Yes, I would say that training as an engineer has contributed to my academic career. Engineers are people who know how to get things done and they have a systematic approach to problem-solving. This is important for work not only in the field of engineering, but also in social sciences and humanities research. And engineering is a very collaborative profession. Engineers never work alone on a machine or its part. They collaborate with their colleagues, designers, technologists, and line workers, and collaboration is equally essential for scholars, as a lot of the research is conducted in the form of collective projects.
For a long time, it wasn’t either St. Petersburg or Helsinki but I kept working in both cities. As I started my period in the Finland Distinguished Professorship programme in 2012, when the Allegro train had just been launched a couple of years before, and people could easily commute between Finland and Russia. Upon getting a position as a regular professor at the University of Helsinki since 2017, I still kept working part-time in St. Petersburg as well until 2022 — then all ties were cut for apparent reasons, and it’s no longer possible. The advantages of Helsinki are the working conditions and quality of life and the environment here, which I greatly enjoy.
When I first started as a researcher, everyone was rather optimistic, driven by expectations of democratisation. I was already skeptical at this point, and over the period of the 1990s, my skepticism kept increasing. I also developed an understanding of the fact that the entire field is ever-changing and in constant flux. Scholarly interest cannot merely focus on whatever ongoing events at the time but instead consider these changes in a broader theoretical and comparative perspective. If we are looking only at what's going on just here and now, we cannot answer the most important question: why?
I’m a proponent of comparative political research, because in order to answer the “why?” questions, researchers need to figure out the major drivers of these changes and then analyse the differences and similarities in cross-national and also cross-temporal perspective.
I would say that when you approach the question of democratisation from a comparative perspective, it’s a long and winding road: many countries which we consider democracies nowadays had a very long and complicated path towards democratisation. Let's take a look at France, for example.
In France, democratisation started in the late 18th century and was completed by the late 19th century. Let alone Germany, where the path to democratisation stumbled on Nazi dictatorship and included the period during which the country was de facto split in two states of East and West Germany. So, I would say that Russia in many ways lags behind its European neighbors. However, Russia today should not be perceived as a country that has reached an end point, but rather one in the process: and as such, it may demonstrate both progress and decline along the way. We should avoid assuming that the current situation in Russia is going to last forever.
So, I would say that while the current situation looks very grim, it will change eventually. You know, social science often demonstrates something what Albert O. Hirschman, an economist of the 20th century, who conducted research on Latin America, labeled as a bias for hope. I have some bias for hope in research on Russia, too.
Before 2022, Russian political science demonstrated certain progress: there were several good study programs in various universities. There were some examples of international collaboration between scholars from European countries and the United States and Russian scholars: some young Russian scholars got their PhDs in leading universities in the United States or in Europe.
However, 2022 resulted in a serious blow to this development: some study programs ceased to exist, and some people left the country. This turn is an epitome of the claim Samuel Huntington made some decades ago: “where democracy is strong, political science is strong: where democracy is weak, political science is weak”. However, I do believe that some of Russian scholars who now working in Europe, in the US and elsewhere may have a certain impact on area studies and on the discipline as a whole.
Some countries in the region have previously not been addressed enough, such as Ukraine before 2022. While there were some places, such as Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, which specialized in Ukrainian studies for many years, Ukraine was not studied in a systematic way in many other scholarly institutions, and there is a need to develop Ukrainian studies.
I still think that attention most probably won’t be shifted away from Russia in area studies, simply because it is the biggest country, a challenge to security, a large economy and important in many other respects. Instead of substituting Russian studies by studies of other areas, I would say that there should be a complementarity of research on Russia and other Eurasian countries.
The problem with political commentary in the media or in the role of an academic expert is that there are some questions that are simply impossible to answer, especially if journalists or policymakers are looking for predictions about some critical and topical issues unfolding in the here and now.
I would say that social scientists are not so good with predictions, not only regarding Russia, but with anything else: our knowledge is very limited in that regard.
When we as scholars deal with very hot and sensitive topics, we should base our analysis on evidence-based research, and this is a really difficult task. Sometimes people fall into the trap of wishful thinking or the opposite, they adopt an alarmist perspective. But I would say that we as researchers should be academics first, even though we definitely have our political preferences, we should provide clear and unbiased comments.
When it comes to policy advice, I think that's a more fundamental problem. Because the roles of the scholar and that of the policy advisor are certainly different, and combining these roles is a really difficult task. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I would just point out the well-known Sovietologists, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Richard Pipes, whose policy impact as national security advisors in the United States we should assess not as scholarly but rather as political influence.
Among my publications, I consider what I call the trilogy of Russian Politics to be most important of them all and my major contribution. The three books are building on each other, focusing on the role of agencies, ideas, and interests in Russian politics and policymaking.
