Extractivist, Exclusionary, and Exploitative?

Many institutions may be motivated to get involved in contemporary political issues, especially when they believe their relevant community (be it employees, customers, consumers, audience) is relatively ideologically homogeneous and has predictable political desires. Although these efforts may achieve important goals, our results suggest that if these efforts result in perceptions of politicization, they may involve tradeoffs with costs in public trust and deference.

• Cory J. Clark et al., 2023[1]

When research is also “me-search,” it can be perceived positively as well as negatively depending on laypeople’s preexisting attitudes towards the research object….  One experience with a personally affected researcher might be enough to impact the evaluation of the whole field.

• Marlene Sophie Altenmüller et al., 2021[2]

The knowledge academics produce undoubtedly reflects the way we work in the field and back at home.  Perhaps the (in tone) strongest recent critique of the way we work was first presented at the 2022 Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) annual convention and subsequently published in the January 2023 issue of NewsNet as an article titled “The (Sorry) State of the Field or Why Western Humanists Need to Listen in Silence and Solidarity.”[3]  In the essay, the author affirmatively responds to a colleague’s Twitter criticism of scholars who exhibit “the intellectual arrogance that is required to speak for an entire field, especially when that field is not one’s home,” a comment the author finds “wholly justified.”  Unfortunately, the author does not cite the source of this criticism, making it impossible to examine the then-Tweet.  But the idea that a scholar in the “discipline problematically known as Slavic Studies,” or in any other ASEEES-related discipline, would attempt to speak for the entire field seems at best far-fetched.  In any case, the implication here is twofold: first, that scholars’ study of places and peoples to which they do not belong is particularly problematic (a postcolonial truism for adherents of its theory), and second, that academics who study the communities from which they hail might have special purchase on the field’s attention.  This kind of thinking, combined with the cryptic instruction, apparently aimed at Western Slavists, to “listen in silence and solidarity” (to whom, scholars espousing a particular view or hailing from particular places?), runs the risk of parochializing field, however defined, and is therefore unlikely to produce scholarship of the highest quality.  It seems to me that the important question is not whether it is better or worse for Western Slavists to conduct research from afar or local scholars to conduct “me-search” at zero altitude, but rather concerns how scholars from diverse backgrounds should be working together to advance our common interest in producing accurate knowledge about the diverse places and peoples we have dedicated our professional lives to study.  This question, in fact, is what the author sets out to answer in the second half of the essay.

According to the author, the “sorry” state of the field predates the current Russo-Ukrainian war and is due in part to the “hierarchal, extractivist, and exclusionary values” that are said to characterize the culture of many institutions of higher education in the West, and that are expressed through the “exploitation of local partners,” the “marginalization of local contributors,” and “a lack of appreciation for cross-border collaborative work,” as well as to the “professionally self-serving ways” that “Western academics” have conducted research “until now,” that is, ca. 2022.  It is true that academic institutions, archives, and libraries have hierarchical organizational structures, and that learning involves “extracting” data from sources, including people.  Of course, the same can also be said about similar non-Western institutions.  It is also true, and this the author does not fully acknowledge, that Western scholars in the fields known as Slavic and Central Eurasian studies have been collaborating with local partners in mutually beneficial ways for the better part of half a century (evidence to follow).  In any case, what the author does not do in the essay is to show that work in Slavic studies has been hierarchical, extractivist, exclusionary, or exploitative.  The cogency of the author’s bold claims about the way we have worked prior to 2022 stands on assertion alone.  One suspects that University of Rochester Professor Emerita Kathleen Parthé is not the only Slavist to find the author’s essay “poorly-argued and mean-spirited,” and yet its claims have not, to my knowledge, been otherwise challenged.  In response to the “disapproving tone” of the essay, Parthé asks: “Is there no evidence of non-exploitative research relationships past or present?”[4]  This is the question I set out to answer in the present essay.

There are other problems with this way of thinking about how we conduct research in the field.  Consider the matter from a different angle: When Americanists from abroad travel to Washington, D.C., to conduct research in the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and other (re)source-rich repositories and communities, is their practice of taking notes, making photocopies, acquiring digital images, relying on institutional staff for research-related assistance, consulting with local scholars, etc., also “extractivist”?  When the foreign Americanists hail from, say, well-endowed universities in western Europe, and the local scholars upon whom they rely work at cash-strapped community colleges, is their relationship also “hierarchical”?  And when the foreign Americanists publish single-authored work and acknowledge the contributions of those who facilitated the research, are such practices “exclusionary” and “exploitative”?  Does it matter how these questions are answered?  Or are they only germane when the researcher is Western and the research facilitator non-Western?   In any case, while some institutions of higher education in the West may “fetishize” the single-author monograph in promotion and tenure considerations, others clearly recognize the value of multi-author publications, including peer-reviewed articles and books. 

