Retrospective on Russia Studies with Dmitry Gorenburg
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This is CNA Talks, the flagship podcast of CNA, a Washington, D.C.-based research and analysis organization. Every year, the CNA Board of Trustees presents the Trustees Award to a CNA employee who embodies the values of CNA and whose contribution advanced CNA's mission, the safety and security of the nation. I sat down with this year's winner, Dimitri Gorenberg, to discuss the awards.

his over 20-year career at CNA, and how the field of Russia Studies has changed during that time. Welcome to CNA Talks. I'm John Stimson. I'm delighted to welcome Dmitry Gorenberg to the show. Dmitry is a senior research scientist in CNA's Russia Studies program, and he was recently honored with the CNA Trustees Award. So I wanted to take the opportunity to have him on the show and talk about his distinguished career. Dmitry, thanks so much for coming on and congratulations on your award.

Thank you very much. Thanks for having me on. Absolutely. Just to start off, can you just tell us about how you felt when you won the award? I'm sure it was a really validating experience about your career. As you probably know, I've worked kind of off-site for more than 20 years now up in Boston. So I've always sort of felt a little bit removed from CNA Central, as it were. It was pretty gratifying to know that

Even though I'm not around, you know, everyone every day, I'm still like my work still being noticed. I mean, beyond just the obvious sort of feeling that, you know, work on Russia and the kinds of work I've been doing on political and military threats coming from Russia is being recognized.

Speaking of somebody who is in HQ, your work is very much noticed, even though you are off-site. I think my department engages with what you're doing all the time. So that, it wasn't a surprise to me, but that's good to know that it made you, helped you feel connected when you are an off-site employee. So you've been with CNA since the year 2000. Can you tell us, can you tell me about what Washa Studies looked like at the time?

When I arrived, there was an ongoing program that my first boss, Hank Gaffney, was running through the Navy as a kind of a partnership program with the Russian Navy. So it was a very different time. And there were efforts to...

kind of build relationships between Russia and the United States and, you know, sort of hopes of partnerships and so forth. So we were, you know, the early years, we were doing things like bringing U.S. admirals over to Moscow to Russian naval bases to meet with their officers to tour some of the facilities and vice versa, bringing some of their folks over

over to the US to various facilities. So it was a very much a kind of a what can we build together kind of model. Now, it was a lot

smaller than what we have now. It was basically, I was the only Russia specialist on the staff for most of that time. And that really lasted in that way for until after the annexation of Crimea. So the first, let's say close to 15 years, I was really the only Russia person. And then once we got to, especially after 9/11,

I think the Navy and the US military kind of moved on from Russia and wasn't paying that much attention. So, I mean, it was Middle East was the biggest area of concern. And so there was not very much Russia work at all. That partnership program ended probably around 2004. And so from 2004 till, you know, for about 10 years or so, there was occasional Russia work, you know, people were still

on and off interested in what the Russian Navy was doing, what some of its foreign policy interests were, but it was not a, it was hard to call it a program. It was more like occasional studies on Russia.

Yeah, that's pretty difficult for me to imagine now, honestly, because I've been here for about seven years. And in the entire time I've been here, your program has been one of like the most prominent in the media and the communications department. We interact with you all the time. So that's the significance of that shift is is very interesting. I mean, it has been a long time. Yeah.

Um, but just to hear that, like, it was so small and such a, and like the, the fundamental difference in the relationship at the time and how much things have changed. It's pretty interesting to hear about how that's, how much things have shifted in the last, like in the last 20 years. I can tell two stories that might be interesting about that shift. Uh, one was, uh,

when uh you know russia first you know the annexation of crimea in that 2014 intervention i remember talking to folks at the russia desk at osd policy they were working on the annual partnership plan with russia one week and then you know they took those hats off and put on okay now they're an adversary how are we going to deal with that like in the next week so there was this like 100

180 degree turn on how to deal with Russia and what one should do with Russia as the Defense Department. And then, as a consequence of that, I remember going over to

