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Misreading Russian Studies: A Response to Sarty 

 

Paul Goode, Carleton University,1 

 

 

Leigh Sarty’s introspective essay “Misreading Russia” makes two core claims: (a) that 

understanding Russia’s history is crucial to understanding Russia today and (b) that failing to 

appreciate Russia’s history explains the West’s perpetually misguided policy towards Russia since 

the 1990s, culminating in the war Russia is currently waging on Ukraine. The first claim could be 

formulated as a general stance on the importance of historical and area knowledge for policy-

makers—a claim that I suspect few would find objectionable despite Sarty’s admitted historical 

determinism. However, the implications of such a stance do not necessarily lead to the second 

claim, which I argue is factually detached from debates within the academic study of Russia as 

well as recent Russian history and politics.  

The Tradition of “Getting Russia Wrong” 

Sarty’s article fits within the literary genre of “getting Russia wrong”: every few years, a debate 

arises in Western capitals over policy towards Russia in which academics and policy-makers 

lament their failure to appreciate the true drivers of Russian policy. As a result of this failure to 

attend to Russia’s history, culture, and regional specificities, Western analyses and policy are 

claimed to have produced pathological outcomes that repeatedly drive Russia away from 

democratization and into renewed conflict with the West. At times, this failure is ascribed to the 

West’s ideological blinders—this was especially the case during the Cold War, though it also 

emerges in the claim that the West imposed market reforms on Russia—or otherwise to the West’s 

inability to understand different peoples. Both of these implications are present in Sarty’s essay, 

particularly as concerns the destructive path of Russia’s economic “shock therapy” and 

privatization and the claim of the West’s ethnocentrism (Sarty 2024, 129–33).  

For example, the work for which this genre is named, Patrick Cockburn’s Getting Russia Wrong 

(1989), argued at the tail end of the Cold War that Gorbachev’s reforms were for real—a seemingly 

uncontroversial point in hindsight, but one which took aim at conservative voices in the West who 

argued that Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika were nothing more than a strategic pause in the 

Cold War between the USSR and the West.  

 
1 Paul Goode is an Associate Professor and McMillan Chair of Russian Studies at the Institute of European, Russian 

and Eurasian Studies 



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Stephen Cohen’s Failed Crusade (2000) marked another significant contribution to the genre, 

arguing that the West (mainly the US) perceived only reform and success in Russia but downplayed 

the costs inflicted on Russian society—a claim that resonates with Sarty’s observation that, 

“inattention to Russia’s distinctiveness contributed to the tumult of the 1990s, and tarred well-

intentioned efforts to assist Russia with a brush of insensitivity” (Sarty 2024, 132). Cohen further 

argued that the West’s ideological motives were revealed in its failure to criticize Russia’s leaders 

as long as their actions appeared to support Western foreign policy interests.  

At best, such takes rely upon a highly selective reading of the vast research conducted during and 

since the 1990s. The collapse of the Soviet Union occasioned a wave of state creation and, along 

with it, a wave of regime change that was claimed in the name of national democracies by those 

who led the revolution (Beissinger 2002; Huntington 1991; McFaul 2002). Academics vigorously 

debated ways to understand and model politics in Russia in the 1990s. In political science, the rush 

to incorporate Russia and other post-communist states into comparative understandings of political 

and market transitions sparked debates about the applicability of models from previous 

democratizing waves in Latin America or Southern Europe that occupied the pages of flagship 

journals in the field, most notably the Slavic Review (Bunce 1995a, 1995b; Schmitter and Karl 

1994, 1995;). As a graduate student at Oxford, I was fortunate to witness a legendary debate 

between historian Timothy Garton Ash and Columbia University’s Alfred Stepan over the merits 

of the so-called “transitology.” Ultimately, the notion that “transitology” dominated comparative 

politics (Carothers 2002) and the field of Russian studies became more of a myth that informed 

critiques than a substantive reality that informed policy (Gans-Morse 2004).  

The reverse influence of political openings in the post-communist world was felt within political 

science, as well. From the varied and somewhat chaotic range of approaches to studying Russia 

and post-communist states in the 1990s emerged a consensus around the need for systematic 

approaches in comparative research but also to integrate them with historical approaches and 

qualitative methods. In fact, the movement that challenged the centrality of rationalist approaches 

and quantitative methods in American political science even took its name from Gorbachev’s 

perestroika (Monroe 2005).  

