[I mentioned in my first post that I would also deal in this blog with some Russian/(post-) Soviet issues. Here is a piece I wrote upon hearing that one of RAND's most influential Soviet/Russia gurus, Jeremy Azrael, had passed away on March 19, 2009. People interested in the field of Soviet/Russian studies might still get a kick out it. Or not.]
Some teachers just grab you. Jeremy liked to think of himself (and talk about himself) first and foremost as a ‘schoolteacher’. At first, I certainly didn’t see him that way. My initial impression of him was that he was a fairly inarticulate, pig-headed, contrarian, self-absorbed, often grumpy, somewhat distant, Luddite (his most advanced technological tools were his yellow-pad and pencil) Russia-guru. The cast of characters we had at the Rand-UCLA Center for Soviet International Behavior in those days was almost like a Hollywood Walk of Fame of policy-focused Soviet specialists. It included the soft-spoken, intellectually meticulous but almost painfully shy Abe Becker; the more ebullient, wicked smart, outwardly extremely self-confident and more naturally eloquent Arnold Horelick; the jovial, accessible, broadly interested and thoughtful Bob Nurick; the philosophical Frank (pre-‘end of history’) Fukuyama, the various military experts such as Ben Lambeth (the first Westerner to fly a MiG23-27) and many others. All of these were remarkable scholars in their own right. But even within this crowd Jeremy stood out.
He was a true ‘loner’ and a total gut person. I have always been instinctively suspicious of gut-people. But Jeremy was the kind of person whose often idiosyncratic take on Russia you always wanted to hear, as it was invariably original, well-informed and very hard to dismiss out of hand (however vehemently you wanted to J). Whenever he started talking – in public and in private; in English AND in Russian – you sometimes almost felt embarrassed by his painstakingly slow cadence with the constantly interjected ‘ya know’s, ‘huuuu’s, etc. But that embarrassment quickly morphed into admiration once you started ‘getting’ what he was mumbling – maybe inarticulately, but therefore not any less convincingly. He had this amazing gift to just grab your mind and take it exactly to where he wanted it to be – inside HIS brain. Even if he typically took you there in a distinctly non-Euclidean way J.
Within our graduate program, Jeremy was definitely the person we all most liked to (violently) disagree with. This was not your usual garden-variety group of graduate students. Every single one of us had been studying the Soviet Union for at least a half a decade, most of us at some of the most prestigious academic institutions in the US. Many of us even already had some professional work experience in the field. We had all gathered in Santa Monica to be part of the RAND/UCLA on-the-job training program that was to shape the next (and – as it turned out – last) generation of Sovietologists. For those of us who had decided to pursue our PhDs at UCLA and not at the RAND Graduate School, there was an enormous gap between the very theoretical, 'social scientific' part of our UCLA training and the much more applied Soviet courses and research projects we worked on at RAND. But even for us ‘UCLA’-fellows, our offices, interests and hearts were clearly at RAND. And there Jeremy was a towering presence within the 'Soviet Center'. To me – and probably to many of my friends – he incarnated the inveterate ‘old’ Cold Warrior-cum-Sovietologist. A first generation Cold War Soviet specialist, who, like Richard Pipes, Marshall Goldman, Adam Ulam, Helène Carrère d’Encausse, probably had a personal axe to grind with the Russia and/or the Soviet Union their families had fought or left. A generation we felt did not have the personal distance required for dispassionate top-notch scholarship. Jeremy belonged to this first generation that we, inspired by a second generation of less ‘hardline’ Sovietologists like Stephen Cohen, Jerry Hough, Bob Legvold and others, were going to surpass through more rigorous scholarship fully anchored in 'social science'. All of this in the name of better evidence-based (and not gut- or ideology-based) policy advice to future decisionmakers – better policy of course being what made most of us at RAND tick.
