John Van Oudenaren is the author of the new book The Geopolitics of Culture: James Billington, the Library of Congress, and the Failed Quest for a New Russia. It focuses on the role Billington (1929-2018), the former librarian of Congress, played in U.S.-Russian relations. Van Oudenaren's other books include Crisis and Renewal. He is a Global Fellow at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, and was director of the World Digital Library and chief of the European Division at the Library of Congress.
Q: What
inspired you to write The Geopolitics of Culture?
A: I thought
it was an important story that needed to be told.
The Library
of Congress did amazing things in and with Russia under [James] Billington’s
leadership: helping a major library in St. Petersburg recover from a devasting fire,
preserving and making accessible to scholars through digitization and
microfilming the records of the Soviet communist party and the international
communist movement, launching large-scale exchanges of people and of books,
organizing conferences, helping the Russians to create their first digital
libraries, and jointly organizing film projects, concerts, exhibitions, and scholarly
conferences.
These
activities reached ordinary Russians and helped the Russian cultural sector get
back on its feet after it was decimated by the collapse of the Soviet economy.
There was
also a political reason for writing the book. Putin has cultivated a myth among
the Russian people that in the 1990s the West, led by the United States, set
out to destroy Russia and its culture.
This is of
course not true. Western governments and organizations made enormous efforts in
the 1990s and beyond to help Russia create a prosperous market economy and a
stable political system. Mistakes were made, to be sure, but the claim that
U.S. intentions were malign is a lie.
The Library
of Congress wasn’t by any means the biggest provider of outside assistance to
Russia, but it played an especially important role. It helped to preserve and showed
respect for Russian culture at a time when many Russians felt humiliated by
their poverty and when Russian economic, political, and military power was at a
low point.
Gorbachev
and Yeltsin both acknowledged what the Library of Congress had done, and Putin
seemed to acknowledge it in the early 2000s, when he had several long meetings
with Billington and the two men discussed Russian culture and identity.
But later,
when Putin turned hostile to the West, he developed a mythology about Russia
being a 1,000-year-old culture that the West is out to destroy and that Russia
needs to “defend,” including through actions like the invasion of Ukraine.
I don’t know
how and when the truths that I document in the book will make their way into
Russia, but I am confident that someday they will, if they haven’t already. But
the first step to having the truth known is to document it thoroughly with
sources and evidence.
Q: How did
you research the book, and did you learn anything that especially intrigued
you?
A: I started
with published sources – newsletters, annual reports, press releases, and so
forth, as well as Billington’s own voluminous writings, including his books, op-ed
pieces in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, and his speeches,
articles, and congressional testimony.
I also used
a lot of unpublished archival sources – from various offices and divisions in
the Library of Congress, the Billington Papers at the Library of Congress, as
well as papers at the Reagan and Clinton presidential libraries, and at Harvard,
Princeton, and Yale. I did interviews with former and current Library of
Congress staff.
I was
personally involved in much of what is covered in the book, so I drew on my own
memory, but I always tried to check against written sources, because memory can
play tricks.
Lots of
things intrigued me. Personal relationships were interesting.
For example,
the friendship between Billington and the poet Joseph Brodsky. Billington loved
poetry, American and Russian, and he selected Brodsky to be poet laureate of
the United States at around the time the Soviet Union was collapsing.
Billington was
by profession a cultural historian, and he had great hopes that once the
communists were gone a classical Russian culture would reemerge.
He saw
Brodsky as the embodiment of this revived Russian culture, not only because of
his poetic genius but because in the 1960s Brodsky had been the protégé of the
two last great survivors of pre-Bolshevik Russian culture: the poet Anna
Akhmatova and the writer Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the poet Osip Mandelstam
who had died in the gulag.
Brodsky was
flattered to be cast in this role, but he didn’t believe it for a minute. The
correspondence between the men shows that Brodsky thought that post-communist
Russia would be dominated by thugs and gangsters of various kinds – “city boys”
he called them – rather than a revived Russian Orthodox Church, thriving rural
communities, and a Russian cultural renaissance, such as Billington was hoping
for. In this, unfortunately, Brodsky was right and Billington wrong.
Billington’s
relationship with Nancy Reagan was another surprise. They had worked together
on the June 1988 Gorbachev-Reagan summit, when he arranged her cultural program
in Moscow and St. Petersburg. They kept in touch, and I found in his papers a
copy of a long handwritten letter to her.