The first one is the book
I have a new book project, Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Russian History I’m co-editing together with Sari Autio-Sarasmo and Ivan Kurilla from Ohio State University. It addresses various dimensions of political, economic, social, and cultural history of Russia after the Soviet collapse. The volume is going to be extensive, with almost 40 authors working on it, including a number of our Finnish colleagues among contributors. I expect that it will be an important volume in the Routledge Handbook series.
Also, the project includes a research component, and there are several joint articles our team members from the Aleksanteri Institute are working on together with the researchers from Masaryk IIPS and PRIO. In one article in which I’m one of the co-authors we are working on analysis of the impact of domestic and international factors in political changes in the countries of Eastern Partnership: namely Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine before 2022. We try to understand what the combination of domestic actors and European and Russian influences led to so diverse outcomes within this group of countries, and what are the implications of these domestic and international constellations for understanding the logic of democratisation and/or autocratisation in these countries and beyond.
As a general recommendation for people who do social science research is to build your research agenda on several components. First, there is a need to do research on what is really interesting for you, and there is no universal solution to that question: young scholars may choose the topics on different grounds, but this choice should be well thought through also in discussion with colleagues, peers, and teachers, since you are going to invest a lot of time and efforts to your subject of study. The process of gaining new knowledge is not so straightforward: it’s not always the case that you made the right choice from the very beginning and sometimes people change the focus of their research quite dramatically, but it’s still worth considering from the very beginning.
Second, there is a need to get knowledge and skills from various fields beyond one particular theme. Young scholars need to form general knowledge of their respective disciplines, an outline of the other disciplines, and they need to go through methodological training and all of which is rather complicated, and it’s all time consuming while your time is very much limited.
In addition to a varied disciplinary knowledge a diverse experience beyond academia is useful. Many people who are known as successful scholars in the fields of sociology or political science, for example, not only used to work in academia, but they had also previously gained experience from participating in social activism, they used to work in the media industry or in the NGOs. Sometimes such experience can prove very useful.
Finally, there is an impression that researchers are leading a relaxed life, as the schedule is flexible and you get to travel to interesting places as part of your work. That's true. But it's also true that usually the people who achieve real success in academia are working 25 hours per day and eight days per week, so it's not so easy as it may seem from the outside.
There are so many persons I’m thankful for but let me focus on three categories of people.
First, those people who helped me at the very beginning. I must confess I have no specialized education, such as doctoral training: I relied a lot on the support of scholars who greatly helped me in launching my academic career. Andrey Alekseev, sociologist from St. Petersburg, was my first informal teacher. Another one was Mary McAuley, a British scholar who came in the early 90s to St. Petersburg to conduct her research and hired me as an assistant. Mary became a real mentor for my research, even though we never established official supervision. Among Finnish scholars, Risto Alapuro provided very important support for me, and he encouraged me to start working in Finland.
In the second category there are my numerous former and current colleagues from the European University at St. Petersburg and from the University of Helsinki. I could not name them all, as it will be an incredibly long list and I may forget someone, so I’ll just avoid that mentioning them all collectively.
Finally, I’m thankful to those who were my students at a certain point and now I get to learn from them as they became scholars themselves. Among them are my colleagues at the Aleksanteri Institute, Margarita Zavadskaya and Anna Tarasenko. I should also mention Egor Lazarev, who attended my lectures in St. Petersburg and is now a professor at Yale, and another former student, Anton Shirikov, who is now teaching at the University of Kansas. There are also some other promising doctoral researchers and postdocs. Maxim Alyukov, who is now a postdoc at the University of Manchester and currently at the Aleksanteri Institute as a visiting fellow, defended his PhD some years ago here at the University of Helsinki: I'm proud to have supervised his dissertation.
I’m sure that this category of former students who turned into insightful colleagues will be expanded over time, also including some of our current and future doctoral and master’s students here at the Aleksanteri Institute.
I would say that there is a need for a more in-depth analysis of contemporary Russian and Eurasian politics from a broader theoretical perspective of comparative historical analysis. What we have observed in post-Soviet Eurasia is a trajectory of post-imperial changes upon state-building on the ruins of the Soviet Union. There have been major changes in political economy after the Soviet system collapsed, which have paved the way for what I would describe imperfect political capitalism. Also, there were attempts to change political systems, which contributed to shifts from one-party regimes to personalist autocracies, ranging from Belarus to Tajikistan.
However, these developments are not regional and era specific either. We may find numerous parallels from different parts of the world and historical periods, be it in Europe or post-colonial Africa, but these developments deserve to be analyzed theoretically and comparatively.
Writing an article or let alone a book on this topic wouldn’t be easy, but this is what I'm really interested in. I hope that one day, these ideas will be materialised in one form or another.