The Port Of Leningrad: From Late Communism To Crony Putinism

>> Norman Naimark: My name is Norman Naimark and I have the pleasure today of standing in for Neil Ferguson as best I can. In this interview of Tomasz Blusiewicz, who is a Harvard PhD and a research fellow here at the Hoover Institution. So we're gonna have a conversation about his fascinating work, which is about Baltic seaports and corruption and how they contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union.

So, Tomasz, let me start with a kind of basic question, which is, how did you get into this fascinating work? I mean, after all, you look at a number of different seaports. You have to work in a number of different languages with a number of different cultures. I mean, how did you come to this subject?

>> Tomasz Blusiewicz: Yes, if you read my proposals when I was a graduate student, and you might remember actually one of my proposals, because I submitted it here. I applied to graduate school at Stanford in 2011. My proposal was about something different. It was about the Polish recovered territories. It was about the new borders that Poland received after World War II.

But then, of course, when you're a graduate student, you get a chance to read a lot. You have a lot of time to think about what your research is going to be about. And I remember in my second or third year, I just happened to discover a book written by a Polish historian of the University of Warsaw.

The book is called, I'm not sure if there's a version in English. So I read it in Polish. It's about the black market in Poland under communism. And when I read that book, I was like, wow, I thought I knew something about communist Poland, but this book just completely opened a new horizon for me.

I mean, he just wrote about these phenomena about the black markets and so on that you just don't. I mean, I knew partly about them from my upbringing. I knew about these phenomena from my parents' stories, right? But it was just the tip of the iceberg. And then I read his book, which is a very well researched book.

The historian's name is Jerzy Kochanowski. And in Polish, the title of the book is Through the Back Door. So delivering supplies through the back door. So I read that book, and especially the parts he had on port cities were just astonishing to me. It was like a true revelation.

And I was like, I have to get to know more about it. Secondly, because I was born in Poland and I moved here when I was 18, I didn't want my dissertation to be exclusively about Poland. I would never allow myself to do that because it's a little bit like cheating, you know, I mean, it's a country, you know very well.

You know the language, so it's so much easier than, let's say, some friends I have, colleagues of mine that I really admire, born and raised in the United States and going to study as graduate students, Central Asia. For example, there was a colleague of mine, Maria Black, also at Harvard.

She's now working for the Library of Congress. And she actually went out to Central Asia for two or three years, right? So I was very impressed by that. So I said, well, at least let me study Russia and Germany, which, of course, as a pole and as a historian, you can't really ignore.

So that's how I expanded my focus just to the entire Baltic area.

>> Norman Naimark: Listen, I want to ask you something. I'm fascinated by these five years you spent in Tumen from 2017 to 2022, right? And very few people in the west have a kind of experience with Putin's Russia, I mean, that's closest to us.

In other words, many of us spent time earlier in this century there working and, working in the archives. And it was a semi free country, you could almost say, but things have changed a lot in late Putin's Russia. I'm just curious, how would you, this isn't directly related to your work, but how does your time in late Putin's Russia kind of contribute to your understanding of the research, too?

And what were some parts of it that really, you would want other Americans to know about?

>> Tomasz Blusiewicz: First of all, the college I went to work for in Russia was a special kind of college because it was English instruction only. It was based on a liberal arts model.

It was run by the director, Andrei Sherbenok. He received his PhD at Berkeley. Then he was a fellow at Columbia for three years. So it was a kind of Potemkin village, for our listeners, a kind of a show, a kind of a token Russians wanted. And I knew about it.

When I came there, the Russians, even in the Soviet times, the Soviet Union, even Stalin, still wanted to have these elements in his society that would suggests to a western visitor that, they have democracy, that they have open society and things like that. So it's in that tradition, and I knew about it.

It was a very special project. So just that our listeners understand it was not a regular university in Russia because there, of course, I would have to know Russian, so we were treated differently. And I could tell you a lot of stories about how the, let's say regular, regular, just meaning the state employed Russian professors, not as regular, not as extraordinary just the state-run university where they were very distinguished professors.

They were very jealous of our position because we were treated, we had special rights. But then, after three years, because my Russian got much better, I was invited, actually, to teach at the ordinary university. And there I had a chance to see the bureaucratic system. How much bureaucracy was there?

Incredible amounts. I was just swamped with paperwork. Most of my work there was what Russians called which means giving account of your activities. So bureaucracy was-

>> Norman Naimark: We have some idea, too.

>> Tomasz Blusiewicz: Monstrous there. No, you can't even-

>> Tomasz Blusiewicz: Here, you have assistance. At Hoover, for every researcher, we have two assistants, secretaries and research assistants.

No, you can't even compare it. But about the regime itself, so I had no illusions about the regime itself when I went there. But I still thought that Putin would be a reasonable guy. I mean, I knew about all his, for example, the murder of Nemtsov, of Politkovsky.