Having thus characterized the state of the field, the author recommends “alternative research approaches” that include identifying and empowering local partners; working with these partners to make sources, especially those perceived to be at-risk, publicly accessible; collaborating with local partners to produce and disseminate knowledge; and sharing this knowledge locally in multiple forums.  While it is clear this approach can be powerfully (and empoweringly) productive, it is less clear how it fundamentally differs from approaches taken by the international team of scholars who in the 1990s collaborated to produce a multi-author, interdisciplinary study of Russian empire between the 18^th and 20^th centuries, for example, or from the work of the German Historical Institute Moscow; of Ekaterina Boltunova and Willard Sunderland’s International Laboratory of Russia’s Regions in Historical Perspective; of Paolo Sartori, Pavlei Shablei, Bakhtiyar Babadjanov, and Ulfat Abdurasulov; and of the international teams that published and digitized countless archival sources, projects where the final word concerning what would be digitized by local partners and paid for by Western ones rested with the former.[5]  More recent digitization projects, which the author rightly champions in the essay, place more emphasis on “community engagement,” that is, on returning digitized assets back to the communities that preserved the original ones, and on helping those communities contextualize the assets, leading to greater “community investment” in our research and, hopefully, greater appreciation of this kind of knowledge production at our home institutions. [6]  While this is surely a productive path forward, it is one that at least some Western academics have been walking for decades.

Rather than requiring Western academics to listen in silence and solidarity to their non-Western counterparts, the production of accurate knowledge about the world, past and present, requires that scholars listen actively and critically, and identify and endeavor to redress hasty generalizations and unsubstantiated claims about the development of their fields, including the question of how Western scholars have historically worked with local partners to produce knowledge.  In introducing a special issue of Central Asian Survey dedicated to assessing developments in Central Eurasian studies since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the author explains their purpose is not to criticize “Western scholarship per se that has produced tremendous amounts of empirical and theoretical studies,” but to encourage Western scholars to “incorporat[e] more non-Western perspectives.”[7]  And yet the article presents Western scholarship in disturbing ways.  Western scholars in the 1980s and 1990s, the author claims, “treated Central Asia as a simplistic and exotic locale” and sought not genuine collaboration with their Central Asian counterparts “but rather to extract notes from the field and assistance with local contacts.”  Emphasizing the extractive and exploitative quality of Western knowledge production concerning Central Asia, the author comes close to accusing Western scholars of plagiarism, asserting that “local scholars’ knowledge is often represented in published works of their foreign counterparts who unknowingly may be extracting data and analysis without attribution or co-authorship.  Because local knowledge is not published in Western outlets or presented in familiar forms, it is used without proper citations.”  According to the author, some scholars from Central Asia feel their contributions to the field have been “marginalized” (the author does not say by whom and in what ways), and scholars in the “northern hemisphere” more generally “share mutually held grievances on the neocolonial language of some Western scholarship” (specific examples of the posited problem are not cited).  These are serious claims, to be sure, but they are difficult to assess because they are untethered from evidence, or at least evidence the author is willing to share with the reader.  It is surprising that such claims are published in Central Asian Survey, which for decades has served as a Western forum for the publication of “local knowledge.”[8]   Surprising, too, is the absence of any discussion of the considerable investment in the production of knowledge concerning Central Asia and the Caucasus made by Western state agencies, non-governmental organizations, private foundations, institutions of higher education, and individual scholars, from which both Western and non-Western scholars have benefited.  The rich history of international scholarly exchange involving Western, Slavic, and Central Asian scholars – documented in countless books and articles, grant applications and letters of recommendation, as well as foundation reports and other sources – awaits its student.

A related criticism in the same article is the claim that Western scholars have failed to “coproduce knowledge” with their local counterparts.  “Such interactions,” we are told, “can include the exchange of data, analysis and paywalled publications.”[9]  This raises an interesting question: What exactly counts as “coproduce[d] knowledge”?   For most Western academics, research-related fieldwork is preceded by years of training in multiple languages and disciplines, comprehensive examinations to assess the quality of their knowledge and skills, multiple drafts of project prospectuses and grant proposals, and then involves visiting local archives, libraries, historical sites, museums, and communities, and drawing on the expertise of specialists and the lived experiences of people in those communities.  Are Western scholars of Central Asia to make co-authors of every archivist, librarian, and scholar consulted in the course of conducting research?  In any case, and as noted above, Western and non-Western scholars have been co-producing knowledge for some time, and it is also worth remembering that a significant amount of scholarship produced by Russians, Central Asians, and Dagestanis has been translated into English and French by Michael Kemper, Allen Frank, Stéphane Dudoignon, and others.[10]

While a comprehensive history of U.S.-Soviet and -post-Soviet scholarly collaboration in Slavic and Central Eurasian studies remains to be written, its record calls into question claims that Western humanists have used their power and privilege in ways that have been hierarchical, extractivist, exclusionary, and exploitative in relation to local partners.[11]  On the contrary, in seeking to produce knowledge about the peoples and places of northern Eurasia, Western scholars, as guests in states whose governments looked suspiciously upon them, were sometimes junior partners to their non-Western colleagues, more supplicants than sovereigns in cultivating mutually beneficial scholarly relationships. To demonstrate this point, let us briefly consider the careers of Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, William Craft Brumfield, and Daniel Clarke Waugh, who for half a century have been producing knowledge about the history of the vast space and diverse peoples we study thanks in part to mutually beneficial relationships forged with local scholars.

