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Russia’s war in Ukraine has sparked debate about the approach to the study of Russia and Eastern Europe in the US academic environment. In particular, the topic of the conference of American Slavists, which will be held in Philadelphia this fall, will be the “decolonization” of research in the region. “Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has led to widespread calls for a reassessment and transformation of Russocentric power relations and hierarchy both in the region and in the way we study it,” says the website of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Oksana Shevel is a professor of political science at Tufts University in Massachusetts and the vice-president of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies, until recently she headed this organization.

In an interview with Voice of America, she said that many professors who teach senior and graduate students are already doing so based on a more comprehensive approach, paying attention not only to Russia, but also to other countries in the region. Some of them take the call for “decolonization” negatively, believing that they have long since achieved this in their lectures and publications. On the other hand, she said, teaching at the level of individual courses, high schools, perhaps poorer universities, still gives students a simplistic picture of the region, based on the often mistaken ideas that have long dominated academia and public opinion.

“Ukraine is known much less than they know Russia, or they know it as a kind of Russia Lite, where people live who cannot radically differ. If, let’s say, civil society is weak in Russia, it means that it is probably weak in those countries as well, or weaker. If there are problems with democracy there, then there are problems everywhere, if there is corruption in Russia, then obviously there is corruption in Ukraine as well,” she said in an interview recorded using Skype.

Tetyana Vorozhko, Voice of America: From the way Russia’s war against Ukraine is covered and discussed, we see that to some extent some assessments do not match reality. The readiness of Ukrainians to resist was underestimated, and the readiness of Russians to resist the actions of their authorities was overestimated. Does it come from the way the history of these countries is taught in the United States?

Oksana Shevel, Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University, Massachusetts: To answer briefly, yes, it is related to this. Most people in America, in the countries of Western Europe, even if they studied at the university, they may have taken one general course on the history of Russia. And this general course covers many centuries and, obviously, is often very Russocentric, because those regions that are smaller, not in the center, are given less attention.

You can’t say that all courses are like that, because of course, if it’s a decent university, there will be, let’s say, courses for graduate students, courses for senior students, there will be a more nuanced teaching of history. But in general, for the average citizen, the average student, there are much fewer courses that pay more attention not to Russia, but to the regions, the so-called post-Soviet region or Eastern Europe.

Ukraine is known much less than they know Russia, or they know it as a kind of Russia Lite, where people live who cannot radically differ. If we assume that civil society is weak in Russia, it means that it is probably weak in those countries as well or weaker. If there are problems with democracy there, then there are problems everywhere, if there is corruption in Russia, then obviously there is corruption in Ukraine as well.

There are various reasons for this – the size of any country affects how much attention is given to it in general courses, the demand of students. But the so-called “decolonization” of Slavic studies is currently focusing on paying more attention not to Russian regions, but to various countries, including Ukraine and Central Asia.

T.V.: If we talk about Ukrainian voices, Ukrainian researchers, are there not enough of them or is there simply no demand?

O.Sh.: It seems to me that there is both. If a person says: “I want to study Russia” – there have never been any questions, the country is big and important. If someone wants to study Ukraine, it does not mean that he cannot. There are many people, I know many colleagues who studied Ukraine, have jobs, but very often there was and still is such an attitude that maybe this is not enough. There have been more such specialists over the past 30 years.

Then the question arises, when we hire someone to a university, and when a person specializes in only one small country – not necessarily Ukraine, it can be a country in Central Asia or Eastern Europe, the Baltic – will he be able to teach as it was many students wonder if enough people will come to these courses?

TV: You said that over the past 30 years there have been more people studying Ukraine. We know that there is an Institute of Ukrainian Studies at Harvard. There are such professors as Timothy Snyder, Serhii Plokhiy. In Canada – Serhii Yekelchyk. What contribution did they make to the understanding of Ukraine in recent years?

O.Sh.: I can say more about political science, because I myself am a political scientist. I am taking a course in comparative politics. We take examples of different countries, and, as a rule, if you take a textbook on comparative politics, there will be Russia, India, France. Ukraine is not there. Why is Ukraine not there? Ukraine should be there. I will do so in my course. I will not have a textbook for this. I will look for the literature myself. But, in principle, if this decolonization will progress, the textbooks on comparative politics that will be published and have case studies, it seems to me that there should be a case study of Ukraine. And this will lead to a greater understanding of Ukraine as a country, and a greater contribution to the theory of comparative politics.

