An Interview with Elizabeth Brainerd, Professor of Economics at Brandeis University

Elizabeth Brainerd’s office is located directly off the busiest hallway in the International Business School at Brandeis University. Although a buzz of student voices leaks around the corners of the closed door, Brainerd’s quiet, serene voice easily dominates the space as she describes her research and voices her concerns about the future of Russian-American relations. Russia experts are rare in academia, and becoming even rarer as Russian studies shrinks in favor of scholarship about China and the Middle East. Economists who focus on Russia are even more scarce. The prestigious Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian studies at Harvard University (of which Brainerd is a member) lists only about 10% of the participating faculty as economists.

As the only Russian Area Studies major in my class at college, I was particularly interested in Brainerd’s decision to pursue this niche topic within economics. Although she had no familial connection to Russia, Brainerd explained that as a child, she was fascinated by what life might be like on the other side of a curtain, which in her imagination was actually constructed of iron and divided West and East. She signed up for introductory Russian during her first semester at Bowdoin College and went on to pursue a double major in Russian and Economics. After graduation, she lived in Moscow before returning to the United States to pursue her Ph.D. Several years later, in 1992, the Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, who was advising President Boris Yeltsin about post-communist economic reforms, gave Brainerd the opportunity to travel back to Russia; there she collected Russian data that became the basis for her dissertation.

Brainerd’s work today spans a vast range of topics, but many of her projects revolve around women in Russia. Brainerd believes that conditions for women have improved in Russia lately, but also notes that despite the Soviet Union’s effort to improve women’s education, gender discrimination in Russia is still much more prevalent than it is in the United States. She cites the low numbers of women in high-ranking roles in business and government, as well as the large percentage of women who still stay home to cook and clean. Her channels of investigation into women’s lives in Russia range from divorce rates in pre-revolutionary Russia to unbalanced sex ratios resulting from sex-selective abortion in the Caucasus. Even when she discusses some of the most surprising results from her research, her tone is that of someone who is accustomed to being surprised. She speaks about Russia as endlessly fascinating, “There’s always something that’s unusual and that doesn’t seem to fit anywhere else.”

Brainerd speaks matter-of-factly about her pessimism regarding America’s relationship with Russia. She laughs quietly as she mentions that her husband’s prediction of President Vladimir Putin’s assassination has failed to come true for the last ten years. Brainerd comments on the apparent lack of Russian dissatisfaction with the current system of governance, but does not attempt to explain it. She is an economist, and this is not her area of expertise, but even sociologists and political theorists sometimes struggle to understand the ideology of the Russian people. Brainerd, like all the best Russia experts, seems to have accepted that even when one thinks one knows Russia well, some things will always remain mysterious and unexplained.

Clio Flikkema: I understand that you double-majored in economics and Russian. I was hoping you could start by telling me a little bit about what lead you to two such different fields of study as an undergraduate.

Elizabeth Brainerd: When I got to college I was taking lots of intro courses. I took intro to economics because it fit into my schedule, and it turned out it had a really great teacher, Peter Gottschalk, who is now at Boston College. It was inspiring and I found the economic way of thinking appealing. It was also challenging, it was harder for me than what I thought I would major in, which was politics or history, which came to me more easily. I actually liked the challenge of economics, so that was not that difficult a decision. Russian…I’d always been interested in Russia, I don’t know why, I don’t have family from Russia. I think it was because when I was a little kid, I thought that the iron curtain was real. I thought there was really a true, literal iron curtain that divided east and west, and I thought it was really fascinating what it might be like to live on the other side of the iron curtain. In college, I needed a fourth class, and very much randomly, I took russian and had a really great teacher. I ended up majoring in Russian, and then I went to live in Russia after I graduated. I worked there, this was 1986 when it was still the Soviet Union, as tutor for a deaf American boy. I was actually living in a Russian apartment in Moscow, it was pretty unusual.

CF: Has learning the Russian language influenced your decisions about your area of research?

EB: Oh, absolutely. Knowing Russian has been critical to what I have done.  When I went to get my Ph.D. in economics, I actually didn’t intend to study Russia, but I started my Ph.D. in 1991, and then in 1992 Jeff Sachs went to Russia, famously, to advise the government. The way he operated at the time was to take a bunch of graduate students with him to be on the ground and be his eyes and ears. He convinced me to take a year off from my Ph.D. program and work for him in Moscow, and the only reason he did that was because I spoke Russian, and my Russian at the time was pretty good from having lived there. When I was in Moscow, I was able to get some household survey data that was all in Russian, that no one else could get, since I was physically there and making contacts. That became the natural thing for me to write my dissertation on. One of the things they teach you in Econ 101 is comparative advantage, and I realized that I definitely had comparative advantage in studying Russia. Plus this is what I understood and what I was motivated to learn more about from my experience living there, so learning Russian was just critical. Even now I use it whenever I do research because a lot of the data I use is written in Russian. Now it’s easier, they print a lot of their yearbooks in English and Russian , but some of the archival work I do is all in Russian. Some of it I just couldn’t do without having learned Russian, you can’t get google translate into the Soviet Archives.