It is difficult to identify a Western scholar who has done more to facilitate the use of the archives and manuscript repositories of the former Soviet Union for historical research in Slavic, East European, and Central Eurasian studies than Patricia Kennedy Grimsted.  For more than fifty years, Grimsted’s directories and supplements have been essential reading for academics conducting research in Soviet and post-Soviet archives – including for Soviet academics, since her guides had no equivalent within the Soviet Union.[12]  In the 1990s, Grimsted worked with Russian archivists to compile a digital directory and bibliographic guide to Russian archives, whose online English sequel, ArcheoBiblioBase, she continues to oversee as an Honorary Fellow of the project’s original sponsor, the Amsterdam-based International Institute of Social History.[13]  Though a Russianist by training, this fact has not, of course, prevented her from making monumental contributions to the study of non-Russian histories and cultures, or serving as a prominent research associate at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.  In this connection, her Baltic region, Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Moldavan archival directories and the fruits of collaboration with Ukrainian and Polish archivists deserve special mention.[14]  More recently, Grimsted’s research has focused on the restitution of Nazi-looted archives, libraries, and art, and addresses holdings in no fewer than ten countries, including in western Europe and the United States.[15]  As Grimsted herself has acknowledged multiple times, her work on the development, holdings, and published reference aids for the many archives and manuscript collections of the former Soviet Union and elsewhere would not have been possible without the robust assistance of local partners.  In publishing her studies, Grimsted hoped they might “serve as a stimulus for scholarship and constructive international scholarly exchange.”  Indeed, in making available to her contemporaries and future generations of scholars “key[s] to a vast and largely unknown treasury of historical materials which are relevant to far more than the Russian past alone,” as the Oxford scholar J.S.G. Simmons observed on the publication of her directory concerning Baltic and Belarusian repositories, Grimsted has for decades personified such scholarly exchange.[16]

William Craft Brumfield, for his part, has made many outstanding contributions to the preservation of the historical and cultural heritage of the diverse places and peoples of the former Soviet Union.  As the historian Elizabeth Wood has observed, Brumfield’s half-century’s worth of photographs of Central Asian, Russian, and Ukrainian architecture have “captured a legacy” and helped to preserve evidence of buildings – “wooden mills, homes, and churches – that are no longer standing.”[17]  For almost two decades, the Moscow publishing house Tri Kvadrata has been publishing, in Russian, with financial support from the Kennan Institute of Advanced Russian Studies, Brumfield’s “Discovering Russia” series (fifteen volumes to date), and with financial support from the Vologodskie Zori foundation, Brumfield’s Vologda series (seven volumes to date).  In recognition of his outstanding contributions to the preservation of the historical and cultural heritage of Russia, Brumfield was made a full member of the Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences (since 2002) and an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Arts (since 2006), and he is a recipient of the D. S. Likhachev Prize (2014) and the Russian Order of Friendship (2019).[18]  Far from plundering the places and built environment whose history he has helped to preserve – including Islamic architecture of Central Asia, Ukrainian churches, and Jewish monuments – Brumfield has made them, as a Russian scholar observed in reviewing his study of the photographic legacy of Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii, “a second homeland.”[19] 

