*A shorter version of this article first appeared on the invaluable Johnson’s Russia List, #38, 14 February 2024, https://russialist.org/
In a classic exposition of politicized science, Juliet Johnson, in the presidential address* to the 2023 annual convention of the Association for Slavic, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies (ASEEES), offered a very distorted description of the state of Slavic, Eurasian and Eastern European studies in a call to “re-center” their supposed orientation and focus away from Russia. This call fits into an overall pattern of the perversion of science that has been deepening across American academia for decades.
Agitated, activist academics tell is in scientific journals that there is a genetic disorder of “whiteness.” In May 2021, the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association published the article “On Having Whiteness” written by a black doctor, Donald Ross, MD. The journal abstract for the article reads: “Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which ‘white’ people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness’s infiltrated appetites—to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning (“never again”) or as temptation (“great again”). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure” (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00030651211008507?journalCode=apaa&fbclid=IwAR3uvydXgUnIXLZ2NoExCKN7bmASl3HKo0NwzVO-QKunA7aQzMw8snp03kQ). Ross and his thoughts were hosted at a conference of the The New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute in 2020 in which he presented on the same theme (https://internationalpsychoanalysis.net/on-having-whiteness-with-donald-moss-at-nypsi/?fbclid=IwAR2cJG_WSAYmOJecGpvnuKRmeabj6zcoQEdGA3Irkx_zkIh9w2V_TWqJTgs). Soon the Washington Post, already a leader in anti-Russian narratives, picked up Ross’s mantle, offering an editorial on “multiracial whiteness,” in which a New York University ‘professor’ named Cristina Beltran leveled a pseudo-academic attack on all non-whites who support former President Donald Trump, Republicans, or conservatives and their causes. Such traitorous non-whites, in her unique reading of reality, had decided to become white or bathe in whiteness. They do so on “the promise” from whites that minorities, like whites, “can lay claim to the politics of aggression, exclusion and domination.” They manifest the whiteness they treacherously appropriate, she scribbled, by the “persecution and dehumanization of others” (www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/01/15/understand-trumps-support-we-must-think-terms-multiracial-whiteness/?fbclid=IwAR0HlMvJbqufrYHNX6mTl2gHMd91SrVJtrhye9YBl_XzLw5EH_BfesZ4uLs). This disease of whiteness is ‘communicable’ and therefore it is urgent that it be treated, we are told by erstwhile academics striving for the managerial state.
In Slavic, Eurasian, and Eastern Eurpean studies, Johnson informs us, there is a disorder of “Great Russian narrative” that must be overthrown by “de-centering.” Vladimir Lenin also urged a struggle against “bourgeois science” and “Great Russian chauvinism”; on and on it goes. If Johnson gets her way, and she surely will, then we likely will be seeing pieces describing the disorder of Russianness or something of this order. Already elements of Russian culture have been ‘cancelled’ at points across the globe whether in sport, academia, or the arts. American cancel culture and its biased self-righteous wokeness need to catch up. Accordingly, Johnson calls for ‘de-centering’ Russia in the realm of Eurasian, Eastern European, and Slavic studies.
In order to justify ‘decentering’ the Great Russia narrative’ and set up her argument Professor Johnson frames the problem for her listeners not by presenting data but by a meaningless anecdote. This kind of approach comprises much of what passes for ‘science’ in American academia nowadays. Thus, Johnson homes in on a Moscow sociologist ‘friend’ who, according to Johnson’s telling, rejected her gift of a Kyrgyz embroidered pillowcase covers “refused even to touch them, saying ‘why would I want something so provincial’”. This served the purpose of demonstrating both the imperial arrogance, hubris, and (as Michael McFaul has so wisely lectured all Americans) guilt of all Russians in the problem of imperialism, colonialism, and neo-imperialism as well as the need to return this to the center of the ASEEES field. In this view, Russia must be studied in a biased fashion by studying it as American history is studied in our schools and universities today, solely through the eyes of those who have an axe to grind. Russia is to studies as much as Latvia is and is to be framed by anti-Russian Western, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Polish, Czech, Kyrgyz, Georgian and disaffected Russian observers and not according to its weight in the world or any objective, scientific standards.
Since anecdotal evidence is so important to American scholars – particularly when a political cause, in this case the liberation of Ukraine that so much drives Johnson’s scienctific agenda – I will offer my own. Years ago, circa 1995, when I was still, as I recall, a doctoral student, I and my now deceased Jewish-Russian-Soviet wife were invited by a friend who worked in the State Department to a get-together hosted at the home of the Georgian ambassador to the US or the Georgian embassy, again I cannot recall precisely. I do recall very clearly one incident during that evening. My friend introduced us to a female co-worker from State, who upon hearing my wife’s Russian accent (dread!) immediately shifted into a mocking parody of a stereotypical ‘novaya russkaya’ moskvichka (new Russian Muscovite female), using her hand as an imagined telephone. The intent was clearly to insult my wife, whom she had just met but had the temerity to speak English with a thick Russian accent – that is, to be a dastardly Great Russian. On the basis of this anecdote one, perhaps in anger, might propose that ASEEES should promote a shift to a greater emphasis on the study of russophobia in any study of Russia that still might be permitted in future? Johnson’s lame anecdote and a few quotes from many decades ago of other ASEEES members making claims similar to her own are the only pieces of ‘evidence’ political scientist Johnson provides on matters being off-center, imbalanced in favor of the “Great Russian narrative” in the ASEEES universe.
