HOW TO BE A “RUSSIAN EXPERT”

There are a lot of Russian experts in America these days. Not that there was a particular shortage of them in the cold Soviet years, but after the fall of the Soviet Union it seems that the eligibility bar has been lowered below belief and comprehension. Not only being from the region, and telling the folks what they very much like to hear is an instant qualifier, but it appears that, for the American native experts on Russia, a lawyer’s diploma is amply enough. Forget that one needs to have learned quite a few of things about Russia: with all the disinformation, distortion, and oversimplification, published as fact, it is probably better not to know at all, rather than to learn things the wrong way.

This entry may offer a half-joking, half-serious test to determine who is the real expert and who ought to be run out of town. I am sure that almost all the questions will be so far above the level of the current experts that a single right answer to a dozen of them should be an extreme rarity. These questions will include the knowledge of Klyuchevsky’s classic History of Russia (incidentally, experts, how is he different from, say, Solovyev or Karamzin?!); one on Nietzsche’s acknowledgment of Dostoyevsky as his teacher in psychology; another one on the role of religion in pre-Revolutionary versus post-Revolutionary Russia; (was Tsarist Russia more religious than Soviet Russia, or was it the other way around?... the answer is emphatically the latter!); yet another, on whom exactly Lenin is endorsing as his successor in the famous Lenin’s Testament (the correct answer is… Stalin!, for which see my entry Lenin’s Testament, posted on this blog on February 2, 2011), etc. I intend to develop this questionnaire in the months or years ahead, and it will be a lot of fun!

…This is such nonsense!, I will be told. Mine is not a progressive modern approach to political science and to Russian studies. There are new parameters for useful knowledge, and my old history is useless yesterday news… I shall not argue with such ‘experts,’ though: There is no point to. Let us just see how the events of the next decade will bear out their new-improved expertise, and let history have her last laugh. (As for me, any which way, I won’t be laughing…)