A Tale of Two Dissertation Topics -- Part 1

Ok, so I am going to break this post up into two parts. I have been slow in writing it for a number of reasons. First and foremost, I wanted to include personal affairs that involve other people and my mind has been reeling with considerations of their privacy and the feedback loop this blog could create into my actual personal life. I always thought that the more transparent I could be, the better for me, the better for society. And I do still think that the willingness to expose the most private and vulnerable workings of my inner life is in large what makes what I write worth reading. However, it was a completely different proposition when I was sending out emails to a bounded group of friends and colleagues most of whom I wouldn’t see for another year or two. Now not only do I know that certain people I would normally write about at length in emails they would never see, are reading the blog, but I also worry that others through word of mouth or internet searches will stumble upon it without context and find themselves talked about at length in surprising ways. After much hemming and hawing I think I have struck a fair compromise between the emboldened salacious details I would normally pack into a private email and the sterilized version of deliberate omission I would pass along to professors and parents. The second source of delay is that when I started this post I framed it in a way that was meant to conclude with a very bold and decisive statement of my dissertation topic as the big pay-off at the end. And sadly, while I am closer than ever to making that proclamation, right now, I am not there yet. Finally, this post became unwieldy fast and is already quite long so in the interests of not boring or blinding the few people who actually read this thing, here you go, part one:

It has happened. Finally. I suppose I have not actually spoken much about it in the blog, but I spend most of my waking hours either torturing myself about the fact that I do not yet have a dissertation topic or attempting to blot this fact out with a neuro-chemical cocktail of endorphins stimulated by television, chocolate, drinking and carousing with 20 year olds, which then generally leaves me feeling all the worse about myself in the morning. Only in the American system can one be in the fourth, yes I said FOURTH, year of a PhD program and still not have a dissertation topic. There are two years of classes, a year of teaching, summer fellowships, guaranteed funding, workshops, conferences, all of which seem to have acted like a washing machine on my brain, leaving me tossed, turned, bleached, discombobulated, cleansed of all the bright ideas I came in with and questioning why I set out on this whole endeavor, so late in life relative to the nubile 24 year olds who came straight in from undergrad or took a year or two off to work at and buy into the rhetoric of a DC think tank or international NGO, in the first place. Not that I am the only one in this position in my program— having taken the leap into the abyss with no plan and no institutional infrastructure after college, having gotten my bearings, worked at multiple real jobs around the world and in the process built up ideas of how I think the “world” (loosely defined) works and where it’s flawed. But the lot of us who came in late don’t seem to be fairing particularly well and all seem to have a similar “lost dog” quality about us as we bumble off into the field trying to make the academic jargon and flawed methods we’ve acquired in the PhD program match up with what we once knew about the way the world works in practice and what we want to spend the next two years researching and writing, potentially building a career on.