Stephen Fish’s (2001) rejoinder to Cohen (entitled “Russian Studies Without Studying”), lists in 

exhaustive detail the varieties of research ignored by the “getting Russia wrong” perspective. With 

particular regard to Russia’s market reforms, Fish and others have documented (and historians are 

well aware) that the Soviet Union’s economy was deeply corrupt at the elite level in the 1980s 

while the Soviet masses relied on black markets and bribery to survive the systems’ problems 

including endemic shortages, hoarding of labour, and falsified statistics (Dallin 1992), while the 

process of stealing the state’s assets began already under Gorbachev (Solnick 1998). Consequently, 

Fish argues that “blaming Yeltsin and the Americans exclusively for Russia’s postcommunist 

agonies is like blaming Ronald Reagan for (or crediting Ronald Reagan with) the dissolution of 

the Soviet Union” (Fish 2001, 355).  

Along similar lines, Sarty cites a controversial article by Shleifer and Treisman (2004) as evidence 

of a field consensus “that Russia’s ‘flaws’ did not render it unique, that it was on track to develop 

like any other middle-income capitalist democracy, in accordance with the confident postulates of 

social science theory” (Sarty 2024, 130). Yet this claim misses the active debate that followed the 

publication of the article. Indeed, one of the most telling was the intervention by Leeson and 

Trumbull (2006), who noted that a key failing in Shleifer & Treisman’s work was their reliance on 



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biased official statistics—in other words if Russia appeared to be “a normal country,” it was 

because it aimed to present itself as such. 

Mistaking the Politics of Ignorance in Autocracies 

Another crucial oversight found in the “getting Russia wrong” perspective is the influence of 

regime context on the production of knowledge about autocracies and hybrid regimes like Russia. 

Autocracies are producers of ignorance about their own operations, concealing both the formal 

and informal means by which power circulates in closed regimes (Ahram and Goode 2016). 

Scholars conducting research within autocracies face significant obstacles, ranging from restricted 

access for conducting fieldwork and interviews to risking surveillance and reprisal (Glasius et al. 

2017; Goode 2010). Often, the constraining effects of rising authoritarianism are not felt or can be 

dismissed until open repression becomes impossible to ignore.  

In 2009, I presented a paper at a conference on “The Russian Field” hosted by the Center for 

Independent Social Research in St. Petersburg, where I provided evidence of the decline of 

fieldwork conducted in Russia that tracked with autocratization in the 2000s. By contrast, field 

research suddenly increased after democratic openings in countries like Georgia and Ukraine. 

Russian scholars in attendance told me that they did not see this as evidence of a problem for 

Russian scholarship so much as it suggested the “degradation of Western political science.” In this 

regard, ironically, Russian academics reflected the perspective that Sarty attributes to Western 

social scientists about Russia and post-communist states as semi-democratic or democratizing. By 

contrast, my own meta-analysis of all publications in top disciplinary and area journals found that 

scholars who continued to conduct fieldwork in the 2000s and 2010s (publishing their research 

mainly in area studies journals) produced important consensus-infirming research that signalled 

rising authoritarianism in Russia and throughout the region (Goode 2016). 

Fast forward to the present day and we now find Russian school and university curricula re-written 

to require patriotic education and emphasize the Kremlin’s preferred version of history. Russian 

researchers have found themselves cut off from access to foreign sources of funding, which are 

declared “undesirable” organizations. University administrations patrol what academics can 

present at international conferences or publish abroad and require Russian scholars to report on 

contacts with foreign researchers. In the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the few 

remaining independent research centers and private universities were either closed, absorbed into 

state-run universities, or their leadership replaced or co-opted. Many researchers were fired for 

their critical stances on the war and thousands fled Russia. As one Russian colleague wrote to me 

in 2022, “we no longer know where the regime’s red lines are.”  

In post-Soviet autocracies, regimes use a range of repressive measures to pre-empt political 

challenges, including “the manipulation of public consciousness and collective memory to spread 

stereotypes and myths about the domestic opposition, the West, former communist countries that 

shifted to the democratic track, and democracy in general” (Silitski 2010, 276). Among Western 

observers, these regime narratives are often mistaken for real grievances, while public silences or 

conformity with regime narratives are treated as indications of their legitimacy. Consequently, one 

risks becoming complicit in autocratization when repeating regime narratives that discredit 

opposition, facilitate domestic repression, and even justify foreign aggression. In Sarty’s essay, for 

example, Putin’s lamentations about the 1990s are implicitly treated as legitimate reflections of 



