Bob Sharlet can remember exactly how he made the decision that would determine his professional life.
The year was 1956, and Sharlet had interrupted his college years with a stint in the Army. Attracted by the opportunity to see Europe, he enrolled in the school that trained young Americans in the languages of those areas that the American military was watching closely.
Sitting in a cold basement on an Army base in Massachusetts, Sharlet chose to study Czechoslovak.
The decision, he says, was “serendipity. It was almost a flip of a coin that I ended up studying Czechoslovak. I had ten minutes to choose.”
With that decision, Sharlet embarked on a career in Soviet and Eastern European studies that has taken him around the world. A nationally and internationally-known specialist, he most recently was named the Chauncey H. Winters Professor of Political Science at Union, where he has taught since 1967.
But to return to that cold basement ….
Sharlet spent a year studying Czechoslovak, and then another two years working in Europe. When he entered graduate school after returning to the United States, he had a better sense of what he wanted to do, so he took advantage of the National Defense Educational Act and earned a fellowship to study at Moscow University.
For Sharlet, that time in the Soviet Union solidified his ambitions. Indeed, once he was there, he admits he was hooked. “The Soviet Union has always been intriguing to me because it was, and still is-with Russia as its main successor-the largest country on earth, and it has a
fascinating history,” he says. “I have always felt it was important.”
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, where do his scholarly adventures take him now?
Sharlet has just returned from a two-year leave during which he acted as the senior coordinator of the Rule of Law Consortium, an organization that provides government-funded aid for the development of the newly-emerged independent states. He was the resident specialist on post-Soviet law and politics and supervised Rule of Law projects in a handful of new states from offices in Washington, Moscow, and Kyiv.
Sharlet's scholarly endeavors as well as his teaching have focused on Russia, to some extent the Ukraine, and a few of the other more progressive, independent states. Some of the states, he says, are so “backwater” in their policies and organization that there is very little information available about them. In addition, those states whose language is not Slavic makes translation difficult, and information available is minimal.
To keep up with such a rapidly changing area of the world, Sharlet relies on Russian newspapers, databases, and correspondence via e-mail. Because there are vast amounts of information available (as opposed to before glasnost), it is more a matter of sorting the information than obtaining it.
Sharlet's courses have changed
significantly since he began teaching, especially over the last ten years. In the late 1980s, when Gorbachev's reforms were taking place, he had to alter his courses almost every day. “I would have to start each class with the latest development and what implication it had for the past and what implications it might have for the future,” he explains.
Surprisingly, his teaching became easier when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, because it gave closure to the era. Now, in his courses on Soviet law and politics, Sharlet covers the emergence of the Soviet Union and Soviet system, the Gorbachev era, weathering the attempts at reform, and Russia as the Soviet Union's chief successor.
Bolstering his assertion that his career never has a dull moment, Sharlet recalls how he heard of Gorbachev's resignation and the end of the Soviet Union.
“It was Christmas Day, 1991, and I and my son, Jeff, were in Cairo visiting his sister, Jocelyn. We were out shopping, picking up a few things in a small convenience store. An old Egyptian woman in traditional garb, with head covered, was minding the cash register while engrossed in a television news bulletin. I asked of the news and the old woman told my daughter that President Gorbachev of the USSR had just resigned.
“In a flash, that had been the final stroke, the mighty Soviet Union was no more, and the Cold War had become history.”
Sharlet admits the news took him by surprise. “I was out of position, you might say. I wasn't home at the computer. I wasn't near a phone.” But it was interesting to say good-bye to the Soviet Union on a small street in Cairo, he says, a place that reminded him much of his early days in Moscow, a place he found “absolutely intriguing, fascinating, frustrating, and irritating-all together.”
Sharlet is finishing a book on Russian politics, which will be the seventh he has published. This winter he will teach a course on the politics of law in the USSR and post-Soviet Russia as well as a seminar on the politics of imperial decline. He also hopes to develop a new course focusing on the domestic fallout from the Cold War in American society and politics. In the meantime, he is watching Russia closely, expecting continued significant changes to greatly affect the young nation.
Bob Sharlet's recommended reading:
Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick. A Pulitzer Prize-winning book that tracks the end of the Soviet Union.
Developments in Russian and Post-Soviet Politics (3d ed.), edited by Stephen White et al. A collection of articles on the emerging Russian political system.
Comrade Criminal by Steven Handelman. A book by a journalist that reveals the great problem of organized crime in post-Soviet Russia.
