The spoken word, stories retained only in memory, and the oral transmission of narratives, both historical and fictional, have a crucial place both in the underground survival of culture during times of repression and also in any subsequent public confrontation with those times of repression. In such periods, when oppression and censorship make official documents suspect and unofficial writings dangerous, oral sources provide a valuable corrective. As a team of glasnost’-era Russian oral historians wrote, quoting a prevailing sentiment, “for us the documents are subjective, and the only things which might be objective are the memories.”^[1] Hallmarks of the Stalin period include Akhmatova’s entrusting her Requiem to the memory of Lidiia Chukovskaia and Solzhenitsyn’s reliance on “stories, written or oral” to confront the immensity of the Gulag.^[2] Later, when wide-ranging discussion of the Stalinist and larger Soviet legacy became possible, the voices of glasnost’ represented a noisy coming to terms with the past. Television and movies showed in-depth interviews with camp survivors and life stories in documentary format such as Semen Aranovich’s I Was Stalin’s Bodyguard and I Worked for Stalin. Mass movements such as Memorial, and academic organizations such as the Oral History Center at the Moscow Institute of History and Archives mobilized to reclaim the past, and as a result historical events became more available and therefore closer.^[3]
Discussion and dialogue – the interplay enabled by interviewing and oral communication – have thus been key in preserving and making sense of the Russian past and in the on-going assessment of the Soviet legacy. But oral history as an academic field is still quite new in Russia. Marina Loskutova’s anthology presents itself as “the first attempt to acquaint the Russian reader with an extraordinarily varied and dynamic trend in the social sciences, which has received the name of oral history.” As such, the collection provides a succinct overview of how the field developed in the West.
In a quite detailed introduction, Loskutova, of the European University in St. Petersburg, surveys the development of oral history as an academic discipline in Western Europe and the United States. She first notes the tendency in treatments by Western scholars to stress both the ancient roots and the novelty of oral history as an approach and then turns to the unique development of the field in various nations, at the same time raising many of the theoretical and institutional issues that have shaped that development. While in the United States, in the work of Allan Nevins and others, oral history began as an approach to the lives of “great men” in politics and industry and only later took on an interest in “history from below” (as reflected, for example, in the work of Studs Terkel and Alex Haley), in Great Britain it emerged from the beginning from social history, ethnography, and studies of the working class experience. Turning to Italy, Loskutova notes the tendency there to combine research and social activism and also points out the importance of less formal working groups and circles. Germany and France came late to oral history, for reasons of both academic proclivities and institutional culture. Loskutova also traces the impact of the “linguistic turn” in the social sciences on oral history, leading to a shift from an emphasis on science and objectivity to a focus on individual realities, narrative theory, and the nature of memory and its social construction. The introduction covers material found in previous English-language surveys of the topic, but Loskutova’s treatment also makes good use of a range of more specialized sources and provides a satisfying synthesis of the field’s evolution.^[4]
Many of the eleven works anthologized here are classics of oral history study, and the authors include some of the most widely published and highly regarded in the field: Alessandro Portelli (2 articles), Michael Frisch, Jan Vansina, Paul Thompson, Tamara Hareven, Alistair Thomson, Luisa Passerini, Ronald Grele, Gabriele Rosenthal, and Patrick H. Hutton. Originally written between 1972 and 1993, the articles and excerpts have all appeared in English, including three that had their first publications in Italian. Categorizing her selections into six sections, Loskutova first offers discussions of the nature and tasks of oral history (sections “Oral History: Approaches and Problems” and “Oral History and Oral Tradition”), then moves to applications of oral history methods and case studies (sections “Oral History and Social-Demographic and Economic History,” “Oral History and the Political History of the Twentieth Century,” and “Practical Aspects of the Researcher’s Work: Conducting the Interview and Interpreting It”), and ends with one selection marking the trend toward relating oral history studies to issues of tradition and collective memory (the section “History and Memory”).
In addition to a good selection of articles, the volume makes the material easily accessible, with intelligent excerpting and editing, informative editor’s footnotes, biographies of all the contributors, and an annotated index. Published by the European University in St. Petersburg and funded by the Open Society Institute (Soros Fund) and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, it is attractively presented in a paper cover with a photo collage and intriguing jacket quotations from Washington Irving and Agatha Christie (both epigraphs to Portelli’s “What Makes Oral History Different”).
The selection of materials for the anthology is considerably more limited in quantity and scope than that of similar collections that have appeared in English.^[5] The comparative brevity is not, however, necessarily a drawback: the book presents particularly thought-provoking and well-written studies without overwhelming the reader with unnecessary detail. If the goal is to introduce students to some of the best materials on oral history and then inspire them to do oral history themselves, the book achieves that well.
It is curious, however, that Loskutova misses an opportunity to connect these materials to a Russian context in any way. Her introduction, in portraying the collection as a “first attempt” to broach the topic in a Russian collection, does a disservice both to a vibrant if recent approach among Russian investigators and to the substantial work done by Western investigators in Russia. The Gorbachev period saw both popular and academic movements focused on oral history – a phenomenon well represented in the first volume of the International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories, published in 1992 under the title Memory and Totalitarianism.^[6] Western scholars, meanwhile – including Paul Thompson, whom Loskutova calls the “British founder of oral history” – took advantage of new access to informants to conduct extensive oral history interviews in Russia, leading to numerous articles and books based on oral sources.^[7] A vital connection between oral history and Russian Studies in the West began much earlier: the first systematic in-depth interviews with Soviet йmigrйs in the early 1950s coincided with the dawn of modern oral history and continued with subsequent projects that together augmented significantly what Western scholars knew about life in the Soviet Union.^[8]
There is a further Russian connection to be made. The increasingly sophisticated theoretical context for discussions of oral history (nicely represented by the selections in this anthology) has led scholars to draw on literary theory, notably Russian theory. The authors in Loskutova’s collection mention in passing Mikhail Bakhtin, Roman Jakobson, Vladimir Propp, and Boris Tomashevskii. A more sustained exploration of the Bakhtin angle could be particularly productive, especially given the frequent calls for a more nuanced understanding of oral history interviews as “collective creation[s]” and “joint activities, organized and informed by the historical perspectives of both participants” – in other words, as dialogue.^[9]
Oral history is burgeoning in Russia and other former republics.^[10] It has received institutional support, with oral history centers at the European University of St. Petersburg and the Russian State Humanities University in Moscow, as well as regional centers in Petrozavodsk, Perm, and elsewhere. As it often has elsewhere, oral history also offers important alternative voices to the country’s official historical narrative: recent publications include ones focusing on the voices and perspectives of camp survivors, Muslims in Dagestan, and Armenian women who witnessed events from the 1915 genocide to violence in Nagorno-Karabakh.^[11] Researchers from the former Soviet Union continue to show a penchant for turning to Western sources for their methodological underpinnings.^[12] Loskutova’s collection, composed of classic Western texts, will not change that, but it will certainly make those texts more widely available to a Russian-speaking audience, and this accessible, well-selected, and stimulating volume will doubtless contribute to the popularity of oral history.