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Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre: 2000-2025

Professor Roy Allison

The Russian and East European Centre (as it was called for its first fifty years) at St Antony’s was established in 1953. This was three years after the College opened its doors to its earliest students. It was the first of the St Antony’s regional centres to be founded. It thereby set a pattern that was to be one of the distinctive features of the College. The Centre’s first Director, David Footman, immediately launched a seminar series that embraced pre-revolutionary Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The seminar took place on Mondays at 5.00pm and has met continuously on that day in term time ever since. It is the longest-running seminar on Russian and Eurasian history, politics and society in Britain.

In the early 1990s, shortly after the East-Central European states became non-Communist and fully independent at the end of the Cold War, their study migrated to the European Studies Centre (formerly the West European Centre) of St Antony’s. What has colloquially been known as ‘the Russian Centre’ (used here for the sake of brevity) was renamed the Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre in 2003. The whole of the former Soviet Union has remained the subject of research and seminars in the Centre, with a particularly strong focus in recent years on Ukraine.

The Early Years

Isaiah Berlin, the renowned Russian-British social and political theorist and historian of ideas, took a keen interest in the Russian Centre and it was through him that the historian George Katkov came to St Antony’s in 1956. Katkov was appointed University Lecturer in Soviet Institutions, though his lectures were light on the development of Soviet institutions and focused especially on the revolutionary years (on which Katkov had strong views).

One of the peculiarities of the Soviet Union, given the strict censorship which had a baleful impact on the social sciences, was that frequently more insight into Soviet society could be obtained from the study of Russian literary journals than from the socio-political literature produced in the USSR. During its first quarter of a century the Centre was well served by its literary specialists. Max Hayward, without ever writing a full-length book, gained a justified international reputation both as a brilliant commentator on Russian literature of the Soviet period and as an outstanding translator. Hayward was later joined by three versatile colleagues: Harry Willetts, Ronald Hingley, and Harold Shukman, all of whom combined the writing of history with their much-admired translations from Russian. The most prolific and broad-ranging among them was Hingley, while Willetts became the first-choice English translator of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. For most of the 1960s and all of the 1970s Willetts was Director of the Russian Centre, for much of the time with Hayward as co-Director.

The Growth of Centre Expertise: Politics, Economics, International Relations and History

This strong focus on Russian literature and culture in the early years of the Centre was gradually replaced by expertise in social sciences, alongside history. A significant shift towards the study of the Soviet economy and also of the economies of Eastern Europe took place with the arrival in 1963 of Michael Kaser. A Cambridge economist, Kaser came to St Antony’s after serving both with the Foreign Office and the United Nations. His diplomatic skills enabled him to establish good relations with the best economists and economic historians in Central and Eastern Europe and these contacts led to fruitful scholarly interchange. Kaser’s interests set a firm foundation for the later research on Russian and post-Soviet economics in the Centre.

Michael Kaser is pictured here at his retirement dinner with Alex Pravda and Anna Lever (his former secretary).

East European studies were further strengthened by the appointment in 1967 of Richard Kindersley whose particular speciality was Yugoslavia, although his first book was on pre-revolutionary Russian political thought. Kindersley’s Russian had been honed as a naval officer and interpreter in the service of the hazardous British convoys to Murmansk during the Second World War. Before being elected to a Fellowship of St Antony’s, Kindersley was in the Foreign Office. He served in the British Embassy in Belgrade, and his Balkan interests matched those of the College’s first Warden, Sir William Deakin, whose own wartime exploits involved being parachuted into occupied Yugoslavia and fighting alongside Tito and his Partisans. A friend of Winston Churchill, Deakin helped Churchill with research for his wartime memoirs.

