Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain

7 Moscow Think Tanks

7 MOSCOW THINK TANKS Inside the research institutes and among the party intelligentsia a remarkably important evolution of political views occurred, and one simply cannot begin to understand the changes of the second half of the s without taking account of it. —  Until the mid-s the Soviet Union had no official body devoted to the study of foreign policy or international economic and political affairs. During the Stalin years, such issues were decided by the Vozhd’, the “Great Leader” himself, without the advice of experts, and at a time when there were few such experts in the Soviet Union. In a wartime interview, Maksim Litvinov, former Soviet ambassador to Washington, said that the Soviet Foreign Ministry was headed by three people, none of whom understood America. “The same has been true, a fortiori, to this day,” commented Walter Laqueur in , “with regard to the Politburo.”1 Soviet ignorance about the rest of the world persisted through the Stalin years. Of the last years of Stalin’s rule, Georgi Arbatov, the Soviet Union’s preeminent Americanologist, has written: “Extremely primitive notions [were] cultivated in these years about the rest of the world and the world economy, about capitalism and international relations. For a long time we did not want to abandon these notions. They were drummed into the heads of a whole generation of our experts, and became sacrosanct dogma.”2 After Stalin’s demise, however, there was growing criticism in Moscow of the failure of the social science institutes of the Soviet Academy to analyze capitalist societies, and in  the Academy established an Institute for World Economy and International Relations, commonly known by its Russian acronym IMEMO, which Georgi Arbatov has described as “an oasis of creative thought in the late s and early s.”3 The institute, explains Arbatov, “tried to concentrate the leadership’s attention on reality, and on the problems that demanded radical change in the economy and domestic and foreign policy.”4 Led by Nikolai  . See Walter Laqueur, “Julian Semyonov and the Soviet Political Novel,” Transactions-Society  (July/August ): . . Georgi Arbatov, The System: An Insider’s Life in Soviet Politics, trans. John Glad and Oleg Volkonsky, with an introduction by Strobe Talbott (New York: Time Books, ), . . Ibid., . . Ibid., . Inozemtsev, its brilliant and sophisticated director, IMEMO became the model for similar institutes on Africa, Latin America, and the United States and Canada. The Institute for U.S. Studies was established in December  with Arbatov as director. It was renamed the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies (or ISKAN) in . In his memoirs, Arbatov claims that Brezhnev, in his “catch up with America syndrome,” agreed to establish the institute after it was pointed out to him that the United States had many scholars studying the Soviet Union while the Soviet Union had none who were studying America.5 In the following years, the Soviet Academy would establish a number of similar institutes dealing with other parts of the world until, by the late s, more than , specialists were working in twelve Moscow institutes in data collection and assessment essential to foreign policy formulations.6 Arbatov, a doctor of sciences in history, had worked as an editor in the party press during the s, at IMEMO in , and in the Central Committee apparatus from  to , where he became an adviser to Brezhnev. His proximity to Brezhnev was most important in the s when, because of the indifference of other Politburo members, Soviet policy toward the United States was made largely by Brezhnev and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. As a protégé of Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov, Arbatov in  became a candidate member of the Party’s prestigious Central Committee, and a full member in . Arbatov is a typical example of the Russian maxim,“It’s not what you know but whom you know.” Arbatov had never been to the United States but he was a fast learner, and quick with a quip. When I first met him in  and asked how he had come to be appointed director of ISKAN, he replied with one of the one-liners for which he was to become known in the West.“Since I have never been to the United States,” he said with a knowing smile,“I am considered neutral on the subject.” The new institute focused on various aspects of the United States—economics, foreign trade, domestic politics, social issues, foreign policy, the military, disarmament , and agriculture. And to provide advice on such a broad range of subjects, Arbatov...