Jeremy was also of the ‘government department’ generation (all his degrees were from Harvard and he had taught for 20 years at the University of Chicago), whereas we felt ourselves ‘political scientists’, or better yet – courtesy of the UCLA-side of the RAND/UCLA program – ‘social scientists’. Jeremy talked about Parsons and Merton, about Nathan Leites. We were cognizant of the works of those scholars, but they represented the generation that ‘our’ readings criticized and had ‘moved beyond’. We were trained in shiny new 'rational choice' methods that in our minds clearly bore far greater promise. Jeremy was an entirely unapologetic ‘area studies person’, which our UCLA training had convinced us was the lowest possible species within the already fairly backwards genus of political scientists. We almost tried to dissimulate the fact that our main research interests really did lie in a particular part of the world (and if it weren’t for the fact that we owed our – fairly generous – stipends to ‘area studies’-subsidies, we might have!). Area studies, we had learned, stood in the way of the noble quest for the deep underlying structural laws of international relations and comparative politics. They diverted too much attention to the regionally specific or exceptional at the expense of the globally generalizable. Methodologically speaking, areas studies were also prone to all sorts of biases and unacceptably low N’s for serious research. (We of course were not fooled by Alexander George’s – one of the few RANDites who had actually made a name for himself in the political science field - copout article that everybody quoted to get away with what we thought was flimsy ‘small-N’ research).
There were many other cleavages between Jeremy and us. Jeremy was a ‘hardliner’, George Shultz’ Russia guru in the first Reagan Administration of ill ‘evil empire’ repute. Our group was ideologically mixed – maybe a sprinkling of hard-liners too, but most of us were distinctly more liberal, more ‘enlightened’ (in our own eyes) and even more importantly – underneath a fairly thin veneer (or so we thought) of normative biases, we were hard-nosed post-ideological analysts and scientists with a distinctive aversion to emotion-laden and hence academically compromised ideologists. Jeremy had also spent quite some time and continued to have excellent ties with the CIA – an organization that most of us respected but only begrudgingly. We had occasional meetings with analysts from SOVA, the CIA's Office of Soviet Analysis, whose analytical acumen did impress many of us much more than we cared to admit. But we (let's say most of us) were not – nor did we want to be – spooks. We were neutral, evidence-based, methodologically better trained and bureaucratically unbeholden analysts – REAL RANDites who were finally going to get the Soviet Union ‘right’.
Jeremy never pulled his punches. Every now and then he would refer to some academic literature we knew only partially and felt obsolete. But mostly he was just piecing together pieces of information on the basis of intuition – an intuition we clearly acknowledged to be based on unusually deep knowledge about the country and the regime of which we were all students, but still ‘only’ an intuition nevertheless. In his mind, of course, he was the old wise school teacher, who had fully internalized the operational code of the Soviet Politburo and the Soviet 'system', who had seen and heard it all, who was not fooled by the ill-guided sophistries of ‘modern’ political science and whose main task it was to knock all of that pseudo-scientific, wishy-washy, liberal nonsense out of our heads and to turn us into ‘serious’ scholars.
And to be honest, even if at times unorthodox, Jeremy truly was an unusually effective teacher. One of the most memorable learning experiences in my life occurred in the fall of 1989. Jeremy was teaching a course at RAND on the Domestic Sources of Soviet Foreign Policy. It was a required course that was only offered every other year, so most of us were in it (even though we were still a relatively small group – maybe 15 people or so). I seem to recall that class that day had started out in the best of spirits. Jeremy had brought in some pastries or cookies his mom had baked for us. He described her as a typical Jewish mother – a concept that was not particularly familiar to me, but that definitely grew on me as I tasted the delicacies. At that point in the course, we had already read and discussed all of the traditional literature on the topic (which most of us were familiar with anyway). We had moved onto what was happening at that time (under Gorbachev). There were not that many (good) readings on this topic yet, giving us more time to read 'real time' articles and to debate those amongst ourselves and – of course – with Jeremy. We had our usual 'Jeremy vs. the rest' fight. We argued that the domestic sources had changed (Sheila Fitzpatrick, Moshe Lewin, etc.) and that this was leading to a new genuinely new foreign and security policy – Gorbachev’s so-called ‘New Thinking’. Jeremy wouldn’t have any of it – this was still a Communist regime, most likely old wine in new bottles, and we should not trust the charm offensive. The discussion got ever more heated, but still remained mostly factual