The UC Interview Series: Ambassador Stephen Sestanovich

 

Maksimas Milta: Maksimas Milta is a Ukraine Country Director at The Reckoning Project. Based in Kyiv, he leads TRP's work to collect testimonies of Russian war crimes and to ensure accountability of perpetrators. As an Associate Expert at the Eastern Europe Studies Centre and a former ReThink.CEE Fellow at the German Marshall Fund, Maksimas is a frequent commentator on Eastern European affairs. Earlier, Maksimas worked in the senior management of the European Humanities University, a Vilnius-based Belarusian University-in-Exile. Maksimas holds an MA in Political Science from Vilnius University and is a graduate of Yale’s MA European and Russian Studies, where he was a teaching assistant to Prof. Timothy Snyder.

 

Ambassador Stephen Sestanovich: Stephen Sestanovich is the George F. Kennan senior fellow for Russian and Eurasian studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis professor emeritus at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, where he taught from 2001 to 2023. From 1997 to 2001, he was the U.S. State Department's ambassador-at-large for the former Soviet Union. He has also served as vice president for Russian and Eurasian affairs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, director of post-Soviet studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, senior director for policy development at the National Security Council, a member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, and senior legislative assistant to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.  Ambassador Sestanovich is the author of Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama (Knopf, 2014). He received his PhD in political science (1978) from Harvard University.

 

Past Experiences: On Exciting Days when Congressmen Were Keen to Learn about Russia, on Builing and Independent Think-Tank in Moscow, on Resilience of Russian Siloviki Structures

 

Maksimas:                   Do you recall how you got interested in Soviet studies? What was that moment that made you so curious about the subject?

Stephen Sestanovich: I came to this field from a slightly different direction compared to some of my friends and colleagues. A lot of them, whether in the academy or in government, got interested in Russia first through culture. Something in Russian literature or Russian music moved them. Condoleezza Rice and Strobe Talbott are examples of this.

For my part, I had taken courses in American diplomatic history, on American foreign policy, and it was clear that the Soviet Union was the biggest policy problem the United States faced. That was the reason why it seemed important to me to understand Russia better. So, I took my Russian novels course after getting interested in the Soviet Union, not the other way around.

The first course I took on Soviet politics was taught by a guy named Myron Rush of the Cornell government department. He was a specialist on succession in Soviet and Soviet-bloc political systems. He was especially interested in moments of fluidity during leadership changes. The topic has remained a source of considerable personal and political interest for me. I even wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on the Tito succession, which was just under way at that time.

What seemed like an especially fascinating analytical problem in this field was understanding the way a revolutionary regime became so rigid and brutal. There were people who challenged the idea that it was inevitable. I had a Trotskyite friend who gave me copies of Trotsky's autobiography and was constantly trying to convince me that Trotskyism rather than Stalinism, could have saved the Soviet system. We also all argued over Steve Cohen's claim that Bukharinism was another potential path. Ultimately though, Solzhenitsyn convinced most of us that the path from Leninism to Stalinism was inevitable.

At my PhD program at Harvard I studied with Adam Ulam, who wrote many books on Soviet politics, Russian history, and Soviet foreign policy. He taught his students that Soviet leaders often had contradictory aims and that the key to understanding their actions was in seeing how they reflected these contradictions. He was especially interested in Khrushchev's policies, in his often erratic handling of Berlin, China, and the Cuban missile crisis.

Ulam embodied a combination of intuition and careful research in coming to conclusions about what Soviet policy amounted to. He was the kind of historian who could not be hired today in a leading political science department. So much the worse for political science departments, I would say. In my studies, I learned from many brilliant scholars whose contributions would not be recognized by the academy today.

Maksimas:                   It seems that personality-centered perception of the Soviet Union and Soviet politics was very influential in your education, is that correct?

Stephen Sestanovich: Yes, but an important part of the drama of Soviet evolution in the 1970s, and then in the 1980s, when I was working in government, and in think tanks, was that one always had to pay attention to the interaction between policy preferences of individual leaders and the systemic realities that constrained them.

