Russia cannot be understood with the mind alone,
No ordinary yardstick can span her greatness:
She stands alone, unique –
In Russia, one can only believe.^[1]

Fedor Tiutchev

Tiutchev’s famous lines, “Russia cannot be understood with the mind alone / No ordinary yardstick can span her greatness,” like Churchill’s oft-cited “riddle wrapped inside an enigma, inside a mystery,” are by now hackneyed tropes of an imaginary Russia. Yet they provide a useful entry for my topic, the different receptions which Petersburg historian Boris Mironov’s two-volume magnum opus, A Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917, first published in Russian in 1999, encountered in the West and at home.^[2] I examine these differentiated responses to illustrate the largely unexamined relationship between knowledge and power, which continues to dominate western (but especially American) scholarship on Russia, as well as the unchallenged assumption that, in relationship to Russian history, western historians presume to occupy an Archimedean point allowing them to render impartial judgments upon their peers in Russia, with little critical self-examination. This is a surprising conclusion in the age of post-modernism, when all such claims are suspect. But it also helps explain the huge outpouring of critical, largely admiring, commentary offered Mironov’s volumes in Russia.
Two anecdotes from my own past explain the musings which led to this essay. In the early 1970s, I worked in Moscow as a translator for Progress Publishers. There, among the motley assortment of foreigners, who for one reason or another had ended up stranded in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, was a sizeable group of highly educated Russians, working as editorial staff. Among the few of the latter who had been promoted from the dreary task of checking every Marxist-Leninist citation in manuscripts destined for English-language audiences, to editorial positions slightly less demeaning was one Alexander Markov. A typical Muscovite intelligent, Markov had a fierce devotion to learning, but also the caution in his eyes foreigners of my generation often encountered. On occasion, out of sight of others, when pleased at the fruits of our collaborative translating and editing, he would whisper to me, “You know … we are all part of a republic of letters.”
This claim to a trans-national community, though slightly unorthodox in that environment, was not likely to get the bearer in serious trouble during the period of stagnation. But it did represent a mental pilgrimage, in the way that Benedict Anderson deploys the term to describe how invisible pathways (first religious, then administrative, and finally, in colonial settings, educational) create collective identities. The notion of pathways, as well as the frequently encountered term of the late Brezhnev and early perestroika eras, that what middle class professionals yearned for was a normal life, or normal’naia zhizn’, will form the leitmotifs of the text below.^[3]
My second anecdote concerns a minor revelation I had in the mid-1980s. I was visiting the home of my mentor, the accomplished scholar of the Great Reforms, Larissa Zakharova of Moscow State University. At that time, the wall unit, containing handsome sets of the complete volumes of major Russian writers, was a necessary appurtenance of the middle-class Moscovite apartment. Professional historians would have their apartments crammed with complete sets of Kliuchevsky, Soloviev, and the scholarly monographs of Akademkniga. Larissa Georgievna also had a living room filled with books on Russian history, but entire rows were in English, largely the gifts of her British and American colleagues. She often held her seminars in this room, and her graduate students greedily pored over these books.
I was proud of my own contribution to that collection (Russian Peasant Schools, 1986). But in retrospect, I am also struck by the incongruity of the situation: why was it that erudite, distinguished scholars in the Soviet Union were encouraging their best students to look at western monographs to learn about Russian history?^[4] Why, indeed, were English language works privileged? After all, what role do American scholars play in English historical scholarship on England, in French scholarship on France, in German scholarship on Germany? Given the indisputable global preponderance of American research universities, a significant role, no doubt, but also a secondary, subordinate role, and this is how it should be.^[5] Below, however, I argue that the situation in late Soviet historical scholarship was an anomalous one; that American scholarship exerted a hegemonic role, and that this situation has been perpetuated in the post-Soviet era, as grant competitions have fostered an asymmetrical environment best described not as a republic of letters, but in terms of James C. Scott’s public and hidden transcripts.^[6]
The extraordinary response given to the recent publication of Mironov’s A Social History can best be understood as part of this hegemonic discourse. Comparing early discussions of A Social History organized respectively by the journals Otechestvennaia Istoriia^[7] and Slavic Review, David Ransel concluded “A Single Re-search Community? Not Yet.”^[8] But Ransel’s valid assertion needs to be taken a step further. In fact, while western reception has been polite, if tepid, the extraordinary attention given in Russia to A Social History is unprecedented, and may represent a turning point in the Russian historical profession, especially in its relations with the West. As Europeanist A. B. Kamensky wrote on the pages of the prestigious journal Odysseus (Odissei: Chelovek v istorii):

It is clear … that this book is not just … a “significant event” in the historical profession, but something grander; both the work itself and the discussions of it are, on the one hand, evidence of the existing state of contemporary Russian historical studies [istoricheskaia rusistika], and for that reason everything published on this occasion of this work’s appearance merits its own study … at the same time A Social History of Imperial Russia is a landmark in its own right.^[9]