Johnson ‘conceptualizes’ her “de-centering Russia”, supposedly not as cancelling Russia per American academia’s ubiquitous ‘cancel culture’, but as a movement to support an abandonment of the allegedly dominant approach in Slavic, Eurasian, and Eastern European studies (SEEES) that “marginalizes others and privileges a ‘Great Russian’ narrative.” The field must “acknowledge the perspectives, choices, and central roles of other countries and peoples in the region, including indigenous and racialized peoples” and not treat the non-Russian Soviet peoples and republics as somehow lesser or ‘peripheral’”. … “De-centering Russia means questioning the still-predominant narrative that privileges the relationship between the United States (or the “West” more broadly) and Russia. Just like it’s not all about Russia, it’s not all about the US or the West, either. For example, one of the most infuriating implications of the popular narrative that Western expansion of NATO and the EU is to blame for Russia’s ongoing violence in the region is the implicit assumption that the countries wanting to join both are somehow pawns to be swapped between Great Powers.” Anyone who pays even scant attention to U.S. media, academia, and government knows that the idea that NATO expansion is a cause or perhaps the major cause in the war is virtually banned from Western discourse, but for Johnson the idea is an “infuriating” “popular narrative.” One gets the feeling that the US is thrown in as a cover for her anti-Russian position, with Johnson posing as a champion of the little guys, who just happened to find an ‘open door’ to NATO, without any cajoling, urging, or bribing. Who opened the door, whether the door should have been opened or the house even left stabding, and how new members were nudged into the alliance must be ignored. What really infuriates Johnson is that the Russians claim that NATO expansion above all the other encroachments on its national interests and security forced Russia to act. Here, the infuriated president of an association encompassing all the social sciences and humanitarian studies related to all the states and peoples ranging from Warsaw to, dare I say, Vladivostok, from, dare I say, Murmansk to Termez also ignores – among much else – the clear cut data provided to us from Ukraine’s top negotiators at the Gomel and Istanbul talks of March-April 2022 as well as other Ukrainian officials that Russian negotiators’ primary goal was an end to NATO expansion (https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1746596120971673766.html; see also https://x.com/i_katchanovski/status/1750362694949966291?s=51&t=n5DkcqsvQXNd3DfCRCwexQ).
Similarly, Johnson provides no evidence whatsoever to support her claims that non-Russian peoples are ‘racialized’, peripheralized, or otherwise treated disproportionately to their power, influence or the interest they attract in service of some “Great Russian narrative.” In accordance with the new ‘scientific’ approach claimed unilaterally for themselves by American liberals, Wokists and their ilk, her presentation is anything but data rich. Johnson provides no data on the ratio of ‘Great Russian-centric’ to non-Great Russian-centric SEEES university courses, doctoral dissertations, book publications, peer-reviewed journal articles, or other publications. Nothing of the sort. She simply complains that Russia has received and continues to receive the lion’s share of attention in SEEES and a Russian sociologist does not like Kyrgyz pillow cases. Falling short of this, the low scholarly bar relative to her claim, Johnson also fails to address that which actually would be a real issue indicating SEEES is imbalanced, off-center, non-proportional in its foci. That is, is the SEEES focus overly Russia-centric in the sense of their attention to Russia exceeding Russia’s importance in world affairs relative to other ASEEES countries? That perhaps would be an issue worth pursuing but one, albeit, difficult to measure and certainly not addressed by Johnson.
Scholarly, analytical, governmental, and public concentration on great powers is natural. It is similar to the greater attention that men pay to beautiful women or that women pay to powerful men (please forgive the not fully inclusive nature of the last phrase and hence lack of Wokism here). We can rage at ‘collective criticism/self-criticism’ sessions against what is natural, but that will change nothing in our human realm. This is true no matter how much “hunger for change” there may (or may not) be or how much people atop ‘evil hierarchies’ and ‘patriarchies’ demand, as Johnson does, that we “change quickly” “individually and collectively” with “no more excuses.”
Johnson describes how ASEEES should explain the propriety of de-centering Russia to the outside world, but she ignores the reality to which that outside world should alert her. In every realm or sphere of human activity it is powerful individuals, universities, companies, countries, cultures that draw ‘excessive’ attention. The seeming excessive nature of the attention they attract is usually commensurate with the natural level of attention their power and influential provoke, putting aside intentional efforts to shape attention (propaganda, marketing, public diplomacy, disinformation, misinformation, fake news, etc.) in one way or another. The US government’s diplomatic, military, economic, and cultural efforts are focused more on Russia than any other state in the SEEES region and for good reason. The power of Russia’s military, economy, and political influence far exceeds that of Kyrgyzstan. Just ask the Kyrgyz.
Johnson is right only in part when she says that this a consequence or legacy of the Cold War. That conflict was the consequence of the USSR’s importance as one of two superpowers – its great power. Power draws attention in politics just as beauty does in male-female relations. Get used to it. Before and after Soviet power, Russia has been one of the top three-to-five world powers, depending on one’s interpretation and criteria. Therefore, it indeed would be strange if the White House, State Department, Defense Department, CIA, the Pentagon, media, business and, yes, academia and ASEEES were to devote more attention to Kyrgyzstan or Moldova than to Russia. Why should more students be attracted to study Moldova rather than Russia? With Western governments and media obsessed with Russia and its ‘unprovoked, brutal, full-scale war on Ukraine’ (the West’s misnomer in single quotation marks, Johnson’s misnomer in bold), high school and college students will naturally have their interest piqued not by events in Tajikistan but more often by momentous, world-historical events such as those unfolding in the two great Slavic lands now at war as a result of Western interference in their relations.
Johnson seeks to restructure the universe of Slavic, Eurasian, Eastern European and, yes, Russian teaching, research, and publication away from her mythical Great Russian-centricity. She seeks to dismantle “a vicious circle of Russo-centrism. Who sits on admissions committees and hiring committees? Who writes the job advertisements? Who evaluates applications and tenure files?” Of course, this is precisely the same mechanism that has led all the social sciences to be dominated by leftists, liberals, and Wokists over recent decades. She and her audience know well how feminists in SEEES (there are very few blacks or Hispanics on our field thanks to the country’s balkanization by liberal and leftist academics who push such minorities into African or Latino studies) and throughout academia manipulate job announcements so that whites, males and/or conservatives need not apply, unless they are more liberal, leftist, woke, and anti-colonial than Hillary Clinton, Karl Marx, and Barak Obama.
The obvious nature of this dilemma reveals that Johnson’s call for SEEES’s restructuring is a step driven by emotion. Apparently, she is angry at Russia and Russians and tired of hearing about them. She like so many want revenge, and she can exact some from her position at ASEEES. This becomes obvious when she addresses Russo-Western relations and the NATO-Russia Ukrainian war, as I discuss further below.
