Maxim Visnovsky is a recipient of the Harriman Junior Fellowship and the Summer Civil Society Graduate Fellowship.

What region/topics are you focusing on at the Harriman Institute/SIPA?

I focus on Russia and the former Soviet states. More specifically, I focus on post-Soviet security, Russian foreign policy, NATO and NATO-Russia relations. At the Harriman Institute, I try to expand on my undergraduate thesis from King’s College, London, which focused on the shift in Russia’s foreign policy between 1991 and 2012.

What are some of your favorite things about studying here?

I love the opportunities here. In my undergraduate thesis, I cited passages from the work of a prominent expert on Russian studies, Mikhail Zygar. Now, when I want to know about Russia’s views on NATO enlargement in the 1990s, I can just go to his office here and listen to what Gorbachev would tell him about it. Apart from that, the Institute always secures great guests. I remember that just a few months after Vladimir Kara-Murza was released in the historic U.S.-Russia prisoner swap, he was already sitting in a room with us.

What’s your most memorable experience here so far?

Kyrgyzstan. As a part of my studies at Columbia and the Harriman, I spent a summer in the small town of Kerben, Kyrgyzstan, teaching girls in a school and doing field research. It was an immense experience from the beginning to the end. On the first day when I was flying from Bishkek to Kerben, the pilot was told mid-air that Uzbekistan had closed their airspace, so we could not land because the airport was right at the border. We returned to Bishkek, and, because the next flight was not for another three days, I took a 10-hour taxi drive through the mountainous country, which ultimately cost around $10. I fell asleep for a bit and, upon waking up, the altitude was above 3,000 meters (10,000 feet) and there was snow around us, which is something I wasn’t expecting in Central Asia in the middle of June. There is much that could be said about my experience in Kyrgyzstan.

What fellowships, if any, have you received from the Institute?

I was fortunate to have received the Harriman Junior Fellowship as well as the Summer Civil Society Graduate Fellowship. Harriman also does its best to support their students in participating in academic, professional and research conferences. This way, I was able to speak and present at Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Northeast Network Conference at Yale University. This April, I will be presenting at the Jordan Center at New York University.