Those of us working in the field were keenly aware of that drama. President Reagan, for example, seemed to be constantly wrestling with it. On the one hand he had a sometimes exaggerated sense of the challenge posed by Soviet institutions and ideology, a real sense that this was a system that enshrined, rewarded, even required repression and cruelty. That was a highly rigid picture of Soviet institutions. On the other hand, Reagan combined this image of our adversaries with a very strong interest in the way the personal choices of Soviet leaders-and his own relations with them-could transform that reality.

Many of his staffers, including myself, wondered whether he was being taken in by the lure of Gorbachev as an attractive personality without understanding the constraints and imperatives of the system he led. In fact, though, the president understood the balance between those two forces.

I remember talking to one of his senior staffers about why it was that Reagan thought Gorbachev was ready, willing and able to move in a new direction. His answer: Reagan had come to the conclusion that Gorbachev no longer believed in Soviet ideology.

Now, for a junior NSC staffer this was an astonishing revelation. How had the President come to that conclusion? What could make him think this?  Was he just deluded? Today we can see that he was exactly right - Gorbachev had ceased to believe in Soviet ideology, at least as it was embodied in Soviet institutions, and was willing to reform them. Reagan found a way to draw out that lack of belief not just by creating a warm personal relationship, but (and I think this was even more important than the personal warmth) by combining it with extremely tough policies that forced Gorbachev to move in the right direction.

We often forget it today, but Reagan was extremely uncompromising in his dealings with Gorbachev. That uncompromising character reflected his convictions about the evil and dangerous character of Soviet institutions. His personal warmth reflected his conviction about the impact that individual leaders could have in reshaping the system. For me, it was an up-close education in the way in which political institutions and individual leadership interact.

Maksimas:                   In 1987, amid perestroika, you moved from President Reagan’s Administration to CSIS. The following seven years you spent at CSIS was a period of the most extraordinary transformation of the Soviet Union. What were think-tank discussions about the future of the Soviet Union like at the time?

Stephen Sestanovich: It was a dramatic period for anybody working in this field. Day by day we encountered new developments, new information that would have the potential to change one's mind about the big question: Could the Soviet Union fundamentally change or even be brought down?

People in the field did not agree with each other. People outside the field did not agree with people inside the field and had many questions for them. There was exceptional interest in what experts knew or thought and a lot of discussion about what they were mistaken about. Every day challenged conventional wisdom. Every day there was demand for an interpretation of what the hell was going on. People wanted to structure the disagreements, they wanted to fund big studies, they wanted to bring scholars and practitioners together, they wanted to argue it out.

Looking back on it almost 40 years later, one can easily exaggerate the ferment of the time, but this was a period when it seemed as though the world was being turned upside down.

For example, I would get requests from people at the CIA to come and lecture their entering officers, including their young Soviet experts, so that they could begin their work knowing what those of us who've been working in the field for a while thought. I remember one time I spent an hour and a half talking to the young CIA people. As I was coming out, Bob Gates (who was I think deputy national security adviser at the time) was coming in to spend the next hour and a half with them. The idea was first to get an outside expert to stir up the young officers, to challenge the orthodoxy of their own leadership. And then they would get a senior established orthodox policy figure to come in and tell them why the external people were completely wrong. (laughs)

At that time, you had Congressional working groups established to understand what was going on in the Soviet Union. You could literally get twenty Congressmen to sit and listen to experts. The New York Times op-ed page would call all the time asking us to write another piece about what just happened in Moscow.

The CSIS leadership had regular dinners with the senior members of Congress, big donors, and important former officials. Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski would speak to these groups about what in their view was going on in the Soviet Union. I remember that Kissinger would pick on me in his speeches. “Young Sestanovich is totally wrong about this or that,” he would say. This too reflected the atmosphere of uncertainty and upheaval: it was actually worth the attention of big shots like Kissinger to argue with the younger generation of experts.

I left the Reagan administration in 1987. As Gorbachev’s policies unfolded, factions appeared around Washington. One of the people who stayed on in the NSC after me handling Soviet affairs was Fritz Ermarth (who had actually been Ulam’s student ten years ahead of me at Harvard). Fritz got a reputation as a “Yeltsin lover”. There were the people in Washington who were the “Yeltsin lovers” and people who were the “Gorbachev lovers”. For some time, these factions were competing within the Bush Sr. administration and produced an exceptionally lively, sometimes even feverish, emotional, and under-substantiated clash of analyses. Eventually, their debates were resolved by events: Yeltsin prevailed, and Gorbachev did not.