Finally, Daniel Waugh has spent much of his career productively embedded in Soviet and post-Soviet historical professional communities (full disclosure: Waugh was my undergraduate advisor).  For more than fifty years, Waugh has been committed to making his work accessible to Russophone audiences, in part by publishing much of it in Russian, even when this meant forgoing royalty rights and risking promotion by publishing his second monograph, an important contribution to the study of Russian provincial life in the age of Peter I, in Russian.  As Waugh himself has observed, publishing in languages other than English “was not necessarily deemed a good credential when being assessed for promotion and tenure,” but “to publish in English meant that Russian colleagues might never read the work either because they could never get their hands in it or because they could not read the language.”  For this reason, Waugh decided to write his “Viatka book” in Russian for publication in St. Petersburg, “as painful as the process was.”  Of course, not only Russian but all Russophone audiences benefit from this decision.  Ever concerned with making scholarship as widely accessible as possible, Waugh has long believed “it is imperative in the 21^st century that all scholarship become readily available on the Internet.”[20]  In addition to having gratefully acknowledged the editorial efforts of colleagues who helped make his Russian-language publications possible, Waugh has published memoirs that read like a long thank-you note to his Soviet and Russian colleagues.  In the memoirs Waugh seems less an embodiment of Western academic privilege than, initially, a resourceful graduate student and novice codicologist, and later, a valued colleague to renowned members the Soviet and post-Soviet historical establishment.  The fact that Dmitrii Sergeevich Likhachev wrote the forward to Waugh’s book on Muscovite turcica, and Sergei Mikhailovich Kashtanov served as an external reviewer for Waugh’s final promotion (delivering seven single-spaced pages and concluding “the works of Dan Waugh constitute a great contribution to historical science”) powerfully attests to the high esteem in which local scholars have long held Waugh.[21]  For his part, Waugh has more than once acknowledged the “inspiration and support I have received from my Russian colleagues, whose expertise is on a level that I still can but aspire to attain.”  To demonstrate “the respect in which [historian Aleksandr Aleksandrovich] Zimin was held outside the Soviet Union,” for example, Waugh organized a Festschrift for him, and subsequently found other ways to honor the scholarly legacy of Zimin and other Russian colleagues.[22] 

Waugh’s professional efforts did much to “decenter” Russia in the Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies program at the University of Washington (UW) long before the term became fashionable.  After the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the subsequent loss of federal funding, Waugh played a leading role in saving the program and helping to make the university “a leading national center for the study of the Baltic region” and “to put Central Asian Studies at the very center of [the Russian, East European, and Central Asian studies] program.”[23]  In 1993, he successfully proposed creating a Baltic Studies Summer Institute, which became the springboard for developing the Baltic Studies program at UW, which he insisted be “pan-Baltic” and transnational in perspective, and which involved years of successful fundraising efforts on his part.[24]  In comments delivered in 2019 on the occasion of the 25^th anniversary of the Baltic Studies program at UW, Waugh, whom the local Lithuanian community considered a kind of high priest (krivis) of Baltic studies in the United States, recalled that in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, “the so-called area studies programs…were still anchored in an obsolete understanding of ‘Russia and Eastern Europe,” which is why he had argued for placing the program not within the Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies program, but within the Department of Scandinavian Studies, where it still resides.[25]  In addition to helping build the “Amber Road” at UW, Waugh also made important contributions to Silk Road studies.  In affirming Waugh’s “remarkable contribution to Central Asian studies,” historian Ali Igmen, writing in 2006, pointed to Waugh’s “comprehensive Silk Road courses, his unique web page, his beautiful photographs and his affection for the people and the mountains of Central Asia,” where “he has succeeded in reaching out to the community with his knowledge of Central Asia and Imperial Russia.”[26]  Indeed, Waugh’s contributions to Central Asian studies, and Silk Road studies in particular, including thousands of photographs of historical monuments from across the heartland of Islam, are remarkable for their high quality, breadth, and depth.[27]  Today, Waugh continues to build bridges to civil society in the post-Soviet space, including in Russia, where in the fall of 2022 he participated electronically in four separate conferences (including one on the Silk Road), working with Russian academics who are “not on the Putin bandwagon” and are “continuing to publish good objective scholarship.”[28]

By engaging in mutually beneficial international scholarly exchange in these ways, Waugh, Brumfield, Grimsted and other Western scholars like them have simultaneously advanced the cause of knowledge concerning the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and their successor states and societies, and helped those societies to preserve their history and culture.  In doing so, they have provided examples of apolitical cross-border collaboration worth remembering and emulating.

[1] Cory J. Clark, Calvin Isch, Jim AC Everett, and Azim F. Shariff, “Even When Ideologies Align, People Distrust Politicized Institutions,” (manuscript in preparation), University of Pennsylvania, PsyArXiv Preprints, April 14, 2023, https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/sfubr, 48 (all internet resources last accessed June 10, 2025).

[2] Marlene Sophie Altenmüller, Leonie Lucia Lange, Mario Gollwitzer, “When Research Is Me-search” How Researchers’ Motivation to Purse a Topic Affects Laypeople’s Trust in Science,” PLoS One 16, 7 (2021): 16.

[3] The following discussion is based on Victoria Donovan, “The (Sorry) State of the Field or Why Western Humanists Need to Listen in Silence and Solidarity,” ASEEES NewsNet 63, 1 (2023): 11-13. See also idem, “Against Academic ‘Resourcification’: Collaboration as Delinking from Extractivist ‘Area ‘Studies’ Paradigms,” Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue Canadienne des Slavistes 65, 2 (2023): 163-173.

[4] Kathleen Parthé, “On: The (Sorry) State of the Field (JRL #18, January 24, 2023),” Johnson’s Russia List, January 24, 2023, https://russialist.org/kathleen-parthe-on-the-sorry-state-of-the-field-jrl-18-jan-24-2023/.