The quantity of the field’s focus on Russia can not reflect some ‘Great Russia-centric’ approach. The overwhelming majority of courses and publications on Russia cast that country in a negative light that goes far beyond Russia’s reality. It is precisely this un-restructured Cold War approach that contributed to NATO expansion and the current war in Ukraine. One only needs to look at mass media and mainstream journalism. Its anchors, authors, and ‘experts’ are the products or progenitors of university courses and programs that tend to demonize more than they shed light on Russia. When is the last time you saw a mildly Russia-sympathetic point of view on CNN, PBS, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, ABC pointing out the potential threat NATO poses to Russia. A Russian ship visits Venezuela, and all hell breaks loose in media. NATO surrounds Russian with an alliance (that has bombed numerous countries, ncluding a Russian ally illegally) and missile systems, and there is dead silence. Concomitantly where over the last two decades have been all the articulations in SEEES-related books, scholarly articles, analyses, and journalism purveying the ‘Great Russian narrative’ on NATO expansion, missile defense, Chechnya, jihadi terrorism in Russias, and sanctions? They are nowhere, and when they appear the authors are subject to attacks, slurs, and ostracizing. The hysteria surrounding Tucker Carlson’s Putin interview is a good measuring stick. I am quite sure Johnson was appalled and would encourage all others to be appalled or change.
If SEEES and its subfield of Russian studies – a term less and less in circulation – are so Great Russia-centric, where is the corresponding, ‘dominant’ narrative, of which Johnson speaks? If the Great Russia narrative is so disproportionaltely dominant, why did publications arguing against NATO expansion – an expansion Great Russians bitterly opposed – not dominate the field and were in fact far and few between over the course of 30 years of post-Cold War history? If the Great Russia narrative is so prevalent, where was ASEEES activism and the overrepresentation of publications critical of the U.S.’s illegal bombing of Belgrade, of the West’s violation of its own UN resolution stipulating Serbia’s territorial integrity by recognizing Kosovo’s independence, of radical Chechen nationalism and terrorism in the 1990s, of the extremist North Caucasian jihadi terrorism in the early 2000s, of the West’s repeated violations of the OSCE’s rule of non-interference in the domestic affairs of its member-states by way of its democracy- and revolution-promotion in numerous countries across the SEEES region, of the rise of ultranationalism and neofascism in Ukraine, of Georgia’s initiation of the Five-Day War in August 2008, of the Western- cultivated and -endorsed illegal overthrow in Kiev of the Viktor Yanukovych government by way of the 20 February 2014 neofascist-led false flag terrorist attack, of the Maidan regime’s declaration of an ‘anti-terrorist operation’ against Donbass separatists without any attempt to negotiate with them (Moscow negotiated with Chechen nationalist terrorists for four years before starting the first Chechen war in 1995, of Kiev’s failure to implement any of the main clauses of the Minsk accords? Where is the pervasive Great Russia narrative of condemnation of the West’s rejection of Russian proposals to avoid the war in December 2021 and of an initial agreement to end the war in April 2022? Where the crescendo of calls and Johnson’s own for negotiations to end the bloodshed in Ukraine? None of the above can be found, because no dominant, prevailing, and pervasive ‘Great Russia narrative’ exists. Indeed, any such narrative has been almost entirely absent and veritably banned from articulation. Johnson’s idea is to make such a ‘narrative’ less visible if not invisible. Unanimity is the spirit of the age.
Johnson puts forward a truly absurd notion: “Imagine if US policymakers had spent more time before the full-scale invasion listening closely to experts on the Baltics and other East European states rather than focusing predominantly on Russia and Russia experts – might policy have evolved differently? Scholars of Russia and others who already have a seat at these tables can lead the push for greater inclusivity.” Of course, the overwhelming majority of scholars focused primarily on Russia and Russia experts supported the policy of NATO expansion that is the primary cause of the war, as Ukrainian negotiators now acknowledge. This is even more true of experts on the Baltics and other East Europeans. It was the latter, fellow diaspora members in U.S. government, and the Baltic and East European countries they focused on that literally drove NATO expansion from the start. In SEEES countries where NATO membership was not popular, NATO and Western governments spent billions of dollars to create pro-NATO constituencies and fund opposition and revolutionary parties to remove uncooperative leaders and regimes from power.
Johnson offers her opinions with a self-assuredness and self-righteousness that speaks to one of two negative circumstances. The first is that some in her audience might not have shared her view, would have been made to feel ‘excluded’ and uncomfortable, with her position of small power being utilized in order to cajole and establish unanimity—not the inclusive community activist academics typically claim to uphold. The second possibility is that the entire audience to last man, woman, and non-binary supported her absolutist plea for “plurality”, in which case the state of affairs is even more disturbing, though consistent with general trends in the U.S. This is the very same process we have seen across the West in response to the Ukraine war, so Johnson is right in among the crowd. I put aside here the recent whittling down of public support for backing Ukraine’s efforts in a war that did and does not have to be, if Western parties were willing to negotiate with the Kremlin as Ukraine did in March 2022 before the West stepped in to block the deal. Like the open door, Kiev willingly walked unorepared into a war with its powerful neighbor upon only its own agency, I guess.
Imagine’s Johnson’s class lectures and reading materials. Are they likely include the elements of the “Great Russia narrative”: serious analysis of arguments such as the Russian invasion being provoked by NATO expansion, Kiev’s discrimination against russophones in Ukraine, the illegal overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych’s neutrality government nurtured by Western democracy promotion, direct interference by the West in Ukrainian government and politics, the inordinate presence of ultranationalists and neofascists in Ukraine and its politics, the now extensively documented February 20, 2014 false flag essence of the terrorist snipers’ massacre organized by those very same untranationalists and neofascists that sparked Yanukovych’s violent removal from power, etc. In this context there was some justification for Putin’s violent action, and so this must be excised from the discourse as it has in the media and government statements. But context is not what social ‘science’ in the present age is interested in. Certainty, enforced and well-paid enforcement of certainty, is.