This struck
me as a quaint reminder of a lost world: good penmanship. My handwriting is so
bad I can barely leave a note for the dry cleaners, let alone write a long
letter to a former first lady. But he seemed fine with sending it and she
obviously read it and replied!
I guess the
other surprise was to realize, belatedly, what a coherent world view Billington
had – one encompassing culture, religion, politics, international relations.
I used to
write a lot for him – mostly speeches and letters – and he was generally
satisfied with what I wrote, because I understood his world view and could feed
it back to him when he didn’t have the time to do the writing himself.
But it
wasn’t until I sat down, amidst the pandemic, and read through pretty much
everything he had ever written that I realized what a consistent, coherent
world view he had, one that I guess he developed at Princeton and Oxford in the
late 1940s and early 1950s.
The
experience has made me think more seriously about intellectual biography as a
genre and to wonder who else that I know or know of had this kind of unified
world view.
Q: How would
you describe James Billington’s legacy when it comes to relations between the U.S. and Russia,
and what do you think he would say about today's interactions between the two
countries?
A: Well, he
got some things right and some things very wrong. He was obviously correct in
warning, as he did in the 1990s and early 2000s, that the heavy focus of
Western policymakers on economic reform – shock therapy, rapid privatization,
and so forth – was discrediting the United States and dissipating the good will
that ordinary Russians felt toward Americans after the fall of communism.
He was right
to draw attention to neglected psychological and cultural aspects that Putin
has since seized upon in a twisted way to stir up Russian hatred toward the
West.
But he was
clearly wrong about Putin. In the early days he argued that Putin was a kind of
Charles de Gaulle – a patriot who would use nationalism and mildly
authoritarian means to revive Russia and help it recover from national
humiliation in the way de Gaulle had helped France after its defeat in World
War II.
At most he
warned that Putin might became (or might be superseded by) a Milosevic – the
Serbian leader who exploited Serb nationalism to maintain his power. But as we now
know, Putin turned out to be a thousand times worse than Milosevic – in the
deaths and destruction he has caused and may yet cause as the war in Ukraine
grinds on.
Were he
alive today, Billington would be appalled by what has happened in Russia and at
the state of U.S.-Russia relations.
He always
saw post-communist Russia as engaged in a struggle between forces of light and
forces of darkness, but he was an optimist by nature and believed that the
forces of light would prevail.
But that
clearly has not happened. What has happened – the invasion of Ukraine, the
perversion of the Orthodox Church, the war crimes committed in Bucha and
elsewhere, the murder of political dissidents and suppression of freedoms – is
worse than the worst outcomes that Billington warned about in the 1990s and
early 2000s and argued that Western policy needed to work to prevent. He would
be very disappointed.
The positive
legacy of Billington’s work is his teaching and constant reminders that in
dealing with foreign countries we need to pay greater attention to cultural and
psychological factors and to these countries’ histories and traditions.
We can’t
just bribe or bomb or badger them into becoming liberal democracies as we tried
for the first decades after the collapse of communism. But neither should we
give up on trying to have a positive moral and political influence on the rest
of the world, as seems to be the approach of the current administration.
Billington
was always searching for a middle path between these two extremes – between on
the one hand expecting everyone would eventually become just like us because of
McDonald’s and the internet, and on the other of being indifferent to
circumstances in other countries and maybe even preferring autocracies to democracies
because they can be easier to deal with.
In the book
I argue that these are lessons from his work that we need to incorporate into
our foreign policy if we are to survive in this increasingly complex and in
some ways more hostile world.
Q: How was
the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: Well,
there are two parts to it – the “geopolitics” and the “culture.” Billington was
part of that generation of American thinkers who had come of age during and
just after World War II.
They were
taught that the United States had fought two wars in the first half of the 20th
century to prevent a single hostile power from dominating the Eurasian land
mass and its industrial and population resources.
Woodrow Wilson
had reluctantly entered World War I to prevent a German victory, and Franklin
D. Roosevelt was determined to stave off a British defeat at the hands of the
Axis.
The cold war
that began in the late 1940s was yet another struggle to keep a single, hostile
power – in this case the Soviet Union allied with China – from dominating
Eurasia.
The United
States won a spectacular victory in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed and
the cold war ended.
But
Billington always warned that there was nothing permanent about this victory
and that the United States needed to head off the emergence of a new coalition
of hostile powers, most likely comprising China, Russia, and some of the
Islamic states, that would dominate Eurasia and threaten U.S. interests and
security.