and ‘academic’. And let's make no mistake about this: he excelled at that too. He adduced 'his' evidence, 'his' theories. But at some point he lost it. He suddenly snapped and became personal. He was truly furious. “I am the only [expletive omitted] person in this class who actually cares about the Soviets”. That sentence hit me like a slap in the face. I had certainly never heard a professor of mine use the omitted expletive. This was also exactly the type of passion that I felt had to be avoided at all cost in sound scholarship and policy advice. But the biggest shock I experienced had nothing to do with cultural or academic decorum – I actually suddenly realized he was right! Much of my thinking (and my education – ESPECIALLY my US training) to that point had been framed by the Cold War conflict. East-West. Us-them. Global competition. Geopolitics. Arms control. Diplomatic battles. New defence doctrines. Even before coming to RAND, I had read whole libraries about those things and had studied them under the big names in the field like Brzezinski, Legvold, Bialer, Gasteyger and others. These things had become my everyday bread and butter., I thought I 'lived' them. But in reality, they were entirely abstract. I had always thought this 'Cold War angle' was the very reason why we read our way through hundreds of pages of CIA (/FBIS/JPRS)-translations from the Soviet press (the originals of course mostly not being available) a day. The ‘big’ stuff. The reason the American and other Western governments were funding our discipline - and our education. But here was Jeremy Azrael, one of the ‘big shots’ in the field who was supremely uninterested in any of this (certainly the military or diplomatic parts of it). It suddenly dawned on me that he was in this (besides for himself of course – just like all of us) for the people of those countries!
I had always thought that hardliners like Jeremy hated the Soviet Union. But suddenly Jeremy had taken me deep inside himself to the connection between his brain and his ‘gut’. And what I saw there was the polar opposite of what I had imagined. Here was NOT a guy who hated all things Soviet – but very much the opposite. Here was not cold cynicism – here was warm (if – I still felt – misplaced) idealism. Here was not the right-wing zealot who wanted to aggrandize American power at the expense of everybody else – here was a compassionate conservative (pardon the historical anachronism) who felt the Russian (and Ukrainian etc.) people deserved MUCH better. Deserved genuine democracy and not the half-pregnant type of democracy Gorbachev was proposing. Deserved a dignified place in this world (I know Jeremy had a cordial relationship with Prokhanov and I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in Prokhanov’s dacha when Jeremy and he went at it) not one based on simulacres (again not a Jeremy word) of power like military might.
So yes, a strong personal angle, but not the family vendetta against the Soviet regime, not 19th century dog-eat-dog thinking; but rather the battle for a more normal, dignified, 'modern' and free life for the Soviet (and afterwards post-Soviet) peoples. I had read such things before, but they had always struck me as post-hoc rationalizations of a Cold War ideology that was really all about power but had to be dressed up in some more human fashion. But there was no mistaking Jeremy’s sincerity on this one. That day, Jeremy gave us the full treatment – moral equivalence, sophistry (I’m sure he didn’t use that term, but that’s what he meant), ivory tower behavior, etc. I still get goosebumps when I think about it. Here’s how another fellow in the program described this feeling to me yesterday: ”his experience and commitment to Russia always made me feel like my association was so distant and antiseptic. I don't know if the latter is purely a product of our ‘rigorous’ analytical training or something more personal that when compared to his passion for Russia and close connection to Byzantine powerplays makes my "armchair" analysis seem so artificial.”
When I think back, I think it is fair to say that of all Soviet specialists we had at RAND, Jeremy was the one whose instincts proved the most astute and accurate. On many things he too, of course, totally missed the ball. But on some very key issues his instincts proved stunningly prescient. Whereas many of us (and our senior peers) were totally captivated by Gorbachev’s ‘New Thinking’ and ‘perestroyka’, Jeremy was one of the few who saw much more continuity than discontinuity. Gorbachev, in his eyes, was maybe marginally better than the apparatchiki before him, but he was still a fundamentally flawed 'commie'. Every week we adduced new evidence of things that were clearly changing, but Jeremy didn’t ‘buy’ it. Didn’t WANT to get it, we thought. We felt he was just a stubborn hardliner stuck in his own mental schemes and unwilling to adjust those to the new realities. But looking back now, it is clear that we were the ones who didn’t ‘get’ it. We were the ‘conservatives’ and he truly did operate at a deeper, more systemic and more forward-looking level of knowledge about that country. One that all of our supposed methodological sophistication (rational choice, formal modeling, game theory, etc.) could not get us to.