Ultimately, Johnson’s appeal is not a scholarly one but a political one as the terminology suggests (“racialized”). She seeks to have ASEEES continue to further the Democrat Party-state’s domestic agenda as well as the gravely misguided U.S./NATO foreign policy agenda. Regading the former, it appears that ASEEES is to be hijacked to pursue the political goals of the Obama-Biden revolution from above that is transforming the American republic into a single-party dominant state that increasingly resembles Putin’s own authoritarian regime. One strategic goal seems to be is to apply American Wokism to SEEES beyond the already widespread, unconstitutional reverse discrimination against white males and conservatives in academic hiring and the all too prominent role of feminist approaches to the field. The revolution must reach a higher stage of Wokism. Re-centering’s goal is to frame Russia and the Great Russian people as manifestations of racial, ethnic, and gender chauvinism. Great Russians will be incorporated into the category of white supremacists. Scholars who fail to re-educate themselves and join the fight against Great Russian supremacism will be ostracized in hiring, publishing, and grant-receiving. She and her colleagues know how to affect ‘change’.
Reverse discrimination against white males and conservatives in American academia has a decades’ long pedigree, yielding ample experience in the use of admissions committees and other university institutions. Despite U.S. court decisions one can be sure that admissions committees continue to discriminate against the ‘white supremacists.’ College application forms require students to engage in Soviet-like ‘samo-kritika’ (self-criticism) by asking them to explain how they fight racial and gender discrimination. Job announcements of tenure-track positions are designed to eliminate white male contenders by requiring ability to teach courses on feminism or women in, say, Russia or Central Asia. Now, under ‘re-centering’, job announcements will exclude those whose academic work focuses on Russia or too closely examines the thinking and practice of those in conflict with Russia: e.g., the jihadist ideology and violence of the Caucasus Emirate mujahideen or of its Al Qaeda- and ISIS-affiliated successors in Syria and Iraq or ultranationslism and neofascism in Ukraine, the Baltics, or Romania. Those who might research, write, or teach about such subjects will be labeled ‘Great Russia narativists’, apologists, and Putin agents and denied faculty positions, publication, and ultimately careers even more so than is the case now.
But more than shutting down freedom of thought in academia or helping build the Obama-Biden single-party dominant Democrat Party-state, Johnson seeks to deploy the ASEEES to forward U.S. foreign policy planks. Johnson’s call for a shift in the field as a result of Russia’s “full-scale” (it wasn’t) invasion of Ukraine and the “liberation of Ukraine” is consistent with an intensifying of the politicization of ASEEES as well as Soviet and Russian studies that has always been present and marshaling it in support of U.S. foreign policy goals, central to which is NATO expansion. This is why her ASEEES speech echoed a series of U.S. foreign policy goals and bromides: (1) rejecting Russia a sphere of influence in Eurasia (“not naturalizing a Russian ‘sphere of influence’”); (2) support for NATO expansion in support of that goal; (3) the chimera that Russia plans to attack another country soon (see below); and (4) ‘decolonization’ of Russia’s supposedly imprisoned minorities.
The real axe that Johnson seeks to grind is the very stone that irritates in the West’s shoe and historically has been a main element in Russo-Western relations and the geopolitical and geostrategic conflict that often has defined it. This is the somehow annoying fact – annoyance being a decidedly unscientific approach to one’s object of study – that out of all the Slavic, Eurasian, and Eastern European countries (if one excludes China as falling into the middle group), Russia has been the most powerful and influential politically, culturally, economically and, yes, militarily. In fact, the one thing that unites all of the countries in the ASEEES’s remit is that they were all once upon a time part of the Russian and Soviet empires. This was true in pre-Soviet and Soviet times and is true today. Rather than accepting this incontrovertible fact and analyzing its causes and consequences, while setting Russia in a world-historical system in which it interacts, Johnson would encourage us to adopt an approach in which we view Russia mostly through the lens of the other nations, states, polities, cultures, and economies that are part of Russia’s imperial legacy. They are to be assigned the role victims of Russian power, a role that many of these countries’s citizens have embraced and often exaggerated precisely in order to garner Western support for policies of revenge such as NATO expansion. This has the curious resemblance to the liberal-Woke doctrine in U.S. and increasingly all Western politics, in which all the ‘rest’ are seen to be the victims of a structurally racist capitalist system designed by power-hungry white males genetically predisposed to strive violently for dominance. Black, Hispanic, female, gay and other victims are taught to live in their victimhood and seek out revenge and compensation from the white supremacists and their racist state and institutions.
In relation to Russia and the world or, more specifically Russia and the SEEES region, Johnson actually seeks to promote a truly dominant Western narrative that Russia has a unique record of stepping on the toes of others by dint of its power and influence. Forgotten is that Peter the Great appropriated imperialism in all its gusies – territorial and ideological – from Europe. Returning to the SEEES region, forgotten are: Polish Catholic imperialism, expansionism, and messianism; Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Croatian revanchism; the little imperialisms such as Georgia’s in Ajariya, Abkhaziya, and South Ossetiya. Not forgotten is the little imperialism of Russia’s ally, Serbia. One wonders where the ASEEES roundtables or sections on Ukrainian ultranationalists and neofascists, so influential in Kiev’s internal politics, or on their vision of an ‘Intermarium’ ranging from the Baltic to the Black Seas with Ukraine’s as its leader and supported by some Ukrainian and pro-Ukrainian scholars, some of whom may be ASEEES members.
This is part of the truly dominant ‘great’ Western narrative of demonizing Russia rather than attempting to objectively analyze and understand it. If the Great Russian narrative is so dominant, where are all the ASEEES roundtables and sections on Western Russophobia? Indeed, Johnson’s call is intended to do the opposite: to transform not just ‘Rusology’ (the study of things Russian broadly defined) but research and writing on all Eurasia through a Russophobic lens. There are repeated references to SEEES’s ‘decolonialization’ – a term that comes directly from an old Cold War U.S. foreign policy objective in relation to the USSR and revived publicly after February 2022. I provide an extended excerpt from Johnson’s talk, which indicates just how much ASEEES is politicized and has and will continue to put itself at the service of Western states and NATO objectives in ‘de-centering Russia’:
Last year, in response to the full-scale invasion, the annual convention spotlighted Ukrainian studies and the work of our Ukrainian colleagues. Over 90 scheduled sessions last year addressed Ukrainian studies.
