Ben Eklof uses his discussion of the contrast between the «polite, if tepid,» reception in the West of Boris Mironov’s A Social History of Imperial Russia and its enthusiastic reception in Russia as an «extraordinary» and «unprecedented» work to illustrate what he perceives as the relationship between knowledge and power. Eklof would have been more accurate in stating his case had he reversed the two terms, for his argument is that the West’s power enables it to influence the shape of knowledge. That relationship, he claims, still unjustly dominates Western and American scholarship on Russia.
Eklof calls it an incongruity that «erudite, distinguished scholars in the Soviet Union were encouraging their best students to look at western monographs to learn about Russian history.» By contrast, American scholars have always played «a secondary, subordinate role» in the study of English, French, and German history – subordinate to scholars native to the lands where those histories unfolded – «and this is how it should be.» No one would contest Eklof’s observation «that the situation in late Soviet historical scholarship was an anomalous one,» but he fails to point out the obvious. In the Soviet Union the advantages enjoyed by native over foreign scholars in the study of a country’s history were negated to a greater or lesser extent by the restrictive ideological and institutional frameworks within which native scholars had to work.
Good Soviet scholars appreciated that Western scholars were free to study and write on whatever topics, and in whatever manner, they chose. They were not simply «bourgeois falsifiers» but were making valuable contributions to the historiography of Russia – contributions that native historians were barred from making, except in rare cases «for the drawer.» If «American scholarship exerted a hegemonic role» (a loaded term which indicates Eklof’s bias) in the late Soviet years and in the post-Soviet era, this was surely due to American scholars’ long head start in enjoying unfettered working conditions. Eklof, however, attributes Americans’ hegemony to the competitions (surely only in the post-Soviet era) for grants from Western sources – competitions which «have fostered an asymmetrical environment» by favoring applicants whose proposals are in line with current Western scholarly fashions. (It may be beside the point to note that Western scholars and graduate students face the very same problem, even if their financial plight is not often as dire as that of their Russian peers.) To the extent that, as Eklof claims, the community formed by historians of Russia is not currently «a republic of letters» but «an empire of letters» with a «built-in hierarchy of knowledge and power,» this situation results much more from the wounds inflicted on Russian historiography by the Soviet regime than it does from any desires of Western scholars. Such wounds do not heal overnight, or even in one generation.
A Social History’s enthusiastic reception in Russia may well be connected with the work’s thesis, with which Eklof agrees, that Russia has been a European country, albeit not a «normal» one, for it had important peculiarities owing to its relative economic, social, and political backwardness. These peculiarities posed obstacles to the country’s modernization which by 1914 were being overcome, but they continued to pose serious problems. Eklof’s only complaint about Mironov’s book is that it is too defensive about Russia’s successes in overcoming these obstacles. In a long footnote, Eklof faults Mironov for dwelling on Russia’s failure, after three centuries of effort, to become a completely modern society like the Western model that both historians accept as the norm. Russia’s failure, Eklof suggests, was no different from that of other European countries to modernize completely. Britain has retained her hereditary monarchy and established church, French politics have been marked by «ceaseless chaos,» and American politics have been «premised on the genocide of American Indians, chattel slavery, and extreme levels of racism.» These examples, I venture to propose, are in quite a different class from the economic, social, and political peculiarities Russia long owed to her non-Western heritage – and in some respects, still owes.
Mironov shares the nineteenth-century Westerners’ view of Russia. In its cursory treatment of the pre-Petrine era, A Social History minimizes the importance of the eight formative centuries before Peter the Great during which Russia, an immediate neighbor of the West, was nevertheless a different, a non-Western, society. The ensuing three centuries of Westernization have been heavily influenced by Russia’s pre-Petrine, non-Western, cultural heritage. Many elements of that heritage are «backward» only if measured by Western standards – standards unique to the West. To establish Western civilization and culture as the universal norm is itself hegemonic. But one goal of A Social History, according to many commentators, is to instill in Russians pride in the normality, i.e., Europeanness, of their nation and its history. Mironov’s quest is for not only a usable past, but a useful one. Russia must therefore be seen as normal, as part of Europe. Eklof regrets that Mironov has not pressed his case more forcefully.
Eklof accurately points to the current plight of historians in Russia: collapsing budgets for universities, libraries, research travel, and subsidies for academic publishing; a decline in the number of titles and the size of print runs of scholarly books and their skyrocketing prices; rising travel costs; limited access outside Moscow and Petersburg to books and to the Internet; woefully inadequate quantities of textbooks for university students; and «the precipitous decline in status and relative standard of living in the academic profession.» Surprisingly, however, he concludes that Russian scholars’ «contact with the West is tenuous and concentrated in a few sites, perhaps even more so than in Soviet times [my emphasis].» Eklof’s memory of the pre-Glasnost’ era has either been shaped by some atypical personal experiences or clouded by the passage of time and nostalgia for his youthful years. That nostalgia, colored by Eklof’s leftist bias, is even more evident in the following assertion of his: «To describe intellectual relations between Russia in [sic] 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.»
Eklof’s principal argument explaining the more positive reception of Mironov’s book in Russia, as compared with its reception in the West, is that the work «normalizes Russian history but also the Russian historical profession.» Russian historians – at least some of them – recognize in A Social History an affinity «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.» In short, according to Eklof, Mironov’s book, whatever its shortcomings, has struck an effective blow against Western historians’ hegemonic role in the study of Russian history. If this is true, the book’s tepid reception in the West, in contrast to its enthusiastic reception in Russia, clearly makes sense. Quod erat explicandum.