March 25, 2008
Russian evolution
CAS’s Lohr sits on Clinton’s Russia team
The long, cold, dark winters of northern Wisconsin can be almost Russian in their harshness. Perhaps it is no surprise then that from a young age, Wisconsin native Eric Lohr developed a fascination with Russia.
“In seventh and eighth grade I fell in love with Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy,” the Russian history professor says. “It’s just great literature. It dealt with the big issues. That’s the thing about Russian literature, it always has a blend of the purely literary with the political and philosophical.
Since cracking the pages of those magical books he found in the library of his father, a world history teacher, Lohr has evolved into a foremost expert on Russia. So respected is his knowledge of the country and its people that in November 2007 he was asked to become one of five members of the Russian Advisory Committee for Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
“We think about how things that are happening relate to the history of how she’s approached things,” Lohr says. “The interesting part is it’s a campaign, so you’re looking for campaign points, but you’re also thinking in terms of long-run policy making and carving out and reinforcing the consistent world view that she has established.”
Lohr’s views began to take shape after his first trip to Russia, which came as a part of a class during his freshman year at the University of Wisconsin. After graduating in 1990, he started a nonprofit organization in Estonia, which he continued to run through his time as a graduate student at Harvard. Every year during the decade, he spent at least part of his summer in Russia or a nearby former Soviet state.
“The respect for culture is something that attracted me to Russia,” he says. “The ballerinas are superstars. The top opera singers are household names. [Moscow] is a real cultural capital.”
After a few years teaching at Harvard, Lohr came to AU in 2003. Washington was a great fit—he’s always had the political itch. In college Lohr volunteered for a little known state senator named Russ Feingold, and he later worked on Capitol Hill for Rep. David Obey (D-Wisc.).
“I loved D.C. and always thought it would be a dream to come to teach at a university in this environment,” he says. “The AU motto of ideas into action and action into service, I really believe in it and have always pursued it. That’s one of the things I really like about the university and the town. I find that so many people are academics, but also engaged. It’s been an academic agenda of mine to bridge the gaps between academic work and contemporary commentary on policy.”
Lohr’s involvement in the Clinton campaign came at the behest of Lee Feinstein, director of national security for the Democratic contender. The Russian Advisory Committee reports to Feinstein, who deals closely with the candidate herself.
Although Russia has not been a huge hot-button issue during the primary, Lohr believes its importance will grow during the general election run up. Earlier this month, Dmitry Medvedev was elected president of Russia. He’ll take office in May.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty about Russia going forward,” Lohr says. “We’re all kind of watching Medvedev. There’s reason to be hopeful, but we just don’t know what he’s going to do or whether he’s going to have power.”
Lohr envisions one of three scenarios playing out in the coming months. The first possibility is that outgoing president Vladimir Putin could retain control and Medvedev could leave. The opposite could happen, or, they both could remain in office with Medvedev being the weaker of the two.
“Almost everyone thinks it’s going to be one of the first two within six months,” he says. “That doesn’t matter much if Medvedev doesn’t carve out a different policy.”
The Putin years have been disastrous in many respects, Lohr says.
“I suspect in the long run history will look back on Putin quite negatively,” he says. “He deeply undermined civil society, free press. There wasn’t much democracy there in the ’90s, but he really derailed that process. That’s reversible much more quickly than people might assume. What’s probably not reversible is the path of extremely corrupt and unfair capitalism he’s pursued. There are estimates that he might have squirreled away $40 billion, making him one of the wealthiest people on the planet. He hasn’t really fully denied it. Certainly all the other ministers and people around him have amassed unconscionably huge fortunes. It’s a level of corruption that I think will probably lead to the democratic moment sometime in the future when anger spills over about this.”
Whatever the future holds for one of civilization’s great societies, Lohr will be there to study and contextualize it.
“There’s a real ethic of hospitality there,” Lohr says of his home away from home. “The people have a small number of friendships, but they are very deep and close friendships. It’s really an interesting place to study and travel.”