People became accustomed to the unexpected. In the fall of 1989 when Gorbachev visited East Germany, we had a discussion among senior people at CSIS. Our best experts who handled NATO, strategic questions, and Eastern Europe said that the one thing they knew for sure was that Gorbachev would never -ever! - allow East Germany to be lost to the Soviet bloc. That much was inconceivable. We could talk about a reform of one sort or another, but Gorbachev, they insisted, would never allow the East German regime to fall. I remember pushing back, saying: “After everything that has been happening, you just cannot be sure of that. This is a moment when we have to take into account the possibility that Gorbachev might do something that we consider completely antithetical to 40-plus years of Soviet foreign policy. He’s already saying things that cut the ground from under the East German leadership”.

I cannot think of a time when debates within Washington have been forced by events to take account of so many extreme possibilities. And not just extreme possibilities of a bad kind, but extreme possibilities of a good kind as well.

Maksimas:                   Given the magnitude of developments, and the uncertainty that was constantly present, do you recall that you would start at CSIS working on some completely new topics, something that you never worked before with?

Stephen Sestanovich: In my case, already during my time in government, I had a special interest in the transformation of relations between the Soviet Union and its client regimes in the Third World. It seemed to me already from the 1980s that there had been a significant disenchantment with those regimes, and a desire to reduce the Soviet investment in them.

At CSIS I brought in a guy from Harvard, another Ulam student, to establish a newsletter called “Post-Soviet Prospects”. To be fair, we originally called it “Soviet Prospects” which itself was symptomatic of the time. His job was to look at understudied topics: the way in which the black market was working, the sell-off of state property and new fortunes being made, ways in which people could create new media outlets and how old media outlets got to advance various heterodox viewpoints.

Another colleague at the Center was Walter Laqueur, a very famous historian. He had written about many different topics, including the Middle East, but he found himself drawn back to Soviet politics in the late 1980s. He asked me to set up what we called the Glasnost Group – bringing together people from around Washington once a month to share their research, trade gossip and tips, and keep each other apprised of what was going on. People from inside the government used to come to these meetings together with people from other think tanks, universities, the Kennan Institute, the Wilson Center, Congressional staff, and journalists. I remember having a conversation with one of our members, David Remnick, as he was about to go off to the Soviet Union as the Washington Post correspondent. I said to him: “There are a lot of interesting things happening in local government. Lots of local politicians are building a new power base for themselves based on real popularity among the citizens, not just on the support of the Central Committee. I just read a really interesting speech, for example, by the new First Secretary of the Moscow Committee, a guy named Boris Yeltsin—you will want to follow him.”

It was important to find other ways of sharing research and staying in touch with others in the field. CSIS was also the home base of SOVSET, a computer link among Soviet Union watchers to enable experts to communicate more quickly with each other. In this way, Western specialists shared information and new developments that they came across in the Soviet media. It may not sound particularly transformative today, but in the late 1980s we thought it was very advanced to have an email, linking together people who were watching the Soviet Union unravel.

Maksimas:                   Then you became the vice president for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the Carnegie Endowment. Suddenly in 1994 it was possible to open a Carnegie office in Moscow. How did you feel about it, did it seem like a natural outcome of the recent developments or was it rather surreal?

Stephen Sestanovich:  I was approached by Morton Abramowitz, President of the Carnegie Endowment. He asked me to come to Carnegie and help to create an expanded Russia program that would take account of the changes in the Soviet Union and in the post-Soviet states.

                                        The program included building a major think tank in Moscow. At the time, we only had a small office there. I wanted Carnegie Moscow to be called “Центр Карнеги”, so that the acronym could be the notorious “ЦК” (the same as “Центральный комитет”, or Central Committee). People in Moscow would understand from the acronym that we were an important new center of power! (laughs)

Seriously, it was a big innovation in that environment to have a large multi-national think tank right in the center of Moscow. We wanted to make it clear to Russians that it was possible to have a think tank that was completely independent of the government, that did not rely on the government for its personnel, funding, analytical conclusions, or choice of topics. As an institutional matter this was completely unfamiliar in Soviet terms, of course, but we had to work at underscoring the principle on our own side as well. We created working groups that paired scholars from Russia and America looking at economic reforms, demographics, and civil-military relations. We would bring in people from other parts of the Carnegie Endowment who were not Soviet experts but were experts on, for example, non-proliferation, or economic reform, or migration. We would pair them with Russian scholars to create a habit of collaboration and to create a new kind of scholarship. We even had scholars from other countries, non-Russian and non-American, to do collaborative work.

