An Interview with James Billington

In this issue we continue our series of "e-interviews," in which we pose written questions to figures in the field who, we believe, in their capacity as scholars and public figures will be of significant interest to the readers of Kritika. We are especially pleased this time to publish the responses of one of the world's most prominent historians of Russia, James H. Billington.

James Billington was sworn in as the Librarian of Congress on 14 September 1987. He is the 13th person to hold the position since the library was established in 1800. Perhaps best known to historians for his scholarly works on cultural history and the history of the revolutionary movement, his major works include Mikhailovsky and Russian Populism (1956), The Icon and the Axe (1966), and Fire in the Minds of Men (1980). Most recently, he published Russia in Search of Itself (2004).

Born in 1929 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, Billington was valedictorian at Princeton University, where he graduated with highest honors in 1950. Three years later, he earned his doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College. Following service with the U.S. Army and in the Office of National Estimates, he taught history at Harvard University from 1957 to 1962 and subsequently at Princeton University, where he was professor of history from 1964 to 1973. From 1973 to 1987, Dr. Billington served as director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. As director, he founded the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the center and seven other new programs, as well as the Wilson Quarterly.

Highlights of Billington's tenure at the Library of Congress (LC) include the introduction of the American Memory National Digital Library (NDL) Program, accessible through the library's home page (www.loc.gov), which makes freely available online more than ten million American historical items from the collections of the LC and other research institutions. These American Memory materials and the LC's other Internet services, which include the online "card catalogue," handled more than 3.8 billion transactions in 2004.

In addition, Billington created the LC's first national private-sector advisory and support group, the James Madison Council. Its members have supported the NDL Program, many other library outreach programs, and important new acquisitions for the LC collections. In 2000, the library's bicentennial year, Madison Council Chairman John W. Kluge made the largest monetary donation in LC history: $60 million to create a center within the library for advanced scholars and a Nobel-level prize for lifetime achievement in the humanities or social sciences.

Billington's ongoing connections with Russia and the Newly Independent States include the founding of the Open World Program and his chairmanship of the Board of Trustees of the Open World Leadership Center. The Open World Program is a nonpartisan initiative of the U.S. Congress that has brought more than 10,000 emerging young Russian political leaders to communities throughout America, and has launched smaller pilot programs in Ukraine, Lithuania, and Uzbekistan. In addition, the Library of Congress has placed online a major bilingual website with the National Libraries of Russia. Billington's specifically Russia/NIS-related honors include the Pushkin Medal of the International Association of the Teachers of Russian Language and Culture (2000); honorary doctorates from the University of Tbilisi in Georgia (1999) and the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow (2001); a foreign membership in the Russian Academy of Sciences; and the Chingiz Aitmatov Gold Medal from the Kyrgyz Republic. He has accompanied ten congressional delegations to Russia and the former Soviet Union.

Here are our questions and his answers.

Kritika: In your published works, you have argued that Russia needs to be understood through the history of its culture and ideas. In your 2004 book, Russia in Search of Itself, you analyze the outpouring of post-Soviet publitsistika to show nationalist, authoritarian, and xenophobic strands coexisting with rather fragile pluralistic and Westernizing ones. What conclusions should be drawn from this, however? Do you think that Russian culture since the late 1990s is fragmented, or has it essentially shifted in...