When George Katkov retired in 1971 his successor as University Lecturer in Soviet Institutions was Archie Brown, who moved from a lectureship in the Department of Politics at Glasgow University and brought an interest in comparative politics (becoming Professor of Politics in 1989), as well as contemporary Communism. Brown’s pioneering scholarship, with a particular focus on Soviet institutions, political culture and leadership, established St Antony’s as notable hub for research and teaching on Soviet and Russian politics. The study of politics, and particularly international relations, was further strengthened with the arrival in 1989 of Alex Pravda who had been Director of the Soviet Foreign Policy Programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House). With his contacts and knowledge Pravda brought the study of international relations into the mainstream of Centre activities. On Archie Brown’s retirement from teaching in 2005, he was succeeded by Paul Chaisty, who had already held a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at St Antony’s between 1997 and 2000. Chaisty’s extensive research on Russian politics has sustained Archie Brown’s interest in comparative politics, for example in studying presidentialism, which extended Centre ties with a broad network of scholars. He is currently Professor of Russian and East European Politics and served as Head of the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA) from 2022 to 2025. Roy Allison, who, like Alex Pravda, had studied for his Oxford DPhil at St Antony’s, returned to Oxford in 2005, and became Pravda’s successor in 2011 as the International Relations specialist within the Centre. Having been Reader in International Relations at the London School of Economic, he also headed the Chatham House Russia and Eurasia Programme from 1993 to 2005. He has been Director of the Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre since 2015 and is Professor of Russian and Eurasian International Relations in OSGA.

Michael Kaser was a Professorial Fellow from 1972 to 1993, remained an active Emeritus Fellow thereafter and passed away in 2021. The gap left by his retirement, as a specialist on the Russian economy and economies of the region, was filled by the appointment of Carol Leonard, formerly of the State University of New York, as University Lecturer in Regional Studies of the Post-Communist States and Fellow of St Antony’s in 1997. She retired in 2011 and was eventually replaced by Christopher Gerry in 2017, from University College, London, who had particular expertise in the health economics of the region. This appointment was made possible by the offer of a very generous external donation by a former Russian and East European Studies student, which secured a position for the Centre permanently in the field of Russian and Eurasian economics and political economy. After he moved to a position in the University of Central Asia in 2022, Gerry was replaced by Michael Rochlitz who was Professor of Institutional Economics at the University of Bremen. Rochlitz’s regional focus, as Associate Professor in the Economies of Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia, spans not only Russia and the former Soviet Union, but includes an interest in China. Since October 2025 he has been Director of Russian and East European Studies at OSGA.

Soviet and East European history has remained a central field of study and teaching at the Centre for many decades. In 1998 Robert Service, a prolific historian and renowned biographer of the early Soviet period, who was already a Professor of Russian History at University College, London, replaced Harold Shukman on the latter’s retirement. Service’s research moved steadily toward the late-Soviet and post-Soviet field. On his retirement he was replaced in 2013 by Dan Healey, from the University of Reading. Healey brought to the Centre further scholarship on the Soviet Gulag, but also original research on Soviet era sexuality, which contributed to the wider development of gender studies in the University. Dan Healey was replaced in turn by Zbigniew Wojnowski from the University of Roehampton in 2022, whose historical interests marked a shift from a dominant focus on the USSR as a central state to a more diversified approach. Wojnowski, a Polish scholar whose research includes an interest in the Soviet borderlands, interethnic relations and imperial dynamics, has keen interests in Ukrainian and Central Asian history, and taught for several years at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan.

Influence on Public Policy

Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The eight academic specialists wrote papers, which were read in advance and annotated by the Prime Minister. They were read also by Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe, Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine and by senior officials. The six-hour seminar was later described by prime ministerial adviser Sir Anthony Parsons as having ‘changed British foreign policy’. The Prime Minister’s Private Secretary Sir John Coles, in a post-seminar memorandum to the Foreign Office, referred to a ‘change of policy’ and ‘a new policy’ resulting from ‘the conclusions of the meeting on East/West relations’.

The academics advised against the policy of minimising contacts with the Soviet ‘evil empire’ (as President Ronald Reagan described it in March 1983), arguing that significant change in Communist systems was more likely to be promoted by fully engaging with Soviet and East European societies at all levels – from dissidents to General Secretaries. The official invitation to Mikhail Gorbachev to pay his first visit to Britain (three months before he became Soviet leader) had its origins in that seminar. Gorbachev’s December 1984 visit laid the foundations for what became a surprisingly constructive and fruitful relationship between Gorbachev and Prime Minister Thatcher.