[5] See The Editors, “Preface and Acknowledgements,” in Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700-1930, ed. Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen, and Anatolyi Remnev(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), xi-xii; Denis A. Sdvizhkov (in collaboration with Guido Hausmann), ed., Posle grozy: 1812 god v istoricheskoi pamiati Rossii i Evropy (Moscow: Kuchkovo pole, 2015); E. M. Boltunova and Villard Sanderlend [Willard Sunderland], Regiony Rossiiskoi imperii: identichnost’, reprezentatsiia, (na)znachenie (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2021); Paolo Sartori and Pavel Shablei, Eksperimenty imperii: Adat, shariat, i proizvodtsvo znaniii v kazkakhskoi stepi, Historia Rossica (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2019); Paolo Sartori and Bakhtiyar Babadjanov, “Being Soviet, Muslim, Modernist, and Fundamentalist in 1950s Central Asia,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 62, 1 (2019): 108-165; Paolo Sartori and Ulfat Abdurasulov, Seeking Justice at the Court of the Khans of Khiva (19^th-early 20^th Centuries) (Leiden: Brill, 2020). It is worth noting that Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700-1930 was conceived in the 1990s and emerged from interdisciplinary workshops conducted in Russia and the West, and that both it and Regiony Rossiiskoi imperii are dedicated to Boris Vasil’evich Anan’ich and Anatolyi V. Remnev, respectively.   On collaboration between the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI) and Yale University Press that resulted in the acclaimed Annals of Communism series and Stalin Digital Archive, see William F. Buckley, Jr., “Read All about It!  But Hurry,” National Review, April 22, 1996, http://yupnet.org/annals/Reviews/review_texts/Buckley1.htm; Scott Heller, “Yale Editor Brings Hidden Records of Soviet Communism to Light,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 28, 1997, https://www.chronicle.com/article/yale-editor-brings-hidden-records-of-soviet-communism-to-light/; John J. Miller, “The Annals of Jonathan Brent,” National Review (May 22, 2006): 43-45; Diane Kalder, “Yale U. Press Digitizes Stalin’s Massive Personal Archive,” Publishing Perspectives, June 22, 2012, https://publishingperspectives.com/2012/06/yale-u-press-digitizes-stalins-massive-personal-archive/; and “Collections,” Stalin Digital Archive, https://www.stalindigitalarchive.com/frontend/node/21128.

[6] On community-engaged scholarship, see, for example, Will Mason, “On Staying: Extended Temporalities, Relationships and Practices in Community Engaged Scholarship,” Qualitative Research 23, 3 (2021): 706-26, https://doi-org.proxy2.library.illinois.edu/10.1177/14687941211049318; John Forester and Anna Sims Bartel, “Writing and Publishing Community-Engaged Scholarship: Advice for Junior Faculty on Promotion, Publishing, and Craft,” Journal of Community Engagement and Higher Education 14, 2 (2022): 34-50; Lotte Wilms, Caleb Derven, and Merisa Martinex, “LIBER Digital Humanities and Digital Culture Heritage Working Group: A Case Study of International Collaboration and Network Building,” Art Libraries Journal 46, 2 (2021: 57-63, https://doi.org/10.1017/alj.2021.6; and Anne Schwan and Tara Thomson, The Palgrave Handbook of Digital and Public Humanities (n.p.: Springer International Publishing, 2022).

[7] The following discussion is based on Erica Marat, “Introduction: 30 Years of Central Asian Studies – The Best Is Yet to Come,” Central Asian Survey 40, 4 (2021): 477-82.