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public sentiment,2 while NATO’s intervention to halt genocide in Kosovo is presented as “actions 

against fellow Slavs in Yugoslavia.” Indeed, he draws a straight line from the Kremlin’s narratives 

about the 1990s to the current war, stating plainly that “Once this background is understood, the 

logic of the decision to invade Ukraine becomes apparent.” (Sarty 2024, 131) 

Misreading Putin’s Politics of History and Memory 

In arguing that the West’s failure to appreciate the distinctiveness of Russia’s geography and 

culture culminated in the consolidation of Russia’s elite consensus around anti-Westernism (for 

whom Putin emerged as the chief advocate), Sarty elides the vast mobilization of domestic 

repression in Russia that keeps Putin in power. Moreover, there is little evidence that the Kremlin 

does a better job of appreciating Russia’s history than the West. Defenders of Russia’s war in 

Ukraine sometimes point to Putin’s now-infamous essay from the summer of 2021, “On the 

historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” as justification (Putin 2021), yet the essay was 

roundly criticized by professional historians within Russia for its many inaccuracies. In a study of 

the evolution of Putin’s historical references over the years, Alexei Miller concludes that “attempts 

to analyze these texts…as, above all, statements on historical issues, and to see the roots of political 

decisions in the author’s views on history are fundamentally wrong” (Miller 2023, 71–72).  

There is also ample evidence that few Russians have a clear understanding of recent history or that 

they share Putin’s predilection for re-writing Russia’s history. In my own interviews conducted in 

2014–2016, I found that many Russians had only a loose grasp of recent history, struggling even 

to identify when the Soviet Union ceased to exist or when Putin came to power. During the 

COVID-19 pandemic, Putin invoked an obscure historical reference to Pechenegs and Polovtsy in 

likening the threat of the pandemic to historical challenges overcome by Russia in the previous 

millennium. Rather than inspiring the Russian people, Putin’s comment was relentlessly ridiculed 

online and became a popular meme on Russian social media (Gaufman 2023, 124–25).  

In short, we should not take Putin’s quotes about the lessons of history as accurate, nor should we 

assume their popular resonance stems from Russians’ knowledge of history. In fact, the Kremlin 

is most successful when it uses history as a pretext to mobilize emotional attachments rather than 

using it to convince and educate. For example, the committee established under former President 

Dmitrii Medvedev3 to correct “historical inaccuracies” about the Great Patriotic War quickly faded 

into obscurity. By contrast, the Kremlin’s annual campaign to commemorate the Great Patriotic 

War around May 9th succeeds by cultivating the sensation of being part of a great victory 

(Oushakine 2013).  

Claiming Agency on Russia’s Behalf 

Beyond its reliance on a caricature of the field of Russian studies and mistaken assumptions about 

the political relevance of historical memory in Russia, the “getting Russia wrong” perspective 

suffers from two additional problems. In the first place, it amounts to a subtle assertion that the 

West has agency in determining policy towards Russia, whereas Russia can only respond. Indeed, 

 
2 “Putin and the elites who support him have seen themselves as correcting the errors of the 1990s and their 

consequences; by painting that decade in ever more dire terms, they foster their legitimacy as the stewards of a 

strong Russian state that guarantees order at home and secures Russian interests abroad” (Sarty 2024, 131). 
3 It scarcely bears mentioning today, but Medvedev’s single term as Russian President was overshadowed by the 

ongoing presence of Putin as Prime Minister—a period that is sarcastically referred to as “tandemocracy” in 

reference to Putin and Medvedev as the ruling tandem. The changing of places between Putin and Medvedev in 

2008 and 2012 is cynically referred to as a “castling” maneuver, to borrow from chess terminology.  



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Sarty presents Russia as eternally trapped by and reacting to the challenge of competing with a 

more powerful West from a position of relative weakness, which in turn is “the wellspring of 

Russian authoritarianism” (Sarty 2024, 127). If Russia’s lack of agency resulted in autocracy in 

Russia and even war in Ukraine, then Sarty suggests this represents a “failure adequately to 

appreciate how Washington’s universalist pretensions—aided and abetted by its NATO allies—

have been perceived in Moscow” (Sarty 2024, 132). To support this interpretation, Sarty presents 

Putin’s description of the terrorist attack on a school in Beslan in 2004 as an attempt by 

“international forces” (a dog whistle for the West) to grab a piece of Russia as evidence that Russia 

is only focused on its own survival.  