I think it was Opnav N35 to talk to an admiral there with, and I went, I think I went with Eric Thompson, who was my VP at the time. And we thought the admiral was kind of interested in, you know, what was going on now with Russia. And it was just kind of an information session as it were. And

So we did that. And then towards the end of the meeting, he was like, so, OK, it's coming towards the end of the fiscal year. I have one hundred thousand dollars I can give you right now. And then I'll give you more in the fall, you know, in the fall or whatever it was. And I was like, oh, this is a different environment. We're going to have to pivot to a more resource rich environment, let's say.

Right. Well, especially if you were used to like disinterest and, you know, like a focus elsewhere. And then all of a sudden there's this big shift towards, oh, here's $100,000 and there'll be more. That's that. I mean, it's got to be a big mindset shift in that moment. Right. Right. There was a mindset shift. There was a real...

realization that I needed help. And that's where we started building, we started hiring people, you know, not immediately because, you know, you have to make sure that this is going to be sustained, obviously. But that was that was sort of the initial impetus was once a few months had passed and it seemed clear that this work was going to continue to flow. That's that's what it kind of started really building a program rather than just one guy.

Right. And let's get into that a little more. Like the Russian Studies program at CNA has kind of paralleled interest in Russia and its role as an adversary. So tell me a little bit about that development of the team and what that experience was like, because that must have been a little bit of a shift in what you were used to doing, maybe moving into a little bit more of a development role in addition to just in addition to a research role.

Yeah, well, there was always a development role because previously it was kind of a lot of hustling, as it were, right? Where you're like, okay, is there anybody who's interested in funding Russia? I need to cover myself somehow, right? So there was that kind of development earlier. This was more development in terms of building sustained relationships, right? Previously, it was like, okay, it's

Somebody, we found a command that's interested in Russia. We did a study for them. Now they've satisfied that itch and they might come back in five years or something, or maybe they won't, right? Now they're like, we're going to be focused on Russia and we're going to need sustained help. So let's build some relationships with Russia.

research organizations. And then it's a question of CNA and therefore us as the SMEs on this, being there as the people that they can trust. So you do an initial study, you provide some good products. They say, oh, okay, this is good. We trust you guys. Let's do more. And so that's kind of how we've

build out some of our core relationships with organizations like UConn's Russia Strategic Initiative, with various Navy partners, folks in the intelligence communities, and so on. But it was a gradual process. My first move was I needed immediate help on a particular study. So I said, and I knew there was this guy who

who was looking for, uh, for some part-time work and his name was Mike Kaufman. And so I got in touch with him and I said, Hey, you want to come in as part-time on call and help me with the study. And so that's what he did. And, you know, and the story went on from there and he, you know, we brought him in full time pretty quickly thereafter. And, and then he and I kind of, uh, worked together to develop the program, uh,

from that point on. And that was around, it was probably 2015 or so, 2016. That's actually fascinating to hear Mike Kaufman's origin story, as it were, because I'm sure as most of our listeners know, he's become one of the most prominent voices about the Ukraine war and huge following on social media, on all these podcasts and really prevalent in the media. So to hear about him coming on as a part-time worker and, you know, before all this kicked off,

That's just really interesting to hear that, to hear that origin story. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. He was at the time, I think he had a fellowship at the Kennan Institute and had recently left NDU. So he was kind of in between things and looking for things. He did a lot to build out the CNA program before moving on to other things. Absolutely. Yeah.

Shifting a little bit from staff to your research, you know, you had an existing body of research that you had built up over the years before Russia annexed Crimea. And I'm curious how that like helped position CNA and your team as like leading experts that were ready to hit the ground running as soon as the conversation shifted.