I knew about what kind of a guy he was, but I still thought that there would be some limit to his aggressive behavior. So in this sense, the invasion of Ukraine really came as a surprise to me. It was really a shock-

>> Norman Naimark: Really to all of us.

>> Tomasz Blusiewicz: Because I also felt slightly, if I can put it this way, I felt slightly betrayed by him because still, I went to work for Russia. And I worked for kind of for the Russian state. I was teaching liberal arts courses to russian youth, for which I was reprimanded once or twice when I went too far, let's say, when I criticized Stalinism.

But I felt betrayed a little bit by Putin because I thought he would be a reasonable guy, kind of like Brezhnev.

>> Norman Naimark: Right.

>> Tomasz Blusiewicz: Right, that he wouldn't do something like that. And now, well, we can all see, and I hope the future will show. Clearly, there was a huge mistake that he did.

So that was a shocker to me. But there were signs of this coming, especially after Navalny's poisoning. I could see the oversight over the university increase.

>> Norman Naimark: You feel that in two minutes.

>> Tomasz Blusiewicz: Yes, the students would receive phone calls, because Russian students were very involved in supporting Navalny.

They organized marches. There were many marches, especially when Navalny came back, he was arrested. That's, I think, January 21, if I'm not mistaken. There were marches in many Russian cities. And my wife's brother, for example, he was a student, and he wanted to go, and he received a call from the administrators.

If you go, there will be consequences up to removing you from the university. There was also increased oversight over our research. I applied for a few grants, for example. And they were rejected, I think, on the grounds that they were not patriotic enough and things like that. But definitely not until very close to the war did I feel this kind of cold breath of the regime.

No, I must say, up until then, I lived a pretty carefree life, as much as I could, and maybe doesn't sound that great, because I was not actively engaged. I want also the listeners to understand I was not actively engaged in supporting the Russian opposition the way I am right now in any way.

Because this would automatically lead to deportation, and the doors would be just closed. So I was not engaged in that. I was trying to do my job the way I was trained at Harvard and New Chicago. That's what I was focusing on. And I think I'm still in touch with many students who, by the way, are now, thanks also to my recommendation letters, are able to study in Europe, something I'm kind of fond of.

They are able to study at master's programs in Europe. So, yes, the regime was there, but up until the war, it was kind of in the background, but then it suddenly came into your life with full force.

>> Norman Naimark: I hope one day you write something about your experiences.

>> Tomasz Blusiewicz: I plan to.

>> Norman Naimark: Cuz it would be very interesting, and I can see from this work that you're now doing on the Putin era that a lot of that has some influence on it. So that'll be very beneficial.

>> Tomasz Blusiewicz: Right, so If I can just finish my thought here, sorry for interrupting.

I guess I underestimated Putin. I underestimated his resolve. And I also think he has changed during COVID If you listen to his speeches, there's so much of old style soviet propaganda. Even my wife tells me, you know, in the two thousands, he was all about, you know, opening to the west, you know, free markets.

If Russian people could go everywhere, travel freely. His rhetoric was completely different, and now he has this. Right now, his rhetoric is kind of doomsday rhetoric. He switched to that. So this was shocking to me. But I don't know-

>> Norman Naimark: I mean, I feel exactly the same. So I think your perceptions, at least from the outside, sound right to me.

Anyway, let's return to your work a little bit. There are two strands of it that are very interesting. Well, the one that's the most, in some ways, salient is this kind of subtitle you have about the Hanseatic League and about the Hansa and the revival of the Hansa in the Baltic and the way these ports work together in this kind of corruption and KGB-

>> Tomasz Blusiewicz: But also establishing trade links.

>> Norman Naimark: And trade links, right.

>> Tomasz Blusiewicz: Between them where they were labeled corrupt by the Soviet regime because they were outside of the centrally planned economy. But no, they were just trade links. And people brought goods that were in demand in one place and what traders have been doing for millennia.

So there was an element of corruption in the soviet institutions that were supposed to police these activities and liquidate them, but for many reasons, they always failed to liquidate them fully. And actually, as I demonstrate in my research, they grow in the 70s, 80s, and then become this explosion that I call return of Hanseatic League, by which I mean the return of, for example, the Baltic republics to this organic European trade system.

Not just trade, but also political system and so on.

>> Norman Naimark: So is there anything left of that except for, I mean, there's probably a lot left of that, except the Soviet Union's not part of it. I mean, Russia is not part of it, is that correct? I mean-

>> Tomasz Blusiewicz: So my dissertation that you mentioned, Return of the Hanseatic League, also applied to Russia to some extent.

>> Norman Naimark: Right.

>> Tomasz Blusiewicz: Because Russia in the 90s, even though.-

>> Norman Naimark: St. Petersburg was involved.