And then came Yeltsin. This again led to vehement discussions within RAND. Most of us (seniors and juniors) were profoundly skeptical of Yeltsin and the dangerous tinkering with one of the main 'poles' of the world system. We had difficulties reorienting our entire mental compass to the new realities. But Jeremy was there. Faster than any one of us. Not HE was the old Sovietologist, WE were. We were on Gorbachev’s side, he was immediately on Yeltsin’s side. Jeremy was seeing new opportunities for a real new Russia (and, of course for him and for RAND). Prior to that outburst in class (and subsequent analogous exchanges), I would have attributed his pro-Yeltsin attitude as American Cold War triumphalism, a desire to break the ‘evil empire’ into smaller pieces that would make it easier for the West to ‘divide and conquer’. I still suspect that may have had something to do with it. As undoubtedly did his contrarian nature that was as delightful as it was irrepressible. But Jeremy was also seeing a chance for a more ‘normal’ Russia. Trusting – often against evidence and better judgment – the democratic instincts and the raw guile of the remarkable political animal that was Yeltsin . Accepting that radical, painful change was required to ‘break the back’ (to paraphrase Barrington Moore – yet another Sovietologist who became respectable in the political science field ) of the communist system that had invaded the very fiber of these societies like a cancer. Seeing what many of us saw as the ‘chaos’ of the Yeltsin regime as what it probably was – the birth pangs of a new wave of Russia’s ‘normalization’. A normalization that the West had to foster, had to help them with.
In this, Jeremy quickly decided – and this is something we at the Center definitely did not like – we did not need ‘Soviet’ specialists (CERTAINLY not the spineless sad excuses for Soviet specialists that we were) but ‘serious’ functional specialists. REAL economists, REAL demographers, REAL education specialists, who could really help the new Russian government in its transformational task. True to form (temperament? vocation?), he saw himself as the interface between the nascent Russian elites, whose trust he was gaining (Jim Thomson in his touching eulogy explains some of the techniques Jeremy used for this) and whom he genuinely wanted to help, and the top policy experts from the West. He reached out to these people (such as the economist Dick Neu, or demographer Julie DaVonzo) within RAND and inspired them with his vision and enthusiasm to link up with Russian counterparts and to start doing ‘serious’ work on Russia.
Now that the Soviet Union was gone, we (the West, the US, RAND) first of all needed new networks with new ‘serious’ Russians. In no time, Jeremy (skillfully capitalizing on RAND’s and his own personal reputation as a serious and well connected ‘Cold Warrior’) had the personal cell phone numbers of the entire Who’s Who of the new Russian elite. He started showing everybody how tight he was with the key players by referring to them not only by their first names, but by the Russian diminutives of those names (‘Sasha’ Shokhin, ‘Misha’ Khodorkovskiy, etc). Gut-player that he was, he was one of the first to realize that from studying the Kremlin, the High Command, the KGB or the First Part Secretaries we now had to start taking the nascent business elite seriously. And that meant not reviling them, but studying their activities, tracking their preferences, taking their desire to start reforming Russia seriously, socializing or even ‘coopting’ them in useful ways, helping them in becoming responsible pillars of a new more normal Russia. Going a step further, Jeremy also realized that we could now do much better than merely ‘studying’ these elites through traditional desk research. We could actually go see them in person, start building relationships with them – and thus gain a much richer and more privileged factual data base to get under their skin. And who better than Jeremy the gut player to get under the skin of these Russian gut players. By the time other Russia specialists started coming to the same conclusion that business leaders deserved more scholarly attention[1], Jeremy had already set up the RAND American-Russian business leaders’ forum at which the top Russian oligarchs regularly met with the top US ‘oligarchs’ AND policymakers from both sides to exchange views on the role that they played in their respective economies, polities, societies. They met twice a year, alternately in the US and in Russia, and in between forum meetings, Jeremy would be hobnobbing with all of them regularly in their offices, homes and dachas in Moscow and elsewhere to prepare the Forum meetings. It was en route to one of Jeremy’s meetings (interestingly enough, that’s how we called them; NOT 'RAND' or 'Forum' meetings, but 'Jeremy' meetings) that Yukos’ Mikhail Khodorkosvkiy – probably the oligarch that made the biggest impression on Jeremy (and on everybody who ever attended sessions of the forum) – was arrested. The story of these meetings remains to be told and I for one certainly hope it will at some point.