A lot of my Russia work pre-2015 was for the Navy because there was a time when there was more kind of core studies, right? And so I started joking at some point as I realized the pattern that I was doing a gradual tour of the various seas that surround Russia. So there was a study on the security situation in the Baltic, and then we did one on the Black Sea, and eventually...

the Pacific and the Arctic and so on. So it was kind of this circumnavigation of Russia, as it were. And so that was a lot of the earlier work was on that. And then the other thing that I did was I started, and this was around 2008, 2009. So I started a blog, which was the thing to do at that time. And at the time, Russia was...

going through a period of reform of its armed forces, probably its most effective reform. And I just started kind of writing about that, tracking developments, tracking what they were doing, how it was working and so on. And at that time, there was a niche. There wasn't really a strong cohort of Russian military specialists. There were a bunch of kind of, there were folks who were kind of

left over from the last days of the Cold War who were close to retirement age at that point. But there weren't really younger people that much in the US, not in government, let's say, working on Russia. So I started writing about this and the blog got pretty prominent. That helped me develop a bit of a following. This was in the days before podcasts, right? Now maybe we do a podcast. I was just thinking that. And so...

So I was writing fairly frequently and had people reading that and got my name known both in the analyst community, but also in the government community. So I think that helped me.

me personally just get connected to people who are interested in Russia work. And then because I was at CNA, then that could that ended up down the road, I think helping CNA be seen as one of the places where, you know, that kind of work could be done and done well.

And I imagine that the focus on the Navy was actually very significant because one of the primary strategic benefits of Crimea for the Russian military is the fact that it's one of their warm water ports off of, I believe it's the Black Sea, but please correct me if I have that wrong. So like I would think that that positioning would be would be really important and really valuable in that moment.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, the Crimea has been described as kind of a land-based aircraft carrier sitting in the middle of the Black Sea. If you ever look at the map, it's just there in the middle of the whole thing. And so from there, you can kind of dominate the whole region if you're so inclined. And then it's also very valuable to

in non-war times as a launching pad for deployments to the Met, right? And that was how

Russia kind of organized its whole intervention in Syria was probably by shipping supplies from Crimea to Syria via the Turkish Straits. And that, you know, it kept doing that up until the full-scale invasion when Turkey closed the Straits, to warships, I should say. So speaking about the full-scale invasion, after that happened, you were one of several CNA analysts who were sanctioned by the Russian government, which I imagine was probably a pretty interesting experience. So I'd love to hear a bit about that.

Honestly, it didn't affect me that much at that point because what had happened is I was and most of the rest of the team were traveling to Russia at least once a year, often a couple times a year, up through 2019. And then COVID kind of ended that, right? And just when we were sort of thinking that it might be time to go back, the invasion began. And then it seemed like

And then, you know, there were various sort of arbitrary detentions of Paul Whelan, Brittany Griner, you know, various people arrested under various pretexts. And it seemed that people in our field probably would be smarter not to travel to Russia at that time. So I was already sort of not going to Russia. And then about a year after the invasion, so this was May 23, I think it was,

So I was put on a list of people who aren't welcome in Russia, and there was like 500 people on this list. So it was pretty clear that the

you know, some junior intern in foreign affairs ministry who said, okay, come up with 500 people. And so they went through and here are some think tanks that you should go after. So everyone at CNA who was listed as a Russia expert or was in leadership, the executives were also put on the list, but then also completely other people. So I was on the same list with Barack Obama and Stephen Colbert. That's sort of my claim to fame. Stephen Colbert, that's totally.

I didn't know he was on the list. That's actually pretty funny. So, I mean, and then in the field, it kind of almost became a badge of honor to be on a list. It meant somebody had noticed that maybe you were doing something right. I remember bragging to my friends about it when it happened. Like, not, obviously, I wasn't on the list, but just saying like, oh, people at my company were sanctioned by Russia. Clearly, we're getting on their skin. So I definitely can see that being a badge of honor.