T.V.: If we talk about the legacy of the dominance of Russian votes, we can see that there is a certain unreasonableness of colonization, imperial policy. For example, in the museum I saw with my own eyes that it was written “Odesa, Russia”. They explain to me that at that time Odesa was part of the Russian Empire. But this is not the case when we say, for example, that a person was born in Delhi, when India was a colony of England, no one says that a person was born in England. Why this difference?

O.Sh.: Here, it seems to me, there are several reasons. One of them is that Russia has always positioned itself as a decolonial country, if we look at the Soviet period. The USSR fought against colonialism and they encouraged decolonial movements. Even the very idea that the Russian Empire, let’s say, the Soviet Union was also an empire, is not even perceived by an average citizen, not an expert.

Russia always made this emphasis and it was partly easier to do because it was a territorial empire – not an overseas empire like England, where it was obvious where the metropolis was and where its colonies were. And in Russia, it grew so territorially that it was difficult to say where exactly Russia itself ended, and where the empire began. Odesa was an imperial conquest. From the point of view of today’s Ukraine, this is obvious, but from the point of view of how this empire grew, it is “originally Russian land”. This narrative seeped abroad as well.

If we say that Odesa is Ukraine, it is strange for many. (In their opinion) it may have become Ukraine in 1991 – that is, again, misunderstanding of those processes. Kateryna founded Odessa, and what does it mean that there was nothing there before that? It does not. We know that.

And even the very fact that everything Soviet was called Russian. I was proofreading a student thesis a few years ago, and he, the student, regularly used the word Russian army when describing the events of World War II. And I say to him: “Why are you doing this?” And he says: “Isn’t that possible? I read in books that they say the Russian army?” It is a process that has lasted for ages. If the decolonization process goes ahead, it will take years.

T.V.: Is there internal resistance to the process of decolonization or are these structural problems?

O.Sh.: I think there is, because many people believe, and this is a valid argument, they say – I am a specialist in history, I teach the history of Russia at some university. I do not present it in such a way that I am indirectly accused, perhaps. I look at the complexity of social life, not only look at what the tsars did, and I will not tell students that Russia in Central Asia brought only modernization, that I discuss these problems, and because what else do I need to decolonize? Many teachers and professors who teach history in this part of the world believe that they have long been more critical about it, they do not draw a direct parallel from Kievan Rus to today’s Russia, they will not say that the Soviet government brought only positives.

T.V.: Do they no longer trace the origin of Russia from Kyivan Rus or do they still trace it?

O.Sh.: If you take a graduate-level course that studies the history of Russia, obviously, no one there will say that there was Kievan Rus, and then there was Putin’s Russia. But if you take an average student who has taken one course or another in school or university, they still have this idea. They do not know about the 300 years between the Mongol invasion and the so-called unification of Ukraine with Russia (according to imperial and Soviet historiography – GA), what processes took place there, what was there in the Polish-Lithuanian Principality. But that there was Kyivan Rus and we somehow came to Russia – this idea took hold in the minds of many people in the West.

T.V.: Can Ukrainian scientists or the Ukrainian state, scientific institutions do something to help this process of decolonization?

O.Sh.: In American Western universities, there is great freedom of teaching, freedom of thought. Even the very idea that someone can say – here you are teaching Russian history, show me how you teach it, I will show you how it should be – it will absolutely not be accepted here, even from colleagues, not to mention from a foreign state.

But, let’s suppose, if the Ukrainian state had money for some scholarships to go to Ukraine to study. There were many programs before the war, for which students went to Russia, where they studied the language, some subjects, where the teaching was obviously with some emphasis. It is not even necessary to draw some political line with them, but simply that you are in this community, you see the processes that take place there, the discussions that take place even in Ukrainian families, it would be very useful. Slavic studies organizations can also allocate more money to such students.

There are not so many Ukrainian studies teaching centers – there are in Harvard, there are in Canada, perhaps more of them could be founded. But the idea of ​​how history will be taught, in principle, it seems to me, should be an internal process in the academic environment itself.