Daniel Satinsky: Okay. So what I'm interested in is your personal experience and more about the Wilson Center and how it got started and its purposes within Russia. How did you get involved with Russia?

Blair Ruble: Let me tell you about the Wilson Center first. It was founded in 1968 as a living memorial to Woodrow Wilson. The idea was to have a living memorial and to build off Wilson’s career as an academic and a politician. To bring together the world of ideas and the world of public affairs. It got up and running in 1971-72. In 92-93 they appointed Jim Billington as director. Billington came down from Princeton. He and the people at the Smithsonian had this vision of creating an institute for advanced study that happened to be in Washington, not a policy institute but an academic institute. Then Kennan convinced Billington that the way to do this was to have regional programs. Kennan Institute was the first regional program, and its basic mission was to help Americans understand Russia. It was that broad. Obviously it evolved overtime. At the beginning the Kennan institute concentrated on getting academics into Washington to talk, starting conversations between academics and policy people, this was at the end of the Vietnam war. The idea was that academics had a very different experience in the Soviet Union compared to the policy people. The center became home for residential scholars and the Kennan Institute became a home of residential scholars. I got interested in Russia in college at UNC Chapel Hill, went to graduate school at the University of Toronto, and then spent a year in Leningrad for dissertation research. I ended up in Washington because my wife had a job there, and I joined the Kennan Institute staff in 1975. Fred Starr hired me to do a study of research institutes in the Soviet Union, which broadened my horizon.

Daniel Satinsky: What was your dissertation on?

Blair Ruble: Soviet trade unions and labor relations. It was a non-subject, but I got a book published. Fred invited me to join the Kennan Institute staff to do a big study of the research institutes in the social sciences.


Daniel Satinsky: In those years, were there visitors from the Soviet Union?

Blair Ruble: Very rarely. I remember a couple of visitors at the Kennan Institute. What did happen was that Fred and I decided to send what we had written to the research institutes themselves. We got about 20 or 30 responses. Then we had a call from the Soviet embassy. They invited us over and suggested making it a joint project with the Soviet Academy of Sciences. This led to an agreement to create these handbooks, and that got me going back to the Soviet Union.

Daniel Satinsky: Did you get tripped up by the defense-oriented economy in Leningrad?

Blair Ruble: Yes, there was a sting operation of sorts. Meanwhile, I left the Wilson Center and ended up at the Social Science Research Council in New York in 1985. We got a lot of money to promote the development of Soviet expertise.

Daniel Satinsky: Where did the money come from?

Blair Ruble: A program called Title Eight through the State Department, and also from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation. My job was to seek out academic talent and give grants to graduate students and young faculty.

Daniel Satinsky: So you realized the challenge for Soviet studies was the lack of collaboration with scholars from the region.

Blair Ruble: Yes, I thought we needed to create colleagues in the Soviet Union who had enough Western social science training to interact as equals. The Kennan Institute position became available in 1989, and George Kennan reached out to me. It was a great opportunity to create meaningful professional experiences on both sides, integrating Soviets into the life of academic work of Kennan and supporting Americans who have been involved.

Daniel Satinsky: How did you find the Russian colleagues?

Blair Ruble: It varied tremendously. In the early 90s, there was so little money for social scientists in Russia that we were inundated with applications. We gave a year of professional experience in Washington to mid-career Russian social scientists, who soaked up the experience and made significant contributions. We also had a massive speakers program to invite different Russians to speak.

Daniel Satinsky: What was your meta-objective for this program?

Blair Ruble: The founding purpose of the Kennan Institute was to help Americans understand Russia, and I wanted Russians to help Americans understand Russia. Secondly, to create colleagues who would work with us and others. Many of them became influential in their fields.

Daniel Satinsky: What was the major change you saw in them by being part of this program?

Blair Ruble: There were three major changes. First, the opening up of the world to them. Living in Washington and seeing how things worked, they formed their own views about how the world functions. Secondly, we left them to work undirected, which was a new experience for many. They appreciated the freedom to pursue their own professional interests. Thirdly, the Wilson Center brought together people from academia and policy, which helped Russian academics see a different model of engagement with policy.

Daniel Satinsky: Did this change carry over into their activities in Russia?

Blair Ruble: Yes, many became involved in policy-making, education policy, legal reform, and social policy. Several became university administrators or were involved in education policy. Some worked on labor economics, migration, and legal reform. However, once Putin came to power, many connections were severed, and the atmosphere changed.