Below I will elaborate upon these assertions. I begin with an outline of the contents and arguments of A Social History. I then turn to its reception in the United States and in Russia. Along the way I include some observations about the historical profession, public interest in history, and the ideological constellation of history texts and instruction in schools and universities in Russia. My comments about the Russian context in which A Social History was introduced are anecdotal, not based upon survey research. Nor do they take into consideration the small but talented and resourceful cohort of Russian trans-national scholars, brought up in the former Soviet Union and educated both there and abroad, and now making a striking contribution to Russian historical scholarship (largely, but not only, in the West). Substantive discussion of the rich fabric of this work at the middle level of generalization will be deferred, although I personally feel that it is at this level, rather than that of the global generalization or overarching framework, that Mironov is at his best, indeed unmatched as an historian.
Since the author of these pages was personally involved in the editing and translation of the English language version of A Social History, I have sought to avoid all evaluation of its worth, both positive and negative. Instead I focus on the response to A Social History by two different communities, and what it tells us about both. Thus, we are dealing strictly with reception and not with truth value.

SUMMARY AND OUTLINE OF A SOCIAL HISTORY

For those who have not perused A Social History the following is a brief summary, written by the late Reginald Zelnik in the American Historical Review:

“The thread that runs through the story… looks something like this: Russia was, at least potentially a “normal” European country, but a European country that was not lacking in important peculiarities, including what is sometimes described as the relative backwardness of its economic, social, and political development. To use Mironov’s language, Russia experienced all the important developments in these areas, but they were “asynchronic” in the way they evolved. Russia’s peculiarities, most of which are familiar to specialists, are not presented as virtues (in Slavophile style) but as obstacles or impediments to a broad and balanced “social modernization,” an outcome whose positive value Mironov has no wish to deny. But these were obstacles that could be mastered with time, and Mironov goes to great pains to help us follow the sometimes tortuous but nonetheless rapid processes that suggest that the obstacles were being genuinely if (on the eve of world war and revolution) incompletely overcome. At the same time, he is too honest a historian to ignore the contradictory, more depressing, “pessimistic” evidence of incomplete modernization and continued, even growing social tension and political crisis, so much so that one can read whole paragraphs – his discussion of the civilizing of the Russian village versus the partial “peasantization” of the Russian city is a good case in point – that seem to take opposite positions, or at least to produce conflicting moods and expectations in the reader as one moves from page to page. In the still contested (if by now somewhat hoary) debate over the degree of influence of close peasant background on the social and political volatility of industrial workers, Mironov judiciously explains the case for each side but ends with something resembling a neo-Menshevik position; that peasant disrespect for private, individual wealth, and peasant attachment to collectivist institutions and habits help explain the rapid rise of working class radicalism and indifference to market-based liberalism in the early twentieth century.”^[10]

Volume 1 is organized as follows: 1) territorial expansion, 2) social structure and social mobility, 3) demographic processes and problems, 4) the family, 5) town and country, 6) serfdom, and 7) the main societal organizations of the peasantry, nobility and urban estates, and the genesis of individualism and individual identity (lichnost’); volume 2, 1) law and the courts, 2) the evolution of the Russian state, and the establishment of a law-governed state, 3) state, society and public opinion, and the establishment of civil society, and 4) the societal development of Russia in the imperial period, and Soviet modernization.^[11] Treatment of the pre-Petrine era is cursory. Likewise, except for in his concluding remarks, the Soviet period does not come into view.

RECEPTION: THE WEST

Anglo-Western reception of A Social History has been mixed. To be sure, publication of the two-volume history prompted a special session at the 2000 National Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS), and a follow-up forum on the pages of the Slavic Review, as well as individual reviews by leading scholars in all of the major journals. But the Slavic Review panel, attended by Mironov himself, was, in the words of Reginald Zelnik and Louise McReynolds, excessively critical, at times even condescending. David Ransel, Willard Sunderland, and William Wagner all provided measured but substantive critiques of Mironov’s views on empire, law, social structure, modernization, and for neglect of religion, gender, private life – in short, “many topics at the center of Russian studies in the west today.” But Steven Hoch caustically sought to demolish the very foundations of A Social History by attacking his quantitative approach as wrong-headed and fundamentally incompetent.^[12]
Individual reviews suggested that Mironov is “out of step with Western methods and conceptualizations,” that (Okenfuss) Mironov’s “strident anti-Marxism” and “Soviet-bashing intentions” as well as “prickly nationalism” shape his arguments, and that “many of his questions are terribly old-fashioned, tilting as he must at collapsed conceptual windmills, and still dueling with silenced foes.”^[13] According to John Alexander, “Mironov understands social history primarily in a sociological sense, depicting the development of large population groups and institutions, with a major focus on statistical measures in tabular form (but not) topics such as recreational pursuits or medical or sexual mores.” Alexander, while noting that Mironov “draws on several historiographic traditions,” adds that the text “lacks drama, wit, and humor,” and “omits personalities and events that give color and texture to more conventional or narrative history.”^[14]
Most readers looking for personalities and events would not turn to social history, especially one that relies heavily upon numbers and seeks to identify and elucidate the deeper currents flowing beneath the froth of events. In short, this is a criticism not of Mironov, but of social history as such. As for “drama, wit and humor,” it is true, Mironov’s mission, and hence his voice, do not lend themselves to the light touches of humor or irony; as Madhavan Palat perceptively notes:

“Boris Mironov has deliberately assumed one of the traditional burdens of the modern historian, that of building the nation… He sees the Russian nation as sorely in need of construction after the searing experience of the Soviet Union. He accuses Soviet historians of having derided Russian traditions on a scale that other nations could contemplate… Russians have been purveyed a vision of their past so tawdry and gloomy that they could not identify with it. They were compelled to regard their history as a hideous blot on the face of humanity… [the past] has nurtured in them a profound sense of inadequacy; and it has caused a wound that must be healed. The physician at hand is none other than the historian himself; and he shall administer a dose of cliotherapy to the patient. It would reveal to the Russian that his society is a normal one, with as many successes and failures as any other, which is to say, European. This vast opus… is just such a redemptive dose of physic and revelation.”^[15]

Given the mission of psychic redemption and national healing that Mironov has set himself (he, of course, is more modest in his phrasing), the tone of earnestness and sobriety that pervades the text, as jarring as it may be to a western scholarly community prizing irony and mordant wit, is entirely natural and appropriate.
In fairness, not all commentary has been nugatory. In his contribution to the Slavic Review forum, Ransel concludes that A Social History is “the most ambitious and challenging personal synthesis produced in Russia since the collapse of communism.”^[16] In his review, Norman Saul concludes that Mironov should be “stormily applauded.”^[17] Zelnik goes further; he claims that the work is “a tour de force… perhaps the most impressive overview of this subject written by anyone, anywhere.”^[18] Zelnik does point out self-contradictory and problematic aspects of Mironov’s grand theory.^[19] Yet he concludes that “this is a book that cannot be bypassed by serious historians of Russia… We are all in the author’s debt for years of first-class research… and for the limpidity and discretion of his nevertheless passionate writing.”^[20]
McReynolds calls the work “one of the most useful histories of the imperial period to appear in any language.” Palat, who is very critical of Mironov’s defense of the autocracy as largely “law-governed” and progressive, and his finger-pointing at the Russian intelligence for its failure to work harmoniously with the state (a view quite popular in Russian educated circles today),^[21] nevertheless calls the work a “landmark.”
Still, only a handful of western reviewers have fully appreciated the scope and depth of Mironov’s research. He may be criticized for eschewing post-modernist approaches, for leaving out ideology and “cross-cultural interaction” (McReynolds), or his fundamental perspectives and arguments challenged, but those such as Max Okenfuss and others who argue that the 750 western sources (not including those in footnotes) are “spotty, often oddly selected, and fragmentary”^[22] do not appreciate the singularity of his mastery of pre-revolutionary, Soviet-era, and western historiography, including, as Zelnik points out, western writings on non-Russian (primarily European) history.^[23] If this truly were a republic rather than an empire of letters, it would seem preposterous to criticize Mironov for “spotty” application of western sources cited, on Europe, no less. Imagine a book review in the American Historical Review criticizing an American scholar writing on American history for incomplete knowledge of Russian Amerikanistika.^[24] Or, more precisely, an American writing on American history, criticized for incomplete knowledge of Russian writing on German history! There is a built-in hierarchy of knowledge and power, a remarkable conceit in such presumptions. At the very least, as McReynolds argues, “Mironov… deserves far more acclaim for what he accomplished than [criticism] for what he left aside.”^[25]

THE RUSSIAN HISTORICAL PROFESSION: IS THERE A COMMUNITY?^[26]

