November 13, 2003

Now That We're Comrades, We Don't Care Anymore

By Susan Jacoby

NEW YORK -- "Russia is so over." That was the instant response of a young magazine editor when I proposed an article on a magnificent exhibition of rare manuscripts and prints, titled "Russia Engages the World: 1453-1825," currently at the New York Public Library.

I reminded the editor -- whose magazine prides itself on cultural sophistication -- that 2003 marks the 300th anniversary of the founding of St. Petersburg. I also mentioned that the library exhibition is rich in documents, never before seen by the public, chronicling imperial Russia's contacts with the Muslim world.

At the mention of Muslims, the editor perked up. "Could you just write about the Islamic angle?" he asked.

Our conversation was so over. But the editor's dismissive attitude toward Russia extends far beyond a trend-obsessed New York media subspecies. It is symptomatic of a nationwide loss of interest in Russian culture, politics and language since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

The phenomenon is driven not only by changing American attitudes toward Russia itself but by a deeper governmental and societal failure to appreciate the need for specialists with knowledge of other languages and cultures.

Indeed, the U.S. government is spending 25 percent less today, adjusted for inflation, than it did in 1967 on high-level foreign language training. And that figure includes an additional 20 percent for Arabic and Middle Eastern studies appropriated by Congress after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Miriam A. Kazanjian, a Washington-based consultant on international education, notes that the number of fellowships in all advanced foreign language and area studies declined from 2,344 in 1967 to 1,640 in fiscal year 2003.

"America has no long-term strategy to build the expertise we need to understand other cultures," says Richard D. Brecht, executive director of the Center for Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland. "We've seen, in the worst possible way because of our current lack of Arabists, where this short-term thinking leads. It seems that we have to perceive a direct, immediate threat before we're willing to spend money educating our citizens to understand 'the other.' Because the Iron Curtain is gone, Russia isn't a priority."

One measure of Americans' declining curiosity about their former foe is a nearly 50 percent drop since 1990 in the number of college students studying Russian, according to a Modern Language Association survey. "From the late 1950s on, we spent decades building Russian studies as a field," says Brecht. "In less than 10 years, we're undoing what took us 40 years to accomplish."

American interest in all things Russian peaked not at the height of the Cold War but in the late 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost turned the "know thy enemy" motive for studying Russian into "know thy (possible) friend." From the 1990 high-water mark of about 44,600 students, college enrollment in Russian classes fell to just 23,791 by the fall of 1998. For Russian specialists, the only good news is that things haven't gotten worse at the university level during the past five years.

But in elementary and secondary schools, the decline has accelerated. In 1998, 306 school districts across the nation offered Russian language classes. Last year, only 126 did.

Many school districts have dropped Russian in favor of more popular languages with greater everyday use. In Buffalo, for example, a "magnet school" used to offer Russian in kindergarten through eighth grade, enrolling more than 500 students. But in 1996, Buffalo high schools eliminated Russian from their curriculum and the magnet school switched to Spanish.

"We lost all 500 kids in one fell swoop," says John A. Schillinger, professor of Russian at American University and chairman of the Committee on College and Pre-College Russian, an advisory group established during the Reagan administration. "Maybe they'll get back to Russian in college, maybe not. It's a terrible waste."

The decline of interest in Russian is due in part to American provincialism and the conviction that everyone worth knowing should speak English. Indeed, Russian President Vladimir Putin is studying English -- a move that elicited giggles from a retired American diplomat, who observed that President Bush cannot even say "Pleased to meet you (ochen priyatno)" in Russian.

Russian studies has also lost the luster that once attracted the best and the brightest. Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution, editor of Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs and deputy secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, notes that his generation of Kremlinologists came of age shortly after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and knew that U.S.-Soviet relations would dominate American foreign policy.

"You can say that I was a beneficiary of the bad old days," he acknowledges. "There was a lot of prestige attached to studying Russian then."

By the 1970s, public interest in Russia was being stimulated by news stories about the Jewish emigration movement, the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" and the crackdown on dissidents.

American curiosity about Russia intensified as the Soviet system opened up. Gorbachev became more popular in the West than in his own country. He still regularly lectures before sold-out houses on American college campuses -- often the same campuses where enrollment in Russian language and history courses has plunged.

Americans also have a high opinion of Putin -- or did before the recent arrest of Russia's richest businessman. A Gallup Poll last month showed that Putin's job approval rating among Americans -- 58 percent -- is only two points below Bush's. The catch: One-third of Americans have never heard of Putin or have no opinion about him.

The dearth of news coverage also contributes to ignorance of what is going on in Russia today. Television images tend to focus on crime and terrorism. Everyday Russian life, from education to medical care, actually received more extensive American press coverage in the old Soviet days.

One American in a unique position to appreciate the importance of news images of Russia is Boris Jordan, who has built a fortune as an investment banker and venture capitalist since moving to Moscow in 1992. Jordan, whose grandparents fled Russia in the 1920s and settled in New York, was fired by Putin in January as the head of NTV, one of Russia's state television networks, largely because Putin objected to the network's coverage of the government's handling of the Chechen terrorist assault on a Moscow theater in October 2002.

Jordan feels that Americans underestimate Russia's continuing importance. "I'm a cautious person when it comes to the future of Russia," he says, "but what I do know is that it's a country with a highly educated population, a country that is not going to resign itself to a secondary role in world affairs. But when I return to America, I see that too many people have an impression of Russia as a new third-world country. Russia in the public eye, on the nightly TV news, is about criminality -- the 'Russian mafia' -- about AIDS, about general backwardness. And so Russia doesn't command as much attention from ordinary U.S. citizens as it once did."

One irony is that the United States is now home to an expanding community of first- and second-generation Russian immigrants. Approximately 405,000, mainly Jews, have immigrated from the former Soviet republics since 1970 -- more than half of those since 1991. The existence of this community has even been cited to minimize the importance of the decline in Russian studies and to advance the dubious premise that the descendants of immigrants will fill the shoes of aging American Sovietologists.

"That argument is just nonsense," says Brecht. "Most of the kids born here to parents who came from Moscow -- not to mention the grandchildren -- aren't more likely than the child of an Iowa farmer to speak or read Russian at a high level."

It is surely a failure of public education, the news media and government leadership if we downplay American ignorance about other countries by applauding the presence of educated immigrants. And the foreign policy consequences of our cultural illiteracy about 'the other' grow more grave in proportion to the other country's power.

Americans have not yet realized, Talbott says, that "we can use Russian for something every bit as valuable" as waging the Cold War. "My generation learned Russian to deal with an authorized elite in a nation that no longer exists," he says. "Now we

can use it to deal with a much wider range of people. . . . The last I checked, Russia was still the world's largest land mass. And the largest oil producer. And one of the world's greatest and richest cultures -- something that will be true when no one remembers what the Cold War used to mean."

Author's e-mail: Susanhalf@aol.com

Susan Jacoby, who lived in Moscow from 1969 to 1971, is the author of two books on the Soviet Union. Her forthcoming "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism" will be published in April by Metropolitan Books.