>> Tomasz Blusiewicz: Yes, St. Petersburg was there, even though it was controlled by not 100% ethically clean businessmen, it was becoming a part of the European network.

And you asked about Putin's regime. Actually, what surprised me the most is that they were willing to go so far as to destroy the links they've built with, for example, Germany in terms of trading with gas. I mean, this was a huge investment. So the direction Russia was going in the 90s and up until Putin's second term, I think up until Crimea, annexation of Crimea, wouldn't suggest that suddenly Russia would completely isolate itself from at least the Western trading community the way it did in the last year.

So Russia was there in the picture. Russia was there, they had great cooperation with Finland, they had good relations with Finland, and initially with the baltic states as well. The baltic ports were used by the Russians to trade. So it all started disintegrating, I think, in what Robert Service called the second coming of Putin after Medvedev's first term in 2012.

>> Norman Naimark: So you worked in these various archives in the baltic region, including St. Petersburg. And you also in this most recent work, where you're carrying some of this forward into the Putin period. What would you say? You're almost on the edge of journalism. So you mentioned Catherine Belton's work.

It's a wonderful book, and I quite agree with you and other people who have written about the more recent times. I mean, how do you think, as an historian, about where things cease to be history? Or do they cease to be history? Or how do you, let me give you one example from your paper today.

Which was about Sobchak and the speculation that he was actually murdered by the KGB, which I did not know, I had not heard about in, I think you said in Kaliningrad Oblast, yeah? So where do you find the lines where you feel comfortable as an historian, where you don't, where you think you may be becoming more like Kathryn Belton,

>> Norman Naimark: Who is a journalist. And what are those lines, and how do you think about that now that you're doing this more recent history?

>> Tomasz Blusiewicz: I didn't expect that question.

>> Tomasz Blusiewicz: But first of all, our knowledge about late communism. Okay, let's make a short pause here. I'll just say it again.

What we need to understand is that our knowledge about the late Soviet system is limited in terms of archival evidence, right? So that's why these lithuanian archives that I work with that are held here at Hoover are such a treasure trove, because they show you a little bit of that system and you don't have it.

We had a little bit of it in the 90s, right? Some archives were open, and of course, the Garth and other big archives are open, so we have some access to party materials, but not the KGB. So that's why and that's where a historian encounters difficulty, because then you have to rely on nonstandard methodologies such as oral history.

Well, it is a standard methodology. But the second thing I wanna say is that, no, you are right. I mean, actually, I can return the question to you is-

>> Tomasz Blusiewicz: what you would say counts as history in terms of the time it needs to pass between the events and the historian looking at it, right?

Because for me, as a person born in 87, communism is like dinosaurs. I had no personal exposure to it. And I still remember when I was a kid, maybe I was six, seven years old, and we were driving in our car with my parents in Poland, and there was like, you know, it was a long drive, three or 4 hours.

And somehow I asked them, mommy, daddy, tell me, what is this comuna? Comuna is just a pejorative way Polish people refer to communism. And they went on, on a three hour long monologue. And I remember that day, I was just like, wow, it's like outer space, such a weird system.

So that, to me, is history because, you know, there's enough of a generational gap, even though I have access to still. My grandparents are alive, so they still remember World War II, right? But I don't think we would reasonably say today that studying World War II is not history enough.

So it's always a matter of degree. But here in the case of Russia, I would say because it's becoming a closed society again, then it's like historians are like Kremlinologists in the eighties. You have to build your knowledge, or I guess your hypothesis based on very non-standard sources.

Cuz Russia is not a country like the United States, where, let's say 30 years passes and the Central Intelligence Agency has to reveal the records or 50 maybe, for very secret, top secret materials. Russia is a country where you never know what kind of sources will be available.

So you have to rely on, on non standard things. But of course, my dissertation is more historical. The paper I presented for our workshop here, well, one thing I want to do is encourage the readers to study late communism because the roots of these phenomena we see are there.

And how do I convince them that they should study this arcane world of Soviet black markets or Leningrad? Well, I tried to demonstrate that some of those figures who had their roots in that world are currently at the helm of Russia, and it's just one reason why you should study them.

But my historical intervention is not there. It's not in establishing Sobchak's murder, my historical intervention is in the 70s and 80s. So this is just a kind of a contextualization.

>> Norman Naimark: Well, thank you very much, Tomas, for your presentation today. We're really looking forward to the publication of your book, which will be an exciting moment.

And it's very nice to talk to you, Dan.

>> Tomasz Blusiewicz: It was my-.

>> Norman Naimark: And we'll do it again.

>> Tomasz Blusiewicz: Honor and my pleasure. Thank you, Professor Naimark.

>> Norman Naimark: Okay, thank you.

>> Tomasz Blusiewicz: Thank you.