Andrei Sakharov, Director of the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences, writes, in an overview of the Russian historical profession, “Today, Russian historical science is vibrant, dynamic and discursive. It is closely linked with global historiography; the research of historians is based upon an ever expanding incorporation of both world and national historiographical legacies, on the utilization of more and more archival resources. It is growing in conditions of freedom and … has a solid future.”^[27] On the pages of Kritika, a number of informative articles have recently been published mapping the changing ideological constellation of Russian historical writing, and seem to confirm Sakharov’s claims.^[28] And Mironov himself, summarizing the response to the publication of A Social History, argues that “this vibrant discussion demonstrates that... the gap is being eliminated between the level of historical research carried out in the capital cities and the provinces; the wall between Western and Russian historiography is collapsing… and a community of Russianists is emerging.”^[29]
But let us look briefly at the demographics and the communication pathways of this profession. Benedict Anderson wrote eloquently of the school “pilgrimages,” that is, the educational pathways pursued by “natives” and “creoles” in colonial settings which helped give birth to and sustain the notion of a nation in sites such as “Indochine” and “Indonesia.”^[30] It is a stretch to argue that Russia, in its diminished glory, has become a colony of the West, and I am certainly not arguing that there is no “Russia” outside these pathways, but Mironov’s assertion of a progressively more integrated community seems optimistic, given the collapsing budgets of universities, rising costs of travel, limited access to books and to the Internet characteristic of life outside Moscow and St. Petersburg. Let us turn briefly to this situation.
First of all, the demographics. We are all familiar with some basic developments in the Russian knowledge industry.^[31] In the post-Soviet era the venerable networks comprising the Academy of Sciences and its branches have been drained of resources and in many areas survive only as shells. Many in the Academy have been forced to flee to the universities and post-secondary (VUZ) institutes, where they take on multiple teaching loads in order to survive – 85.5 percent of all VUZ teachers in 2000 had multiple appointments.^[32] In most (57.3 percent) cases, this involved supplementary teaching at another institution.^[33] One reviewer of Mironov’s book lamented that it was truly an academic book in that nobody in the teaching world could possibly have found the time to write it! Anecdotal evidence suggests that academic institutes in many fields of research are staffed primarily by scientists of retirement age, and that few young people find a professional career in academics an alluring possibility.^[34] In fact the ageing of the scholarly community has been well established, with most scientists today in Russia being in their mid-fifties.^[35] The number of scientists/scholars who have left to work abroad has been variously estimated at between 80,000 and 200,000.^[36] Of course, the new freedom to pursue research in controversial or formerly forbidden subjects has been heady and has produced a wealth of new research, but has it compensated for the precipitous decline in status and relative standard of living in the academic profession as a whole? Do most academics have greater access to books and articles than in earlier times? In point of fact, subsidies for the publication of academic books have virtually disappeared: the price of books has skyrocketed as the number of titles has declined and the print runs have shrunk. Scholarly listings in bookstores are almost insignificant.^[37]
More important, for my purposes, is the question of communications networks and hierarchy. In the Soviet era, research and critical commentary were overwhelmingly embedded in print culture as well as research travel. At some point during the perestroika era, the average Muscovite subscribed to over thirty journals and periodicals.^[38] Today, by all accounts, fewer and fewer people read national newspapers, subscriptions to journals have declined by more than 50 percent (that is, for those journals which have survived), and libraries are unable to purchase books, especially outside a handful of cities. As for international connections, even in St. Petersburg the purchase of foreign books and periodicals by central libraries has virtually ended. Outside the capital cities, few libraries buy books or subscribe to journals in foreign languages.^[39] In pedagogical institutes, always the poor stepdaughter in academics, the situation is even drearier; libraries in such institutions do not even have copies of the new generation of textbooks future teachers will be expected to use.^[40] As for books, the price of them has increased dramatically in the post-Soviet era compared to average household income, and the print runs of scholarly books have declined sharply.
According to Catherine Merridale, western grants and collaborative projects have played a major role in sustaining academic research and dialogue by resort to the Internet.^[41] One example that comes to mind is auditorium.ru; another is the Open Society’s funding of new generations of textbooks for schools and universities. Yet studies show that only 2 to 8 percent of the population has access to the Internet, and that this is heavily clustered in a few locations, especially Moscow (where the figure is 27 percent). Moreover, access is often limited, episodic, and expensive. Outside the major cities, by some accounts, “fewer historians today read foreign languages.”^[42]
Who then would be aware of the outpouring of commentary on Mironov’s A Social History, which filled the pages of journals, both prominent and obscure?^[43] There are individual reviews, but also round-tables, discussions, interviews, including translations into Russian of contributions by American, British, German scholars. But who, outside Moscow and St. Petersburg, at least, would have easy access to this conversation? Across Russia, most students are limited by family budgets to attending local universities; few can afford the cost of living away from home. Likewise, few graduate students or scholars can afford to visit the large cities to attend forums or conduct research. Thus, with the breakdown of the distribution network and market for books and journals, contact is at best episodic, unsystematic, and limited. To be sure, many of the participants in the round-tables devoted to A Social History themselves came from universities outside Moscow and St. Petersburg. And most of us working in Russian history have the pleasure of rather regular contact with scholars scattered across the former Soviet Union.^[44] Still, such contacts engage only a tiny fraction of Russian scholars. For most it is indisputable that Russia’s academic contact with the West is tenuous and concentrated in a few sites, perhaps even more so than in Soviet times. For most too, the contacts so essential to the professional practice of history, and once conducted through patronage networks as well as subsidies for academic publishing and research travel, are now fragmented, disjointed, and only episodically maintained.

