The following is part of a series in which CERES graduate students interview the members of the new CERES Board of Advisors.
Angela Stent is Senior Advisor to the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies and Professor Emerita of Government and Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She is also a Senior Nonresident Fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-chairs its Hewett Forum on Post-Soviet Affairs. From 2004-2006 she served as National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council. From 1999 to 2001, she served in the Office of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State. Dr. Stent received her B.A. from Cambridge University, her MSc. with distinction from the London School of Economics in Political Science and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Her primary research focus is Russian foreign policy, with special emphasis on the triangular U.S-Europe-Russia relationship. Her latest book is Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest (Twelve Books, 2019, updated paperback 2023) for which she won the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy’s prize for the best book on U.S-Russian Relations.
Tell us about the first time that you traveled to the Soviet Union and what inspired you to study this region of the world.
Angela Stent: When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge University—I was born and grew up in England—I took courses on Russian history, and that got me interested in the Soviet Union. I majored in history, but I didn’t know the Russian language at that point. Then, in between the second and third year of my 3-year degree, my college in Cambridge gave me a grant, and I took a boat from just outside London to Leningrad, as it then was, and I spent a week in the Soviet Union, and I kind of became hooked on it.
I did a Master’s degree in international relations at the London School of Economics, where I started to study Russian. I wrote my master’s thesis on Soviet policy in West Africa, and that knowledge is still useful now, when you see Russia going back to Africa. Then I applied to PhD programs. And that’s when I came over to the United States.
I went to Harvard and did a Master’s degree in Soviet studies, which was where I did the intensive Russian language [study]. Unlike the CERES program, you could go into that program without three years of Russian language. So, I studied language, history, culture and economics, and then transferred to the Government Department at Harvard and wrote my PhD.
A very important moment for me came in 1974 as a graduate student when I went on the British Student Exchange (because I was not yet an American citizen) to do research at Moscow State University. I lived in the dormitory there, but in the Lenin Library, I worked in the room where they put foreigners and distinguished professors and officials. So, we were kind of segregated from Soviet students there. However, my uncle was a molecular geneticist at Berkeley, and his textbooks had been translated into Russian, and he had colleagues in Moscow who were like my second family. I spent a lot of time with them and their friends, some of whom were dissidents.
I wrote my PhD dissertation, which then became my first book, on the politics of West German Soviet economic relations, and how the West German Government had tried to use trade incentives and things like that to encourage the Soviet Union to make concessions on the German question. After I finished the PhD, I came to Georgetown in 1979.
What are the highlights of your career that one might not get from reading your official biography, and what have been the biggest turning points in your professional career?
Angela Stent: Obviously being at Georgetown and being Director of CERES from 2001 to 2021 was very important for me. I taught generations of students and many of them have really done quite well in this field. I have former students everywhere—in embassies, NGOs and positions in the private sector—and that’s been a very important and gratifying aspect of my career at Georgetown.
I’ve written scholarly books but from quite early on in my career, I was working in the policy world. When I came to Washington, DC, I was also working with the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, which was doing a number of different studies. I participated in one on technology transfer to the Soviet Union and then one on Soviet energy in Western Europe.
From 1999 to 2001, I was in the Office of Policy Planning in the State Department for the last 18 months of the Clinton administration and the first 6 months of the George W. Bush administration. That was also a very interesting period for me because it helped my teaching to understand better how the US government functions. Then, from 2004 to 2006, I was the National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council.
I would say another very interesting time for me was in 2008, when I had a sabbatical, and I taught for two months at MGIMO, the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. I taught a course on US-Russian relations, and this was just after the Russia-Georgia war.
I had the opportunity to attend the Valdai International Club Discussion Group from 2004 ‘til 2019. It’s never been an uncontroversial forum, but I found it very useful to go there once a year. In the beginning, we traveled around different parts of the Russian Federation, which I wouldn’t have seen had I not been part of that group since my research was on Russian foreign policy, for which I didn’t need to travel to the far corners of the Russian Federation. And each year at the end, we would meet with the senior leadership—Putin was always there, and Lavrov at different times, and also defense ministers, economics ministers and Dimitry Medvedev when he was briefly president.
Initially, the Discussion Group was really only for foreign experts on Russia. We had real debates, we also had conversations with opposition figures, and we had small meetings with Putin. Later, it became much bigger. There are no opposition figures now, of course, and since 2022, there are very few Americans and Europeans there, and they’re clearly hand selected. I found it interesting not only to listen to the other participants, but also to have discussions with citizens of the Russian Federation and to get an understanding of how the leadership wanted to present its views. They didn’t necessarily mean what they said, but they revealed what they wanted us to believe and that was important in shaping some of my understanding of what was going on there.
How do you keep up with developments in our region in terms of favorite news or media sources. Are there specific authors that you like to keep up with to stay informed on the region?
Angela Stent: That’s a great question. I am on social media, and I follow a number of Russians whom I respect. Most of them are no longer in Russia, but are still keeping up with things, and they post their research. For instance, there are very different views of how much Western sanctions have affected the Russian economy and that’s the type of thing where different authors post the various papers they’ve done.
I do look at the Moscow Times every day, even though their journalists are now living in exile in the Netherlands. There are different Russian newspapers that I look at depending on the issue. I follow Julia Davis, who has a YouTube channel [Russia News Monitor] where she follows all of the Russian evening talk shows and various other things, so that I have a sense of what they’re saying. And then I follow various think tanks, both in the United States, Britain, Germany and France.
What inspired you to join the Board of Advisors at CERES?
Angela Stent: I directed CERES for a long time, and as time went on, the questions of fundraising and how you develop the program became very important. I started to assemble an advisory board, and we had a number of Americans who had done business in the Russian Federation and who were interested in supporting the academic study of Russia. One of those was Michael Calvey, who lived in Russia and in America, but was subsequently arrested and jailed by the Russians over a business dispute. He’s out now, but that incident put on hold our plans for this Advisory board.
When Professor David-Fox took over as Director of the Center, he really wanted to revive this. I became Chair of the Advisory Board because I very much want to help the center in its future development. We do need to raise more funding for student fellowships and things like that. We need to make sure that we have a program that meets the students’ needs as they study and then think about their future careers. I’m pleased that we have people on the board—ambassadors and others—who come from different backgrounds. I’m very committed to seeing the center thrive and hope we’ll be able to carry out that mission.
What do you like to do in your free time?
Angela Stent: I have for many years been in a reading group where we read novels out loud. I also like reading spy novels, which isn’t really surprising given what I’ve done in my life. I now have three grandchildren, so I enjoy spending time with them.