While one might argue that Putin’s rhetorical response to Beslan actually focused on domestic 

terror rather than foreign threats (Snetkov 2007), the policy responses clearly reflected the priority 

of consolidating power. These measures amounted to the shutting down of democratic institutions 

within Russia, including the elimination of gubernatorial elections, and imposing a range of 

restrictions on the State Duma that further strengthened the ruling party: eliminating single-

member districts in parliamentary elections, which previously provided a path for independent 

representatives to win seats; raising the electoral barrier for parties to 7 percent, which was more 

than the combined vote of the two largest democratic opposition parties in the previous year; 

eliminating the category of “against all” from the ballot, which typically provided an outlet for 

protest voting; and eliminating minimum turnout requirements, which made it easier for the 

Kremlin’s candidates to get elected without having to win voters. 

The mismatch between rhetorical anti-Westernism and the policy steps towards consolidating 

domestic power is a common theme in the uses of cultural pre-emption—including rhetorical anti-

Westernism—in the post-Soviet autocrat’s toolkit and more broadly among “informational 

autocracies” (Guriev and Treisman 2022; Schatz 2009). The claim that the West is attacking and 

undermining Russia at every turn has been a staple of Putin’s domestic politics for over two 

decades. The political uses of anti-Westernism became particularly evident following the diffusion 

of electoral revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe as well as former Soviet states in the early-

2000s (Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan) that became known as “color revolutions” (Beissinger 

2007; Bunce and Wolchik 2006; Hale 2006). More recently, the Kremlin used the charge of 

Western meddling to demonize opposition protest movements, most notably the “For Fair 

Elections” movement in 2012 and Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption protests in 2017–2018. Today, 

Russia’s war in Ukraine is further cast in anti-Western tropes, in which Ukraine is depicted as a 

puppet of the US and anti-war Russians are accused of doing the bidding of Russia’s enemies. In 

short, we should be very careful about taking what Putin or his agents say at face value, without 

considering the political context—particularly when they appear to obscure Russia’s agency. 

Realists Also Get Russia Wrong 

A second issue with the perspective offered in Sarty’s essay is that it treats regime survival as 

synonymous with state survival. This is not “Realism 101” but a confirmation of the Kremlin’s 

domestic propaganda that portrays Putin remaining in power (he is now in his sixth term of office) 

as necessary to safeguard the state from all threats, foreign and domestic. This conflation of 

personal political survival with state survival has been a constant problem throughout Russia’s 

modern history, as it reinforces personalist and clientelist politics at the expense of institutional 

development or even liberalizing reform.  



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A prominent example is provided by Boris Yeltsin, who is often depicted as a victim of the West’s 

inattention. Putin’s predecessor was unwilling to risk democratization and instead treated his own 

political survival as essential for the survival of Russia at every critical juncture (Ostrow, Satarov, 

and Khakamada 2007). This association contributed directly to the constitutional crisis of 1992–

1993 that was resolved by the forcible dissolution of Russia’s parliament (which also sought to 

remove Yeltsin from power) and the unilateral imposition of a constitution that created super-

presidential powers. In 1995, the fear of losing power contributed to Yeltsin’s forming of a Faustian 

pact with prominent business leaders that led to the infamous “loans for shares” deal that auctioned 

off Russia’s powerful strategic enterprises (i.e., those that could not be privatized without an act 

of government) at bargain-bin prices, effectively creating the oligarchs in exchange for their 

unyielding support for Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996 (Freeland 2000; Treisman 2010). In 1999, 

Yeltsin’s decision to leave office early and hand super-presidential powers to Putin was motivated, 

in part, by his desire to protect “the family” (the inner circle of Yeltsin’s regime) rather than trust 

in the electoral process—once again ensuring that Russia would continue to drift towards 

autocracy.  