Click here to access the full file relating to this meeting via the Prime Ministerial Private Office files (Margaret Thatcher Foundation).

Our Students

The number of graduate students taught by Centre Fellows has greatly expanded over the years. Among the colleges of the University St Antony’s remains the main focal point of Russian and Eurasian studies. More than half of the teaching and supervision on the MSc and the MPhil in Russian and East European Studies (REES) is carried out by senior members of the Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre, as is much doctoral supervision related to the former USSR.

The Centre is not a teaching unit, however, since Fellows teach for University departments. The most important among these is the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA), previously the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies (SIAS), where the REES MSc and MPhil degrees are located, as well as many REES-related doctoral students. Currently two Centre Fellows are departmentally attached solely to OSGA (Roy Allison and Michael Rochlitz) and others are partly attached (Paul Chaisty also teaches for the Department of Politics and International Relations, while Zbigniew Wojnowski also teaches for the Faculty of History).

Colleagues who have provided core teaching for REES, but are not Fellows of St Antony’s, have nevertheless been prominent participants in RESC events and some have sat on the RESC Committee which oversees the Centre and meets termly. These academics who have been central to our community include:

The synergy between the Centre and REES works well and has allowed both sides to maximize resources and impact in our fields of research and teaching. The Centre’s iconic Monday seminar is now conducted jointly with REES, while non-St Antony’s REES teaching staff regularly attend dinners in college, as do other OSGA researchers and postdoctoral Fellows. Most teaching rooms for REES students are in St Antony’s and the Centre’s Russian Library Reading Room is a core study area and convening site for all REES students, as well as doctoral students working on related topics from all parts of the university.

This interaction of RESC and REES is well expressed by a long-standing discussion forum centred at first on recent news items in the Russian language press, but expanded over the years to include broader topical themes. For many years the Centre friend and Senior Common Room Member Elizabeth Teague (formerly a Foreign Office researcher and Russia specialist) oversaw this lively weekly discussion in term time in the Centre Library Reading Room. In recent years, as carried forward by Centre Fellows and researchers Julie Newton, Magda Leichtova, Anna Davis and George Hajipavli, the emphasis has moved from immediate news items to discussion around regular external speakers, including prominent officials, diplomats and policy-makers, and this informal grouping is also used to showcase and debate research findings of doctoral students.

Student research in DPhil, MPhil and MSc theses has accompanied radical changes in the research environment and access to research materials. From the late 1980s until the early 21st century opportunities for research in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia greatly expanded, as archives opened and there was increasing interaction between Russian and Western scholars, which was full exploited by enterprising research students. In recent years, and especially since the Russian invasion of Ukraine (see below), those opportunities in Russia itself, Belarus and to some extent Ukraine have been sharply curtailed. However, other (though not all) post-Soviet states retain a compensating openness, and a new emigration has brought many talented and knowledgeable scholars from Russia and Ukraine to the West, some of whom have been Centre academic visitors.

College students studying for the REES MSc and MPhil degrees and related doctoral topics can apply to a variety of scholarships and bursaries offered by the Centre, mostly on the basis of endowed funds. These endowments have been made possible by the very generous support of Centre alumni and fellows, as well as others closely associated with the Centre and take different forms. While the Archie Brown and Alex Pravda Scholarship can cover a major part of the costs of study for a College MPhil student, the Fay and Geoffrey Elliot and Archie Brown bursaries enable research students to carry out substantial field work and offset other research costs. Specific scholarships are also available for study respectively on Central Asia, the North Caucasus, for research by Russian students, and for broader research-related travel. Centre funds also support prizes for REES theses. Such endowed funds offer critical support to a variety of College students to complete their studies and join the list of Centre alumni.   