PUBLIC HISTORY AND SCHOOL TEXTBOOKS^[45]

Another topic of real importance is how history is taught in schools and universities. Is it conceivable that A Social History could have a ripple effect, its approaches and arguments spread to the lay community through secondary school and university textbooks, and affect public memory in some way? Catherine Merridale sees a significant generational decline in interest in the past (especially for those born after 1980) and a widening gap between lay and scholarly interests. At the same time she argues that a discursive field does persist, one in which distinctively Russian tropes continue to dominate, such as “a tendency to seek undivided truth... a fascination with charismatic authority, and especially with the personalities of leaders; an equal fascination with the irrational, and especially with the idea of miraculous deliverance; the hoped-for but elusive ‘special path,’ and a taste for making extreme judgments about events.”^[46] As for schools and textbooks, as is well known, there was a huge spike of interest in history in the perestroika era, but then a sharp decline after 1991, as people everywhere found themselves preoccupied with the struggle to survive and the social woes accompanying drastic impoverishment.^[47] In 2001, public interest in how history is taught was rekindled, however, by then Prime Minister Mikhail Kasianov’s notorious public temper tantrum about the quality of Russian history textbooks, and the government announced a “competition” to find the “top three” new textbooks to be used in the schools (the winners were announced in July 2002).^[48]In addition, the new standardized school leaving/university admission exams have forced a reexamination of the school curriculum in history and other subjects. All of this has generated interest in the press and among parents about how history is to be taught, part of renewed attention given in the periodical press to education in general.
The first generation of post-Soviet high school textbooks (up to about 1998) has been carefully analyzed by scholars.^[49] But since 2001 a plethora of new textbooks have appeared; one multi-media curriculum package that has gained popularity and been used in schools in many areas pursues learning objectives for the high school that would prompt the admiration of most American university teachers, in terms both of the sophistication of analysis called for and density of factual grounding, but also of the search for a usable past, combining the quest for truth, empathetic understanding, and pride in one’s country.^[50] It indeed makes use of A Social History. But only a systematic investigation of new textbooks, teachers’ guides, and syllabi, as well as of the selection, production, marketing and distributing networks, all of which have substantially changed since 2000, will tell us much about new, or persisting ideological constellations, as well as about the relationship between academic and public history.
As for university instruction, it is futile to look for A Social History as a classroom textbook, at least according to one report by a foreign observer:

“Under-funding is particularly harmful in the area of textbooks. Russian higher education institutions, like those in France and some other countries, attempt to provide students with textbooks free of charge. They do this from the woefully inadequate budgets of their tiny university libraries. Present funding levels do not allow Russian universities to purchase anywhere near enough textbooks for all students … The result is that many professors and students rely exclusively on pre-Gutenberg technology: lectures delivered extremely slowly so that students can take verbatim notes. Lack of textbooks also means that universities must require many more hours of faculty contact with students than western universities do, because professors are practically the only source of information for many students in many classes.”^[51]

There could be a silver lining here: several participants in roundtables devoted to A Social History observed that Mironov’s concepts and arguments had transformed their lectures… thus leapfrogging over Gutenberg. Working in the city of Kirov in 2006, I found a smattering of citations in works of local history to Mironov’s A Social History, but few graduate students or faculty at the universities were even aware of the work, and none knew of the debate it had provoked. That is to say, the book might gradually make its way into the canon of scholarship cited by provincial historians in their own work, but there is no evidence that an all-Russian, never mind international, dialogue is emerging on the basis of the printed word.

A SOCIAL HISTORY: GRAND THEORY, MIDDLE-LEVEL ARGUMENTATION, AND RUSSIAN RECEPTION^[52]

On the pages of the Slavic Review, David Ransel summarized the praise lavished by Russian historians on Mironov’s magnum opus:

“Russian commentators are struck, first of all, by the genre of Mironov’s study: a personally crafted interpretation of a broad sweep of history, so different from the collectively written general histories produced in the Soviet period … With regard to Mironov’s general framework, Russian commentators accept uncritically his use of… modernization theory and Ferdinand Tonnies’s much earlier notions of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. They do not question Mironov’s construction of a static “traditional” society giving way to a “modern society” as measured by standard indexes of commercial growth, urbanization, industrialization, and legal and political reform. Like Mironov himself, they also accept analytical categories such as national and eth^[53]ic identity, gender, and culture as given and unproblematic.”^[54]