ASEEES has undertaken a range of Ukraine-centered initiatives in the wake of the war. The Association launched a fundraising campaign for the Ukrainian Studies Dissertation Research Grant Fund, developed a resource page and webinars to facilitate support for displaced and embattled Ukrainian scholars and students, created a centralized calendar for Ukraine-related online events, hosted forums on the war and decolonization in Slavic Review, and worked to highlight the massive international mobilization, led and inspired by Ukrainian scholars, to uplift and fund Ukrainian academia and Ukrainian perspectives.
At our conference this year, at least 175 sessions explicitly address the annual theme of “Decolonization” in some way – that’s nearly 30% of the total, which must be some kind of record. As one scholar recently remarked on a social media platform that I refuse to name, “The conference program for ASEEES23 may have more occurrences of the word ‘decolonization’ than any other I have read. Take that, Putin!” The theme clearly resonated with many.
I was especially inspired by the young scholars who spoke yesterday at the Presidential Plenary on “Decolonization in Practice” – Zukhra Kasimova, Chelsi West Ohueri, Viktoriia Savchuk, Jennie Schulze, Darya Tsymbalyuk, and Brian Yang. Scholars like these are the future of our association. Darya has also posted on her personal website her moving and challenging remarks, entitled “Do Not Despair: A Letter to a Scholar Whose Homeland Will Be Attacked by Russia Next.”
Johnson is in effect promoting a propaganda campaign in service of a particular and indeed failed U.S. foreign policy goal of defeating Russia in Ukraine in order to defend NATO’s right to expand wherever and whenever it wants once ‘target countries’ meet the criteria.
Johnson explicitly acknowledges her propaganda agenda and describes a general strategy, selecting six target groups that lie in concentric circles around the ASEEES. The last of these publics is the general public. “One of the legacies of our own long-time Russo-centrism, and of the Cold War, is that others have internalized the view that studying Russia and Russians is inherently more important than understanding other countries and peoples of the region,” Johnson notes again without providing any evidence. “The challenge is thus not only transforming our fields internally, but explaining to outsiders why it is important to do so and why these efforts should be supported with money and time.” Her six target groups include: (1) other academics (“the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association had all of two panels on Ukraine”); (2) university administrators “who decide which hiring lines to grant, which centers to promote, which funding priorities to champion”; (3) students, who “arrive with their own preconceptions and interests influenced by Russo-centrism. Every time Putin does something terrible, our Russian Politics and Russian History classes fill up. Yet even when we can manage to offer a broader set of courses on languages, literatures, histories, cultures, politics, and so forth, it can be a struggle to get enough students to take them. Here we can continue to work both to make existing courses and syllabi on Russia more inclusive…”; (4) funding agencies and donors (“Many funding agencies and donors, especially in the US, have established priorities and implicit practices that strongly privilege Russian studies. When we sit on selection committees and boards, we can help to change that. … (U)niversities are chronically underfunded, as our Ukrainian colleagues literally research and teach from bomb shelters, and as authoritarian leaders in Russia as well as in backsliding and repressive regimes elsewhere in the region actively repress critical scholarship”; (5) policy makers (“Lobbying and organization is needed. For example, when ASEEES sends out a call to contact your representatives, please do so. … Imagine if US policymakers had spent more time before the full-scale invasion listening closely to experts on the Baltics and other East European states rather than focusing predominantly on Russia and Russia experts – might policy have evolved differently?”; and (6) the general public (“Colleagues in the United States – at Thanksgiving, how many of your family and friends asked you to explain what Putin is thinking? This is a Russia-centering question, focusing on Russian goals, actions, strategies, and motivations to the exclusion of others. Public perceptions of Russia do not easily align with a de-centered approach, and there is resistance to accepting new narratives that deviate from established views. Many scholars have been doing tireless and uncompensated work to get better, more accurate information out to the public. Let me give another shout out to my McGill colleague Maria Popova, who since February 2022 has done over 350 media interviews as well as written an accessible book about the run-up to the war with Oxana Shevel.”).
Somehow Ms. Popova, a relatively unknown scholar, easily got around the predominance of the Great Russia narrative, and did media interviews more frequently that once every two days. Oddly enough, the far more accomplished University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer, who provides an antidote to the now Ukrainian-driven, earlier Eastern European-driven anti-Russian narrative surrounding NATO expansion and the other causes of the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War, and many others like him have been banned from all mass media, sidelined to alternative media, despite the supposed Great Russia narrative’s alleged predominance.
Johnson’s presentation is replete with not just contradictions, but slight-of-hand deceptions. Thus, to ask someone “to explain what Putin is thinking?” is “a Russia-centering question” “to the exclusion of other” questions and factors. What Johnson fails to grasp or chooses to distort is that this question is one result of the predominant anti-Russian narrative. In the Western narrative, Russians are always acting, aggressing, invading without cause. Those NATO countries that have bombed and invaded tens of other countries over recent decades suddenly have no agency. Putin invades; that’s what he and Russians do. The West is forced to respond. NATO expansion disappears, abandonment of arms agreements, violent coups, anti-terrorist operations’ aerial bombing of Donbass villagers all disappear, to Johnson’s approval. With all other explanations forbidden from discussion, the only question remains: What are the Russians doing, thinking? Why do they destroy and kill in an ‘unprovoked, brutal, full-scale war’?
