Cally Fiedorek examines the role of Slavic Studies 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

McCarthyism’s gift to American scholarship, it turns out, was the kind that keeps on giving: paranoia.

As the figurative Wall came up, so the claws of analysis came out on American campuses: The Slavic department at Yale—like the vast majority of its homeland counterparts—was founded in the later ’40s, at the apparent height, or depth, of ideological deadlock between West and East. Churchill’s mutually shrouding iron curtain, it was thought, could only be trespassed by the coteries of the higher-learned and strategically enlightened. And so throughout the ’50s, Washington mobilized and funded scholarship in Russian studies on an unprecedented scale in the history of “crown-gown” relations, spawning a new and enduring breed of American strategist-scholars, the kind that now familiarly reside on a good day’s CNN special, or less familiarly, in the innermost bowels of the Pentagon.

Slavic studies—alternately titled, in its many forms of the era, Soviet studies, Russian studies, or the weirdly ethnographic “Sovietology”—was first envisioned as a grand strategy crash-course in the language, culture, and society of the enemy. Taken as a whole, it was a peculiar and unwieldy mixture of political science and (pop) cultural anthropology; on its wide spectrum, Stalin and Pushkin appeared equal—if not equally fearsome—players in the formation of the adversary’s grueling inner world.

Now two decades after the collapse of Soviet Communism in the bulk of Central Europe, and the ensuing political processes of “Europeanizing” Russia’s formerly isolated neighbors, Yale’s once-burgeoning locus of interest in the region—the Slavic languages and literatures department—is but a humble appendix of offices behind the courtyard in the Hall of Graduate Studies. Only about 15 current undergraduates have chosen to call the department home, whether taking the route of the Slavic Languages & Literatures major or the comparatively popular Russian & Eastern European Studies track.

As today’s “strategic intellectualism” steadies itself for the continuously amorphous war on terror—with enrollments in Arabic classes in the U.S. nearly doubling since 2002, according to a survey by the Modern Language Association—yesterday’s too-broadly-defined enemy appears a dwindling source of academic and linguistic interest. But, for reasons also deeply and often paradoxically implicated in the end of the Cold War, many of its insiders find here a locus of growing and under-advertised intellectual vigor.

“There’s generally a sense among those in the field that the area isn’t attracting the same number of undergraduate students as it used to,” said David C. Engerman, Associate Professor of History at Brandeis and author of the newly released (and fascinating) volume Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts. “On the other hand, many scholars feel that their fields have become especially vibrant intellectually in recent years. [Since] the end of the Cold War, scholars…have unprecedented access to new kinds of sources, everything from archival documents, to surveys, to ethnographic fieldwork.”

So what’s a Slavophile to do when his or her raison d’être has been apparently invalidated by ever-new sites of geopolitical “relevance,” even as the root of that waning relevance has blasted open the once-curtained line of inquiry in revolutionary ways? As Jeremi Szaniawski, who’s currently completing a joint PhD in Film Studies and Slavic Studies here at Yale, summarily put it, dejected but not altogether hopeless in manner: “Slavic studies isn’t sexy anymore.”

Engerman’s book traces the U.S. government’s mass mobilization of scholars in the later 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s to the Russian studies cause. The National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958 was administered by the Office of Education and chiefly intended—in the wake of the launch of Sputnik in 1957, a newsreel so unwelcome to so many American eyes—to beef up scientific and techno-military expertise among the college and secondary school generations. In turn it brought considerable, if less complete, funding to the Russian studies venture across the country, and certainly a novel breadth of national attention to the growing legion of Soviet experts in the midst.

For many of the scholar-strategists supported on the government’s watch during those years, it was a fraught relationship from the outset: This whole project was a grave affront to the running humanities dictum of “learning as virtue,” i.e. as a self-rewarding enterprise. The unshakable stigma of strategic knowledge-building was more than enough to curdle the blood of Dostoyevsky-lovers and liberal-arts defenders alike, and curdle it did, though only gradually.

The Red Scare of the ’50s would force these badly-needed scholars to the bloated pedestal of national security: “In creating our name, there was an element of dealing with McCarthyism,” said Dr. Dmitry P. Gorenburg, Director of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) and a scholar of Russian and Eurasian politics at Harvard. “We called it ‘American’ first of all to make it known we’re not Communists, right?”

Also in the wake of Joe McCarthy’s onslaught, one hugely controversial mandate was inserted into the NDEA’s text that required all possible university beneficiaries to disavow any Communist sympathy or belief in the overthrow of the U.S. government. Some 153 universities protested the new affidavit clause, and it was repealed in 1962 after the great wave of pinko paranoia had more or less ebbed; one of the first among those schools to protest—proudly—was Yale.