Daniel Satinsky: So you weren't limited to Moscow and Saint Petersburg?

Blair Ruble: No, we made a concerted effort to reach out to other regions. We set up an alumni association in Russia and held conferences around the country.

Daniel Satinsky: When did you establish an office in Russia?

Blair Ruble: We started in 1990 through the IREX office run by Todd Weinberg. In 1992, we set up a Moscow registered NGO and contracted Todd's company to run the office. This arrangement worked well for about ten years but began to fray. The political atmosphere changed, and subtle hints suggested it wasn't a good idea to be there. The office closed in 2012 when new leadership decided it wasn't worth the effort and that contracts with individuals would suffice.

Daniel Satinsky: When did the atmosphere in Russia start to change?

Blair Ruble: It became shaky under Medvedev, but the real change was when Putin came back the second time. People showed up at the office asking questions about me, auditors visited more often, and the nature of the relationship looked more sketchy.

Daniel Satinsky: It's interesting because I think Medvedev's time was the high point of a globalized Russia. Would you say that part of what you were doing was integrating the Russian academic sphere into the global academic life?

Blair Ruble: Yes, that was part of it. I was finishing up the book on Leningrad and had personal connections with Carnegie Corporation. Jeff Hahn and I decided to study a Soviet city from various directions. We chose Yaroslavl because it was easy to get to and had a smaller defense-related footprint so it was relatively open. The project involved studying local government and dividing tasks among American and Soviet participants. The institutional networks played out, and the project continued even after the Soviet Union collapsed.

Daniel Satinsky: How did you become involved in Moscow's planning efforts?

Blair Ruble: I befriended Slava Glazachev, a city planner with connections in Europe and Medvedev. He mobilized intellectual resources around recontextualizing Moscow and set up a commission on the future of Moscow. Our first grand international meeting was the day of the Bolotnaya demonstrations, which affected the project. After Slava's death, the connections disappeared.

Daniel Satinsky: Did you have any connection to the expat community?

Blair Ruble: I tried not to hang out too much with expats, focusing more on Russian contacts. I did know a few expats, like Randy Bregman, but I was more interested in what was happening locally.

Daniel Satinsky: I knew Randy. He was partnered with Sara Carey. Yeah.

Blair Ruble: Yeah, yeah, he's with Dentons. I was going to suggest you talk to Randy. So Randy and I had been coworkers at one point. So I would hang out with Randy a little bit. Though, I mean, I wasn't opposed to engaging with expats, I just didn't have enough time; and, frankly, neither did they. The expat I really got to know was a Spanish journalist who had been there since '84, and she had been at Kennan, so I hung out a little bit with the journalists. But, you know some the expats didn't want to hear what I had to say because I was going out and about and coming back and saying that something is not going all that well. Warning bells are going off. You really should listen to people. They don't like being lectured to.

Daniel Satinsky: Right. So when did you start to feel this pushback from Russians?

Blair Ruble: In Yaroslavl around 1992, a factory manager expressed frustration with being told how to run things by Americans. By 1994-96, it was clear that relations were going badly, especially during the war in the Balkans.

Daniel Satinsky: And that sort of message wasn't appreciated?

Blair Ruble: No, it wasn't. Many contractors were fulfilling contracts without truly understanding the local context. The AID program had a birth defect in that AID had no previous experience dealing with the region.

Daniel Satinsky: Did you encounter any specific issues with food aid?

Blair Ruble: Yes, there were horror stories about the distribution of food aid. A lot of miscues happened due to arrogance and tone-deafness.

Daniel Satinsky: Would you say there was a consensus among private foundations about their objectives in Russia?

Blair Ruble: It varied. Many foundations saw it as an opportunity to change the country. The Eurasia Foundation was guided by AID, focusing on democracy. MacArthur did a good job by setting up an all-Russian operation, deciding their areas of interest through Russian advisory councils. Carnegie Corporation operated through intermediaries but focused on mid-career rising academics in the humanities and social sciences.

Daniel Satinsky: Was there a feeling that Russia was becoming integrated into the global world?

Blair Ruble: Yes, I believed the only future for Russia was integration into international systems. Many Russians could swim effortlessly in the international environment. I still believe that, despite changes in global dynamics.

Daniel Satinsky: Did you still feel that way after the pushback in 94-96?

Blair Ruble: Yes, until Putin came back. Medvedev was still on that path, and there was hope among Russian elites. But when the KGB guys returned, it marked the end of that period.

