Twenty-five Dickinson students and staff members gathered in Bosler Hall on Thursday, Oct. 1 to hear Dr. J. Sherwood McGinnis, professor at the Army War College and U.S. senior foreign service officer, deliver the lecture, “From Brezhnev to Putin – How We Got Here and Implications for U.S. – Russia Relations.”

The event was sponsored by the Russian Department. Alyssa DeBlasio, associate professor of Russian, said that the department hosts these events to inform people on Russian culture and Russian points of view.

“It is always likely that there will be something relevant to Russia in the news” DeBlasio said. The crowd was a mix of students and faculty from the Russian Department and International Studies Department, as well as those interested in current events.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, Soviet leaders tried to reform the communist system, McGinnis argued.

“I look at this point from Stalin’s death as one where people are trying to reform the system,” McGinnis said. “They know it’s not functioning as well as it should.”

He then discussed each Soviet leader who succeeded Stalin and analyzed their influence on Russia’s political system.

Khrushchev “wanted to demonstrate the superiority of communism while reforming the system… he attacked the ‘cult of the individual’…. Brezhnev pushes for stabilization of Soviet society… cracking down on writers and emphasizing socialism…. Gorbachev wanted to instill economic reform by opening up the system, and the system of information,” McGinnis explained.

After the Soviet Union fell, Yeltsin took power and Dr. McGinnis claimed that “his message was ‘life is going to be better now that communism is gone’…. His words reflected what the people were feeling, this loss of faith in the soviet system.”

McGinnis then analyzed the transition from Yeltsin to Putin, saying that “Putinism itself is based on nationalism…. There is an anti-western bias to that…. It’s crucial for Putin that Russia be taken seriously; Russia wants to be seen as a player.”

As to the cause of the current situation in Crimea, Dr. McGinnis stated that Russia invaded the Ukraine because “there is this feeling [in Russia] that the West has been ganging up on Russia and Russia is looking to extend its borders, looking to provide that buffer for safety and security.”

In spite of current conflicts with Russia in Syria and other states, McGinnis ended on an optimistic note.

“I do think we can develop a dialogue with Russia that meets the concerns of Russia, as well as the concerns of Russia’s neighbors, because right now there is no love there.”

McGinnis will be teaching a course entitled Politics of Oil, Arms, Peace & War: U.S./Russia/Middle East Relations in the 20th and 21st Centuries in the spring. The class will be cross-listed between the Russian, Political Science, International Studies and Middle Eastern Studies Departments.