due to the supposedly terrible impact of sanctions against Russia on the global economy, frightens with a catastrophe in Europe without Russian gas, a new “cold war” of the United States with Russia and China and nuclear "incident".

Finally, I look at what the dissertations of doctoral students from Slavic departments and institutes, who took up their posts during the full-scale Russian-Ukrainian war, are writing about. Dissertation topics reflect scientific trends in the near future. Young scientists in the USA, Britain and Germany continue to search for the secrets of the “Russian soul”. For example, most of the current doctoral students at Ohio State University work in Russian studies, including a graduate of Zhytomyr University. Basically, they have received the appropriate education, teach Russian, travel to Russia or are Russian women.

One doctoral student did not indicate interests in Russian studies. But in his public profiles, he, a graduate of a Kyiv university, calls himself a “Russian resident” from Zaporozhye and holds Russian-language events for the we-know-what diaspora in the United States. At the University of Washington, the award for the best master's thesis was won by a student from Moscow, Svetlana Ostroverkhova: she had a study of the kindness of Prince Myshkin from Dostoevsky's novel that was extremely relevant in 2023. These examples show how complex the situation is.

Fortunately, Slavic centers such as Cambridge are proving that new dissertations need not include stale topics about Russia. So some processes are slowly happening. And not all Slavic centers promote Russians and Russian narratives. There are thoughts that restore faith in the humanities and social sciences as a space for intellectual discussion and critical reflection, opposing the politics of falsification and hatred.

However, Russia's hegemony in Western academia requires research registration, a critical approach, and, importantly, uncomfortable self-examination of Western institutions and environments. Therefore, instead of drawing conclusions in the third year of a full-scale war, let’s give ourselves up to the task: there is no end to the work, and the emotional interest in Ukraine, which was in the first months after the invasion, has subsided. And this is good, because it allows you to check your watch with reality.