Burma/Myanmar Studies in the USSR/Russia: Continuity and Change

Abstract

Burma/Myanmar Studies in the USSR/Russia:Continuity and Change Ksenia Efremova (bio) Burma/Myanmar studies in the USSR/Russia has a century-long academic tradition, which is largely unknown to those who do not read Russian.1 However, despite their involuntary insularity, Soviet/Russian Burma Studies scholars are not "parochial" or "marginal" in any sense, because many Russian-speaking authors (even in the Soviet times) were well acquainted with international (English-language) scholarship and often accommodated findings of their Western and Burmese colleagues into their own research. Moreover, they often tried to provide a different perspective on Burma's culture, religion, [End Page 227] history, politics, and economy, which was not necessarily compliant with Western (predominantly Englishlanguage) intellectual mainstream, thus producing original pieces of thought. Burma Studies can be conceptualized as a part of Area Studies, which implies thorough understanding of Myanmar people's languages, culture, and mentality. It is commonly accepted that Area Studies in Western countries was a product of the Cold War thinking, when the research of remote geographic areas was undertaken primarily for strategic reasons. However, there also was a genuine academic interest in investigating far-away places and nations, which led to a great deal of highquality scholarly work in such fields as anthropology, philology, history, and economics. In the 1950s and 1960s, Southeast Asian studies were introduced to the curricula of leading Soviet higher education institutions that trained future diplomats, military officers, and civil servants. This academic tradition was maintained despite the breakup of the USSR in the early 1990s. To provide a scholarly account of Soviet/Russian Burma Studies, this article starts with a short overview of the discipline's historical development, then proceeds to describe the academic achievements of Soviet/Russian scholars, and concludes with a discussion of their contribution to Burma Studies in general. The end of the Cold War evoked a widespread feeling in academia that "the area studies approach, as it was envisaged and implemented since the 1950s, has to be reconfigured" (Chou and Houben 2006:10). Area Studies in post-Soviet Russia were reconceptualized as a part of World Regional Studies—"an evolving new sub-field of IR based on the methods of politico-economic analysis of regional subsystems and global regions in connection with spatial and time-bound factors of the world [End Page 228] development and, respectively, on the conceptualization of such processes within a new cross-disciplinary study" (Voskressenski 2017:59). In other words, the old, ideographic approach to the study of foreign countries and world regions as unique, exotic phenomena evolved into a new scholarly understanding of these phenomena (despite their variety) as constituent parts of the global whole. Therefore, Burma Studies in post-Soviet Russia were placed in a broader international context. Australian scholar Andrew Selth defines the field of Burma Studies as, : : : a portmanteau term commonly used in universities and institutes around the world to describe the work of specialists from a wide range of different academic disciplines, such as history, political science, economics, anthropology, archaeology, religious studies and art history, who are conducting research focused on the geographical area or political entity currently recognized as the state of Burma (or Myanmar). (Selth 2010:402) In the USSR/Russia, such specialists were informally denoted as "Birmanists." Their further disciplinary qualifications notwithstanding, Birmanists are usually those who were initially trained in Burma's language and history, with some exception: the founders of Burma Studies in the USSR commenced their studies of Burma without prior training in the Burmese language. There are now four generations of Soviet/Russian Birmanists: (1) those who laid the foundation for Burma Studies in the USSR in the 1950s and 1960s; (2) their students, who learned Burmese as their principal Asian language and entered the profession in 1970s and 1980s, while Burma had largely remained closed to foreign researchers; (3) those who learned Burmese as their principal Asian language in 1990s and 2000s, when [End Page 229] Burma/Myanmar was gradually opening to the outside world; and (4) those who joined the Birmanist cohort in 2010s, after Russia's historic "turn to the East."2 These generations of scholars differ in their experiences and motivations, yet there is...