[8]Central Asia Survey, which focuses on the Caucasus and Central Asia,has been exemplary in its inclusivity with regard to international scholarly representation.  See, for example, Dono B. Abdurazakova, “Black Holes of Central Asian History: An Overview,” Central Asian Survey 11, 4 (1992): 85-92; Ramazan Traho, “Circassians,” Central Asian Survey 10, 1-2 (1991): 1-63; Vassan-Giray Jabagi (Cabagi), “Revolution and Civil War in the North Caucasus – End of the 19^th- Beginning of the 20^th Century, Central Asian Survey 10, 1-2 (1991): 119-132; O. A. Efendiyev, “The Nomads and the Settled Population of the Middle East in the Post-Mongol Period,” Central Asian Survey 12, 4 (1993):459-463; Shokhrat Kadyrov, “Some Questions on the Study of the Turkmen Family,” Central Asian Survey 12, 3 (1993):393-400; Nazif Shahrani, “Central Asia and the Challenge of the Soviet Legacy,” Central Asian Survey 12, 2 (1993): 123-135; Uradyn Erden Bulag, “Dark Quadrangles in Central Asia: Empires, Ethnogenesis, Scholars and Nation-States,” Central Asian Survey 13, 4 (1994): 459-478; Marina Mongush, “Tuvinians in China: Problems of History, Language and Culture,” Central Asian Survey 14, 4 (1995): 543-551; Jiger Janabel, “When National Ambition Conflicts with Reality: Studies on Kazakhstan’s Ethnic Relations,” Central Asian Survey 15, 1 (1996): 5-21; Gulnar Kendirbay, “The National Liberation Movement of the Kazakh Intelligentsia at the Beginning of the 20^th Century,” Central Asian Survey 16, 4 (1997): 487-515; Alisher Ilkhamov, “Shirkats, Dekhqon Farmers and Others: Farm Restructuring in Uzbekistan,” Central Asian Survey 17, 4 (1998): 539-60; Saulesh Esenova, “ ‘Tribalism’ and Identity in Contemporary Circumstances: The Case of Kazakhstan,” Central Asian Survey 17, 3 (1998): 443-462; Uradyn Erden Bulag, “The Cult of Ulanhu in Inner Mongolia: History, Memory, and the Making of National Heroes,” Central Asian Survey 17, 1 (1998): 11-33; Zhao Zhenbei, “A New Appraisal of Democratic Reform in the Pastoral Zone of Inner Mongolia in the 1940s,” Central Asian Survey 17, 1 (1998): 109-137; Diloram A. Alimova,” “A Historian’s View of ‘Khudjum’,” Central Asian Survey 17, 1 (1998): 147-155; Dolkun Kamberi, “A Survey of Uyghur Documents from Turpan and Their Importance for Asian and Central Eurasian History,” Central Asian Survey 18, 3 (1999): 281-301; and Azamat Sarsembayev, “Imagined Communities: Kazakh Nationalism and Kazakification in the 1990s,” Central Asian Survey 18, 3 (1999): 319-346.  This is not a comprehensive list of research published in Central Asian Survey in the 1990s by scholars from Central Asia and the Caucasus.

[9] Marat, “Introduction: 30 Years of Central Asian Studies,” 481.

[10] For example, Allen J. Frank, Turkmen Reader (Kinsington, MD: Dunwoody Press, 1995); Ashirbek Muminov and Bakhtiyar Babadzhanov, “Amir Temur and Sayyid Baraka,” trans. Sean Pollock, Central Asiatic Journal 45, no. 1(2001): 28-62;  Qurbān ʻAlī Khālidī, An Islamic Biographical Dictionary of the Eastern Kazakh Steppe, 1770–1912, ed. Allen J. Frank and Mirkasyim A. Usmanov (Leiden: Brill, 2005); Allen J. Frank and Jahangir Mamatov, Uzbek Islamic Debates: Texts, Translations, and Commentary (Springfield, VA: Dunwoody Press, 2006);Alfrid K. Bustanov and Michael Kemper, eds., Islamic Authority and the Russian Language: Studies on Texts from European Russia, the North Caucasus and West Siberia (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Pegasus, 2012); Stéphane Dudoignon, Hymnes de sang: Nouvelles du Tadjikistan (Paris: Indes Savantes, 2022).

[11] On the history of U.S.-Soviet academic exchanges, see Robert F. Byrnes, Soviet-American Academic Exchanges, 1958-1975 (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1976); Yale Richmond, U.S.-Soviet Cultural Exchanges, 1958-1986: Who Wins? (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987); idem, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2003); Wim Van Meurs review of Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain, by Yale Richmond, Ab Imperio 1 (2005): 371-4; Liping Bu, “Educational Exchange and Cultural Diplomacy in the Cold War,” Journal of American Studies 33, 3 Part 1: Women in America (1999): 393-415; A. S. Krymskaia, “K istorii nauchno-obrazovatel’nykh obmenov mezhdu SSSR i SShA v kontse 1950-kh – 1960-e gg.,” Noveishaia istoriia Rossii 2 (2011): 99-106; and Sergei I. Zhuk, “‘Academic Détente’: IREX Files, Academic Reports, and ‘American’ Adventures of Soviet Americanists during the Brezhnev Era,” Cahiers du Monde russe 54, 1-2 (2013): 297-328.

[12] For example, Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the USSR: Moscow and Leningrad, Studies of the Russian Institute, Columbia University (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); idem, Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the USSR, Moscow and Leningrad: Supplement 1: Biographical Addenda (Leiden: Inter Documentation Co., 1976); and idem, ed., USSR Finding-Aids on Microfiche (Zug, Switzerland: Inter Documentation Co., 1976).

[13]Arkhivy Rossii: Moskva i Sankt-Peterburg: Spravochnik-obozrenie i bibliograficheskii ukazatel’, ed. Mikhail D. Afanas’ev, Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Vladimir P. Kozlov, and Vladimir S. Sobolev, comp. Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Lada V. Repulo, and Irina V. Tunkina (Moscow: Arkheograficheskii tsentr, 1997); Archives of Russia: A Directory and Bibliographic Guide to Holdings in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Mikhail D. Afanas’ev, Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Vladimir P. Kozlov, and Vladimir S. Sobolev, comp. Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Lada V. Repulo, and Irina V. Tunkina, 2 vols. (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2000); and “ArcheoBiblioBase: Archives in Russia,” hosted by East View Information Services, https://abb.eastview.com/.

