During the Cold War, Harvard professor Samuel Huntington was persona non grata in the Soviet Union. On orders of the Foreign Ministry, Tass denounced the hawkish political scientist as a "mad dog," and Russian scholars were afraid to support his seminal theories, even when they secretly agreed with them.


Now, however, bygones are bygones and intellectual freedom flourishes. In Moscow for a two-day visit last week, Huntington was granted an audience with Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, an honorary doctorate from the Diplomatic Academy and the warm accolades of his fellow academics.


In return the former advocate of containment expounded a distinctly post-Cold War view of global politics in which Russia must be an active and constructive leader of a Slavic-Orthodox civilizational bloc.


"I used his ideas in my dissertation in 1978," said Alexander Terekhov, a specialist on foreign trade who in 1990 founded the Anti-Communist Party of Russia. At the time, he kept very quiet about his sympathies, which could have cost him his job. While serving on President Jimmy Carter's National Security Council, Huntington publicly argued that American trade with the Soviet Union would merely improve its economy and allow it to channel more money into the arms race against the West.


"Communists were not able to find any counterargument, so they called him a mad dog," Terekhov said after Huntington delivered a lecture titled "The Clash of Civilizations?" on Friday at the Diplomatic Academy.


Huntington and the Russian government probably still do not see eye to eye. A 45-minute discussion with Kozyrev on Friday centered on the future of NATO, which the professor believes should expand to include central European countries such as Poland and Hungary. Nevertheless, Huntington pronounced the meeting "a very useful, substantive discussion."


Huntington's central thesis, enunciated in an influential article in the journal Foreign Affairs in the summer of 1993 -- and still sparking heated intellectual debate -- is that the ideological war between communism and liberal democracy is now yielding to a multipolar world with fault lines based on cultural differences among its seven or eight major civilizations.


"For 40 years, the line dividing Europe was the Iron Curtain," Huntington said in his lecture. "The central dividing line is now the line separating the peoples of Western Christianity from Moslems and Orthodox Christians."


For Russia, the new world order means acknowledging the diverging destinies of the remnants of the Soviet empire, Huntington said. He predicts that the central and East European states will become part of NATO and the European Union, that the Baltics will develop closer ties with Scandinavia and that states in the Caucasus and Central Asia will align more closely with Islam.


Nevertheless, Russia is by no means marginalized in a world in which "global power in any meaningful sense is obsolete," according to Huntington. "As the core state of Orthodox civilization, Russia has prime responsibility for maintaining order in that civilization," he said.


The war in Chechnya is an example of the clash of Moslem and Orthodox cultures envisioned in Huntington's model. Moscow should grant the breakaway republic a generous degree of autonomy, but it should not be allowed to leave the Russian Federation, the professor said.


Huntington said the Slavophile-Westerner divide that has torn Russia since the 19th century would continue "as an inalienable trait of national character." But he said future expansionism by China could tilt Russia further toward the West, with which it shares far greater cultural affinity than with Confucianism, and that the 21st century could see Russia at last serve as a true bridge between European and Asian civilizations.