And you can feel free to skim or skip down to where I actually start to tell the story of the last few weeks and the stumbling onto not just one but TWO viable dissertation topics to which I am finally willing to make a commitment, both of which are motivated by and deeply entangled with schoolgirl crushes I’ve developed on not just one but TWO inappropriate guys. For those of you with any interest or investment in what I think I’m doing in Kazan and more generally with my life, here is the quick and dirty version of how I think I got myself here via autobiography, much of which may be irritatingly repetitive or self-aggrandizing in which case I again exhort you to skip or skim. So in my last year of undergrad, having spent four years reading novels, writing bad poetry and hanging out with would-be artists, I start scrambling for something to do with myself after graduation. A friend recommends I apply for a fellowship he took that sent him to Estonia, which sounds strange enough to capture my attention. So with no prior knowledge of politics or post-Soviet affairs, I take this random fellowship to work at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tallinn, Estonia, under Toomas Ilves who grew up in New Jersey, went to Columbia, used to listen to Nirvana in his office and has since become the president of this former-Soviet US ally. The fellowship consists of a rag-tag group of Columbia students funded by a German Columbia alumnus in New York who has realized that by starting his own fellowship he can have a network of loyal young informants working out of government offices in countries where he has investments. I bullshit my way through the fellowship part of the summer by writing a report on how Estonia could better structure its process of European integration, again with absolutely no prior knowledge of Estonia or EU integration. Meanwhile, the rest of my brain and body is jolted awake in an entirely new way by the absurdity of the post-Soviet world and by the shocking inequality of power I watch playing out economically and socially between Americans working abroad in Tallinn and the local people interacting with them. I’m both repulsed and titillated by the soap-opera-cum-carnival-esque drama of expats living it up on the post-Soviet playground and upon return home to the States decide I want to go back for more. So I get sent to Georgia on the same fellowship in 1999 and begin working as a speechwriter in the Chairman’s office of the Parliament for Zurab Zhvania who later mysteriously dies of asphyxiation via the same kind of kerosene heater I used to use while living in Tbilisi, and alongside Misha Saakashvili who also studied at Columbia and later becomes the President of another strategic post-Soviet US ally in a highly emotional election following a bloodless coup. I am living politics but I don’t know it or have any real interest in or understanding of them at the time. Instead I am still busy marveling at the disconnect between the parallel societies of Georgians living without electricity in an urban wasteland where guns are regularly fired at random in the streets and meanwhile, in a parallel reality, ex-pats get chauffeured to and from their big houses with generators on the side of the hill to their air-conditioned offices all the time thinking they live in the same city as and have an idea of what life is like for the rest of the population. We’ve been through the whole part where I date the Georgian rock star and unwilling to exercise my hegemonic American economic and social power to leave him behind, I attempt to use it “for good” by bringing him home with me. One day a year and a half later I wake up in a studio apartment in Beverly Hills married to an immigrant husband who calls me fat, stupid and knocks me around in an attempt to control my every movement and ensure my love for him. With us in the apartment are two cats, a pit-bull with an aggression problem (the source of which is over-determined by her genetics and the brutal puppy training to which she has been subjected by the Georgian), and his cousin living in our closet, which is to say that I have actually managed to export the absurdity of the post-Soviet experience with me to Los Angeles by carrying a single individual with me. I do however at some point (ok, trite but after 9/11) realize that I am free to return to my regularly scheduled Ivy League existence and flee to New York in a two-door Toyota filled with all of my worldly belongings including the above-mentioned pets, picking up my father at the Las Vegas airport along the way, which is comforting but slightly problematic as the pit-bull who is strapped into the back seat with her yuppy dog seat-belt attempts to take his arm off every time he exits and re-enters the vehicle. I return to the macro level political arena as a speechwriter for the South Korean delegation at the UN just as the North Korean nuclear issue resurfaces and the US decides to invade Iraq, events which require a lot of blustering commentary from the South Koreans as penned by me, a 25 year old American girl who majored in medieval English literature. I still see myself as a writer, not someone political or involved in politics, but merely a mercenary making my living off of them. Then one day I write an innocuous speech on the “Transitional Economies of Eastern Europe” for the General Assembly but something funny happens. As I’m reading the repetitive jargon-laden UN report I realize that it has little bearing on anything I lived through in Estonia or Georgia. Since the Koreans don’t care or know anything about Eastern Europe, I take some liberties with the speech. That afternoon, Counsellor Shin Boo Nam comes into my office slightly puzzled and tells me that four of the former Soviet delegates came over to him to ask for copies of my speech after the session, something completely unheard of in UN etiquette. I realize at this point that I am onto something, that inserting “truth” or a version thereof, inserting words informed by real life experience rather than secondhand reports, into the simulacrum of bureaucratic UN politics doesn’t result in its going unheard with the rest of the rhetoric but actually wakes people up from their stupor and connects as signal rather than noise in the ears of those who recognize it on the other end. My second epiphany occurs in my second year of speechwriting when it becomes clear that I am only regurgitating the same speeches from the previous year because the only thing that has changed in the new UN reports is the latest short-list of buzzwords. I realize that my work is more mathematical than literary or political. There is a formula for everything that gets produced. I realize that I am participating in a strange simulacrum in which we pretend we are in control of and acting to remedy the problems of actual people living in disadvantaged conditions in the world when none of what we do has any affect on them and reciprocally none of what goes on in their world below the radar of the UN bureaucrats and international journalists skimming its surface affects the work that goes on in our parallel elite society. I at this point become interested in politics, namely because I think so much of it is bullshit. I apply and matriculate to SAIS, get roped into Conflict Management as a concentration by a charismatic professor who walks into school wearing a green suit on the first day of orientation and proclaims that international law does not really exist. That summer I do a research project for the OSCE in the North of Kosovo and date a guy on the Serbian side of the divided city of Mitrovica while living in the Albanian South, which entails walking over a bridge full of tanks and evasion of OSCE security protocol to stay in his small apartment that like all the others around it does not have running water and in return I am exposed not only to high levels of lead contamination but also to all of the shit that people on that side of the bridge are subjected to by their own leadership who are not only working against the interests of their own people, who just want jobs and schools and water and electricity, but stirring up problems with the equally malignant Albanian leadership on the other side of the bridge, all of which is presided over and facilitated by the hapless UN Mission of people who are living up on the hill in the capital, Pristina, with their generators, untouched by but still complaining about the backwardness of the disputed territory and escaping to Greece in their Landcruisers on the weekends. I interview people on all sides of the conflict to conclude that the UN’s policy is doing more to pit the Albanians against the Serbs and enflame the conflict between them than making any sort of positive change on the ground, while if you were to read the reports manufactured by the UN and OSCE you would instead observe the steady march of progress and a whole new multi-ethnic country unfolding in the simulacrum. I get into the election monitoring business which involves even more holding of my tongue as the events I observe unfolding as violence and coercion all around me on the ground get written out of the official tale of progress and improvement that the academics will later draw from for their datasets. I watch this spinning of what we want to be happening into a web of bureaucratic documents that do not match the reality of what is actually happening on the ground. I go to work for the OSCE in a role that rather than commenting on participates in and legitimates this parallel fantasy world of international politics, during which time I date a lovely, smart British diplomat and temporarily live the good life on the hill with him and his generator hopping into the LandRover for trips down to Greece on the weekends, and immediately upon realizing what I’m doing apply for a PhD to get myself out of the system. I can’t be a part of it. I need to write about it. And yet, I get to grad school, which had I gone the British route would have entailed my sitting down to read relevant articles and write up my experience to date, but instead back in America for the first extended time in a long time I am thrown immediately into “math camp” where I am grappling with linear algebra and multivariate calculus on the most preposterous leap of faith that *this* is somehow going to make me more effective in either explaining or righting the wrongs I’ve had the weird perspective to observe in the world over the last ten years. I try my luck in other departments—fall in with the right-wing bigwigs in the history department who self-consciously teach the reproduction of Anglo-American hegemony to Yale undergrads, with the narrow neuroscientists who have no desire to look up from their petri dishes to help me trace the path I want to illustrate from stress-induced neuronal damage in the amygdala to cultures of fear and ethnic hatred that perpetuate bad leadership in the world’s hot spots, and finally I do find some sympathy with the social psychologists working on automatic processes that we aren’t aware of but that wind up dictating a multitude of our behaviors, but it’s too late. I have already applied for and won grants to go work in Russia and Georgia and Tajikistan for the year and I’m off to the field before I can synthesize and make sense of anything that’s happened to me.

