President of the Institute of Oriental Studies Professor Vitaly V. Naumkin greets Sergey Peskov, press-secretary of Russian President Vladimir Putin and a Muslim clergyman
Some institutions are resilient and survive the ups and downs of fate. Others cannot sustain themselves and fall by the wayside. A great survivor is the Institute of Oriental Studies (IOS) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which commemorates the 200th anniversary of its founding this year. The bicentennial was recently celebrated in October in Moscow with a congress.
The congress itself, where I was invited to speak, was a gala event — essentially a Russian affair with marginal input from Western scholars, which is what made it remarkable. In Pakistan, we are used to only hearing about and from Western academics about the region. It coincided with Russian’s tilt to the East in world affairs, a celebration of the Asian part of its Eurasian identity. President Vladmir Putin did not attend the congress but a message from him was read out at the inauguration. As much as anything, the gathering signalled the increasingly multi-polar nature of our world.
The IOS was founded in 1818, in Russia during the reign of Emperor Alexander I. It has gone through many vicissitudes through empire, wars, invasions, revolution and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It was originally established in St. Petersburg as the Asian Museum under the Imperial Academy of Sciences, as a depository of oriental manuscripts and a library facilitating scientific research. In 1950, the institute was shifted to Moscow, becoming a major centre of oriental studies. Today its depositories house more than one million volumes of ancient books and manuscripts. In 2008, the St. Petersburg (later Leningrad) branch was reorganised into a separate Institute of Oriental Manuscripts.
The Russian Institute of Oriental Studies marks not only 200 years of its founding but makes a statement about a changed world
The institute in Moscow is a unique venue for the study of the problems in history and cultures of the Orient, especially the countries of Asia and North Africa. Hundreds of experts work there. Its scholars follow a multidisciplinary approach based on history, culture, economics, politics, language, literature and linguistics. Structurally, it is divided country-wise into regional centres and special departments. It has a prolific publications programme and partners with many other academic institutions throughout the world.
From 1977 to 1985, the Institute was nurtured by the legendary Yevgeny Primakov who served as its director but later rose to great political heights as foreign minister, speaker of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, chief of the intelligence service and prime minister. He was the leading Soviet expert on the Middle East and author of Russia and the Arabs, which gave a behind-the-scenes non-Western view of the problems of the Middle East. As a diplomat, he was an ardent supporter of a multi-polar world.
Pakistan is covered by the Centre for the Study of the Near and Middle East. Their recent publication on Pakistan is Database: Pakistan and Neighbouring Countries, 2017, by Sergey Kamenev.