During an age when distrust and hatred hang over mention of the word Russia, when investigation into Communist activities have descended on American government, education and churches, when the nickname of the Cincinnati baseball team is changed, a group of scholarly men, working out of dark offices on Dunster Street are heading the study of modern Russia.

For over five years now, the staff of the Harvard Russian Research Center has investigated the entire Soviet system, from Stalin to Satellite, from social mobility to Soviet medical care. It has filled files with thousands of questionnaires, interviewed over 2000 refugees, and in the process opened up new ideas on the strong and weak points of Russian life. This work will never have the devastating, headline-making effect of a bomb, nor will it even have so direct a result as the work of propaganda men in Radio Free Europe. The job of these men is collecting information about a country enveloped in a great silence, and thus help determine where this country is susceptible.

The Russian Research Center was set up on an original Carnegie Corporation grant in 1948. The Corporation felt the U. S. needed more knowledge of Russia, and it picked Harvard because of the strong social relations department, Russian scholars such as professors Michael Karpovich and Wassily Leontieff, and anthropology leaders such as Clyde Kluckhohn, who had already applied anthropology to the study of Japan in the second world war.

Even then Kluckhohn, executive, director, characterized the purpose of the project as the study of "Russian institutions and behavior in an effort to determine the mainsprings of the international actions and policy of the Soviet Union."

Besides the 11 professors chosen for the executive committee, the staff includes Staff Research Associates, and graduate students writing theses on some aspects of the Russian situation. The Staff men are often assistant professors who also lecture in a course.

Particular Problems

The Center also has specialists from other institutions who are working on a particular problem. This year, Professor Herbert Marcuse from the Columbia Russian Research Center is doing work in Russian philosophy. The other senior fellow, former State Department economist Alexander Eckstein is completing a thesis on the economics of the Russian satellite countries and what happens to these countries during the period of Russian domination.

"It's very hard over to predict what we'll be doing the next year," Kluckhohn said, "because of the large turnover in staff that we have. But the turnover is part of our policy. It keeps us alive to bring in men each year with ideas of their own. That's the reason that we can't plan too far in advance. These men have topics of their own, and that's healthy.

Law and the Church

"If people seem outstanding we let them go outside the few main areas. Currently we have work going on in Soviet language, literature, law and a study of the Orthodox church," Kluckhohn added.

Right now the biggest project over at the Center, is the study of the Soviet Social system, directed by two of the regular staffers, Dr. Alex Inkeles, and Dr. Raymond A. Bauer. Supported by the Air Force, it is a long range program designed for a better understanding of how the Soviet system works and particularly as a basis for firmer predictions on how the regime and its citizens will react to certain situations.

It is the three-month-old hearings of the Air Force's support of this program which were recently blown up in the Boston Post. The Post ran some of the testimony of Senators whose primary objection to the Research Center seemed to stem from their belief that the Harvard faculty couldn't be trusted to do research work on Russia.

The Center's workers took the stories relatively calm, with Bauer, wondering about some of the Post's exclusive factual evidence. "They quoted expenditures on a particular project as $45,000. I don't know how they arrived at the figure. Here we certainly don't know exactly how much it cost but if we could name a figure, it would be closer to $8,000."

Water Pump

Because lack of understanding, or deliberate misinterpretation occurs frequently, the Center must be particularly careful about press relations, requesting right to check copy for facts on all feature stories.