I was completely against having people who were on leave from the CIA or State Department working at Carnegie. I thought it would send the wrong message to the Russians. We wanted to create a new kind of completely independent expert analysis that was not corrupted by the preferences of any government, ours included.

We largely succeeded at that. But the creation of the Moscow Center was inevitably controversial and included big decisions for some people. We always wondered - but could not know -whether Russian scholars who worked with us were tainted by this collaboration. We offered salaries that were way bigger than what they could get from other institutions, and we wondered what impact that had in the intellectual community. Did their choice to work with us mean that they subscribed to the idea of independent research, or was it seen as going over to the Americans?

We had a scary moment when somebody fired bullets into a window at the Center; we found the shells the next morning. We heard from Russian friends that there were signals sent in subtle ways, and sometimes not so subtle (like those bullets), to tell people that Carnegie Moscow was an adversarial presence and that they should keep their distance.

We also could not be completely sure how much the scholars who were working with us were leading us on. For example, early on I hired Dmitri Trenin. He became a suspect character for many Americans. They thought of him as the ultimate equivocator; somebody who was pretending to be with us, but was not really with us, and was a constant straddler who would never make an honest, clear choice. In retrospect, I am still unsure whether, and at what point, Dmitri was making an honest or dishonest choice in favor of working with us. Unfortunately, when the time came in 2022, he chose to stick with his previous patrons. The crackdown on the institution made it impossible to continue and the Center was driven out of Moscow. Dmitri stayed behind as one of the people prepared to take a stand in favor of the old order.

But he was not the sole measure of Carnegie’s success or failure. When forced to choose, most of the senior staff of the Center chose self-exile, honest independence, and a brave challenge to their own country's leaders. Not only did many of them leave the country, but they continue to write independently and critically of what is happening in Russia. That is something that we tried to do over the course of 30 years.

Maksimas:                   After Carnegie you were appointed as U.S. Ambassador for the Newly Independent States of the former Soviet Union. How did you handle the differences in democratic transition of each of those countries? Was a one-size-fits-all paradigm prevalent, or was your approach very nuanced to each of them?

Stephen Sestanovich: By the time I took the job of Ambassador-at-Large for the Newly Independent States, the policy of trying to differentiate among them, and to find productive relationships with each of them was well established.

Of course, there were certain commonalities in the way in which we approached all of them: we thought it was important to institute democratic reforms, to have successful privatization, to create the conditions that would encourage outside investment, to develop partnerships on common security questions and policies to counter proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.  An important part of the U.S. government’s presence in each of these states - and an important part of our separate dialogues with them - focused on these goals.

But we did not think these countries were all the same. We also did not think they should all be dominated by Moscow. We did disagree though, about which countries had the best prospects, which were doing the right things, and which ones were in the biggest danger of making mistakes and lapsing into old Soviet-style practices and institutions.

We also disagreed amongst ourselves and with our colleagues in the field about how to balance different kinds of objectives, what kind of policies and actors to support to achieve the best outcomes for the country and for the region. The United States was interested in having open, democratic, constitutional political forms take root. There should be no doubt about that. At the same time, the U.S. was also very interested in parallel goals, like non-proliferation.

On non-proliferation issues, we cooperated closely with a lot of states, particularly the ones that bordered Iran. We wanted to prevent the transfer of expertise and materials that would help the Iranian nuclear weapons program. That became an important part of our relations with Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Ukraine.

One of the first issues that I addressed after taking the State Department job was a Ukrainian message to us that they would have to resume their support for Russian efforts in building a nuclear reactor at Bushehr in Iran. Ukraine was an important provider of centrifuges for the reactor that the Russians were going to supply. We wanted to delay that, and we worked out an agreement with Ukrainians about how to cut off that cooperation.

There were parallel efforts in countering terrorism. We collaborated closely with the Uzbek and Turkmen governments to try to undermine the presence of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the late 1990s. Neither of them was exactly a beacon of democratic political principles. In all those cases, we were working with governments that were not democratically pure, or committed to free markets, or anything at all. Nevertheless, we had an important agenda of different goals that had to be balanced.