This is a judicious summary. At the same time, when Ransel wrote these lines, he could not yet be fully aware of the scale of the Russian response to A Social History, for it was just getting underway. And these lines, of course, contain an embedded implicit stance of superiority: Russian commentators accept uncritically… They do not question… they accept… categories… as given… and unproblematic. This is, of course, part of the academic give-and-take we all trade in. But it fails to situate this response in what can almost be described as a post-colonial setting. To describe intellectual relations between Russia in the West as post-colonial of course leaves out the Soviet Union’s history as a superpower and “adjacent” empire, but it accurately describes the cultural and academic transition from Soviet to post-Soviet eras.
My argument that this is so is based on a seeming paradox: Mironov’s scholarship, while hostile to Marxist-Leninism, and barely tolerated in the Soviet era, and while informed by western (especially Annales school) scholarship^[55] is now being hailed as a heroic deed (podvig),^[56] accomplished by a deeply patriotic, home-grown scholar, as an unparalleled accomplishment – the first serious grand synthesis of Russian history of the post-Soviet era. It also offers a synthesis that can contribute to finding “a usable past,” and provides a “professional” alternative to the “numerous ‘historiosophies’ proliferating in our time and literally taking over the book stalls on the street with their homegrown ‘theories of Russian history’.” That is, it is a first step in combating the growing gap between public and scholarly history.^[57]
Moreover, Mironov has argued forcefully for both the distinctiveness and the normalcy of Russian history, for reviewers have both harked back to Tiutchev’s famous dictum,^[58] and hailed Mironov’s situating of Russia in a European continuum.^[59] By a dazzling application of the techniques (especially quantitative) of the new “new social history,” Mironov has both demonstrated a mastery of “western tools” and reasserted a continuity (or at least comfort zone) in Russian scholarship that includes the Soviet era. This continuity has been much harder to establish by deploying the techniques of the post-structuralist linguistic turn in the West, for post-modernism, and specifically cultural history, is treated in Russia as an exotic fruit, or worse, a hegemonic imposition from the outside.^[60]
The laudatory tone of the overall response to A Social History is reflected in the flyer for the awards ceremony sponsored by the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences bestowing its Distinguished Medal upon Mironov in 2005. In its announcement the Academy noted that “his work had been met with broad acclaim, both in Russia where today he is among the most widely cited historians, and abroad… Mironov’s foundational two-volume work A Social History of Imperial Russia, has met especial resonance, both throughout Russia and internationally.”^[61] And A Social History has caught the attention of sociologists and economists, as well as historians. One notable example is former Premier Egor Gaidar, Yeltsin’s first “economic tsar,” who cites Mironov heavily in his recent work on the history of Russian economic relations with the West.^[62] Many shared the sentiments expressed by S. S. Sekirinsky: “A Social History provides a matrix, the modification and expansion of the core concepts of which will be the agenda of future historians.”^[63] At the same time, Russian historians were not hesitant to criticize the volumes. One historian found a profound contradiction between the first volume (on society) which was “pessimistic,” and the second (on the state), which was “optimistic” in its conclusions. A heated discussion took place on Mironov’s interpretation of the impact of geography on Russian history, and even more so on issues of colonization and empire. Some objected vociferously to Mironov’s rejection of Russian “exceptionalism.” Some labeled him a monarchist or a “right-wing Kadet,” or even worse, a Eurocentrist. Critics were incensed by his reductionist treatment of bondage (especially its seemingly undifferentiated application to both noble and serf), his uncritical use of Chaianov’s labor theory, his positive treatment of the economics of serfdom, his treatment of population migration as a “safety valve.” Others disagreed with his criticism of the purported irresponsibility of the Russian intelligentsia; or the argument that the Russian state was essentially law-abiding and its policies in advance of the country; or that Russia after 1905 was evolving into a parliamentary framework, with a nascent civil society; or that in some ways the Bolsheviks turned the clock of history back and in collectivization imposed a “second serfdom.” Some pointed to imprecision or inaccuracy in terminology and concepts.
While generating a lot of characteristically Russian argumentation about grand theory, seemingly ungrounded in the building blocks of empirical research,^[64] A Social History has also stimulated a lot of discussion in Russia of what the sociologist Robert Merton called “middle level generalization,” something that has been missing in the Russian scholarly tradition. In my view, this is noteworthy because it is precisely here, at the middle level generalization,^[65] that the work excels, and consistently rewards close reading. In particular, attention has been focused on his analysis of the Russian family (both size and intrafamilial relations); on demographics and the reproductive cycle; on infanticide; on the productivity of serf labor and viability of serfdom itself; on the growing impact of law upon the autocracy; on the relationship between territorial expansion and economic practices; on town and country relations (and the peasantization of the cities in the late nineteenth century); on the formation of estates, the distribution of wealth, and social mobility; and on standard of living (measured by height of military recruits). It is especially here that the breadth of Mironov’s grounding in several historiographies and remarkable training in methods is brought to bear. Unfortunately, an exploration of these themes would take us far afield here.