Daniel Satinsky: So 2008 was a turning point?

Blair Ruble: Yes, Putin's first term had some alignment with the globalization path. But the financial crisis in 2008 revealed vulnerabilities, and Putin's return shifted the direction. The return of KGB influence marked a significant change.

Daniel Satinsky: So that's a pretty, pretty long period, I mean. So you didn't feel that way in 2000, when Putin took over?

Blair Ruble: I know in Putin's first term he actually did some reforms, especially with tax policy.
It was all in line with this kind of policy. I'm not, I'm not. I think. Actually, I think the financial crisis in 2008 may have been a turning point. I think up until then, even Putin kind of bought the line that we may not like this, but we don't really have any choice. After 2008. Well, we don't need this. And we told you this was going to work. Meanwhile, I had a very Interesting, conversation. There's only one thing that could have happened. Do you know, Lena Nemirovskaia and the Moscow School of Policy Science?

She is now in Riga. She's been forced out of Moscow, but she has had for the last 30 years a really remarkable program of symposia, which she called schools. She would invite young-to-mid career officials from Russian regions to come together and meet with top notch foreigners. I went to one of these meetings -- I'm thinking it was September 2008. As we went to lunch they put me on a table with Tatarstan Republic economic officials. I couldn’t imagine what I would talk to these people about. And what they wanted to talk about was that they had not wanted to turn their oil revenues over to Moscow, right? So, they put their money into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds. And what had happened the week before? They had lost tens of millions of dollars. The whole collapse had not run its course yet. So you can figure out which week was that one week when that would have been true. They wanted to know what the hell we Americans were doing? Are you becoming like us? Are you becoming Russians? How do you run an economy this way? And I think I remember Slava Glazachev, who was also really upset, in part because he had invested money in the States 2008, I think, was the moment when the curtain was pulled back in Oz and there wasn't anything there. Whether or not whatever Putin believed in the West or didn't before 2008, it certainly gave him the opening to do things differently.

Daniel Satinsky: But the people who will appear in this book were motivated for other reasons. They were motivated with the idea that by founding these businesses, they were going to show how it should be done and that there was going to be a progressive, change towards a market economy. The best model that we had in our heads of what America was. I'm not sure it was the end, but it certainly was a model. Which sounds like 2008 is a good turning point, really, for all of that, you know, was not well recognized, I guess.

Blair Ruble: I remember this was pretty early on. There was a conference at the Kennan Institute back when we're still in the castle at the Smithsonian Castle. I think it was organized by, of all people, the Heritage Foundation. Anyway I don't remember who the speaker was. He made the observation that there is an American model that really would stand Russia well. But since most Americans don't understand.how this country works, they might not mention it. He continued that the Russians should look at American agriculture where you have land grant universities, heavy government investment, and countercyclical interventions in the market. And I remember sitting there thinking, (again, I don't remember who this was), but I knew he was right, that most Americans think that we have this free market, but the parts of the economy that actually work don’t always follow free market principles. Systems. And that's really the sweet spot. And Russia could get to that sweet spot, I remember. Well, of course I actually.

Daniel Satinsky: That's how our technology sector really works too. Yeah. Right. Same thing.

Blair Ruble: So that actually is a model. But most Americans don't really fully appreciate that, right?

Daniel Satinsky: Right. So if you were to look back and say where there are inflection points, where things could have been done differently or should have been done differently, or is the state of affairs sort of an outgrowth of Russian internal development and it didn't matter what we would have said or done.

Blair Ruble: I think we could have made a difference at the margins. And I think there were inflection points. I think the first one came in 1993. No one else in the world thinks what I'm about to say is true, but I actually think it would have been a good thing if the communists had won the election in 1993, because they would have failed, and it would have gotten that out of the system. And looking back at it now, 3 or 4 years of chaos under Zyuganov is nothing compared to what happened.

Daniel Satinsky: You mean the 96 elections?

Blair Ruble: 1996 election. So I think the 1993 shootout and the 96 election were big turning points. And I think there was another turning point around the time the end of the Yeltsin era when Putin came. That's also about the time of the Balkans war. There's a whole bunch of events that came together. Had we given the Russians a more meaningful role in the Balkans that might have made a difference. I think obviously 2008 and then the return of Putin in 2012 I think those are all possible points when reforms derailed. On the other hand, you know, it's like NATO expansion. If there are a number of us who are saying that bad things could happen in the Russian relationship, but the response which had legitimacy was that the Russians shouldn't have a veto power over whether or not the Poles want to be in Europe.

