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.