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The Public Diplomacy Blog is intended to stimulate dialog among scholars, researchers, practitioners and professionals from around the world in the public diplomacy sphere. The opinions represented here are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.

LETTER FROM MOSCOW
NOV 13, 2008 - 12:00PM PDT
Posted by Nicholas J. Cull
All posts by this author

It is a confession for a historian of the Cold War to admit that he had never visited Russia until last week, and that is the case for me. I nearly went in 1975 but the “evil forces of capitalism” contrived to scrap the educational cruise ship on which my family and I were booked. I saw something of the Eastern bloc in Czechoslovakia and East Berlin in the 1980s; I had Russian friends, and even published on Russian subjects, but never having seen Russia for myself was a significant gap in my experience. And quite an experience it turned out to be. I did all the necessary things for any first-timer. I toured the Kremlin. I stood on Red Square. I visited Lenin in his mausoleum. I traveled through the Metro system with its platforms ornate with art from the old ideology. I bought a set of nesting dolls. There were plenty of snapshots of the new Russia, fabulously wealthy men and women sashaying to impossibly expensive Bentleys, past old ladies scrabbling in the street to collect the Kopecs that young Russian tourists had tossed on the bronze plaque by the entrance to Red Square to bring themselves luck. Or was that a return of the old, old Russia? Tolstoy would have understood it for sure. Seeking a Cold War site, I visited the location of KGB headquarters, the Lubyanka, which now houses the successor agency, the FSB. Outside, I found advertisements for the new James Bond movie. Popular culture seemed, in many ways, to be in sync with the west: the same inane Britney Spears song, the same perky ads for High School Musical III, and local knowledge of other cultural products on offer. One young Russian asked if I'd seen the movie called W, as though to confirm that it really had been possible to make a film about a sitting president. No one is holding their breath for an equivalent treatment of Medvedev or Putin. Once I'd played the game of decoding the familiar posters (so that's what “Simon Pegg” looks like in Cyrillic) the unfamiliar drew me in. It became obvious that there was no shortage of locally produced material. The big movie attraction is an epic about Russian naval history called Admiral, which is advertised all over the city with paraphernalia, including enormous Styrofoam reproductions of World War One-vintage sea-mines. The movie theatre near Pushkin Square had been converted into the prow of a battleship with plastic card. While in the 1980s such films regularly made it to western art-house screens, it seems unlikely that Admiral will steam into our cultural waters; it must surely be our loss. The purpose of my trip was to meet people interested in the study of Public Diplomacy in Russia and take part in a couple of classes on public diplomacy at MGIMO, the international relations university, which graduates 80% of Russian diplomats. The sessions had been set up by the British Council office in Moscow, as a…... FULL TEXT
 
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Katherine Avgerinos on November 21, 2009 @ 3:06 pm:
Dear Nick -

Hello from one of Nancy Snow's Masters students at Syracuse. I'm glad you finally got to Moscow - my former stomping grounds. Admiral is a great film, though rather propagandistic in its attempt to appeal to Russia's past imperial and Orthodox grandeur. If you are interested, I recently published an article on Russia's PD strategy in a journal at Priceton. There is not much out there on this topic, so wanted to share - http://www.princeton.edu/~jpia/. Click on chapter 6.

I hope you keep us updated on any advances with PD programs at MGIMO. My fellow Russian-speaking PD students here at Syracuse and I have been discussing similar ideas. Would be great to find out more info and possibly collaborate.

Spasibo!

-Katherine Avgerinos

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