It could have been done differently had we not rubbed the Russian noses in their failures. We all know that one of the problems with dealing with Russians is, at some point, they just can't help sticking their finger in your eye. No matter, how well-meaning you are, they just have to show that they're capable of being really nasty., I don't deny that the Russians are part of the story, too, but I think we might have handled things differently during, say, the period after the1993 shootout, and the parliamentary elections and the ratification of the Constitution that December.

Clearly the Constitution wasn't ratified because they went off the air and came back and declared that it was. My understanding is that there were people around Vice President Gore who were saying that we really need to change tack. They ran into the buzzsaw of Larry Summers at Treasury, and there was a fight between Treasury and State over the future of Russia policy. And the Summers position won out. More specifically, that the economists had to run the show because the entire transition depended on getting the economics “right.” In December 1993 and January 1994, when Gore and some people at the State Department were trying to say we should step back, they got totally gobbled up by the Treasury.

I think our inability to drive a stake in the heart of the Confederacy has haunted us ever since. Sometimes more so, sometimes less so, but we didn't get the post-Civil War settlement right. And there have been all sorts of really nasty forces in American society that have never really been subdued, never been defeated. I would say the same thing whatever you want to call the KGB . There's an authoritarian, isolationist nationalist strain in Russian society that never completely was put back in the box. Have you ever seen the Georgian movie Repentance? It came out during glasnost under Gorbachev. It's a story about what happens after the dictator dies (clearly Stalin). His compatriots put him in a coffin, and go off to celebrate, and he keeps coming out of the coffin. He won't go away. And there is that element to the Russian story. There's not an alternative vision in the outside world that's as compelling as the past under the dictator.

So, we could have made a difference. I think if Putin hadn't come back, if the idea of another Medvedev term or somebody from his group could have made. We could be dealing with a different world right now. But, we didn't end up where we are without reason. I think there are powerful forces and an inertia that would have dragged on.

Daniel Satinsky: Yeah. I'm trying to kind of understand some of these things from the Russian side as well, because it wasn't as if we had free agency to change the country and we screwed it up. That would be the wrong story to tell. Because we didn't, we had a honeymoon, and we could have done some things differently that I'm trying to understand. So in some ways like the picture of privatization is the Harvard boys came and screwed it up. But I mean, I've read articles about this, and people have taken the position that Jeffrey Sachs and Harvard kind of screwed it up. But on the other hand, they were, how can I say this, they became an instrument for the desires by the Gaidar group to do that. It was just how they were going to do it. They latched on to it and enabled it. But the driving force was Russian, not American.

Blair Ruble: More than that, it got screwed up in some very Russian ways, where there were well-placed Russians who really didn't buy the program but saw opportunities to loot. You can blame the Harvard boys for not being sufficiently aware of those dangers. But fundamentally, privatization failed because there were too many Russians who wanted to get their hands in the cookie jar.

Daniel Satinsky: But there's a Russian economist that I read who sort of portrayed the fall of the Soviet Union as really not inevitable, as a kind of a power grab, to take state property by the nomenclatura. The Komsomol crowd privatized the state property because they could and it was weak enough. So that wasn't necessarily inevitable that it had happened that way. So, you know, those are, I think, important perspectives to have on the limits of what we could and couldn't do. And, and the impact of Russian internal history, forces, social forces, all those things. I'm trying to figure out how to say all that.

Blair Ruble: Well, it's hard to say, but I think it was true. I remember being in a room once when somebody asked Gorbachev when he realized that the Soviet Union was going to collapse. He gave a really unexpected answer: December 1990. And so why December 1990? Because there was a party congress at which the union republican party leaders signaled that they would no longer pass tax revenues to Moscow.

And I just thought, it's kind of remarkable that he hadn't figured it out before then.

Blair Ruble: On the other hand, he was actually talking about something that was real. Yeah. That the elites decided it was no longer in their interest to play the game.

And he said he decided if it was in their interest to play the game there would have been a different outcome.

Daniel Satinsky: When I get about an hour and a half into these interviews, I feel like we run out of intellectual effort at that point. But, I think that this has been very, very useful to me, and very helpful. And I'm hoping that at some point in the future, if I want to, like, maybe run some of these themes by you again, you'd be willing to do that.