The Geopolitics of Culture: James Billington, the Library of Congress, and the Failed Quest for a New Russia by John VanOudenaren. NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Ithaca: Northern Illinois University Press, 2024. 378 pp. $5

Former Director of the World Digital Library and Chief of the European Division at the Library of Congress, John Van Oudenaren offers an insider account of Dr. James Billington’s tenure as the Librarian of Congress from 1987 to 2015. In the absence of “a department of culture, the Librarian of Congress serves as the de facto secretary of culture—the cabinet-level official” who meets with relevant foreign ministers and communicates to the world that the United States “values” all cultural achievements (p. 1). President Ronald Reagan could not have made a better appointment to oversee cultural diplomacy during the Cold War’s end. The “only Librarian of Congress to have a non-US culture as his primary area of scholarly expertise” and presiding over “the largest Russian library in the world outside of Russia,” Billington was the “right man in the right place at the right time” (pp. 35, 46, 11). Billington’s forays into geopolitics began with advising the Reagan administration as it prepared for the 1985 Geneva summit with Gorbachev. He suggested student and professor exchanges, “annual TV messages by the leaders of both countries,” and the establishment of cultural centers with unrestricted access in each other’s countries (p. 42). The common denominator was Billington’s belief that “genuine change had to flow from ideas that had some basis in Russia’s own roots and not from ‘foreign transplants’” (p. 44). Moreover, he believed that Russia could meld the liberal Western political tradition with “conservative Russian beliefs”—a leitmotif in Billington’s thinking, according to Van Oudenaren (p. 88). After the dismantlement of the USSR, Billington called for a great effort from the Bush and Clinton administrations because the Russian people saw “themselves as having accomplished a ‘great deed’ (the Herculean podvig characteristic of saints as well as warriors in Old Russia),” but saw only “little deeds” in response (p. 97). If the United States alienated Russia, Billington correctly predicted in his 1997 Templeton Lecture, Moscow could exclude it from Eurasia if it “were to ally with an expanding China” (p. 161). Moreover, Billington warned that nations were looking to “‘resurgent cultural identities’ to anchor themselves in a globalizing and rapidly changing world,” while the United States was losing its “national identity at home, where Americans were becoming ‘flabby multiculturalists,’ even as they became ‘rigid monoculturalists’ abroad, riding roughshod over other cultures in the rush towards marketization, globalization, and the monetization of information” (p. 162). In his opinion pieces, Billington also criticized NATO expansion in the late 1990s, arguing that the parallel “compensating gestures that Americans make to reassure Russians of our friendship” tended “only to deepen their sense of being patronized (p. 162). Billington’s answer to this was to launch the Russian Leadership Program, later widened and renamed Open World, which aimed to bring thousands of Russians to America in a sustained people-to-people professional exchange. In 2003, Billington plunged into a new venture inspired by his cooperation with Russian libraries—the World Digital Library. By the end of Vladimir Putin’s second term in 2008, “the Library of Congress-Russia relationship was flourishing, delivering on and promising big things in the areas of digital libraries, technical assistance, exchanges of people and library materials, exhibitions, and much else” (p. 233). In the Conclusion, Van Oudenaren reminds his readers that culture for Billington “was not just an add-on—a set of cooperative endeavors to be tacked on to a summit communiqué after the more important issues had been covered”—but “the heart of the matter” (p. 276). Since Reagan, Bush, and Clinton understood this, “the Library of Congress did much to reinforce it” by encouraging “the Russians to look […] to what was best in their own history” instead of “preaching at” them (p. 276). But soon U.S. foreign policy morphed into “little more than a series of crusades against villains portrayed in almost cartoonishly evil terms”—Hussein, Milosevic, Gadhafi, al-Assad, and now Putin (p. 278). In 2021 the Library merged its European Division into “the Latin America, Caribbean and European Division,” which was “in line with the general tendency underway in the U.S. government” to leave international affairs to the military and cultural policy “to Hollywood and Silicon Valley” (p. 285). All Eastern European specialists and students will profit greatly from reading this thoughtful reflection on the unrealized potential of American cultural diplomacy.