[14] Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the USSR: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Belorussia, Studies of the Russian Institute, Columbia University, and Harvard Ukrainian Series  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); idem, ed., Archives and Manuscript Collections in the USSR: Finding-Aids on Microfiche: Series 2, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Belorussia (Leiden: Inter Documentation Co., 1981); idem, Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the USSR: Ukraine and Moldavia, Canadian Library in Ukrainian Studies, Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); idem, ed., Archives and Manuscript Collections in the USSR: Finding-Aids on Microfiche: Series 3: Ukraine and Moldavia (Leiden: Inter Documentation Co., [1989?]);idem and Irena Sułkowska-Kurasiowa, The “Lithuanian Metrica” in Moscow and Warsaw: Reconstructing the Archives of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: Including an Annotated Edition of the 1887 Inventory Compiled by Stanisław Ptasyzcki, Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies(Cambridge: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute; n.p.: Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences, 1984); Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, “The Ruthenian (Volhynian) Metrica: Polish Crown Chancery Records for Ukrainian Lands, 1569-1673,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 14, 1-2 (1990): 7-83; Hennadi Boriak, Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Natalia Jakovenko, and Irena Sułkowska-Kurasiowa, eds., Rus’ka (Volyns’ka) metryka: Rehesty dokumentiv Koronnoi kantseliarii dlia ukrains’kykh zemel’ (Volyns’ke, Kyiv’ske, Bratslavs’ke, Chernihivs’ke voievodstvo), 1569-1673, comp. Hennadi Boriak, Liudmyla Demchenko, Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Natalia Jakovenko, Volodymyr Kravchenko, Viktor Strashko, Irena Sułkowska-Kurasiowa, Kyrylo Vyslobokov, and Hubert Wajs(Kyiv: Derzhkomarkhiv, 2002); and Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, “Praz’ki arkhivy” u Kyievi ta Moskvi: Povoienni rozshuky i vyvezennia emihratsiinoï Ukraïniky, trans. with documentary appendices by Tetiany Boriak (Kyiv: Derzhkomarkhiv, 2005).

[15] See, for example, Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Trophies of War and Empire: The Archival Heritage of Ukraine, World War II, and the International Politics of Restitution, foreward by Charles Kecskeméti (Cambridge: Harvard University Press for the Ukrainian Research Institute, 2001); Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, F. J. Hoogewoud, and Eric Ketelaar, eds., Returned from Russia: Nazi Archival Plunder in Western Europe and Recent Restitution Issues (Builth Wells, Great Britain: Institute of Art and Law, 2007); Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Returned from Russia: Nazi Archival Plunder in Western Europe and Recent Restitution Issues: Afterword ([Builth Wells, Great Britain]: Institute of Art and Law, 2013); and idem, Reconstructing the Record of Nazi Cultural Plunder: A Guide to the Dispersed Archives of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) and the Postwar Retrieval of ERR Loot, revised and updated edition, 2015, Cultural Plunder by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, https://www.errproject.org/guide.php.

[16] From the dedication and dust jacket, respectively, in Grimsted, Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the USSR: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Belorussia, v. 

[17] Quoted in Caroline Knox, “From Russia to MIT: A New Collaboration Is Bringing Russian Culture to the Institute,” September 14, 2016, MIT News on Campus and Around the World, https://news.mit.edu/2016/from-russia-to-mit-0914. It is worth noting in this context that the MIT-Russia and -Eurasia programs have sent scores of MIT undergraduate and graduate students to intern at companies and to teach STEM courses at European and Eurasian universities, including in the Baltics, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia.

[18] On his work to preserve Central Asian and Ukrainian architectural heritage, see William Craft Brumfield, Journeys through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 413-72; idem, Ukrainian Churches: Photographs (Cambridge: Executive Committee of the Ukrainian Studies Fund, 1980).  Brumfield’s photographs of Russian architecture are part of the collection of the Department of Image Collections at the National gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., (https://library.nga.gov/discovery/fulldisplay/alma991746593804896/01NGA_INST:IMAGE and https://www.nga.gov/global-site-search-page.html?searchterm=brumfield); his photography devoted to the architecture of the Russian North constitutes the Meeting of Frontiers: The William C. Brumfield Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (https://www.loc.gov/collections/meeting-of-frontiers/?fa=contributor:brumfield,+william+craft); for his photographic documentation of Jewish monuments in Russia, see the William C. Brumfield Collection, Clemson Libraries, Clemson University, https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/brumfield_collection/; see also the database of over 29,000 images in the William Brumfield Russian Architecture Digital Collection, University of Washington, https://content.lib.washington.edu/brumfieldweb/index.html. 