Oh, and one more important thing. I think it is completely wrong to say that we were operating in a kind of “holiday from history” – today, you can often hear this phrase used to suggest a kind of blissful unreality in the policy environment, a confidence that everything was going America’s way. It sure did not feel that way. We were addressing a whole set of new problems that had to be dealt with in completely new ways. We had no thought that we were enjoying a holiday from history.

Maksimas:                   What do you think is the most underestimated lesson of the 1990s U.S. policy towards Russia? What do we tend to miss or forget? What have we not learned enough?

Stephen Sestanovich: I would single out two things. First, we did not pay enough attention to the importance of reform - or more precisely, non-reform - of what we now call the power ministries in Russia. This was barely on the agenda. We did not think enough about, and not very many Russians thought enough about, the importance of breaking the institutional power of the KGB and other power structures that enjoyed a monopoly of force, the military among them.

We thought that it was important to retain robust - or even to rebuild robust - Russian institutional capabilities, to deal with problems like proliferation and terrorism. But the truth is that the persistence of those institutions in the semi-independent form that they had, is a large part of what has gone wrong in Russia. The deep state turned out to be an unsavory, dangerous reality in Russian politics. And Putin is an embodiment of that.

Second, we similarly underestimated the importance of promoting a non-oligarchic distribution of wealth and power. We thought privatization would ultimately lead to a pluralist order in which power was broadly distributed, and in which there were mutual checks among different elements of the state and society. That did not really happen in the 1990s. The combination of the deep state of the power ministries and the power of oligarchic wealth produced Putin.

I think we were too complacent about both of these issues. Scholars and experts have paid a lot of attention to the second of those, oligarchic rule, but not quite as much, until recently, to the failure to break up the deep state. They were related - after all, why did Putin strike some oligarchs as an attractive successor to Yeltsin? And they both needed more attention among policy makers.

Maksimas:                   Can you talk a bit about the assessment of China's role over newly independent states and Russia at the time? I am sure it differed dramatically from today’s assessment of China's power in the region?

Stephen Sestanovich: In the 1990s and a bit after, China was barely a factor in our thinking about how Russia was going to develop, or about Russia's place in the world. We tended to think that Russia's relations with Japan were much more important than their relations with China.

Maksimas:                   Was it because of the Kuril Islands or because of Japan’s technological and economic power?

Stephen Sestanovich: The two went together. Because Japan was so important in the global economy, we hoped there would be powerful incentives for the Russians to address the Northern Territories issue. We wondered if there was not the possibility of a settlement that would be acceptable to both Russia and Japan while strengthening Russian relations with Western countries as a whole. In the mid-1990s before I went back into government, I wrote that for Russia a productive relationship with Japan was a winner’s strategy, while settling for a strong relationship with China was a loser’s strategy. I argued that a partnership of the latter kind would be just a residual mutual attraction of countries that were slowly coming out of Soviet and Soviet-style rule but not yet ready for prime time among the major powers.

Today such analysis would seem absurd. At the time Russian and Chinese leaders, whenever they would meet, would routinely declare their determination to increase trade by some ambitious percentage, and then routinely fall short of the target. This Russian-Chinese partnership took a long time getting off the ground, and we just did not think about it much. From time to time we did discuss the energy dimension of the issue: Russians were talking about pipelines to the Far East—would they go to Japan and Korea, or would they go to China?  But the outcomes did not seem to reflect in an important way Russian choices about what their place in the world was going to be, so we rather focused on which oligarchs would benefit most from which route.

We might have been completely wrong even then or it might be that things have simply changed. The power of China is now both an unavoidable opportunity and challenge for Russian policy. It has become particularly meaningful for Russian leaders given their deep estrangement from the West.

 

Current Issues: On Relations with the Global South, on Overlong Tenures of Russian Leaders, on Disorderly Unity of Western Alliance

Maksimas:                   Can current American policy towards Russia impact the way the U.S. engages with the Global South?

Stephen Sestanovich: I think one of the answers is what Brzezinski used to call geopolitical pluralism. We must give countries of the Global South a better appreciation of what advantages they will enjoy from continuing strong relations with Western countries, including financial institutions and economic and trading systems.

