Kremlinology Today
Aug 18, 2025
Readers of these pages know well that I very rarely post links to other commentators or interview programs in which they appear. Today is an exception. I enthusiastically recommend to the Community a video of the interview [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hr5iqzrmME ] which Professor Glenn Diesen of the University of South-eastern Norway had with retired CIA analyst, former daily reporter of intelligence updates to President Reagan and his administrative team, and co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Officers for Sanity, Ray McGovern.
I am proud to say that Ray is a good friend despite my occasionally chiding him for not writing down his memoirs, given that he was a participant in the creation of key arms control agreements between the USSR and the USA during his tenure at the CIA. However, in this interview he makes amends by sharing many observations on people and events from those times: it is worthy of being deposited in an archive of oral history and I hope that Glenn and Ray will consider doing just that.
On this video you will also hear about Ray McGovern’s important work these past several years disproving the key element in the Russia-gate hoax that nearly kept Trump from being elected in 2016 and then ‘emasculated his presidency’ (Ray’s term) thereafter. The issue began with the fake news that the Russians had hacked the Democrat’s National Committee computers before the party convention to extract compromising emails sent by candidate Hilary Clinton in an effort to polish her credentials and tarnish the Russians with charges of interfering in the U.S. elections. The release of documents by national security director Tulsi Gabbard a week or two ago has confirmed the correctness of Ray’s findings nine years ago. Regrettably the most guilty parties in the hoax, Clinton and Obama, are unlikely to be brought to justice for proven crimes against American democracy.
At the start of this interview, Ray speaks about the subject which Glenn has called out in the title he assigned to the conversation: ‘the end of Kremlinology…’ Ray explains what Kremlinology meant from the time of its inception within the U.S. intelligence agencies, that is, essentially using open sources, at the time almost exclusively print sources like the daily newspapers Pravda and Izvestiya, to detect changes in Soviet policies and report opportunities for exercising diplomacy to improve global security. He knows whereof he speaks because Ray McGovern was an accomplished practitioner of the art as a CIA analyst and it brought him and the government he served very important benefits.
What prompted Ray McGovern to speak out was an article published five days ago by The Financial Times at a moment when all media were trying to prepare their audiences for the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska. See “No experts in the room: Donald Trump to meet Vladimir Putin after loss of Russia experts.” In that article written by Amy Mackinnon, an FT journalist in Washington, the point they were making is that Trump has driven out of the State Department, out of the National Security Council and other government agencies most of those staff who had a good knowledge of Russia and of the wiles of Vladimir Putin. Instead, Trump was now relying on the ‘foreign policy neophyte’ Steve Witkoff to guide him in the talks with the Russians.
The FT particularly bemoaned the loss of real experts like Fiona Hill, a British-American academic, formerly an official at the National Security Council and advisor to Trump on Russian affairs in his first term. She is perhaps best known as the author of a tendentious biographical sketch of the Russian leader entitled Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin. The title speaks for itself: she uses Putin’s years in the KGB as the key to understanding his world view and governing methods.
McGovern tells us that Fiona Hill is emblematic of everything that has been wrong in the past several decades in the preparation and career paths of our ‘Russia experts’ and why their exclusion from policy making by Trump today is a good thing.
I am delighted by his conclusion since it matches very well what I was saying more than a decade ago:
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2013/11/18/defunding-russian-studies-may-be-a-blessing-a29668
I argued that given the vicious anti-Russian views espoused by the American professoriate specialized in Russian studies, it would be a good thing if the field were deprived of funding and ceased to exist. Then, following the departure of present practitioners, it could be reconstituted with new cadres who were not propagandists, rising anew like the phoenix from its ashes.
In recommending Ray McGovern’s discussion with Glenn Diesen, I am obliged to call out one point of difference I have with Ray’s tracing the source of the problem with Russia experts at the top of their profession today. He points a finger at Richard Pipes and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who were among the leading scholars and advisors to Congress and to U.S. administrations in the 1970s to their deaths in the new millennium. Both of them came from Poland and presumably received anti-Russian views with their mother’s milk. Pipes is especially relevant today given that the aforementioned Fiona Hill, so highly regarded by The Financial Times, had studied under him.
My point is not that Pipes was a Polish Jew and Brzezinski was a Polish Pole, as Ray reminds us. Their common land of birth, Poland, may explain their predisposition not to like Russia, but the anti-Russian intellectual content that they delivered to undergraduates and to their graduate students, that they published in their books and repeated before government investigative bodies came from a different common source – Harvard University, where they both in the late 1940s, early 1950s, together with fellow academic turned statesman Henry Kissinger, learned their Russian history from a certain Mikhail Karpovich, who was one of the very first American professionals in this field. And raising the question of who was Karpovich happens to be very relevant to our understanding of Russian Liberals today, the very folks who were driven out of Russia in disgrace as from the start of the Special Military Operation. Among them is a certain former Russian Foreign Minister, Andrei Kozyrev, who was interviewed by the BBC for commentary on the Alaska summit this past Friday.
