Corporation
of New York
Vol. 2/No. 4
Spring 2004
The History of South Africa: A Twice-Told Tale
Alternative Pathways to College
Centers of Education in Russia: The Case for CASEs
An Interview with Marta Tienda
Also in this issue:
Two Schools Collaborate and Students Succeed
Past Issues:
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Centers of Education in Russia:
The Case for CASEs
For Arsenian, who has had considerable experience with the power of philanthropy and is well aware of how often a grantee’s aspirations can change once its funding is secure, the Ministry also provides some guarantee that the plans and agreements signed with the CASE universities will be respected. “The Ministry’s involvement is critical,” she explained, “because it means that the CASEs are not perceived as just a Western program but as a joint U.S.-Russian, private-public partnership. The universities don’t see us as a charity, but as a collaborator.”
On to Saratov
Reaching Saratov after a much-delayed and very crowded flight on a post-Soviet
regional airline named Saratov Air, which did not give me deep confidence
in its flying history, I realized how distant the world of Moscow is from
some of our regional CASEs.
Untouched in World War II, Saratov is still dominated by the small-village style of architecture that arose in the past centuries when it was a vital trading center on the Volga River. By contrast, young students at the university have the look of the fashion-conscious MTV generation: tight jeans, stiletto-heeled boots and short-cropped skirts. But the old Soviet-era Intourist hotel is still the only place for travelers to stay, and adding to a general air of bleakness, a November snowstorm had left the city without power the week before we arrived and had felled many trees. In the Soviet days, Saratov was a closed city because of its defense work, cut off from the West; today, it still seemed to move at a 19th century pace.
But where we visitors may have seen a rather poor and struggling urban center, the leaders of Saratov State University saw a very different picture: their institution had made it through the really difficult financial years after the fall of the Soviet Union and their proposal to create a CASE had won support from the Corporation and its partners, all of which, for them, were signals of the rebirth of this ancient town.
The CASE itself is important to the university because in Russia, which has a population that is shrinking precipitously, it is expected that some regional universities will not survive. Only those with proven records of leadership and excellence can feel confident about their future. For many universities, the presence of a CASE is the best guarantee that they will not be on the Russian government’s extinction list.
At Saratov State, we meet with Velikhan Mirzekhanov, the CASE director and a warm and friendly man who is well liked on campus. This was actually not my first encounter with Mirzekhanov. A year earlier, he and two other university CASE directors had traveled to an international meeting in Pittsburgh that I also attended. Talking with him at the meeting, he seemed to me to be somewhat different than his colleagues: more innovative and flexible in his thinking and less “Soviet,” perhaps in part because of his non-Russian ethnic roots, which are in Dagestan, one of the former Soviet republics. Translating for him was Tatyana Kharlamova, who hardly fit the old stereotype of a Russian female with academic status. She was slight, with dark hair highlighted to a Russian henna version of chestnut brown. Since her English was quite good, I had tried to engage her in a conversation about the theme* of the Saratov CASE, which officially focuses on “Phenomenology of Power: State, Society, Individual Destiny (Russian and International Experience).” She started to give her opinion at the meeting in Pittsburgh but was outnumbered and upstaged by the table of male leaders who dominated the meeting. I left her that day promising we would meet again in Saratov.
As we began our tour of the CASE, I spotted Kharlamova in a large, bright lecture hall. Her hair was redder, but her smile just as warm. As I’d said I would, I sought her out to finish our discussion from Pittsburgh. “The thematic priority of our CASE is compelling,” she told me as the tape recorder whirred. “Power is a very complex phenomena. It can be connected not only with politics but with other spheres of society and can also be seen in a psychological sense. Studying power gives rise to many interesting ideas.”
But she also admitted that one of the reasons she and other Russian intellectuals want to study power is that they want to have a sense of how, personally, they can use it. “People are freer now and they can voice their personal points of view,” Kharlamova told me. “I think they are eager to express themselves, now that they have an opportunity to do so.”
During the Communist days, Kharlamova’s father was mayor of Saratov. He had urged her to explore the wider world, but even now Kharlamova insists that she would never leave for very long. Saratov is her home, the home of her family. But because of her involvement with the CASE program, her horizons have broadened and her curiosity has been whetted.
Rostov on the Don
The newest CASE to be established is in Rostov on the Don River. Considered
to be the number-three university in Russia, the institution had entered
several rounds of CASE competition before submitting a winning proposal
on the third round.
A city on a major truck route to the Caucasus, Rostov is close to the chaos of post-Soviet troubles. Still, its wide boulevards and smart shops give Rostov a more cosmopolitan air than Saratov. On the “left bank” of the Don River, in a section called “Las Vegas” by the locals, boarded-up summer restaurants and casinos speak of a vibrant warm-weather life. Shabby camps, once summer retreats for Soviet factory workers, tell of a day when the system took care of all of a family’s needs. Rundown and decaying, these camps now await an entrepreneur’s transformation.
For the Carnegie Corporation team, Rostov was an experience of the birth of a CASE. We could smell the paint when we arrived at the new offices for the CASE staff, and camera crews from the local television station soon showed up to record the president of the university receiving the official international foundation recognition.
Marguerite Zakovorotnaya, a 30-year-old historian and CASE administrator, like many of the young women we met in the new Russia, proved to be adept at filling several roles: researcher, administrator and tour guide. She was clearly able to navigate the politics of the university, dominated by older men who had held their leadership positions for decades. She found nothing ironic, as she did much of the work during the visit, that the CASEs theme, like many others, focused on power and identity.
In October 2003, in Washington, D.C., at a gathering I attended, it was Zakovorotnaya who had presented the most fluid and influential report of a CASE forum at a meeting held at the celebrated Kennan Institute, which is the U.S. manager for the CASE initiative. Zakovorotnaya’s paper, entitled The Nature of Russian Political Power in Regional Perspectives, examined what she called the “lost”—those unsure of where they fit into the changing Russian society. Before more than 100 U.S. scholars and others from the nine CASES, Zakovorotnaya caught the attention of the audience with her provocative and focused presentation.