A Reflection on Capstone Project Research Process

By Jacob Hill, MALD 2019 Candidate, The Fletcher School

Thanks in part to a research award from the Fletcher Russia and Eurasia Program, I am currently working on my capstone paper, which focuses on the friendship between Nikita Khrushchev and the Iowa corn farmer Roswell Garst. The research process for the paper couldn’t have gone more smoothly. This is partially due to the somewhat narrow scope of the topic and scarcity of available source material. Mostly, though, it is due to the helpfulness of the various librarians and archivists, all Iowans, with whom I have worked.

Going into the research phase, I wanted to rely first and foremost on primary sources so as not to be influenced by third-party perspectives. This meant resisting the temptation to flip directly to the relevant sections of the biographies of Khrushchev and Garst (by William Taubman and Harold Lee, respectively) and paraphrase the information in them. However, I plan to reference them toward the end of the writing process in order to fill in some gaps and deconflict some of the discrepancies in my own research.

Following a few simple Google searches, I found the Garst Family Papers, a special collection housed at Iowa State University which contains thousands of documents related to the Garst family and a variety of newspaper and magazine articles on Khrushchev’s trip to Iowa. The reference coordinator in the Special Collections department was as accommodating as could be, quickly scanning and sending me everything I needed.

Quite helpfully, she also suggested I contact the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, which maintains a substantial archive of files from former Iowa senator Bourke Hickenlooper. The archive includes all kinds of other great material related to Garst and the Khrushchev visit. The remarkably organized and efficient archivists there digitized hundreds of pages of relevant information and sent them to me within a couple days of my request.

Next, I contacted the reference team at the Des Moines Public Library, who were quick to provide me with an array of useful articles from local newspapers and national magazines.

When I began looking for relevant books, I again tried to find as much material as I could written by Garst and Khrushchev themselves. This led me to Richard Lowitt and Harold Lee’s collection Letters from an American Farmer: The Eastern European and Russian Correspondence of Roswell Garst. While Garst never published memoirs or an autobiography, he was a prolific writer of letters, through which he revealed much about his life, career, and thoughts on a wide range of topics.

To get Khrushchev’s point of view, I used the second and third volumes of a trilogy of English memoirs published by Penn State University Press between 2004 and 2007, translated from a four-volume Russian edition from 1999. In them, Khrushchev speaks at length about his friendship with and admiration for Garst. Despite being about a thousand pages each, the memoirs make for light, often very funny reading, as they consist entirely of Khrushchev’s spoken recollections, as painstakingly transcribed by his son, Sergei. I also referenced Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, the second in a pair of memoirs published by Little, Brown and Company in the early 1970s. However, the authenticity of these volumes has been widely debated, so I deferred to the more recent memoirs, which scholars view as the definitive version of Khrushchev’s reminiscences.

In addition to the biographies I plan to reference later on, I’m using a few other secondary sources, including recent Cold War histories by Gaddis and Westad. To supplement my limited knowledge of Russian agricultural history, I’m deferring to the expertise of the late Lazar Volin, whose monumental A Century of Russian Agriculture: From Alexander II to Khrushchev has proven an invaluable resource.

So far, the writing process has also gone smoothly. First, I combed through the primary source material and recorded every action or event relevant to the Khrushchev-Garst story, arranging this information chronologically so as to create a loose narrative comprised of bullet points from a variety of sources. At the same time, I sorted any relevant thoughts by Garst or Khrushchev into a separate document arranged by topic, to be woven into the paper later.

Next, I went through the secondary sources, picking out any information relevant to the narrative—from significant events in U.S.-Soviet relations that either affected or were affected by the relationship between Garst and Khrushchev, to elaborations on certain Soviet agricultural initiatives—and plugging this information into the appropriate sections of my original documents.

Then, I looked at the information I’d collected through a few analytical lenses, attempting to assess things like Garst’s effectiveness as a citizen diplomat, his impacts on Russian agriculture, and the effects of his friendship with Khrushchev on U.S.-Soviet relations, adding input wherever I felt I had something of value to contribute.

Currently, I’m attempting to mold this somewhat shapeless mass of information and analysis into an intelligible first draft. I’m looking forward to sharing the final product soon.