In his foreword to the third edition, Mironov addresses his critics and acknowledges the merit of many of the criticisms leveled against his volumes. Most of the shortcomings of his work he attributes to the primitive state of research in certain areas. In his opinion, the dearth of studies of marginal social groups, of mentalité, of internal family relations, of daily life in general, of crime and criminality, even of colonization and borders (“forbidden topics in the Soviet era”), and of civil society, made it difficult to address these topics with a sure hand. He concludes that when he sits down to rewrite his social history of Russia – and this cannot be done until a new monographic literature provides the base for such a rewrite – he will do three things: expand the framework to include marginal populations, voluntary associations, etc; supplement his analysis of the “formal legal” side of law, crime, and statecraft to breathe life into the reality of these spheres (move from the de jure to the de facto through empirical studies of lived experience and legal practices); and, finally, refine the methodological and conceptual base by more rigorous use of sociological conceptions, and “by taking into consideration post-modernist conceptions, and especially the ‘linguistic turn.’”^[66] He acknowledges that work in regional archives in the future will surely modify his “centrist” (in the sense of national rather than regional) approach to Russian history.
Yet what a laundry list of points at issue ignores is the tone of respect, almost awe of Mironov’s scholarship that suffuse most commentaries, the frequent assertions that post-Soviet scholarship on Russia had come of age. But perhaps the most resounding praise can be found on the pages of the prestigious journal Odysseus, founded by renowned historian of medieval Europe, A. Ia. Gurevich, in 1989. At a round-table organized in 2004 by Gurevich,^[67] Europeanist A. B. Kamensky joins virtually all other reviewers in agreeing that “since Kliuchevsky there has been no work of this scope founded on precisely defined scholarly conceptions” and in praise of the “extraordinary grounding in sources and historiography.” Kamensky also finds significance in Mironov’s ability to “carry out a distinct synthesis of Russian (otechestvennye) and foreign scholarship; the work being an attempt to overcome the distance (between two traditions) and establish a common space for scholarship.”^[68]
Others made the same point. As noted above, in acknowledging deficiencies in his work, Mironov pointed to “the general condition of (Russian) historiography,”^[69] as a partial explanation. In response, N. I. Tsimbaev of Moscow University (while commending Mironov for the exhaustive use of not only home-grown, but also foreign scholarship) called Mironov’s criticism of Soviet historical scholarship “harsh,” and “unproven.” Yet his elaboration is most interesting here: “This is a very unexpected comment from an historian whose book, after all, is a summation of the work of several generations of historians as well as an adaptation of the achievements of Russian historical scholarship to the concepts and terms of (in Mironov’s words) ‘the dynamically evolving social science of the West.’”^[70]
Take note: “a summation of the work of several generations” and “an adaptation of the achievements of Russian historical scholarship” to western concepts and terms. In a nutshell, I think this comment explains the resonance of A Social History among Russian historians as a whole and the respectful, even admiring tone of re-views, even those most critical. Tsimbaev and many other reviewers of the volume describe a bold work of synthesis which, while controversial and perhaps flawed, clearly measures up to the rigorous methodological standards of “foreign” scholarship (“after all, his work has been translated into seven languages”).^[71] Moreover, as social history, it does not displace, or reject, Russian (otechestvennaia is the term Tsimbaev uses repeatedly) historical traditions; instead it builds upon and adapts the work of generations of scholars, without whose labor Mironov’s work could never have been “built.”
Mironov’s A Social History normalizes Russian history but also the Russian historical profession. One western reviewer noted that Mironov’s conceptual framework restores continuity to Russian historical development; it also restores continuity to the country’s historical profession. The fact that, as Ransel points out, Russian commentators “do not hesitate” to challenge Mironov on a broad front of issues, including many others not mentioned above, does not alter this picture. The commentary is normalized, organic, and self-confident, based upon a common and continuous historiography, in a comfortable relationship with western scholarship, because an affinity is claimed, and felt, between the social history which is the foundation of this work and the Russian historical tradition. In this collective response, the boundaries between pre-revolutionary, Soviet, and post-Soviet are elided and Russian historiography emerges as both integrated with and distinctive from western scholarship – its peer, and rightfully so.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, a comment on normalcy (normal’nost’^[72]) and the “Enlightenment project” of modernization.^[73] My perspective is that the binary opposition of traditional and modern embodied in modernization theory is of course simplistic and misleading, as is the linear trajectory embedded in it, for reasons that are too familiar to rehearse here.^[74] Yet this may be entirely beside the point. Since 1991, Russian historians, both academic and textbook, have struggled to find a suitable framework for Russian history… which after all “begins” in Kyiv. In the West today, it is a truism among historians that “Russia was a state before it was a nation”^[75]; but then, if the “juridical (statist) school” is no longer suitable, what will the master narrative be? Textbook authors have turned, with some success, to the civilizational approach, but it does not easily transfer to the realm of specialized scholarship.^[76]
