From left to right, Dr. Svetlana Savranskaya and Dr. Thomas Blanton of the National Security Archive with Dr. Anna Vassilieva and Dr. Avner Cohen of the Middlebury Institute.
Two issues that are constantly being debated on the Middlebury Institute campus are how we shape our understanding of history, and what part citizens can play as participants in popular debate about important policy decisions. This week those discussions gained from the valuable insight of two of the greatest collectors of critical documents and oral history accounts in modern times, Dr. Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, and Dr. Svetlana Savranskaya, director of Russian Programs.
Dr. Blanton gave a seminar lecture on March 31st titled “Secrecy and National Security: Are We Safer in the Dark?” where he argued that more openness and debate would lead to fewer mistakes and thus keep us safer. Later that same day, he gave a guest lecture in Dr. Avner Cohen’s Global Politics class, during which he shared the story of their long friendship from the time when Dr. Cohen sought to open the national security archives of his native Israel for his seminal book Israel and the Bomb.
Dr. Blanton is a longtime proponent for increased transparency in the United States, from successfully challenging the classification of emails from the Reagan White House as “message slips” and thus not official records, to constantly pushing the envelope as a tireless advocate for declassification and openness. The National Security Archive files close to 2000 Freedom of Information Act requests every year. The documents they receive are accessible to scholars and the general public and provide all of us with a deeper understanding of how decisions are made and history shaped.
“Thomas and Svetlana are creating the foundation of modern U.S. history,” says Professor Anna Vassilieva, director of the Middlebury Institute’s Graduate Initiative in Russian Studies (GIRS). The visit by these world-renowned experts is a part of the GIRS mission to expose students to research and analysis generated by contemporary Russian and Eurasian scholars and practitioners.
Dr. Savranskaya runs the Russian Program at the National Security Archive and she gave three lectures over three days, all in Russian, on the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet War in Afghanistan, and Arms Control and the End of the Cold War. She filled every classroom she spoke in. Apart from MIIS students, her talks drew a large number of students from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency who are in Monterey to study intensive Russian at the Defense Language Institute, just up the road. “It is amazing to see 50-60 students engage with a high-level speaker and ask questions in such advanced Russian,” says Professor Vassilieva. “Only at MIIS!”