After all that we have gotten wrong about Russia – NATO expansion will not affect Russo-Western relations, Russia does not care about NATO expansion, the Chechens of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeriya are freedom fighters ‘closer to America’s founding fathers than to Osama bin Laden, there is no neofascism in Ukraine, Putin and his regime are weak, Putin is Hitler, Putin is losing or ‘has already lost’, sanctions will destroy the Russian economy, Ukraine is winning, Ukraine is a democracy, Maidan was a peaceful revolution, etc., etc. – Johnson’s approach offers us a doubling down on our mistakes, proposing less not more expertise on Russia. This is a most popular response to failure in DC. Double down on failure because you are never wrong; the world simply did not respond correctly, didn’t ‘get it.’
Johnson was right about one thing in her talk: “Public perceptions of Russia do not easily align with a de-centered approach, and there is resistance to accepting new narratives that deviate from established views.” Unfortunately, Johnson’s anti-academic activism is a prescription that will aggravate the deeply embedded Western disease, the Great Anti-Russian Narrative, and ensure that it continues to prevail for decades to come, assuming that beforehand it does not lead to World War III and universal annihilation.
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*FULL TEXT OF JULIET JOHNSON’S PRESENTATION TO ASEEES23:
De-Centering Russia: Challenges and Opportunities
ASEEES 2023 Presidential Address
Juliet Johnson, McGill University
Although it’s not yet a widespread practice in the United States, in Canada we often begin important events with a land acknowledgement. Here’s one I adapted from language suggested by the City of Philadelphia:
“For centuries, the land now known as Philadelphia was home to and cared for by native peoples. These include the Lenni-Lenape and the Poutaxat. We recognize these Tribes’ strength and history of resistance to colonization. We commit to honoring their history, presence, and future. We further know that our modern systems of growing food and owning property are built on the stolen land of Indigenous people and the enslavement of African people. These violent acts continue to impact Black and Indigenous communities today.”
What is acknowledgement? Acknowledgement means forthrightly naming wrongs that have been done and recognizing their ongoing contemporary implications. But more importantly, acknowledgement imparts a collective responsibility. If they are to be meaningful, words of acknowledgement should be precursors to action, not substitutes for it.
So as we meet once again under the shadow of war, I want to speak for the next half hour about the call to de-center Russia in our scholarly lives, and on our own responsibility to act. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has prompted a welcome thirst for acknowledgement backed by action in our academic community. How can we move from words to deeds to meaningful institutional change? What complications and pitfalls lie in our path?
I speak from my own position as a political scientist who was, for the first several years of my career, completely focused on Russia and wrote my first book on Russian banking in the 1990s. I then gained a much deeper understanding of Russian politics and of the need to de-center Russian perspectives in my own work when I started doing field research in other countries of the region a little over twenty years ago. I came away both with a better understanding of the diversity of the region and Russia’s complex role in its histories, as well as with a more profound recognition of the pervasiveness within Russia of paternalistic and harmful views towards other peoples of the region. Here’s one small personal example. After spending several weeks doing research with Kyrgyz colleagues in Bishkek, I traveled to Moscow and went to dinner at the home of a Russian acquaintance, a sociologist. As a hostess gift, I brought her two beautiful Kyrgyz embroidered pillowcase covers. When I offered them to her she refused even to touch them, saying “why would I want something so provincial”? All these years later it still shocks me to think about it.
I also speak today acknowledging that many of you have long been working towards de-centering Russia in your academic research and teaching, and in our association. The call for de-centering Russia is far from new. What’s new is the increased willingness to listen and to act. It’s to our collective shame that it took a devastating war to do it. But maybe it can be a transformative moment. So, how can we effect meaningful change in our fields that outlasts the war?
To address this question, I’m going to talk about three issues.
First, what does it mean to de-center Russia?
Second, where are we as an association coming from and what concrete progress has been made?
Finally, I’ll discuss why we as scholars of the region can’t do this alone, and how we might build support for our efforts among broader audiences.
So, what does it mean to de-center Russia in our scholarly lives and associations?
Let me first emphasize that “de-centering” is NOT a call to stop studying Russian politics, society, culture, and language. As our incoming ASEEES president Vitaly Chernetsky said in a recent media interview, “no one is canceling Russia.” Instead, it is a call to abandon a particular understanding of Russia that marginalizes others and privileges a “Great Russian” narrative.
So de-centering Russia above all requires acknowledging the perspectives, choices, and central roles of other countries and peoples in the region, including indigenous and racialized peoples. What does that mean in concrete terms?
It means not equating Russia with the Soviet Union, and in historical studies of the USSR, not treating the non-Russian Soviet peoples and republics as somehow lesser or “peripheral”. It means acknowledging the complicated imperial and colonial nature of the Soviet Union in regards to its non-Russian peoples and to Central and Eastern Europe. De-centering contemporary Russia means not naturalizing a Russian “sphere of influence” or using terminology like the “near abroad” or “former Soviet republic” to characterize the sovereign states that border Russia. If you wouldn’t talk about the “former Soviet republic of Russia,” you shouldn’t talk about the “former Soviet republic of Armenia.”
De-centering Russia also means taking a pluralistic view of the region as a whole, and even questioning whether or not it is in fact a meaningful region. To what extent does it still make analytical sense to talk about a “postcommunist” or a “post-Soviet” region, especially one implicitly centered around the Russian Federation and Soviet-era legacies? “Postcommunist” and “post-Soviet” as descriptors increasingly obscure more than they reveal, implying continuities and similarities that in many cases no longer exist.
De-centering Russia means questioning the still-predominant narrative that privileges the relationship between the United States (or the “West” more broadly) and Russia. Just like it’s not all about Russia, it’s not all about the US or the West, either. For example, one of the most infuriating implications of the popular narrative that Western expansion of NATO and the EU is to blame for Russia’s ongoing violence in the region is the implicit assumption that the countries wanting to join both are somehow pawns to be swapped between Great Powers. No, these peoples made and continue to make their own choices. And more than that, it is Ukrainians, for example, that have re-united and reinvigorated a faltering European Union and have through sheer force of will and blood made themselves a viable potential member state.