But yeah, I would love to hear a little bit more about how the 2022 invasion sort of finalized this shift in the field. With the invasion, there was, I mean, part of it was the kind of the global attention, right? So everyone was, you know, maybe it's hard to remember now that we're, you know, the media environment has maybe moved on, but it was almost six months where everyone

more or less every day, unless there was some disaster that happened on a particular day somewhere, the top headline was about something in Ukraine, right? Like, or some Russian thing that had been done. Our work, we ended up doing a lot more kind of practical, like, okay, what are the tactics of the Russian military? We shifted a little bit immediately and then more and more so over time to kind of

lessons learned from Ukraine, right? Like what are they doing? How are they doing it? What's working for them? What's not working for them? What are the new tasks? You know, we have my colleague Sam Bendit is like, we're looking at their drone tactics, an area where there's the adaptation super fast, right? So, so that's just kind of a constantly evolving thing, but we're also looking, you know, we did a studies over the last couple of years about

kind of how they're doing mobilization of personnel, how they're training, what are the logistics pipelines, those kinds of things, right? But then we're also doing Paul Mill side. I did a study two years ago on the Russia-China relationship. So how is that shifting?

shifted as a result of the war. A couple of my colleagues did Russia-Iran similarly. And right now we're finishing up a study on the Russian-India relationship, another one that's, you know, it's not quite that same kind of partnership, but it's something that is maybe more important because there's a little bit more distance there and there's more possibilities of

the U.S. having some effect on that relationship. So those are the kinds of things that, you know, whereas before we were doing kind of more general studies, well, how does Russia look at their adversaries or what are the, how is their state armaments program working out, right? It was kind of these general things you look at to kind of know your adversary kind of things. Now we're looking much more in the weeds that, okay, this is what they're doing. So

So one thing, one other thing I wanted to ask you about before we wrap up is that like a lot of members of your team have said that you're a great mentor and that you've helped shape their careers. And I'd love to hear about what mentoring new members of the field means to you and like what your experience with that has been like. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, it's really been super rewarding again over the last 10 years, because before that it was really just kind of me doing my own thing, but having mentors

built out that team and any team will have a combination of senior folks and younger folks starting out. And so I've really enjoyed working with some of the younger colleagues to kind of help them develop the skills that I learned from some of my mentors at CNA early on.

because I had, you know, I had great mentors. They weren't Russia experts, but it didn't matter. It was analysis is analysis, right? And so people like Han Gaffney, Peter Swartz, and various other kind of senior folks at CNA back in the early 2000s really helped me out in terms of

How do you deal with flag officers or sponsors who are senior military folks? How do you interact with them? How do you brief them? How do you write analysis that's at the right level between kind of too theoretical and kind of just description, right? So you need some sweet spot in between that that has some methodology to it but isn't

so kind of in the clouds that the military folks tune out. So I learned all that earlier in my career, and I've really been enjoying passing that on to younger colleagues. And also, I mean, part of my kind of belief is that you, that

people should be given as much autonomy as they can. So my MO with working with younger colleagues is just to give them things to do, whether it's a section or some research, whatever it is that it seems like they're ready for, and let them do it, right? And then you can kind of look it over and provide feedback and help them improve it. And that creates...

ability to work independently on your own and then kind of down the road, these same folks are leading their own projects. Right. All right. Well, Dimitri, this has been really fun. I've learned a lot talking to you and it's been really interesting to hear some of these stories from early in your career. So thanks so much for coming on. Yeah. Thanks for having me. This was a lot of fun. Yeah.

For our listeners, there'll be a link to the Russia Studies program in the show notes. And Dmitry and his team's work can be found there. A lot of interesting analysis on the Ukraine war, as well as the Russian military in general. But I want to thank you all so much for listening. And we'll see you next time on CNA Talks.

The views expressed are those of the commentators and do not necessarily reflect those of CNA or any of its sponsors. CNA Talks is produced, edited, and mixed by John Stimson. Our theme music is by Edward Granga. If you enjoy our show, we'd love it if you could give us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and tell your friends about us. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you in two weeks.