I spent a few days last week in the presence of about 10 academics working in the field of Russian Foreign Policy. As I told them at the end of our meeting, I was struck by three main characteristics of this field: 1) the often astoundingly non-systematic empirical basis of much Russian foreign policy analysis; 2) the stovepiped nature of much of the work; and 3) the lack of any serious attemtp at cumulative knowledge building on this country that is once again become a major policy preoccupation of Western defense and security planners. My main rallying cry was that if we, as a community of experts, want to make a useful contribution to the West's attempt at dealing with a 'new' Russia, we will have to find ways to overcome these three hurdles.