Russkie uchenye-emigranty (G.V. Vernadskii, M.M. Karpovich, M.T. Florinskii) i stanovlenie rusistiki v SShA, and: "Garvardskii Proekt" (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Russkie uchenye-emigranty (G. V. Vernadskii, M. M. Karpovich, M. T. Florinskii) i stanovlenie rusistiki v SShA, and: “Garvardskii Proekt” Richard Pipes Nikolai Nikolaevich Bolkhovitinov . Russkie uchenye-emigranty (G. V. Vernadskii, M. M. Karpovich, M. T. Florinskii) i stanovlenie rusistiki v SShA [Russian Scholarly Emigrants (G. V. Vernadsky, M. M. Karpovich, M. T. Florinsky) and the Rise of Russian Studies in the United States]. 140 pp. Moscow: Rosspen, 2005. ISBN 582430162. Evgenii Vladimirovich Kodin . “Garvardskii Proekt” [The Harvard Project]. 207 pp. Moscow: Rosspen, 2003. ISBN 5824303851. These two slender volumes have one feature in common: they both deal with some aspects of American–Russian relations. In all other respects, they are vastly different: different in subject matter and quality. Kodin's volume, though published in 2003, breathes the air of the Cold War and could have been written by a Soviet propagandist. Its author is identified as the rector of the Smolensk Pedagogical Institute. By contrast, the work of Bolkhovitinov, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, is emphatically post-Soviet in its striving for objectivity and in its sympathetic understanding of the United States. The "Harvard Project" in the title of Kodin's book refers to the Émigré Interview Project launched in 1950–51 by the newly formed Russian Research Center and funded by the U.S. Air Force. It was overseen by the center's director, Clyde Kluckhohn, an anthropologist, and carried out under the direction of two sociologists, Alex Inkeles and Raymond Bauer. The three brought out in 1956 a volume under the title How the Soviet System Works, which summarized the findings of the project.1 Like the Russian Research Center itself, this endeavor had as its mission, by the application of sociological methods, to gain an understanding of the Soviet Union, which by this time had emerged as a dangerous enemy. Given the determined effort by Moscow to prevent Westerners from gaining access to the country and the unprecedented harshness of its censorship, which imposed absolute uniformity on public opinion, it seemed essential to find [End Page 383] some means of penetrating the wall that Stalin had constructed around his country and learn what the regime was really like. Was it effective? Was it popular? Was it stable? The means chosen to answer these questions were in-depth interviews of several thousand of the 250,000 Soviet refugees stranded in the West after the war. Obviously, since they had refused repatriation, these war refugees could not be regarded as objective witnesses, and extreme care had to be taken to filter out personal grudges and prejudices. The results have well stood the test of time. Kodin is fair in presenting these results but rigidly partisan in describing the Harvard Project itself. If one is to believe him, the Cold War was started by J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy. Referring to an opinionated 1990 UCLA doctoral dissertation by one Charles Thomas O'Connell on Soviet Studies at Harvard, he describes the project as a "socio-psychological study of the Soviet Union for the planned operation of the Air Force to subject the USSR to atomic bombardment." According to Kodin, Harvard of the 1950s was a hotbed of anti-communist hysteria. The results of the interviews contradict Kodin's premise that the entire Harvard Project was inspired by anti-Sovietism, for they challenged the prevalent belief that the USSR was loathed by its citizens and ready to explode. They revealed that only 5 percent of the respondents wanted to overthrow the communist regime, and that a similar number, consisting mostly of apparatchiks and military, were loyal to it. The great majority accepted the regime as a given and felt pride in its great-power status. The peasants were most hostile to it, and the young most devoted. The majority of the refugees were identified as socialists: only 14 percent favored capitalism. A major conclusion of the study, cited by Kodin, was thus summarized by the participants in the project: One of the things which the project staff has found most striking and challenging is the relatively low rate of active disaffection from the underlying ideas of the Soviet system as a way of...