Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies

Founded as the Harvard Russian Research Center in 1948, with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation to conduct research into Russian morale.

Harvard Refugee Interview Project

In the late 1940s, the Center took part in a covert US Government operation to 'encourage defections from the U.S.S.R. and to use Soviet emigres living in Germany as intelligence sources.'

in 1948, Kluckhohn was, curiously, director of the newly-organized Harvard Russian Research Center (HRRC). That summer he dispatched Parsons, then chairman of Harvard's soon-to-be famous Social Relations Department, to Germany to identify and interview Soviet emigres resident in West Germany who could provide information on the USSR. Another part of Parson's mission was to recruit the most important of these "sources" who would be brought to the United States and given jobs at Harvard or other American academic institutions. Some of the latter were accused by the Soviets as war criminals and/or Nazi collaborators. One, for example, had worked for the SS in Berlin and, following his arrival in the United States under an assumed name in 1949, was debriefed by the State Department; failing to get a job at Harvard, he went on to the University of Washington in Seattle.

Website

• daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu

People

• Clyde M. Kluckhohn
• Talcott Parsons
• Thomas Cushman