Our public diplomacy also needs to emphasize those features of Russian policy that are threatening to countries of the Global South. We should talk more about the way Russian mercenary groups use their political military tools as levers to gain control of economic resources.  (Once upon a time this was called colonialism!) We should also be able to expose the way in which Russian policy ethnicizes conflict, and show the really ugly dimensions of Russian ethno-nationalist rhetoric. These things are disturbing to countries in the Global South because they threaten their own stability and their own economic well-being. But to address these problems more effectively, we have to be more aware of them, and develop our own tools and countermeasures.

We have to make it as clear as possible what the full set of advantages and disadvantages will be for the governments of the Global South if they align themselves with the Russian state. For all of Putin’s rhetoric about aiming at a more democratic international order, he has also made Russia a more predatory force and encouraged ethnic antagonisms in a way that is regionally destabilizing.

Maksimas:                   Is there a belief of yours, or an attitude towards Russia, that despite the atrocities of Russia’s war in Ukraine remained untouched?

Stephen Sestanovich: One belief is that Russia tends to suffer from overlong tenure among its leaders. Whenever I see comparisons between Putin and previous dictators, I wonder what Russians expect to come next.  The guy has now exceeded Brezhnev. He is rivaling Stalin. Too long a tenure in office obviously stores up big problems. But Russian history also makes clear that there are big opportunities created when the dictator departs.

The most turbulent decades in Soviet politics - the years when it was least clear who would take charge - were the 1950s and the 1980s. You could make a case for the 1920s. All three decades involved leadership transitions. I think that the post-Putin transition is going to create as many opportunities as his long tenure in office created problems.

In the past 30 years Russians often sneered at Ukraine and Georgia as lesser, primitive, provincial political entities. But what those countries did in their disorderly way was open up politics for new contestants and for programs of institutional reform. As a result, they both became politically more progressive than Russia. Try as they might, their leaders were not able to close off political change or fully centralize power.

One question that Russia is going to have to answer is whether it can create regular alterations in leadership that prevent the dictatorial abuses we see today in Putinism. We should not ignore other cases where leadership transitions have opened up opportunities. Even Uzbekistan has managed to find a new direction, as a part of transition away from Karimov’s rule. Changes may be on the horizon in Belarus.

Policymakers, civil-society leaders, academics, experts should all be thinking about how to prepare for those transitions, how to understand them, how to affect them if we can, how to support those who want to find ways of keeping political power from becoming permanent.

Maksimas:                   What can be done more on the side of Trans-Atlantic coordination of the policy towards Russia?

Stephen Sestanovich: The record of the past two years is one of very impressive intra-alliance policymaking.

You used the word coordination in a way that makes it sound as if it is orderly and tidy and follows a certain consistent logic. Intra-alliance policymaking since February 2022 has been a little messier than that. It involves pulling and hauling and efforts by some members of the alliance to challenge each other, but with a basically constructive result.

This is almost always how countries interact in the Western alliance.  It is a coalition committed to certain common aims, but rarely in full agreement about how to deal with new circumstances. Can you create genuinely regularized coordination when you have 31 unruly members who want to get their views before the entire group?

Certain governments in the alliance usually get listened to more than others. Looking at the past couple of years, little countries in the alliance have actually managed to get a pretty good hearing for their views. The bigger countries have been prepared to put their bigger resources to work in advancing common purposes, but they have not simply brushed off the initiatives of smaller members.

Someday somebody will write a good dissertation on the group dynamics of this period. We have seen a process of finding common approaches that resolve disagreements without busting up the coalition as a whole.

These days I am kind of high on the value of the alliance. Putin’s war came at a time when Brexit had challenged European unity, when Trump made many people doubt that the alliance had a future at all, when Russia thought it had enough leverage to influence the choices of individual states. The alliance has done pretty well in the disorderly way that I have described. If you think about the Ramstein meetings, which have on a near-monthly basis kept up momentum for more resources for Ukraine, it is an impressive record.

Now will this experience of working together over Ukraine translate into cooperation on other issues? I do not know the answer to that. Will we see common approaches to trade and monetary issues, on war in the Middle East and policy in East Asia? At the very least Russia has strengthened the baseline conviction about the value of the alliance that every government has to act on.  There is a new presumption about the need for - and benefits of - unity. Putin deserves a lot of credit for this.