De-centering Russia means understanding Russia itself differently and in all its complexity. Henry Hale, Tomila Lankina, and I recently faced this challenge when we agreed to co-edit the 10th edition of the Developments in Russian Politics textbook. How can you de-center Russia in a Russian Politics textbook? Is that even possible? Well for one thing, there’s a full chapter about Russia’s war on Ukraine. Throughout the book we consciously tried to not take elite Russian narratives at face value (that is, avoiding the “Russian gaze”); to reflect on Russia’s multinational, multiethnic, and imperial character; and to include previously marginalized perspectives and voices in the work.
On that note, and most importantly, de-centering Russia in our academic lives means raising the voices and prospects of scholars and students from across the region. It requires solidarity. This won’t just happen on its own. As Erica Marat, for example, has recently written in regards to Central Asia, “international discussions of Central Asia continue to be dominated by Western scholarship … Stepping into the next decade, we need to be more intentional about representing the entirety of our field.” (in Central Asian Studies, December 2021).
Such intentionality is the first step towards change.
So, what does progress look like? At ASEEES, where are we coming from and what progress has been made?
This year is the 75th anniversary of our organization. It was founded in 1948 as the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and it was from the start very much a creature of the Cold War. AAASS held its first national convention in April 1964 at the Commodore Hotel in New York City. Looking back at the program is instructive. Alexander Gerschenkron gave the keynote, entitled “What We Are Doing” – and hasn’t that been the theme of pretty much every presidential address since then?
There were nearly 70 speakers on the program. Of these, only three were women. Not surprisingly, the panel titles freely conflated Russia and the Soviet Union, and of the 15 panels, there were only two on Eastern Europe.
As Norman Naimark noted in his 50th anniversary ASEEES presidential address, “The focus at the [association’s] founding on Russia and Russians to the exclusion of the other peoples of the Soviet Union is striking. There were a few voices in the academy and out who tried to bring Ukrainian, Baltic, and Belorussian concerns to the attention of the Slavic studies community, but with little success.”
People knew about the problem from the beginning, but knowledge was not translated into action. This original Russo-centrism, exacerbated by the Cold War, begat an institutional path dependency that proved difficult to combat.
I don’t want to imply that nothing changed. There was some meaningful progress, especially after 1989. To give just a few small examples: In 2007 then-president Mark Beissinger made “Empire” the official conference theme and gave his presidential address on the “Persistence of Empire in Eurasia.” In 2010 AAASS managed to change its name to the still imperfect but more inclusive Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. ASEEES’s prizes, fundraising, membership, conventions, and regional scholar and graduate student grants gradually and palpably began to reflect greater diversity.
But it has now been many years since the Soviet collapse – most of our graduate students and even many assistant professors weren’t yet born when it happened. People grow complacent and institutional change in normal times is slow. Today, we are not in normal times. The profound shock of Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine has spurred the association and its members to reflection and action.
ASEEES is an organization of its members, and it is at its best when it serves as a focal point and clearinghouse to amplify diverse voices and share new approaches in our fields. Last year, in response to the full-scale invasion, the annual convention spotlighted Ukrainian studies and the work of our Ukrainian colleagues. Over 90 scheduled sessions last year addressed Ukrainian studies.
ASEEES has undertaken a range of Ukraine-centered initiatives in the wake of the war. The Association launched a fundraising campaign for the Ukrainian Studies Dissertation Research Grant Fund, developed a resource page and webinars to facilitate support for displaced and embattled Ukrainian scholars and students, created a centralized calendar for Ukraine-related online events, hosted forums on the war and decolonization in Slavic Review, and worked to highlight the massive international mobilization, led and inspired by Ukrainian scholars, to uplift and fund Ukrainian academia and Ukrainian perspectives.
At our conference this year, at least 175 sessions explicitly address the annual theme of “Decolonization” in some way – that’s nearly 30% of the total, which must be some kind of record. As one scholar recently remarked on a social media platform that I refuse to name, “The conference program for ASEEES23 may have more occurrences of the word ‘decolonization’ than any other I have read. Take that, Putin!” The theme clearly resonated with many.
I was especially inspired by the young scholars who spoke yesterday at the Presidential Plenary on “Decolonization in Practice” – Zukhra Kasimova, Chelsi West Ohueri, Viktoriia Savchuk, Jennie Schulze, Darya Tsymbalyuk, and Brian Yang. Scholars like these are the future of our association. Darya has also posted on her personal website her moving and challenging remarks, entitled “Do Not Despair: A Letter to a Scholar Whose Homeland Will Be Attacked by Russia Next.” I encourage everyone to read it, and to really listen.
All this shows not only that there is a hunger for change, but that we ourselves can change quickly if we actually want to do so. No more excuses. Now the challenge is to build on what’s been done so far, both within and beyond Ukrainian studies. We can do much more individually and collectively, and I hope that our conversations at this conference have helped to advance that goal.
But deeper institutional changes, beyond our individual scholarship and beyond ASEEES, require those outside our fields to invest in change as well.
How do we explain the need for de-centering Russia in academia to outsiders? One of the legacies of our own long-time Russo-centrism, and of the Cold War, is that others have internalized the view that studying Russia and Russians is inherently more important than understanding other countries and peoples of the region. The challenge is thus not only transforming our fields internally, but explaining to outsiders why it is important to do so and why these efforts should be supported with money and time.
There are at least six groups of people to persuade.
First, we must persuade our academic colleagues who don’t work on the region. I vividly remember a workshop I did for my last book, which compared central bank transformation in five countries in the region. During one of the breaks, a well-known international relations scholar pulled me aside to warn me that “people will only care about the Russia chapter.” In the end that book didn’t have a Russia chapter, it instead had a chapter comparing central bank development in Kyrgyzstan and Russia, and it turned out fine. But it is just a fact that our non-specialist colleagues typically regard research on Russia as inherently more important and it is often better rewarded professionally.
This attitude entrenches a vicious circle of Russo-centrism. Who sits on admissions committees and hiring committees? Who writes the job advertisements? Who evaluates applications and tenure files? Scholars of the region will typically be in the minority, if they are present at all. From a social-science perspective, a non-specialist might very well make the Russo-centric assumption that a Russian specialist can teach about the entire region while simultaneously considering an expert on Central Asian politics to be “too narrow.”