CF: How is the availability of data coming out of Russian about the economy today?

EB: It’s much better than it used to be. Is it reliable? I think it’s reasonably reliable. It’s frustrating for me as a microeconomist, there’s not much in the way of household surveys. Most developed and developing countries make the micro data from their censuses available, and Russia still doesn’t.

CF: You’ve done a lot of research about women in Russia and the Soviet Union, especially in terms of labor market outcomes. How do you think the issues women face today differ in the United States and Russia?

EB: I think there’s a lot more gender discrimination in Russia than here in the US, even though Russian women tend to be highly educated and skilled, they’re still discriminated against. There are more pervasive gender roles, it’s been more difficult for the gender roles to evolve. Not that they’re completely evolved in the US. Women in Russia still take on a much larger share of housework and childcare and so on than men do, it’s very unequal. Women are discriminated against in that, but I think in the workplace too. You don’t see women reaching really high levels in business, or even in the government. There’s still much more gender segregation in occupations in Russia than here.

CF: Аs a scholar of Russia, what do you think are the most common misconceptions that we as Americans have about Russia?

EB: I think people perceive Russia as being more monolithic that it is. I think it’s more heterogeneous than people appreciate. Even I sometimes fall into the trap of thinking Moscow is representative of the rest of the country. Especially going there, you tend to think that the standard of living is pretty high and that people are doing reasonably well, but it’s not the case in the rest of the country. But people tend to think of Moscow being the same as Russia, when it’s not.

CF: Where do you see Russian-American relations going in the future?

EB: It’s hard to be anything but really pessimistic about it, as long as Putin is still in power., and there’s so much corruption, and such a lack of democracy and basic human rights. It’s hard to imagine that US-Russian relations are going to get much better without a change in the top leadership. My husband has this theory that someone’s going to just assassinate Putin, and he’s been saying that for a decade and it hasn’t happened. Even if it did happen, it’s not clear that democracy is going to be the norm, or basic human rights for that matter. I’m pretty pessimistic, especially because Russian people, although this is a stereotype to some extent, don’t seem to be willing to affect change at the political level. They seem willing to accept what they’re given. It’s a lot better than it used to be in many ways, but they seem to be reasonably satisfied with the lack of a basic democratically functioning system.

CF: Do you have a theory about why scholarship about Russia is so much less common than other areas of cultural study?

EB: It used to be much more popular during the cold war because Russia was our main antagonist and everything seemed to revolve around nuclear treaties, NATO and so on. Now our attention has really turned towards China as an economic partner, and to the problems in the Middle East. I think it’s just faded as something that’s in the headlines all the time, and also Chinese just seems so useful, whereas perhaps Russian doesn’t seem so useful anymore.

CF: What do you think about language requirements at universities? Are they helpful in rounding out a student’s education?

EB: I support them, yes. I think students need to learn not just the language, but another culture. Learning the language really opens your eyes in way that reading the literature in translation doesn’t quite convey, and it also motivates you to actually go to that country. I think it adds another important dimension to a student’s liberal arts education. I think it does something in your brain too, I’m not sure what, but it seems like it helps you think in a different way to learn a new language.

CF: Through your research on Russia, has there been anything you discovered that you found really surprising?

EB: One thing I’ve studied is unbalanced sex ratios, and the original motivation for that was how the loss of men in World War II affected Russian women. As a part of that research, I’ve read a lot about other countries that have unbalanced sex ratios like China. I was looking at the former Soviet Union, and although I didn’t discover this myself, I started doing research on this incredible increase in sex ratios at birth in the Caucasus, in Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia. They are using sex-selective abortion to abort girl fetuses, and it’s as extreme as in China and India. To me that was just shocking, because I thought I knew this place reasonably well, and there was never any outward evidence of son preference. Especially since, although the Soviets did many negative things, one of the positive things they did was require equal education for boys and girls. They did do a lot to promote gender equality, not always successfully. Given that women are relatively highly educated, relatively engaged in the workforce and able to earn an independent living, it was shocking to me to see this happening in these countries. This happened right after the break-up of the Soviet Union, and my first line of research into that question was whether this was something that pre-dated the Soviet Union, something ancient that goes back a long time, or was it something about the collapse of socialism and the transition to capitalism that made boys more valuable. It’s hard to answer that question, but the research I’ve done suggests that it goes way back. This region is always fascinating. That’s one reason I keep doing research on it, there’s always something that’s unusual and that doesn’t seem to fit anywhere else.