My latest essay, a critique of writings by Anatol Lieven on the likely outcome of the Ukraine-Russia war, elicited many comments from readers, including one string relating to another well placed holder of the Ph.D. degree who gives U.S. higher education a bad name, Yale professor Timothy Snyder. In his periodical articles in The New York Review of Books and in his lectures around the States, around Europe Snyder was a fervent propagandist on behalf of Ukraine and passionate Russophobe long before 2014, when the clash between Russia and Ukraine first took a warlike dimension. He has not changed his stripes ever since.
What the authors of the comments on my website would not know is that Snyder’s prejudices, which deny factual reality, may be taken back to his years as a researcher of his Ph.D. dissertation, which later became a sensation in the academic world (The Bloodlands) because of his applying his knowledge of numerous languages and of numerous archival sources never previously used by authors of the Holocaust. That very research in Ukraine and Poland gave Snyder an emotional attachment to those two countries which we may call a prejudice, pure and simple. And so he is today an utterly unreasonable promoter of the ravings of Kaczynski in Poland and of Zelensky in Ukraine, while his writings on Putin are nothing less than defamation.
Snyder’s case of over-attachment to the experiences of researching his doctoral dissertation is pretty commonplace, if never, ever acknowledged by professionals.
In this brief essay, I point to two other well known academics whose love for their doctoral research subjects seems to have heavily influenced, or to be less flattering, seems to have distorted their political judgment for decades afterwards. The first is Stephen Cohen, who was arguably the most important American historian of Russia in the second half of the twentieth century. The second is S. Frederic Starr, who over the course of half a century pursued a varied but highly visible career as professor, academic administrator and think tank chief preparing security analyses for various agencies of the U.S Government with respect to the post-Soviet trans-Caucasus and Central Asia. I have had a more than passing acquaintance with both scholars and know whereof I speak. Lastly, out of an obligation to be totally transparent, I have a word to say about how my own political mindset to this day, call it a prejudice if you will, was shaped by doctoral research back in the early 1970s. The point is that when you invest, and researching what is essentially a book is investing, you are bound hand and foot.
About Cohen, I will state the obvious, that as the author of the ground-breaking biography of the Communist leader Nikolai Bukharin, Cohen rode that book to fame and harbored an affection for his hero that he would deny, that others refused to see. Bukharin was for Cohen the road not taken in Soviet history, the “Communism with a human face” that Stalin crushed. Does this hint to a broader sympathy for Soviet Russia? I think so, but will not belabor the point. The Bukharin book was Cohen’s ticket to a close friendship with Mikhail Gorbachev, which in turn gave him access to people and inside information which put him on American television as a political commentator. It made him no friend of the Yeltsin regime and wild capitalism that took control of Russia in the 1990s.
My second case, Frederick Starr came to mind a week ago when he made a rare return to public discourse about Russia by writing an article explaining how military defeat in the war with Ukraine might well be good for Russia. Here Starr was relying on his findings from his doctoral research and book about the Great Reforms of Alexander II in the 1860s which transformed government and economics of the Russian Empire. These reforms were made possible, Starr argues, by the defeat in the Crimean War, which discredited the very conservative state policies of Nicholas I and made it possible to reshuffle the deck in dramatic and constructive ways.
All of that may well be true, but how, one must ask, does it relate to Mr. Putin’s Russia in 2023? Reforms? What reforms does Starr have in mind? To put Alexei Navalny in power? To divide up Russia in a Yugoslav-like collapse that the United States and the jackal-states in the European Union could then control? It is not clear, but I do not think that Starr has the interests of Russians and Russia in mind when he advances his latest proposal for reforms via military defeat. I see a sharp turn to aggressive nationalism by any likely successor to Putin and direct nuclear confrontation with the United States, that could turn out badly for us all.
I close with a note on my own firm predisposition to give Russian officialdom the benefit of the doubt whenever there is a question of its competence and patriotic commitment to the welfare of the citizenry. This comes directly from my doctoral studies in the Russian state archives in 1971-72 when I researched reforms of the Russian state institutions, namely the introduction of a parliament, the State Duma, against the background of a revolution that was induced by military defeat – the disastrous Russian-Japanese War of 1904-05. What I found was that those who created the new institutions, including electoral laws, were very well educated, on a par with their best counterparts in Vienna or Berlin, and that the essence of reform already existed on paper in the office drawers of the state counselors who waited patiently for the right moment to introduce them. The ideas did not come from the street but from inside the government.
Those in power in Russia today are not beholden to hereditary monarchs. They are far better prepared to lead Russia to a prosperous and democratic future than the Liberal opposition figures who have now fled the country or than seemingly well intentioned foreign scholars like S. Frederick Starr.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023