Complexity science argues that societal fitness requires self-organization — bottom-up energies combine to forge a capacity to cope with challenges and make the most of opportunities. For more than 1,000 years, however, Russia and most of its neighbors have usually been organized and managed from the top down.
Individual brilliance, as seen in Pushkin, Borodin, or Sakharov, has sometimes broken through this oppressive shell, but society’s human and material roots have been choked and malnourished.
S. Frederick Starr, founding director of Washington’s Kennan Institute, has devoted much of his life to understanding the dynamics of Russian society and, in recent years, Central Asia and the Caucasus. His recently published memoir, Blue Skies: My Life in Many Worlds, details how he has tried to analyze and activate constructive policies across Eurasia and also in Washington.
Anyone with similar goals can learn from Starr’s successes and failures, his joys and frustrations.
Starr’s worldview, like mine, took shape in Cincinnati, where he was born in 1940. Facing the challenges of a world at war, as a little boy, he joined the labors of his family in their vegetable garden, and in his home city, he found a rich cultural environment where face-to-face interactions were abundant.
As a teenager, he investigated Ohio’s ancient native American burial mounds, publishing his findings before joining archeological digs in Turkey, where he was soon directing more than 100 workers. He learned Turkish and German before Russian and was soon ready to study ancient and contemporary Eurasia.
Starr observed that strong reform movements emerged in Russia after military defeats in 1856, 1905, and 1917. His doctoral dissertation at Princeton analyzed not just the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 but also the creation of local self-government in 19th-century Russia. Movement toward self-rule strengthened in 1917 under Kerensky’s Provisional Government but was throttled by the Bolshevik dictatorship in 1918.
Starr became Vice President of Tulane University in 1979, where after regular work paused, he and his clarinet embellished their mastery of New Orleans jazz from the 1920s. Mobilizing many virtuosi was not easy, but Starr took his Louisiana Repertoire Jazz Band to the Soviet Union where he encountered the raw materials for his book, Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union, 1917-1980.
As in politics, music could emerge from the bottom-up as a form of self-expression. Starr discussed such issues with Dmitri Shostakovich, who struggled to do his own thing under Stalinism (just listen to his Second Waltz).
Starr saw that the Baltic republics could catalyze the collapse of the Soviet empire and, in 1986, helped organize an event at the Latvian coastal resort of Jurmala featuring Jack Matlock, who would become Washington’s ambassador to Moscow the following year. Matlock reminded all Soviets that the US had never recognized Stalin’s 1940 annexation of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania.
When the USSR collapsed, Starr worried that the advice and funding given by Europeans and Americans in the 1990s would backfire. Instead of promoting localism, it fostered a new kind of dependence on top-down direction, along with anarchic self-enrichment by future oligarchs.
Back in the US, he moved from Tulane to the presidencies of Oberlin College (1983-1993) and the Aspen Institute (1994-1995). Returning to Central Asia, he helped organize five universities to provide the newly independent former Soviet states with the kinds of young people who could modernize their countries while preserving their best traditions.
Starr’s adventures in Central Asia were not all ivory tower. They included driving over the Pamir mountains and being snow-bound for days in a yurt with no food other than yak meat fried in yak butter.
Starr advised US presidents and government agencies on his meetings with Yeltsin, Medvedev, Putin, and various nonconformists in Russia. It’s not clear that US authorities absorbed any of his messages on the prerequisites for developing peace, prosperity, and human development. Still less were these lessons absorbed or implemented by potentates in Moscow.
Shaped by what he calls a Don Quixote gene, Starr remembers that Russia’s military defeats have often set the stage for deep reforms. If Putin does not prevail in Ukraine, a younger generation of reformists may emerge and change Russia.
Walter Clemens is Associate, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University and Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Boston University, He wrote The Baltic Transformed: Complexity Theory and European Security, Foreword by Jack F. Matlock (2001); Baltic Independence and Russian Empire (1991); and Can Russia Change? The USSR Confronts Global Interdependence (1990 and 2011).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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