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Matlock has been sympathetic to Vladimir Putin's agenda in the Russo-Ukrainian War, blaming the crisis on an America's abandonment of a commitment not to expand NATO, which he says it made to Gorbachev.[70][71] In late 2021, he argued that Ukraine is a state but not yet a nation, because of its deep ethnolinguistic divisions, saying it "has not yet found a leader who can unite its citizens in a shared concept of Ukrainian identity. [….] it is not Russian interference that created Ukrainian disunity but rather the haphazard way the country was assembled from parts that were not always mutually compatible […], not by Ukrainians themselves but by outsiders."
Matlock’s interest in Russian literature began when he was a student at Duke University and was bowled over by Dostoyevsky. His specialization in Russian affairs continued in graduate school at the Russian Institute of Columbia University and as an instructor in Russian language at Dartmouth College. While there, Matlock indexed the Russian edition of Stalin’s collected works, completed his first dissertation on the Union of Soviet Writers, and translated the nineteenth century novelist Nikolai Leskov and the poetry of Andrey Voznesensky, whom he later often welcomed at Spaso House, the residence of the American ambassador in Moscow. He later said that his knowledge of Stalin’s nationality policy proved useful when he took the Foreign Service test.
In a 1997 interview, Matlock emphasized that being a specialist in Russian literature allowed him to develop a rapport with writers and intellectuals at a time when making contacts was very difficult.[1] For Russian people, the reliability of ‘this American…who knew their language [and] their literature probably better than they did…subliminally cast a very useful image’ and drew their interest.