Centre alumni

Many of the St Antony’s students taught by RESC Fellows have made their mark in a variety of professions, including academia, the higher reaches of journalism, diplomacy, law, business and international banking. The number of such prominent alumni is so extensive that only a sample is offered here of those involved in academia, the media and government who studied at the college in the early to mid-years of the Centre.  

Prominent academics from a wide range of countries who were students in the Centre include:

Former students in the Centre have also made outstanding contributions at the highest levels of the mass media. In a distinguished career, Bridget Kendall (now an Honorary Fellow of St Antony’s) served at various times as BBC Moscow, Washington and Diplomatic Correspondent. From 2016 to 2023 she was Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, the first woman to head that college in its long history. James Blitz, following his MPhil in Russian and East European Studies at St Antony’s, held a series of important journalistic posts, Sunday Times Moscow correspondent and Political Editor of the Financial Times among them. Another Centre student to become a notable Financial Times journalist was Chrystia Freeland, who later achieved still greater renown in Canadian politics, holding several senior governmental posts. She was Deputy Prime Minister of Canada from 2019 to 2024.

The high-level journalistic connection exists also through visiting Senior Members who have been attached to the Centre. Steve Erlanger of the New York Times and David Hoffman of the Washington Post each spent a year at St Antony’s in preparation for their stints as correspondents of their newspapers in Russia. John Lloyd came to the College to write a book about Russia just after completing five years as the Financial Times Moscow correspondent.

Some former students in the Centre have also become prominent politicians. In addition to Canadian Chrystia Freeland, they include two in the Czech Republic – Petr Pithart, who has served both as Czech Prime Minister (1990-92) and as President of the Senate, and Jan Kavan who was Foreign Minister and later President of the United Nations General Assembly. One of the leading Czech reformers during the ‘Prague Spring’, who later became an organiser of the oppositional Charter 77, Zdenĕk Mlynář, spent a month at St Antony’s as a Senior Associate Member in 1979.

Milan Šimečka, who completed the MPhil in Russian and East European Studies in the Centre, has gone on to play an active role in Slovak and European politics. He was a Vice-President of the European Parliament 2019-2023, a co-founder of the Progressive Slovak Party and its Leader since 2020. Mark Brzezinski, who took his DPhil at St Antony’s, has subsequently combined a career as a corporate lawyer with senior governmental positions, He served in the Clinton Administration as Director of Russian/Eurasian Affairs, and later as Obama’s US Ambassador to Sweden, 2011-2015, and, during the Biden Administration, Ambassador to Poland, 2022-2025. Samuel Charap, who took both the MPhil in Russian and East European Studies and his DPhil at St Antony’s, is now Distinguished Chair in Russia and Eurasia Policy at RAND. He has also served as senior adviser to the undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security in the US State Department and on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff, covering Russia and Eurasia.

Some former Centre students have combined high-level government service with publishing academic and policy-related work. Nigel Gould-Davies, who was UK Ambassador to Belarus and has subsequently held a variety of academic and policy-advisory positions, is a notable example. Another is Paradorn Rangsimaporn who, while pursuing a successful career in Thailand’s Foreign Ministry, has published well-received academic studies on Russia, Central Asia and South-East Asia. Barbara Habberjam has followed her service as a high-ranking British civil servant, including Minister-Counsellor (Economic and Trade and Investment) in the UK Embassy in Moscow, with a second career as a translator from French and Russian into English.

Notable Visitors

Many leading politicians have visited the Centre and spoken at St Antony’s. The list of these is extensive, so just an illustrative snapshot is offered here of those who the Centre hosted in the late Soviet and initial post-Soviet years. This was a time when such visits were particularly important in helping to open out the former closed political environment of the region. Among Russians they include:

Mikhail Gorbachev visits St Antony’s in October 1996. Photograph: Norman McBeath, supplied from Archie Brown’s private collection.
Alexander Yakovlev (centre), pictured with Richard Kindersley (L) and Archie Brown (R).