Karpovich was a continuator of Russian Liberalism that you can trace in the historiographical field to the great Russian historian of the last quarter of the 19th century Vasily Kliuchevski. Most of these academics were Anglophile. If I may simplify their political views to Trump’s special English: England good, Russia bad. Among the reasons given for the negative interpretation of their own country’s past were the period of domination by the Mongols in the 14th and 15th centuries, the fact that the Europe-wide Renaissance never penetrated Russia after stopping at the Polish border, the very long tradition of serfdom given that Russia was the last European country to liberate its peasantry from slave-like conditions, and the tradition of absolutism in the monarchy which lasted 130 years beyond the French Revolution.
The historiographical tradition of negativism about Russia’s own past went from Kliuchevski to the historian-politician Miliukov, from him to the historian Kizevetter in European emigration and then on to Karpovich in the USA. My point is that self-hatred has been an engrained feature of Russian intellectual life alongside the inferiority complex that I mentioned in a recent interview.
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Of course, real life is often more complex than brief overviews allow. Since, like Fiona Hill, I also studied under Richard Pipes I am obliged to fill in the spaces here. Pipes was my academic advisor for researching my undergraduate thesis and then he was a promoter and supervisor of my work as postdoctoral fellow in the Russian Research Center during 1973-75. At that time already he was traveling on weekends down to Washington with a view to following the Kissinger trail into government. He served as a policy advisor to Washington State’s Senator “Skip” Jackson, co-author of the Jackson-Vanik amendment which established the first and very long-lasting sanctions on the USSR over limited emigration rights for “refuseniks” and other Jews intent on leaving for Israel in the 1970s. In the 1980s he briefly served in Reagan’s National Security Council as a specialist on the USSR. He was at the time a vocal member of the Committee on the Present Danger.
However, as I know well, during the Gorbachev Perestroika years, Richard Pipes changed his stripes and became Russia-friendly. When his history books were translated into Russian and sold well in Moscow he took notice. Eventually at the start of the 1990s he returned to Russia after several decades of absence and did research there. He was in Moscow during some of the epochal events in the establishment of a nominally democratic and free market society in the ‘90s and he corrected his views on the country. Whereas he had previously said that the Russian people were condemned to suffer autocracy in perpetuity as a result of their sad history going back centuries, he now said openly that the Russians had become a free people. Indeed, he engaged other Western academics in a public dispute over this issue.
The moral of the story is that even seemingly stubborn opponents among academics can sometimes see the light.
Finally, I must address one other issue raised by Ray McGovern in the interview. His description of Kremlinology has not kept up with the times.
Ray stands out among peers who were also CIA analysts in the past and today are colleagues in the anti-war movement, since he continues to practice Kremlinology in the sense that he describes in the interview: working primarily with texts, parsing the words, tweaking the grammar to uncover hidden messages. He very often uses to considerable effect the published remarks of Vladimir Putin, Sergei Lavrov, Sergei Ryabkov, Yuri Ushakov and other leading figures in the Russian government. I freely admit that he generally makes greater use of these documents than I do and produces some very newsworthy findings.
His colleagues, past and present, more frequently rely on very different sources for what they say on youtube interviews: unnamed Russian generals or politicians with whom they say they are in regular contact and are receiving scoops. I am very skeptical of the value of such sources. These fellows seem not to consider that if they were receiving real ‘scoops’ especially of a military nature, then their Russian contact could be arrested for violating secrecy laws or worse. They seem not to consider that it is their contacts who are using them, not the other way around.
My point here is that there are still other sources, indeed Open Sources, which can and should be used by Western analysts. This material goes well beyond printed texts on the russia.gov and similar websites.
Russian officials no longer speak in the ‘wooden language’ of the Soviet era, but they are very guarded and what they mean is often not what they say. This is my justification for making extensive use of Russian state television news broadcasts and, still more use of the political talk shows and programs of news and commentary on Rossiya 1 or Pervy Kanal. Their hosts and panelists are, I maintain, floating ideas which the Kremlin wants to test without taking direct responsibility. They are official while also being deniable.
On these programs, besides the presenter, who is scripted from above, you will find the thinking of the creative intelligentsia, of Duma members, of think tank directors and deans of prestigious universities, that is of the Russian establishment which sets the limits on presidential power.
To practice this kind of Kremlinology, you need good verbal Russian skills to catch on the fly what is being said on the radio or on television that will not be reposted on the internet. I have little doubt that U.S. intelligence agencies have staff in the Moscow embassy or even in Washington doing precisely this job. Regrettably they do not share their findings with the general public. That is one of the tasks I try to perform on these pages.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025
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