The post-modern approach, fundamentally deconstructive, offers no recognizable heuristic framework by which to write a textbook-level historical synthesis of world, empire, or nation. In Mironov’s words, “the post-modern view of the world (depicts reality) as chaotic, lacking links between cause and consequence, without important landmarks – decentralized, disordered, fragmented… to accept post-modernism means to lose an ideal and any hope of achieving it.”^[77] For Russians, who have lived through two decades of chaos and plummeting standards of living, concisely summarized by Perry Anderson as “liberation, depression, expropriation, attrition, demotion [of status in the world]”^[78] such epistemologies offer little comfort, and certainly provide few guidelines for a usable past. As Mironov puts it, “(postmodernism) does not jibe well with Russia’s current attitudes, and… it distracts from the resolution of issues that are important to Russian society.”^[79] Moreover, in many places it is regarded as alien, imposed, connected with western agendas, disconnected from Russian traditions. At the very least, the potential for injured national pride is obvious. I heard forceful confirmation of this at the 2003 AAASS national convention in Toronto. At a session on gender and history in post-Soviet historical scholarship, a speaker, Elena Gapova, spoke of her own efforts to bring gender studies to a Siberian university.^[80] Initially enthusiastic, she had come to the realization that this approach tended to privilege an existing elite with strong western ties in grant competitions. By contrast, it often met with disinterest or even hostility outside the university community, or even in university circles outside Moscow. Thus, she had come to view gender studies in this context as inadvertently perpetuating hegemony rather than fostering emancipation and intellectual growth. We should ponder the fact that the term gendernye is not only awkward and imported to the Russian language, but undecipherable to those who know no foreign language; it has no recognizable word root.^[81] Likewise, much of post-Soviet Russian scholarship has been formulated with an eye to western grant organizations, and a sensitivity to what would “fly” with western academic reviewers. Although in some happy circumstances, Russian scholarly aspirations and western reviewers’ preferences coincide, this “adult supervision”^[82] and need to “talk the talk” in order to win funding inevitably evokes “hidden and public transcripts” in which private and public agendas and feelings don’t often match one another.
Mironov explicitly describes his own approach as modified (through the lens of cultural anthropology) modernization theory, which, he acknowledges, “is out of fashion in the West, but just now being fruitfully employed in Russia.”^[83] Mironov provides a clear trajectory for future research, even a challenge, in the assertion that “the substance of societal modernization in Imperial Russia, as elsewhere, consisted in the genesis of personal identity (lichnost’), of the nuclear, democratic family, of civil society, and of the law-governed state.”
The search for a “usable past,” if not a viable intellectual project in the minds of some, is “an important quality of Mironov’s work, and underscores his “moral or cathartic purpose.”^[84] As the Europeanists at the round-table published in Odysseus also noted, finding a “usable past” is also a vital political task today, essential to the stability and very survival of Russia, and to combat nativistic currents which have emerged in response to Russia’s diminished place in the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even more, the Russian Europeanists argue, if Russia is to become part of the European Union, if Europeans are to think of Russia as part of their realm, Russians must themselves believe this to be true. The modernization framework, with all its deficiencies, is amply broad, inclusive and open-ended to allow Mironov, despite all the contradictions of his interpretation pointed out alike by Russian and western scholars, to present a passionate and patriotic (but not nativistic) vision of Russian history acceptable to both scholarly and lay audiences.^[85]
At the individual level too, there are strong presentist elements to Mironov’s read of Russian history, especially in his depiction of the emergence of civil society, of individualism, and of personal autonomy as measures of progress. These presentist elements can be traced to his own personal biography, to his early years as a scholar whose freedoms were unduly restricted even once he had gained western recognition, and to his generation as a whole, a middle class chafing at the humiliating limits imposed by the state, who had little voice in public affairs and who yearned for a normal life, even if this notion was based upon an “imaginary West.”^[86] From this perspective it is easier to understand the feeling behind the argument that “On the whole, during the Imperial era, Russia successfully underwent societial modernization: first of all, people gained autonomy from the collective, whether it be familiar, communal, corporative, or other… and individuals gained an intrinsic worth.”^[87]
At the same time, it is amply broad, inclusive, and open-ended, allowing him to bring into perspective and analyze, at the middle level of generalization, a rich harvest of developments, themes and issues, to pursue the notion of evolutionary change in the family, in society, and in state building. Mironov fully acknowledges the “schematic” and sometimes reductionist qualities of his relentless effort to fit the evolution of so many dimension of economy, polity and society into the straitjacket of modernization theory, and he notes that asynchonicities (what another school would call “uneven development”) were at the root of many of the formidable social tensions wracking the Russian Empire in the early twentieth century. Mironov argues that a positivist approach still has much to offer us in understanding Russian history; at the same time, he argues that he has inserted insights from cultural anthropology throughout the text, not only in his descriptions of lived experience, but also in his conceptualization of the relationship between state and society.
In short, modernization theory is arguably a very decent heuristic framework that, with all its shortcomings, still has considerable explanatory power. For many in Russia, even those critics who reject Mironov’s efforts to make Russian history a part of European history, this framework allowed the author to deploy an array of methodological tools, and connect them with a native historiographical tradition, and in so doing restore luster to their own past as historians. As Russian Europeanist L. M. Batkin put it in his contribution to Odysseus, “Mironov has given us back our past.”^[88]