Misreading Russian Studies

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 policymakers-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.