Engerman helped characterize the gradual splintering of the Soviet studies project as it was originally imagined, and it’s clear the ’50s as a whole played a polarizing and ultimately fatal role for the cohesion of Russian-oriented scholarship. “In the early years, many if not most leading Russia experts saw pedagogy, training, scholarship, and policy as essential parts of the job,” he said in an email. “By the late ’60s, there were no longer just uncomfortable tensions, but hostility between those seeking to shape policy and those interested in contributing to university-based knowledge.” Mars, god of war, and Minerva, goddess of wisdom are—in Engerman’s pitch-perfect analogy—the two gods these scholars were trying, somewhat schizophrenically, to appease in one fell swoop.

The essential tension Engerman is talking about—between geopolitical pragmatism, on the one hand, and the more humanities-based elements of cultural appreciation and appraisal on the other—has proved an underexamined and over-present theme of “area studies” as a whole, here and elsewhere. “Area studies,” in the absence of direct governmental pressure, can indeed seem like the ultimate academic non-commitment.

So “Slavic studies”—a strange and not altogether ethnically sound redaction of Russian and Eastern European studies (Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Albania, and Moldova are, after all, not Slavic countries)—now feels the glare of a complicated and uneven legacy of its perceived “usefulness.” One graduate student outside the direct field of Slavic studies, who requested to remain anonymous, lamented what she saw as the in-fact narrow and historically circumscribed nature of the so-called “interdisciplinary approach” to Russia and her neighbors at Yale.

“Tolstoy and Peter the Great are all fine and good,” she said. “But say the word ‘Chechnya’ and most professors look the other way.”

Founded in 1948 and recruiting independent members as of 1960, the AAASS is a network of some 2,800 Slavic scholars of all fields, with about 15 percent of its ranks residing abroad as foreign liaisons. Over the last six decades the organization has witnessed the rise, rapid fall, and precarious resurgence of interest in Slavic and Central European studies in America, and where they once pressed their providers for expanded resources, they’re now working to “keep institutional and private support firmly in its place,” as Gorenburg characterized it in a phone interview on Tuesday.

Funding, of course, is the black and inscrutably opaque elephant in this room. The Harriman Institute at Columbia, founded in 1946, got a little help from the ever-patriotic Rockefellers; the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard, established concurrently with the AAASS in 1948, had the Carnegie Foundation footing much of its bill. Our “area studies” programs here at Yale have Betty and Whitney MacMillan to thank very sincerely for their existence, but aside from a largely informal spattering of student extracurricular groups, there is no such juggernaut for genuinely interdisciplinary approaches to the study or appreciation of Central European, Russian, and Eurasian societies.

Rough-and-tumble days, we might be tempted to conclude, when the generosity of a single private donor can make or break the comprehensiveness of an entire department dealing with an entire and indispensable region of the world—not specifically meaning this one. There are alternatives of course, but the extent of their investment in expanding the scope of Slavic studies, in this case, is hard to discern. As it stands, almost inevitably, a guild of rare and impassioned individuals has set to doing what it can to circumvent the ostensible limitations of their field’s depleted fashion; it’s not always easy.

More opaque than even Yale in operation and allocation are the handful of European-based liaison groups that help promote and fund the “scholarly interface” between America and blank reasonably prosperous Central European country. Along with the internationally-run Mickiewicz Institute, the Kosciuszko Foundation, based in New York City, is the foremost promoter of Polish studies in the U.S. Its namesake is a palatable addition to the theme of American-Polish cooperation: Tadeusz Kosciuszko—one of the most explosive and beloved figures in all of Polish history—led the famed Kosciuszko Uprising of 1794 in Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus after the Second Partition of Poland; he had a much-remembered stint as honorary brigadier general in the Continental Army during the American Revolution, naming his buddy Thomas Jefferson the sole executor of his estate on American soil. (Kosciuszko requested to use the money in his name to buy the freedom of Jefferson’s slaves and pay for their subsequent education; Jefferson, predictably, would have none of that, and passed it off to someone else.) As the Director of Exchange Fellowships for the Kosciuszko Foundation Maryla Janiak said obliquely, “We have agreements with certain American universities to promote some elements of Polish study in the U.S.”

Established on the twenty-fifth hundred anniversary of the end of the Uprising in 1925, the Foundation well predated the post-Yalta brain drain of an increasingly chilly Cold War, and was firmly established in the effort of bringing the two countries into genuine intellectual contact even throughout the many protracted years of American-Soviet lockjaw.

