Subscribe to RSSCloak and Pen: Harriman, the Government, & Sovietology
By Maddie Wolberg
As such, the spotlight came to rest squarely on America’s academic institutions. Who better to play the role of detective? Universities and think-tanks were easy pickings—officials had the luxury to choose from hundreds of experts, each with intensive research skills, a deep interest in and preoccupation with their subjects, and, perhaps most importantly, time and energy to focus on projects and research. Academics and other professional intellectuals had a well of knowledge dug deeper and narrower than that of the U.S. government. Many had government backgrounds or were practiced and celebrated political, economic, and social analysts. Having largely concentrated on war efforts and administrative tasks, Government officials lacked both the time and the focus of academics, but they desperately wanted comprehensive information on the Soviet machine—and fast.
Beyond this, area studies were becoming increasingly more popular at academic institutions. Intended to focus squarely on one region or even country in particular, area studies attracted students with an interest in understanding regional politics, culture, and language to gain a complete grasp of every aspect of the particular region. Thus sovietology—the study of the Soviet Union and a prime example of concentrated area studies—was born. Some academics, including David Engerman and Alexander Motyl, in recent books have voiced criticisms of the academic study of sovietology during the Cold War, questioning whether the field was perhaps too intimate with government influence. Engerman sums up the problem of sovietology—and the difficulty of assessing the blurred lines between academia and government—when he writes in Know Your Enemy, that during the Cold War, “intellectual life took place in an era of government support or government interference, depending on one’s perspective.” Columbia University’s Harriman Institute struggled with the same problem during the post-war and early Cold War period: given the mutual reliance of government and academia upon one another, how close was too close?
Harriman (originally called the Russian Institute) was created in the name of somewhat less explicit goals. It was founded in 1946, on the tail end of World War II and at the beginning of an era defined by a new international enemy, the Communists. Engerman, a historian on the topic of sovietology, notes that the Rockefeller Institute (who led the charge in sovietology and later helped establish Harriman) hoped to “promote area studies not as a means for knowing enemies, friends, or subjects, but as a means of spurring more cosmopolitan general education, promoting interdisciplinary research, and reducing the ‘provincialism’ of the social sciences.” Nonetheless, by the time the Harriman Institute came to fruition, the Rockefeller Institute was working with new partners to develop academic centers for sovietology: the U.S. government and its intelligence services.
Columbia was targeted as a prime spot for such an institute. It already had the Naval School of Military Government and Administration (NSMGA), which taught international affairs and intensive language with a regionalist focus. The NSMGA marked an already-present connection between government and academia; it had been designed as “an experiment,” seemingly intended to test the waters for a relationship between government intelligence and academia.
The Harriman Institute similarly bridged the gap between the U.S. government and academia, creating a network of information and data that could be shared for mutual benefit. It was initially supported by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a World War II-era intelligence agency which later acted as a feeder of academics to Harriman. The first director of Harriman, Geroid Tanqueray Robinson, was the former head of American Soviet researchers for the OSS. He had begun his career as a civilian academic. His staff was also largely comprised of those who had been in military or government service during the war. Immediately, the linkage between the government and the institute was established and was kept up by a constant flow of staffers from OSS projects called in to work on Harriman initiatives.
Area studies claims to promote understanding and knowledge about America’s neighbors—something that held true for the Harriman Institute. Yet the government depended on information from Harriman for its wartime intelligence and military activities, thus making explicit a major element of the relationship between the two. Harriman’s technical independence, as part of a private university, belied its close link with the OSS and other intelligence agencies. Catherine Nepomnyashchy, the former director of the Harriman Institute, noted in Sixty Years of the Harriman Institute that, “as in the OSS during the war, the faculty at the Institute were training their students in research methodologies tailored to penetrate Soviet obfuscation about everything from production statistics to the rigors of everyday life in the U.S.S.R.” Similar research tactics lead to similar conclusions—a hint at the deep connection between the work of Harriman’s academics and the ways in which it was used. Engerman writes that, “army officers and diplomats […] wanted concrete answers to concrete questions.” They were more interested in simply having information and applying it to a situation than understanding the theories and pedagogical implications behind area studies. The Harriman Institute was also apparently founded to promote research and understanding specifically of the Soviet Union (as opposed to a broader study of regions). In effect, to provide a glimpse of what was really happening in Russia, tellingly called by Winston Churchill a “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Harriman, along with several other institutions and universities including Stanford and the Hoover Institution, intended to help fill a major gap in information about activities within the Soviet Union. While Harriman’s research certainly filled the same gap for academia, the government later used this information for various Cold War operational activities. According to Engerman, the “inter-disciplinary model”—that is, area studies—“was oriented toward the start toward serving policy needs.”