Prominent visitors from other walks of life included:

Among visitors since the turn of the millennium special mention should be made to a series of prominent figures who have spoken for the Centre’s flagship lecture, the Fay and Geoffrey Elliott Lecture. This lecture is named after two long-term friends and very generous donors of the Centre. Speakers in this lecture series include:

More recently the lectures were delivered:

Scholarly Output of Centre Fellows

Members of the Centre were prescient in analysing sources of change within the unreformed Communist systems and as leading analysts of perestroika and of the transformation of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s. Subsequently, they made good use of new sources on the dramatic changes of the late Soviet period, and have researched and published extensively on post-Soviet Russia and Eurasia.

Among the major publications of current Centre Governing Body Fellows and Emeritus Fellows of St Antony’s (listed alphabetically) are the following books:

Roy Allison’s

Archie Brown’s

Paul Chaisty’s

Carol Leonard’s

Dan Healey’s

Alex Pravda’s

Michael Rochlitz’s

Robert Service’s

Zbigniew Wojnowski’s

Harry Shukman was a striking example of a Fellow who published more after retirement from teaching than when he was a Governing Body Fellow. Of particular interest to Russianists was his co-authored book with Geoffrey Elliott (the latter an Honorary Fellow of St Antony’s and friend of the Russian Centre), Secret Classrooms: An Untold Story of the Cold War (Little, Brown in association with St Ermin’s Press, 2002), which is a lively account of the National Service Russian course. As an Emeritus Fellow, Michael Kaser made a notable contribution to the Eurasian part of the Centre’s interests with his The Economies of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan (Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1997).

Culture and Literature

There are now four Governing Body Fellows in the Centre, compared with a peak of seven at one time. The expansion of scholarship and teaching in the social sciences and history did not wholly eclipse the earlier prominence of the study of literature and culture in the Centre. Fellows no longer teach in this field as in the early years of the Centre, but it survives thanks to the Visiting Fellowship set up in memory of Max Hayward, available every second year to young postdoctoral scholars for one academic year, which has often formed a stepping stone to a permanent academic position. The long list of former holders of this fellowship, who during their tenure have usually convened one term of the Centre’s Monday seminar, is a rollcall of prominent scholars. To name but the last four:

The current Max Hayward Fellowship holder for 2025-26 is Panayiotis Xenophontos, who is conducting research on endangered minority Greek and Greek-related literature of southern Ukraine. The interests of Fellowship holders has expanded interestingly in recent years to cover Ukrainian literature and culture. In parallel with this, new seminar series’ on Ukrainian culture were convened in the Centre during 2022-23 and 2024-25, while ad hoc meetings have been addressed by a variety of Ukrainian cultural figures, including the internationally acclaimed author Andrey Kurkov.

The Centre also hosted Oliver Ready for many years as a Research Fellow working on Russian literary work and translations and convening many successful culture events. Ready, himself previously a Max Hayward Fellow (2010-11), also taught Russian literature for the university. As a renowned literary translator his works include Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Penguin Classics, 2014), and the ‘essential stories’ of Gogol under the title And the Earth will Sit on the Moon (Pushkin Press, 2019). His academic publications include Persisting in Folly: Russian Writers in Search of Wisdom, 1963-2013 (Peter Lang, 2017).

From 2011to 2014 Ready also directed the Centre’s Russkiy Mir (Russian World) Programme. This was one of many such programmes funded by Russia and located in Western universities, as a form of cultural and language outreach. These programmes became controversial internationally out of the concern they were intended as a means for Russia to project ‘soft power’ through culture. However, from its inception (launched in the Centre by Dr Alexey Gromyko, director of Russkiy Mir in Europe and a former Centre Senior Associate Member) the Programme at St Antony’s fixed its own activities and output independently. It did not detect efforts at external influence, which would not have been tolerated. The Programme organised numerous seminars, hosted speakers and maintained a small library of Russian works, which were accessible also to the local Oxford community. By 2014 when the Centre decided to conclude the Programme, it had become too bureaucratically cumbersome to manage – a decision which was not regretted later, as Russia began more assertively to promote the Russian World at the expense of the cultural independence of former Soviet neighbour states.