The first of the two schoolgirl crushes currently dictating conflicting paths for my dissertation research set in in the chaos of the Moscow smog in August. Embarrassingly enough, my eye started to alight on a friend’s ex-boyfriend whom I had adamantly advised her to break up with years ago because he didn’t like dogs. It seemed harmless enough until last weekend drunk at a friend’s birthday party in Moscow and sitting on a ladder adjacent to the kitchen where a small Indian man in a doctor’s mask had spent the night frying piles of paneer for the party and left behind a redolent smog of cooking grease that must have psychologically triggered the suffocating emotion of August, he informed me that my friend, his ex, had in fact sanctioned our union over gchat with something to the effect of “Dude, she’s completely crazy, smart, funny and loves living in post-Soviet shitholes, why are you not sleeping with her already?” I am not allowed to discuss the events that ensued in further detail due to a code of silence I may have already violated. But I will say more generally about the weekend that after two years of self-imposed celibacy, it was refreshing to return to the international trampoline of my pre-PhD lifestyle full of brilliant colorful characters living and drinking and dancing to extremes, having informed conversations about crazy politics, people doing things, making the world spin, not just watching and ruminating, my age and older, probably pedigreed in some way but not gauche enough to let on how, like this guy I chatted with at length about the pagan rituals of the Mari people who someone later mentioned offhandly is in line for the Russian throne via Catherine the Great, wine flowing, vodka shots, champagne, a return to “real” life, ex-pat style, which no matter how much I claim to disdain, I love being a part of. The next night we all reconvened at a VIP concert by an edgy strung-out lesbian Bashkir singer at a new high modern architecture school where again all the people were beautiful, if not physically, sartorially, aesthetically, more drinks, the world spinning in a good way. The next night, my last, meant to be a low key dinner at a restaurant frequented by the opposition, billed as bohemian, we started with kir royales and they didn't stop, perfectly cooked steak and spinach, more people I'd wanted to reunite with from the smog-bonding while in Moscow, and suddenly it's 6am and I need to run back to Miriam's and pack to catch the cab to my 10:00am flight back to Kazan. It was not just ideal as a bounded weekend adventure but jolting as a return to a self I thought I’d lost in all my grumbling and ruminating and disdain for the elite ex-pat world I love as deeply as I fear being a part of.

Back in the periphery, I was seriously questioning what I was doing in Kazan as I crept along on my busted tram, the smell of human excrement still lingering in my nose because someone had literally taken a shit in the "lobby" of my apartment building days earlier and no one had bothered to clean it up. Somewhere between the over-indulgence in kir royals and getting on the plane to Kazan, I had internalized the incensed encouragement of a mutual friend to “go for it” with the Moscow crush, because she assured me, he was very interested in me, and parlayed this advice into very embarrassingly initiating a drunken late-night “relationship” conversation with him. He had made it clear that while he found me fun and attractive, he didn’t want to pursue anything further because he did not want to get involved in another long distance relationship. And while, clearly, this is only a sympathetic and polite version of the “I’m just not that into you” blow-off, it hit all of the right buttons to make me crazy about the fact that I’d chosen to come to Kazan. Why was I here on the periphery in a region no one even knows let alone cares about and not in the capital? Why was I not studying elite politics that mattered? Why was I subjecting myself to all of the difficulties of living in the middle of nowhere when the payoff wasn’t even clear? My mind immediately snapped back to the bigger picture, to international relations, to Russian foreign policy, to projects that would require my carrying out research in Moscow. I wanted out of the wasteland and back to civilization and relevance as soon as possible.