That was one
reason why he was so committed to trying to build a democratic Russia friendly
to the United States. Well, fast forward to the 2020s, and that’s exactly what
has happened.
There’s no
need to go into the details here, but somehow we have blundered our way from
the overwhelmingly favorable position we inherited in 1991 to one in which we
are facing what some are calling an “axis of autocracies” comprised of Russia,
China, Iran, and North Korea. Billington saw this as a possibility and wanted
to head it off.
The Trump
administration is now trying to pry Russia away from China, much the way Henry
Kissinger broke China away from the Soviet Union in the 1970s. In theory there’s
nothing wrong with this idea, but I doubt it will work.
And if the
price of winning over Russia is to sell Ukraine and Europe down the river, then
it’s hardly a net gain – indeed it would be a major loss.
As for
culture: Today’s geopolitical rivalry is mostly about hard economic and
military power, but it does have a cultural dimension. The United States and
its allies won the Cold War in part because they won the war of ideas.
They were
able to convince the world’s people that the West stood for cultural and
intellectual pluralism – for the free flourishing of different ideas,
religions, and art forms – while the communists enforced a bland orthodoxy
based on Marxist ideology.
Well, that
script has now been flipped. Putin, Xi Jinping, and the ayatollahs of Iran have
now assumed the mantle of cultural pluralism; they claim to be the protectors
of ancient civilizations going back millennia, while the United States leads a
decadent West that is trying to wipe out traditional cultures around the world
and impose a sameness that flows out of Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
This view is
of course nonsense – I don’t know enough about Iran and China to judge, but I
do know that Putin’s version of Russian culture is a sham that chokes off
genuine intellectual, artistic and religious freedom.
But there’s
a lot of sympathy for this view, in the autocracies themselves, in the Global
South, and unfortunately even in the West where some people are willing to
overlook Putin’s crimes and see Russia as some kind of model civilization.
Billington
(and a few other thinkers, for example the great Sam Huntington at Harvard) saw
this coming and wanted to head it off.
Billington’s
approach at the Library of Congress, which I happened to see firsthand, was to
demonstrate to other countries and cultures that we respected them – that we
were not out to impose a Western monoculture on them and that they did not need
to turn to dictators to preserve values that they held dear.
It was an
uphill battle, but we made a lot of progress in Russia – just not enough.
So that –
geopolitical rivalry with a cultural dimension – is why I entitled the book the
“geopolitics of culture.” In the concluding chapter I draw lessons from
Billington’s thinking that we might apply in the future as we try to get out of
our current geopolitical predicament.
Q: What are
you working on now?
A: I am
writing a history of the Open World program, which is one of the programs
discussed in The Geopolitics of Culture. It began as an exchange program that
Billington initiated with the support of Congress in 1999, aimed at heading off
the deterioration of U.S.-Russia relations that already then was underway.
The program
ultimately brought 20,000 Russians in leadership positions to the United
States. It later expanded to Ukraine and other countries in Eurasia and
continues to this day (although without Russian participation) under the
auspices of the Congressional Office of International Leadership (COIL).
Based on the
earlier book, COIL has asked me to write a more detailed history of this
exchange program, which I was happy to do.
The book
will be a history, but I’m also trying to get at some broader, more conceptual
questions: what role can people-to-people exchanges play in promoting U.S.
interests overseas? What kind of exchanges (youth, professional, cultural) work
best? How can we use exchanges to bolster countries such as Ukraine that are
under attack by Russia, and what role might such exchanges play in rebuilding,
down the road, some kind of relationship with a post-Putin Russia?
I’m also
putting on my political science hat to do some work on Europe. I’ve written
books on the EU in the past. The EU can be bureaucratic and boring, but it’s
now getting very interesting as Macron, Merz, Starmer, and a few others are
stepping up – working to ensure their security and their prosperity in what
many are calling a post-American world.
Q: Anything
else we should know?
A: I would
just like to thank this blog and Deborah Kalb for this opportunity to discuss
this book. As readers who are book lovers and writers know, the economics of
book publishing are pretty daunting these days, and anything that supports
independent and academic presses ultimately helps authors.
The
Geopolitics of Culture is available at Amazon, but a better bet is to purchase
directly from Cornell University Press. Here is the link:
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501775765/the-geopolitics-of-culture/#bookTabs=1
By typing
the discount code 09BCARD in at checkout, you take 30 percent off the price
(electronic or print edition).
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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