[19] Evgeny Khodakovsky, review of Journeys through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, by William Craft Brumfield, The Russian Review 80, 2 (2021): 302; see also William Craft Brumfield, “Amerika sokhranila dlia russkikh proshluiu Rossiiu,” interview by Rodina correspondent, August 22, 2018, https://youtu.be/tYLJXgWcnS0?t=5; idem, “O Rossii s liubov’iu,” interview by Natalia Metlina, Mezhdu Tem, TV “Zvezda,” December 23, 2019, https://tvzvezda.ru/schedule/programs/201808231539-wgb0.htm/2019122491-ynKRF.html; idem, “Faded Glory in Full Color: Russia’s Architectural History,” interview by Kritika editors,” Kritika: Explorations of Russian and Eurasian History 17, 2 (2016): 379-404.

[20] The “Viatka book” in question is Daniel’ Uo [Daniel Clarke Waugh], Istoriia odnoi knigi: Viatka i “ne-sovremennost’” v russkoi kul’tury petrovskogo vremeni (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2003).  For the quotations, see Daniel Waugh, “The Enthusiasms of Youth and Where They Led: A Memoir,” Quaestio Rossica 3 (2014): 31, 32.  Waugh began visiting the once-closed city Kirov (formerly Hly’nov/Viatka) in 1996.  Waugh’s work in the Kirov region “stimulated some re-thinking of what was really significant in Russian culture, whose history,” Waugh observed in 2014, “too often has been told from the perspective of the center, not from that of the regions.  Increasingly now, the perspective from the regions is finally getting its due…. The excursion out into the Russian provinces to Viatka has had a lot to do with re-orienting and, somewhat ironically, broadening my thinking” (ibid., 28, 31).  See also idem, “Discovering Viatka,” REECAS Newsletter (Winter 1997): 2-3, 15.

[21]The Great Turkes Defiance. On the History of the Apocryphal Correspondence of the Ottoman Sultan in Its Muscovite and Russian Variants, with a foreword by Academician Dmitrii Sergeevich Likhachev (Columbus: Slavica, 1978).  Kashtanov is quoted in Stephen E. Hanson, “Celebrating the Contributions of Daniel C. Waugh,” REECAS Newsletter (Spring 2006): 1.

[22] Daniel Clarke Waugh, “Zimin’s Study of the Sources for Medieval and Early Modern Russian History,” in Essays in Honor of A. A. Zimin, ed. Daniel Clarke Waugh (Columbus: Slavica, 1985), 1-58; idem “Introduction” and  [D. Yo], “K izucheniiu fal’sifikatsii pis’mennykh istochnikov po istorii srednevekovoi Rossii,” Festschrift for A. A. Zimin, ed. P. B. Brown, Russian History/Histoire Russe 25, 1-2 (1998): 7-10 and 11-20; idem, “The Enthusiasms of Youth and Where They Led: A Memoir,” Quaestio Rossica 2 (2014): 25-26; idem, “The End of an Era.  Remembering Sigurd Ottovich Shmidt (1922-2013), Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 14, 4 (2013): 910-20.  For examples of American-Soviet scholarly collaboration, conducted “in the best spirit of collegial relations, where there was trust in the exchange of information, not any kind of rivalry or one-upmanship,” see the tribute to the memory of Iurii Dmitrievich Rykov by Daniel C. Waugh, “Memory and Memoirs: The Past as a Foreign Country,” Slověne 11, 1 (2022): 397-434, quotation on 416.  Waugh recalls (“Memory and Memoirs,” 416-17 n. 33) that Edward L. Keenan “sent numerous copies [of his The Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha: The Seventeenth-Century Genesis of the “Correspondence” Attributed to Prince A. M. Kurbskii and Tsar Ivan IV, appendix by Daniel C. Waugh (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971)] directly and via [Waugh] to give to scholars and libraries” in the Soviet Union. 

[23] Stephen E. Hansen, “Celebrating the Contributions of Daniel C. Waugh,” REECAS Newsletter, Spring 2006, 2. 

[24] Daniel C. Waugh, “A Proposed Baltic Studies Summer Institute (BALSSI),” Baltic Studies Newsletter no. 67 (1993): 15-16.

[25] “Waugh Comments for Baltic Studies Anniversary Event, April 26, 2019,” email message to author, May 22, 2025.

[26] Ali Igmen, letter, REECAS Newsletter, Spring 2006, 4.

[27] For photographs of historical monuments of Central Asia and other parts of the Islamic world, see the Daniel C. Waugh Collection, ARCHNET, https://www.archnet.org/collections/1271, and the “Historic Environment Image Resource (HEIR), University of Oxford, https://heir.arch.ox.ac.uk/pages/home.php?login=true.

[28] Daniel C. Waugh, e-mail message to author, February 17, 2023.