In the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine, the conflation of regime and state survival also 

informs the most recent version of “getting Russia wrong” associated with Realist accounts of the 

war in international relations. The most visible proponents of this version include famous 

international relations scholars like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Mearsheimer not only 

argued that Russia’s occupation of Crimea was a defensive response (Mearsheimer 2014) but today 

confirms the Kremlin’s narrative that NATO somehow provoked Russia into its full-scale invasion 

of Ukraine (Mearsheimer 2022). Such takes display a surprising naiveté in accepting at face value 

Putin’s claims that Russia was forced into action by the West—once again obscuring Russia’s 

agency, this time in its invasion of Ukraine. It is further disheartening that these arguments would 

be taken up by those who argue for appreciating Russian history and area knowledge, given that 

Mearsheimer and Walt are not experts on Russia (or Ukraine, for that matter) and lack in-depth 

knowledge of the region’s politics.4  

Conclusion: Asking the Right Questions 

Contrary to the “getting Russia wrong” perspective, I would suggest that scholars of Russia have 

struggled to ensure that Russia’s history and contextual knowledge are taken into account and that 

area experts are accessible to policy-makers. Along with Sarty, Cohen, Cockburn, and others 

writing in this tradition, most would accept the principle that appreciation for a country’s history 

and knowledge of the area are prerequisites for making effective policy. However, this knowledge 

does not reserve agency to those making policy in the West, meaning that one needs to take 

seriously the likelihood that Russian history and anti-Westernism are subordinated to the Kremlin’s 

domestic political and economic agendas and that these agendas concern regime survival rather 

than Russian history and geography.  

Looking at Russia’s recent history, it is unclear what might have turned out differently or, indeed, 

what concretely is being proposed by such a perspective, today. Given the vast amount of historical 

and social science research produced on the breakup of the Soviet Union, does it make sense to 

accept the Kremlin’s narrative of 1991 as something that happened to Russia rather than as an 

 
4 It is worth noting that Mearsheimer’s approach is criticized even among international relations scholars for its 

reliance on untestable theoretical propositions and lack of empirical evidence (Dutkiewicz and Smolenski 2023; 

Polianskii 2024).  



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outcome that was accelerated, say, by competition between Gorbachev and Yeltsin? With regard 

to the 1990s, does it make sense to suggest that the West forced market reform upon Russia, or 

perhaps the West made excuses for corrupt and increasingly autocratic behaviour precisely because 

it treated Russia as exceptional? Since 2014, does such a perspective mean indulging Russian 

nationalists’ complaints about the West’s “lack of respect,” excusing Russia’s ongoing attempts to 

re-imperialize, and interpreting conflicts primarily from Russia’s perspective (Koval et al. 2022)? 

And today, does it mean that the West should accept Russia’s claim that it is responsible for 

Russia’s invasion, including the crimes and destruction that it has committed?  

These questions serve to illustrate that the “getting Russia wrong” approach is fatalistic rather than 

constructive. Instead, there are more useful and pressing questions that require analysis by scholars 

and experts with career experience in studying Russia: for starters, what remains of our pre-war 

paradigms for understanding the drivers of Russian politics, and what are the realistic scenarios 

for a post-Putin Russia? How can Russia de-imperialize after the war’s end? How deep and 

enduring is the Russian public’s support for Putin’s regime, if one can even peer beyond the effects 

of wartime censorship and repression? How can we research and support anti-war activists in 

Russia without also exposing the networks that support them? How has the war enabled alternative 

national projects to rival the regime’s brand of militarized patriotism?  

To these questions, one might further add a range of practical questions that will shape research 

agendas for those who study Russia for years to come: what are the best practices for collaborating 

with Russian scholars to avoid exposing them to risk while also avoiding extractive relationships? 

How should we respond to calls for decolonizing research on Russia, including greater attention 

to minority ethnicities and inequalities and promotion of subaltern voices within Russia, especially 

under conditions where external funding and research collaborations cannot reach local scholars? 

And to ensure that we do not lose a generation’s worth of expertise, how should academic 

departments and academic publishers recalibrate their expectations, training, and standards with 

regard to data collection and reporting, given the lack of access to Russia for graduate students and 

emerging scholars, especially coming on the heels of the pandemic? 

There is a regular cadence to the West’s hand-wringing about “getting Russia wrong,” which is 

typically followed by finger-pointing over “who lost Russia” and then, inevitably, the alarmist 

“where have all the Russia experts gone?” In fact, the Russia experts are still here, and their ranks 

are swelling with scholars and experts who opposed the war in Ukraine and fled Russia after 

February 2022. For anyone still worried about “getting Russia wrong,” the way forward is to learn 

from this new generation of experts who have exacting and personal knowledge of Putin’s Russia. 

Rather than seeking to claim responsibility for the Kremlin’s actions, worrying about paths not 

taken in the 1990s, or revealing Russia’s fate in its geography, they are focused on the kinds of 

questions raised above, and they are starting to lead the way with methodological innovations that 

lay bare the regime’s political, economic, cultural, and informational underpinnings.  

 

  



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