We see these problems in our disciplinary conferences as well. My political science colleagues can testify to the train wreck for area studies that is the American Political Science Association annual meeting. I heard Emily Channel-Justice yesterday lamenting that the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association had all of two panels on Ukraine. There are even issues in related regional studies associations. Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans have often been treated as afterthoughts in European studies, as somehow secondary to the “real Europe,” meaning Western Europe.
All of this takes intentional work to change. For example, Milada Vachudova took the initiative to put together a special “snap” roundtable on Ukraine at the 2022 European Union Studies Association conference, and Maria Popova gave a powerful keynote address at last summer’s annual meeting of the European Consortium for Political Research entitled “Ukraine is Europe.” We must continue to talk loudly and often, not only to each other, but to our disciplinary colleagues.
The second group to persuade is university administrators. Administrators are the ones who decide which hiring lines to grant, which centers to promote, which funding priorities to champion. This is ever more difficult and important in times of budgetary stress, and in fields that devalue areas studies more broadly. The education challenge here can be immense. Here’s another story for you. For many years Dominique Arel’s Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Ottawa has held the Danyliw Research Seminar on Contemporary Ukraine, which is one of the most important annual interdisciplinary gatherings of Ukraine specialists in the world. As is usual at such events, at this year’s meeting the Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences opened it with words of greeting. In these introductory remarks, she admitted that when she started her job, she had asked the chair of political science something to the effect of “is this Ukraine chair really important?” This is so often where we start.
Each new department chair, new Dean, new Vice-President, and new President must be actively engaged with. We need to think about new methods of outreach to administrators, and to work across disciplines in doing so. Moreover, if you’re at a place in your career and life in which it makes sense, please consider taking on these important administrative positions yourselves and using your power for good. Those with expertise in Soviet bureaucratic practices may find it to be a special advantage in working in administration.
The third group is students. Students arrive with their own preconceptions and interests influenced by Russo-centrism. Every time Putin does something terrible, our Russian Politics and Russian History classes fill up. Yet even when we can manage to offer a broader set of courses on languages, literatures, histories, cultures, politics, and so forth, it can be a struggle to get enough students to take them. Here we can continue to work both to make existing courses and syllabi on Russia more inclusive, and to use our collective voices to encourage students to explore a wider range of inquiry, including across disciplines. We can also try to teach and, especially, to co-teach interdisciplinary courses when possible.
For graduate students, we need to address the professional ramifications of doing more inclusive research in the region, and for those not from the region, investing time in learning languages other than Russian. Will there be jobs? Publications? Funding? Recognition? Here the fact that it has now become much more difficult to do research in Russia might ironically encourage and reward this greater diversity, as students who once might have done Russia-focused research reorient their work instead. Maybe Russia has helpfully de-centered itself.
The fourth group is funding agencies and donors. Many funding agencies and donors, especially in the US, have established priorities and implicit practices that strongly privilege Russian studies. When we sit on selection committees and boards, we can help to change that. Please, if you are able, volunteer your time for these roles when asked to do so and volunteer yourselves for these roles.
We can also encourage funders to direct more attention towards supporting regional scholars, regional exchanges, regional collaborations, and different and more equitable models of scholarship. In many places the situation is simply dire, as universities are chronically underfunded, as our Ukrainian colleagues literally research and teach from bomb shelters, and as authoritarian leaders in Russia as well as in backsliding and repressive regimes elsewhere in the region actively repress critical scholarship.
The fifth group is policy makers. In North America there is a continuing battle for scholars of the humanities and social sciences to justify their mere existence and to show that we can be “useful” and “practical.” Lobbying and organization is needed. For example, when ASEEES sends out a call to contact your representatives, please do so. This is a perennial problem and in practice we honestly don’t have much control over this, but let’s keep doing what we can. Moreover, we can work harder to bring a broader range of knowledge into policymaking as well. Imagine if US policymakers had spent more time before the full-scale invasion listening closely to experts on the Baltics and other East European states rather than focusing predominantly on Russia and Russia experts – might policy have evolved differently? Scholars of Russia and others who already have a seat at these tables can lead the push for greater inclusivity. That, in turn, will make for better policy.
The last group is the public. Colleagues in the United States – at Thanksgiving, how many of your family and friends asked you to explain what Putin is thinking? This is a Russia-centering question, focusing on Russian goals, actions, strategies, and motivations to the exclusion of others. Public perceptions of Russia do not easily align with a de-centered approach, and there is resistance to accepting new narratives that deviate from established views. Many scholars have been doing tireless and uncompensated work to get better, more accurate information out to the public. Let me give another shout out to my McGill colleague Maria Popova, who since February 2022 has done over 350 media interviews as well as written an accessible book about the run-up to the war with Oxana Shevel.
Finally, I want to emphasize that we are all in this together. Only by listening to and working with each other can we move forward in de-centering Russia, especially given such challenging international and institutional environments. It’s not just up to the scholars of Ukraine, or the Balkans, or Central Asia, to do this on their own. To echo the apocryphal quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin when signing the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in 1776, “We must all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
As many of you know, Vitaly Chernetsky’s chosen theme for next year’s ASEEES conference is liberation. In the ensuing year, let us work to liberate ourselves from old blinders, old assumptions, and old patterns of inaction. Let us not allow cheap talk or symbolism to become a substitute for deeper change. And, most importantly, let us hope that by the next time we meet, we can pay tribute to the liberation of Ukraine.
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NEW BOOK
EUROPE BOOKS, 2022
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RECENT BOOKS
MCFARLAND BOOKS, 2021
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MCFARLAND BOOKS, 2018
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About the Author –
Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, www.canalyt.com. Websites: Russian and Eurasian Politics, gordonhahn.com and gordonhahn.academia.edu
Dr. Hahn is the author of the new book: Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Thought, Culture, History, and Politics (Europe Books, 2022). He has authored five previous, well-received books: The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (McFarland, 2021); Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the “New Cold War” (McFarland, 2018); The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland, 2014), Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and Russia’s Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction, 2002). He also has published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media.
Dr. Hahn taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and was a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group.