The Centre Library and Reading Room  

Since the inception of the Centre Fellows and students have benefited from the rich library resources of the University as a whole, the more so now that so much has been digitised. The St Antony’s Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre has benefited also, however, from its own specialist Library, with over 25,000 volumes, which is particularly strong on many aspects of Russian and Soviet history, politics and the economy. In the early years of the Centre there was both a Librarian and a Secretary. Since 1982, the post of Librarian has been combined with administration by two successive linguistically gifted people whose skills and commitment have enabled them to combine these roles: Jackie Willcox from 1982 until the end of 2007, and Richard Ramage from January 2008 to the present.

The Library physical environment has also been greatly enhanced. Following a successful fundraising campaign, previously hidden features of the Russian Centre library area of the nineteenth century building were exposed and restored, and further rooms and a mezzanine floor added to the library. Since this internal perestroika, completed in 2009, that study area has become much more attractive for students and visiting researchers. It acts in many ways as a central site for REES students in general, since OSGA lacks any dedicated space for this group of students.

The holdings of the Library remain primarily in Russian, but publications in other languages of Eurasia and Ukraine are being purchased and the overall purchasing policy is kept under review. This reflects the consolidation of the research interests of Fellows and research students beyond Russia.

Regional Diversification

It took fifty years for the Centre to change its name to Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre in 2003, to signal the broad scope of its contemporary research and activities. However, Central Asia had never been neglected in the Centre. Michael Kaser’s interests stretched back to the former Central Asian union republics. Paul Bergne – a former Ambassador to Uzbekistan and Senior Associate Member of the Centre until his death in 2007 – was an authority on the Caspian and Central Asia and he convened regular seminars on the region. For many years the Centre hosted major annual public lectures by Central Asia specialists in his memory. Roy Allison, who had directed major projects at Chatham House on Central Asia, also took up this field of interests on his arrival at the Centre in 2011. The appointment of Zbigniew Wojnowksi and Michael Rochlitz has consolidated the expertise of Centre fellows with this part of the former Soviet Union. In practical terms research is helped also by the greater accessibility to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan for research students compared to earlier post-Soviet and especially the Soviet years.

For the South Caucasus, the establishment since 2017 of a Georgian Programme in REES, which supports research and the attachment to the university of postdoctoral Fellows from Georgia, has helped to knit together research on this state by OSGA and the College Centre. For several years the College has hosted an annual Oxford-Georgia Forum – which has showcased research and policy issues in a day of discussion on Georgia from the UK more widely. Events are frequently held also on topics related to Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Most significantly, far more attention is now devoted to Ukrainian studies by Centre Fellows, in different fields of social science as well as history. Related events tend to be part of OSGA activities, but in collaboration with RESC and the European Studies Centre of St Antony’s, which is also keenly interested in contemporary Ukraine. Funding for a Ukraine Hub, during 2024-26, for cross-University coordination of research and expertise on Ukraine, while not subordinated to RESC, has been fully supported by Centre Fellows.

The University Consortium

The project with the largest budget in any College centre since 2015 is the University Consortium (UC), which is organisationally located in RESC. This multifaceted project was created and driven forward by the energy and commitment of the director of the project, Julie Newton, earlier a St. Antony’s student, who received her doctorate in 1994 and who has been a Research Fellow in the Centre since 2015.

The UC, funded through generous grants from Carnegie Corporation of New York, is an interregional training programme for students from the US, Europe and Russia. It forms a network of students, academics and officials in a consortium of leading universities: Oxford, Columbia, Harvard, Sciences Po, Berlin Free University, and (until Russia’s full-scale attack against Ukraine in 2022) the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. The project organises regular discussion and training modules, seminars, lectures and large annual conferences drawing together prominent experts and officials with selected students. The intention has been to stimulate dialogue and creative thinking, in terms of both scholarship and policy, about how to understand and mitigate the serious deterioration of relations between Russia, the US and Western states in Europe.