Maksimas:                   Do you see realistic ways for scholars from the West and their counterparts from Russia to continue collaborating?

Stephen Sestanovich: The easy answer is no. For the foreseeable future, animosities and suspicions are going to be very great.

It will remain dangerous for Americans or other Western scholars when the Russians keep arresting people as hostages to get their own sleazebags out of Western jails. Scholars from the West have to be pretty careful, particularly if they are dealing with any kind of sensitive subject. When a Wall Street Journal reporter is arrested because he is interested in what is happening in the defense industry in Yekaterinburg, it is a warning to anybody asking questions about anything related to national security.

Russian scholars will also have difficulty convincing Western counterparts of their bona fides. Are they really independent scholars? Are they really committed to free inquiry and to following the evidence and the research they do wherever it leads them? There are too many people I simply would not want to be on a panel with and would not want to see get invited to conferences.

Having said that, I think it is also important to add that we cannot be in the business of canceling Russian academics, journalists, artists, public intellectuals, businessmen. We always have to ask ourselves whether there is a way - I’m thinking of Ronald Reagan again - to engage with and to influence the choices of people who will shape Russia’s future.

We should not be naive about the possibilities. This is a powerful dictatorship that has narrowed the opportunities for any kind of independent inquiry and expression, particularly in fields where we used to think it was important to be able to reach out to Russians. Those possibilities are mostly gone. And yet, thinking about succession, there is going to be a moment where the system may open up again. Or at least where there will be fluidity and opportunity that outsiders want to be able to encourage. That is why just canceling Russians is not a sophisticated answer - it risks missing the opportunities ahead.

At the risk of sounding like a three-handed economist here, let me add another perspective: we have to recognize that a lot of Russians have made a choice about which side they want to be on. We should not pretend that they have not done that.

Here is even the fourth hand. We should also do everything we can to recognize those who have made a choice to oppose what has happened and to make it easier for them to succeed in the West, and to succeed in having an influence back in Russia. There should be more welcoming visa policies and encouragement for anybody who wants to avoid the inevitable next wave of conscription. We must tell the Russian IT workers, scholars, journalists, and young businessmen that if they want to avoid the next draft calls, they are welcome in the West. That is one more way of undermining Putinism, and we should go for it. I have expanded my answer beyond engagement with scholars, because I think it is part of a broader set of questions about engaging with Russians in general.

 

Message to the Younger Generations: The Opportunities Are Going to Be Great

Maksimas:                   Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine reinstated interest in Russian studies, which was in decline for years. What encouragement would you suggest to a new cohort of Russian studies students, who might not have a family attachment or a prior connection to the region? What should they focus their energy on within Russian studies?

Stephen Sestanovich: Oh, my God! This is an easy one! (laughs) Enormous opportunities are ahead to study a transformation that is bound to be on the agenda. Whatever the outcome for Russia’s political system, for its society and economy and culture, for its inter-ethnic relations, its technological development, its climate policy - you name it - the opportunities to study the process, to contribute to our understanding of it and to have an audience for one’s conclusions, are going to be great.

They may not be quite of the eye-popping character of the late 1980s, but they will be great. We have had two decades and more of ossification, and we have seen the consequences for Russia and for the world outside Russia of that ossification: a dictatorship and war. For young scholars who can help us understand what is going on when the system opens up, the career rewards and the intellectual satisfaction, and the sheer fun of it, will be enormous.

There is lots of work to be done. It is very complicated, there will be lots of disagreement about what is happening. And that is what interesting careers are made of.

Maksimas:                   Is there a particular field of research that was prevalent in 1980-1990s that you miss at the moment?

Stephen Sestanovich: We are producing too many experts on disinformation and cyber security. We need to revive security studies in some new form. We need to study the sources of power in Russia. Those will be decisive in either allowing or preventing a real transformation down the road. It was the institutional power of the deep state together with oligarchic wealth that created Putinism and flourished in it. Money, hard force, and ethno-patriotism are the three sources of power in current Russia. They need to be understood if we are going to understand the next opening up of the Russian system.

Maksimas:                   Thank you very much for an intellectually inspiring conversation.

Stephen Sestanovich: Thank you.