As the funding for (and thus the field of) post-Soviet studies in the US dissipated, the RAND Soviet Center, which once housed the country’s second largest concentration of Soviet specialists after SOVA, essentially disintegrated. Initially, RAND (read:Jeremy) still managed to obtain some research funding for collaborative research projects with Russian scholars on issues such as demography, migration, education, etc. But soon, Jeremy decided that RAND’s greatest value-added was as a facilitator of the high-level dialogue that took place in the Business Leaders’ Forum. He clearly also cherished the central role this allowed him to play in the corridors of power of both countries. Within RAND, it was hard to fight with the Forum’s material and reputational success. Very few people dared challenge Jeremy’s views, and the few who did consistently lost. Because Jeremy had learned a thing or two about power – how to get it and how to keep it. When a kind RAND colleague yesterday sent me Jeremy’s obituary, I decided to google him and came across this 1958 piece from TIME Magazine about the first Americans to receive stipends to study at Moscow State University (МГУ) in the 50s: “Most of the men, ranging in age from 22 to 37, are married, but at week's end only 23-year-old Harvard Political Science Student Jeremy Azrael had managed to take his wife.” Think about this: not only did he manage to get one of those scholarships, not only was he the only one of the (presumably pretty competitive) bunch to manage to bring his wife along, but he even managed to get that story into Time Magazine! Jeremy knew how to get what he wanted and how to hold onto it.
One of the last times I had a longer talk with Jeremy was in Santa Monica in 2004. We met in his office in the old 5-story RAND building. It was in the late afternoon and the views from his room over the Pacific, the palm trees, the Pier, Santa Monica Beach were absolutely stunning (they always tend to be even more spectacular when I see them than how I remember them). We caught up – as we had been doing at regular intervals for the past decade – on what we had been working on since we last met. He – as always – first asked how my daughter Sophia was doing. My wife and I had adopted a Russian baby while I was working at RAND out of the Santa Monica office in 2000 and Jeremy had of course followed our epic combat with the Russian bureaucracy from the front seat. This he never forgot. For some reason, adopting a Russian baby independently gave me more credibility in his eyes as a ‘true’ Russia specialist than any scholarly piece I had ever written. It was almost as if he was willing to forgive me my polished smart-ass ‘European’ (not a positive thing in Jeremy’s view J) pretentiousness just because of the fact that I HAD demonstrated that I actually cared about the Russian people.
As we talked on that sunny afternoon, I was happy to hear that he was still going strong (although he had a very scary cough) and that the forum was thriving. I was less happy that he still was not willing to leverage some of the networks, knowledge and money he had so skillfully accumulated for RAND through his business leaders’ forum to rebuild a genuine research capacity within his Center. Jeremy listened to me, as usual (we had had the same discussion on and off for a decade), he mumbled something and then he changed the topic. He knew better. His 'gut' told him otherwise. And he did not want to budge on this one.
Shortly thereafter he suggested we walk over to Santa Monica Place for a margarita. Needless to say, I agreed and insisted it would be my treat. A few minutes later, as we were sipping our margaritas on the outside terrace of a Mexican restaurant on the third floor of Santa Monica Place with a stunning view over my beloved Pacific Ocean, I recalled his eruption in class back in 1989. He smiled and replied “Well, ya know, huuuuu, I don’t remember that one, but I’m, huuu, glad to see it made such an impression on you”. The old RAND building is gone. Jeremy is gone. But that impression is with me and will stay with me. Here’s to a great old schoolteacher!
[1] In that time, I personally only came across two other people who saw and seized that window of opportunity – Klaus Segbers (then at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik) and Masaru Sato (at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tokyo).
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