The only bright spot in Kazan was my second and in this case quite literal schoolgirl crush on my Russian grammar teacher. From the outset I connected with Lev and it really pains me to change his name because in real life it’s so dramatic—the first part rare and old Slavic and the last translating loosely to “divinity.” He’s my age, 35, and built like a Serb, 6’4 and broad through the shoulders, with big amber eyes, short cropped dark hair and that feeling of post-Soviet brokenness about him that I find again and again in people, particularly men, my age from the former USSR and Yugoslavia. I don’t know how to describe it exactly but it reminds me of my cat Joe, also a product of the former-USSR, who as a kitten was loud and demanding of attention and saw himself as the center of the world until we brought home another cat, and until that point I don’t think he had realized that he was a cat and wouldn’t grow up to be like me or Dato, and upon seeing this other cat and understanding his place in the world, he became very silent and not sullen but sad in Zen way, like he had accepted his lot in life but still remembered a time when he had imagined so much more for himself.

Lev was assigned to test my conversation skills and we wound up talking for over an hour about world politics, my Russian never sounding so good as I went back and forth with this sharp and well informed instigator, whose realpolitik perspective snapped me back to the way the Russians see the world, without any of the cotton candy gauze of an “international” community or saccharin sweet rhetoric of freedom and human rights for all, gumming up and obfuscating the “real” picture of governments vying for world power. We have our one-on-one tutorial together in this weird ecology building off campus filled with plants and soil samples, fish, toads, snakes and mushrooms living and growing in various aquaria. And even before I had admitted the crush to myself I remember having the feeling that the lady at the front desk who handed us our key read Lev’s teaching credentials with deep skepticism and threw me a disapproving look as if we were going upstairs to use our ecologically musky classroom for illicit purposes beyond participles.

Just back from Moscow, everything about Kazan seemed small and sad, except for Lev, who was wearing a white tee shirt just tight enough that his arm muscles casually bulged through the sleeves. He asked how my trip to Moscow had been and when I told him about hanging out with my friends, the international journalists, he tilted his head and squinted at me skeptically in this way that he does, which coming from anyone else would seem utterly condescending, but which I’ve learned to associate with my further edification about life in Russia, and asked me, “So what do you think about the reporting by the foreign correspondents in Moscow?” I looked at him blankly, knowing there was a catch I wasn’t getting, “I don’t know. It’s pretty good, no?” “Do you think they are very complete in their reports about Russia? Do you think they understand Russian politics or society?” “Well, yes, I think they do. Most of them speak Russian fluently and have been studying Russian politics and living in Russia for many years.” He did not look impressed, “Have they been living in Russia or have they been living in Moscow?” I laughed and he launched into a diatribe about the rest of the world only getting reports of the politics in Moscow and then assuming that those politics sum up the reality of the country, that Moscow is in full control, that Russia is a completely centralized state, and the rest of the people living throughout its vast landmass are just peasants or pastoralists, sheep of some sort that tow the center’s line. He claimed that Moscow feeds stories about their full control to international and domestic journalists alike who in turn report on and reinforce Moscow’s control as social reality in Russia and the rest of the world.

And right, that’s why I was here on the periphery. In Moscow I’d been sucked back into the elite perspective, into “seeing like a state” if you will. The periphery became just a backwater again, important only when something explodes onto the radar of the media or into the laps of Moscow politicians. But isn’t the project of academics, as the people with the time and resources and outsider’s perspective, to try to figure out how those explosive events develop, what conditions contribute to them, how and when everyday life becomes political to the point that it makes the news? And if we pay more attention to the stories of local politics before they hit the news, if they make their way from the vast darkness of the periphery to the elite discourse of international journalism and UN rhetoric, does that actually shift the politics themselves, creating new centers and capitals? Sadly, I am without answers. So I will leave you hanging here with the problem of the dueling worlds unresolved—with a deep desire to be a part of the elite action in Moscow and a commitment to understanding how regular people live in the republics of the Trans-Volga as deeply motivated by divergent crushes and will potentially update you with a dissertation topic that takes both into account at some point next week.


p.s. feedback and possible dissertation topics/research questions very welcomed at lesliehough@gmail.com