The seniority of speakers for the UC attests to its outreach. These include (among many others):

Julie Newton has been assisted on this ambitious agenda of activities and dissemination of expertise by the Russian foreign policy specialist Magda Leichtova, who has a doctorate from the University of West Bohemia in the Czech Republic (2010), and (until 2025) by former REES student John Alulis, who have been part of the intellectual fabric of the Centre, working on its premises, throughout most of the project’s history.

The Scholarly Challenge of Russia’s War against Ukraine

When Russia launched its full-scale offensive against Ukraine it created a political, social, cultural and human chasm between the two most influential states that emerged from the dissolution of the USSR. The shocking war that resulted has already lasted over three and a half years and its effects will powerfully impact at least a generation of Russian and Ukrainians, not to mention the effects of confrontational relationships between Russia and Western states. For RESC there have been many consequences as a research centre and as a convening centre for students and a few deserve particular mention.  

First, scholarly contacts with counterparts in Russia have been severely constrained or frozen. In the statement issued the day after Russia’s attack, RESC unequivocally condemned the aggression. Importantly, however, the statement noted that, as a scholarly community, the Centre had always believed, and still did believe, in the value of academic ties and interaction with individual Russian scholars. In practice, however, as Russian university rectors openly supported Russia’s war efforts, institutional ties could not continue (similarly suspended at Russian university institutional level by the UC project), and individual online contacts increasingly created risks for Russian counterparts. However, visits and seminar talks for the Centre by Russian academics who are effectively exiled, some with new positions in Western universities, have continued.

Four Oxford university academics, including the Centre Director, Roy Allison, in February 2024 found themselves placed on a Russian travel ‘stop-list’ (a personal sanctions list). The Russian Foreign Ministry website justified this action, in the peculiar polemic it adopts, as a reaction against ‘the so-called brain trusts that operate out of major British and Western educational institutions’ driven by ‘Russophobia’. In fact, many hundreds of US academics and specialists have similarly been banned from Russia. Not only Centre fellows but their supervisees have found that fieldwork in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine (for varying political and direct military security risks) is anyway subject to firm FCDO advice against any travel.

The counterpart to this rupture of relations with Russia is that the University and UK academe in general has made considerable efforts to support schemes to allow for visits by at least some Ukrainian scholars at risk, as research in Ukrainian universities became dangerous or impracticable. Also, as previously noted, there has been increasing attention to Ukrainian studies in its own right among Centre Fellows, as well as colleagues in the College’s European Studies Centre.

The war has curtailed not just academic contacts in Russia but the means to conduct all forms of in-country scholarly work (archives, interviews, surveys etc). One consequence is that new research methodologies to extract material from large data sets and web scraping have become more common among research students in the social sciences. Historians turn more to archives still accessible in other post-Soviet states and to fuller exploitation of material in the West. This in turn has been accompanied by an interest in de-centering the study of the region from the arguable distortions of viewing history and contemporary developments in the wider post-Soviet region excessively through the prism of Russian materials or attitudes. This intellectual diversification reinforces the regional diversification in RESC research from a traditional Russia-focus, which has anyway been happening for many years, as outlined previously.

At the same time this recalibration should be kept in perspective. It is essential that core expertise on Russia itself is retained through the activities of the Centre, as well as research and thesis supervision by its Fellows. This need is emphasised by world-wide interest in, and concern about, the direction of developments in Russia, all the more as it seeks to close itself to external scrutiny. This follows years of downgrading research and graduate study in area studies in UK academe at large, to which OSGA, its units such as REES and the specific offering of the St Antony’s Centre have been important exceptions. There has been no time in the post-Soviet era when such knowledge has been more significant.

A Final Word

Christine Nicholls, the author of the history of St Antony’s College published in 2000, concludes her chapter on the then Russian and East European Centre by noting that a ‘mixture of scholarship and fun…characterised the Russian Centre both before and after the fall of communism’. As the Centre nears the final quarter of its first century, this spirit remains. Our hope is that high-level scholarship and its institutional underpinnings will be further reinforced and remain accompanied by the congeniality and collegiality which have defined its past.

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