Polish or Czech studies were, after all, not to be called Russian or former-Soviet studies, as much as the histories and cultures of these countries have been deeply impressed, for better or for worse, by their eastern-lying benefactor-bully. The many other countries than Russia residing under the widely-flown “Slavic studies” banner have followed a slightly different trajectory over the decades than Russian studies itself, for sometimes obvious, sometimes vaguer reasons. In one sense, the end of the Cold War and the increasing political dissociation of Central Europe from its Soviet past has considerably opened up interest in and access to Russia’s former sphere of influence; in another, pressing sense, many of the History department’s offerings in Central Europe and Eurasia are profoundly—and more or less exonerably—russocentric.

Nowadays at least, a few members of the wide and motley field of interest are cleaning up the spillage of the overly broad—and somewhat parochial—“Slavic” nameology. Gorenburg mentioned that the AAASS has recently approved a name change effective July 2010: the Association for Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies. A name change inconceivable in McCarthy’s day: a sign of liberal—perhaps overly liberal-artsy—things to come.

As for the distribution of strictly Russian- versus other Central European-oriented classes in the U.S., the criticisms differ depending on whom you ask, or rather where. For Ian Convey, ES ’11, a History major-proper but a frankly startling well of knowledge on contemporary Eastern European politics, the disequilibrium is “perhaps more true today than it was during the Communist period, when the whole question of the Iron Curtain countries was arguably more pressing because they were literally upon ‘our’ (i.e. the civilized, non-baby-eating Western European) borders.” Convey, it is worth mentioning, grew up in England, and asked about the difference in approach to Slavic studies at home and at Yale, suggested: “The US public was fed a far purer diet of anti-Soviet, anti-Russian, anti-Communist propaganda, and through the process of digestion has accreted far more bile towards these groupings than most European audiences, in my opinion. Professors therefore have to contend with the legacy of this.”

Gorenburg took a different, if modified, stance on the heavy Russian emphasis at work in the area: “I think the field as a whole is much better about [the diversity of Slavic studies] than it used to be,” he said. “The study of the Soviet Union, for one, used to be completely Moscow-oriented. When the Union broke up, more scholars started paying attention to Eurasia and the Ukraine, for example, and the bordering states, but also even within Russia there was much more attention being paid to the individual regions.”

Importantly—even throughout the Cold War—figures like Milan Kundera, Vaclav Havel, and Witold Gombrowicz drew considerable academic interest in their countries’ literary traditions, and particularly the mode in which their national writers had configured social and political criticisms within the supposedly innocuous playing-field of “the arts.” Perhaps the inevitable overlap of social history and culture reveals one possible source of redemption for the underfunded and the under-encouraged among us.

“Being of Polish heritage, I can lament the fact that Slavic Studies at Yale doesn’t offer more Polish-related classes,” Szaniawski said over lemonade at Atticus. He knows that the lament applies to more countries than one. “But I must note the wonderful efforts of Professor Krystyna Illakowicz, not only through her classes but also thanks to her unrelenting efforts to bring Polish theater, artists, and intellectuals to campus.”

Illakowicz, who revived the long-dormant Polish language program in 2007 and is the sole active authority on Polish culture at Yale, believes strongly in the inherently related fabrics of language, film, theater, and political history itself. “Theater and politics are deeply intertwined,” she said. “Polish theater was the ultimate dissident force.” This October she helped conduct a remarkably well-attended conference on Polish political and social transitions following the ascent of Lech Walesa’s Solidarno movement in 1989. Parallel to, or competing with, Karen von Kunes’ ever-popular summer course on Kafka and Czech film offered in Prague, Illakowicz organized a summer program this past year entitled Polish Transformations: From Solidarity to the European Union, offered in Kraków, but had to cancel due to lack of interest. Next summer, she’s combining forces with the Slavic department at Brown in hopes of improving their overall odds of enrollment. Slavic scholars, Sovietologists—whatever you want to call them or whatever they want to be called—are still building, slowly, surely, their very own solidarity movement.

Despite frustrations with the perceived—if unspoken—intellectual provincialism of “Eastern Europe” (which now prefers “Central Europe”), few of those promoters of Slavic, and non-Slavic, scholarship are calling for the creation of some new pan-European genre of study. “I think it would be impossible and facile to create a ‘European Studies’ department, or anything so broad,” said Convey. “At the very least, the OCI would struggle to restrict the major to displaying 600 classes or however many the limit is before a search is defined as too broad.”

Rather than the implausible “dream scenario” of offering fully realized, country-by-country expertise, Szaniawski said, “What would be viable, in my view, would be core seminars that would not only tackle Russian culture, but offer panoramic views, say of tendencies in Slavic cinema, or even Eastern European cinema to include Hungary and Romania, for instance, to give students an idea of what’s out there, and perhaps have them pursue studies further on an independent level.”

Thousands of men and women in the United States, no longer exactly strategists, are keeping on until the wheel of history next rescues their noble pursuit from the derisive—and implausible—label of a pure, somehow ahistorical humanities.

Cover design by Emma Ledbetter.