We conceive of academia as unbiased and without special interests which might affect its research outcomes. This was seemingly compromised by the close relationship between the Harriman Institute and the U.S. government during the early Cold War era. But was there indeed something fundamentally wrong about using independent intellectualism for policy purposes? Olga Khvostunova, an assistant professor at Moscow State University and a visiting scholar at the Harriman Institute this semester studying the role of think-tanks in Russia and the U.S. during the Cold War, told me that the legitimacy of the work done by an independent think-tank or academic institution is compromised when it is commissioned by the government or too closely involved with its interests. Often, she said, a “government will choose what they want to choose” out of a research analysis, risking an emphasis on certain beneficial aspects while neglecting others which make not be so flattering or useful. This is especially dangerous, Khvostunova noted, when think-tanks and academic institutions downplay their cooperation with government bodies or private actors, a relationship that is “sometimes not articulated.” We need only to look to recent scandals that exposed Columbia Business School professors who failed to disclose their personal interests on Wall Street, and with governments, while researching and reporting about the current economic crisis to understand this problem’s seriousness.
Similar scandal, while not frequent, and rarely recorded in writing, certainly occurred at Harriman during the height of the Cold War and the Red Scare. There is some evidence of underground CIA funding for publications of the Institute, including the Current Digest of the Soviet Press, which was dedicated to attaining Soviet news from within the country and which was headed by a Columbia professor. Either party, however, apparently never acknowledged the subject of where sudden bursts of funding came from for the struggling publication. More frighteningly, contemporaneous with the rise of McCarthysim in the 1950s, several prominent scholars at the University were accused of having Communist tendencies or influences. They were mostly reinstated, but not without consequences for the academic community: Engerman notes that the “climate of fear” established during the witch hunts of the 1950s may have resulted in “scholars opting for ‘safe’ topics, students opting to study different regions, or seminar participants taking care not to appear pro-Soviet.”
The story of relations between Harriman and U.S. governmental agencies is not wholly a bad one, however. The intensive collaboration between the two bodies may have resulted in broad, positive benefits. After all, despite concerns that the government may have excessively influenced Harriman research and conclusions, there is little doubt that the field of area studies gained huge support after the government became intimately involved in promoting it. Regionalist scholars, especially those of previously understudied areas like the Soviet Union, benefited from increased resources and support for their projects and enabling the growth of sovietology and, later, of Russian and Eastern European studies. Beyond this, common sense suggests that the more sources of input—and the more diverse backgrounds and environments from which this input comes—the better and more comprehensive the outcome will be. This seems to have held true for the Harriman Institute as well. Fledgling projects like the Current Digest of the Soviet Press benefited from government interest in the project, which not only allegedly supported it financially, but also helped its writers gain access to the country via connections at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, where diplomats were already clamoring for translation services. Given the somewhat troubled relationship between the embassies—Russian officials had previously refused to grant student visas to American scholars, claiming that universities were too full as it was—the members of the Harriman Institute, coupled with diplomats in Moscow, seem to have exerted some pressure on the U.S. State Department and perhaps the Soviet government, who had been wont to permit such collaborations.
Khvostunova similarly notes the potential for positive collaboration between governments and public or academic institutions: “People in government can’t be experts in every issue. … They need intellectuals, the media to work with them. … [A better model would be] like the Agora, a place where people can come together and ideas are exchanged.” She points out that activists and intellectual leaders should, in fact, become more involved in “the apparatus” of government in order to effect policy change. It is difficult not to agree with this point in the era of public conscience and consciousness, where multiple sectors of the populace—and notably academics and students—have the opportunity to engage in governance and force reform.
Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, Legvold, the former Harriman head, told me that the Harriman Institute has reduced its connections with the government, only permitting collaborations between scholars and government bodies that are contracted independently and are born from “contact which is informal.” He emphasized the importance of keeping a separation between government and academia, remarking that, during his tenure as director, “we didn’t want any entanglement or any negative consequence from working with the government, especially from working with the CIA or the Department of Defense,” both of which have reputations for conducting secretive, backdoor operations. The risk of government collaboration says Legvold, “is that the outside world is looking at [our] research and says it’s colored because it is done for the government or the CIA.”
Indeed, Harriman has benefited from its hefty endowment, supported by private donors and independent organizations, which has helped it to avoid any serious reliance on government funding since the 1970s. Given recent concerns over the Chinese government’s growing interest in establishing a “Confucius Institute” at Columbia, which will only be supported if Tibetan studies at the university are de-emphasized or even cut, it is not surprising that Legvold is quick to defend the Harriman Institute. It is this type of awareness and distaste for government interference, however, which will continue to protect the Harriman Institute, and other academic institutions and organizations like it, from losing their independence and choice of projects. The death knell of independent and unbiased intellectualism will only sound, it seems, if we lose sight of keeping academia open and honest—always imbued with the goal of improving the academic community, society, and the world.
