Russian Research Center Well Into Third Year

After more than two years of gathering data, classifying and analyzing it, and putting out magazine articles, compilations, and book reviews, the Russian Research Center is going into the book publishing business. Its first volume, which is slated to appear this spring, is a volume by Alex Inkeles, research associate at the Center, on public opinion in the Soviet Union.

There will be a steady flow of such books on specialized topics like this for the duration of the Center's work, which ends in 1953. At that time, there will also be one comprehensive volume uniting the political, economic, and social aspects of the investigation of the Soviet Union.

The subject matter of this investigation is divided into three main areas, though all research is supposed to cut across department lines. The first project, under the direction of Merle Fainsod, professor of Government, is the Communist Party, past and present. The second is a survey of all sides of the Soviet economy, conducted by Alexander Gerschenkron, associate professor of Economics. The third study is a sort of amorphous lump, entitled Psychology and Social Life, which, along with several "miscellaneous projects" takes up everything except politics and economy.

The study of the Communist Party is being conducted "not only from the point of view of the political scientist but also from those of the economist, psychologist, and sociologist." Thus such studies as "party Policies in Literature" and "An Interpretive Study of Marxist Method" take their place alongside specialized investigations of purely political events.

The official four-page outline of the party study breaks downs into sections on the history, composition and organization of the Party, its ideology, its relation to Soviet society, and its implications as a world Communist movement. IN reality, most of the studies spill over, several of these areas and no special effort is made to confine them.

Fainsod's main worry in his work is the difficulty of getting information on the contemporary status of the Russian Communist Party. He gets official government documents and party journals direct from the Soviet Union, and these constitute the bulk of his working material. In addition, several workers in his general field have access to U. S. government information on Russia.

Another important source has been people who have fled to Western Europe and America from Russia and her satellites. So far, no "top" members of the Party have emerged from behind the "Iron Curtain," but several minor officials and numerous people not officially connected with the Party have contributed valuable bits of information.

It is not only under the Soviet government that Russia has become a grudging source of information, Fainsod asserts. Back in the days of the Czars, Russian censorship was tight, tighter in fact than during the early thirties.

Money Problems

In analyzing the Soviet economy, Professor Gerschenkron has the problem both of getting material and then translating it into American terms. This second stop is necessary, he states, because while the Russians have not been known actually to falsify statistics, their production comparisons are often distorted by significant omissions.

Ingenious juggling of Russian production figures is absorbing several members of Gerschenkron's staff. Donald Hodgman is constructing an independent index of Russian industry, based solely on Russian figures, which "have a considerable upward bias." Hodgman will then try to make some sort of comparison with U. S. output.

Franklyn D. Holzman is doing extensive work on Russia's taxation system, which differs from ours in its relation to the economy. His study is important because it may help to show why Russia is subject to the same sort of ups and downs that plague free enterprise societies.

The third investigation, that of psychology and social life of the Russian people, is in many ways the most novel, because "the fields of anthropology, psychology, and sociology have hitherto play little part in Russian studies." There is no specific outline for the study, and this looseness reflects the difficulty of applying usual research methods to the Soviet Union.

Among the most important work in this section is Raymond A. Bauer's study of "the conception of man in Soviet psychology." This is expected to shed light on the Russian government's official view of the nature of man.

Inkeles' book is designed "to explain the effectiveness of Soviet propaganda." In it, he will try to balance two fundamental facts about Russian mass communication. "On one hand," he thinks, "the Russian system is a well-planned, smoothly-run, and fully-utilized apparatus. But on the other hand, it is not designed with the purpose of facilitating the free flow of ideas among the Russian people."

In the Beginning...

The Russian Research Center was set up on an original Carnegie Corporation grant of $100,000 in late 1947. This amount was only for original expenses of establishing the study; final cost of the entire project will be in the neighborhood of $800,00, all coming from the Carnegie group.

Director Clyde K. M. Kluchkohn, professor of Anthropology, emphasized at the start that it was going to be like any other regional study at the University; it was not intended as a "feeder" of information to the State Department.

"The major objective of the Research Center," Kluckhohn said, "is the study of Russian institutions and behavior in an effort to determine the mainsprings of the international actions and policy of the Soviet Union."

For its first few months, the Center was engaged in a survey of what was already known about Russia, finding what knowledge there was on which to base further investigation. During the summer of 1948, various American scholars did some exploratory activities in Central Europe. The final aim of the five years of study was a large mass of new or newly-integrated material, in published form, which would contain a fairly comprehensive picture of Russia today.

There is no doling out of money to individuals; the Center invites experts on Russian and other students her to do research. There is an overall plan of study, and some effort to correlate the individual research jobs into one unified picture. Subjects not mentioned specifically in the outline, however, are open to study by specialists particularly interested in them.

An Executive Committee is in charge of the Center, directly responsible to provost Buck and acting as the final judge of what research is to be undertaken. Talcott parsons, professor of Sociology, Edward S. Mason, dean of the School of Public Administration, Donald C. McKay, chairman of the Committee on International and Regional Studies, Fainsod, Gerschenkron, Michael Karpovich, chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages, and Wassily W. Leontief, professor of Economics, sit with Kluckhohn on this group.

The rest of the staff consists of a host of graduate students and research fellows writing their doctorate theses on some aspect of the Russian situation, and professors and instructors with specialized knowledge of certain subjects.

Most of the investigators at the Center have not been to Russia itself. Travel to that country has been severely restricted for the last 15 years, and has been virtually impossible since the war. Almost all the professors and students, however, have been in one or more of the so-called "satellite" countries or China, which have been the subjects of individual studies.

Naturally, there is considerable difficulty in securing material for study. The Center has not now, and has never had, any contact with the official Russian government, and has had to rely exclusively on printed matter and interviews with former residents of the Soviet Union.

Reading Matter

The printed sources include both books and current periodicals. Though there are great numbers of books describing the Russian scene at various periods, most of them were published in Russia, and are not readily available for study. Some are not even in the largest libraries, but exist in single copies owned by people scattered throughout the world. In such cases, the Center requests the book, transfers it to microfilm when it is received and returns it to the owner. Rare books have come from such places as the Library of Congress, the West coast, New York, and Paris. The Center also subscribes to 180 magazines covering all aspects of Soviet life.

The Center's work, though not commonplace, is not completely, isolated or unique. Columbia University's Russian Center and Stanford's Hoover Memorial Library exchange personnel with Harvard for lectures and conferences. There has also been contact with individuals at Yale and at the Far Eastern Institute of the University of Washington. One foreign group cooperating on the Russian problem is Chatham House (the Institute of International Affairs) in London.

The five-year study now being conducted on Quincy Street is an extremely ambitions and difficult job. If it lives up to the expectations of its founders and directors, it will provide a lot of badly needed understanding.