Sometime in 1989 (if I remember correctly), and shortly after chastising me roundly for lending credibility to Soviet historiography by collaborating with the social historian Vladimir Drobizhev on an article for Istoriia SSSR (this I remember quite clearly), my friend Boris Mironov took me to a special screening of a new documentary film about Boris Yeltsin, presented by the Raikom of a local Leningrad Soviet. The film showed Yeltsin sitting in thought at his kitchen table, taking the metro to work, gazing out his kitchen window, greeting ordinary people on the street, thinking again in his modest apartment, chin on hand, dreaming and practicing his visions of a democratic Russia. At the end of the screening the local party big shot invited the discussion promised in the film’s announcement. A good many hands in the crowded auditorium shot up, but when the first questioner asked about the party’s position on the processes of Soviet democratization, he was told that his question was out of order. The discussion was to be only about the artistic merits of the film, not its political implications. Like many others, I was startled. Boris was incensed. We left along with everyone else after a few minutes of acrimonious shouting, Mironov muttering under and over his breath about the idiots still ruling the country.
As with our reaction to the Yeltsin documentary, Ben Eklof wants to turn the discussion of Mironov’s remarkable work away from its content to the implications of its reception. His provocative (if somewhat dated) observations rightly cast the publication of Sotsial’naia Istoria as a signal documentary event in post-Soviet historiography. But he wants to position its audience reaction, especially in the United States, in «what can almost be described as a post-colonial setting,» (306) as evidence of the «imperial» yardsticks by which many Western scholars still measure even a path-breaking study like Mironov’s and find it wanting. The not so «hidden transcripts» of this response are condescending, excessively critical, unreflective of their hegemonic implications, and in contrast to L. M. Batkin and other Russian historians, blind to Mironov’s singular achievement [podvig]: «[giving] us back our past» (307, 317). In Eklof’s view, all of this supports his larger point: that the «hegemonic role» American scholarship on Russia exerted anomalously in the last Soviet period «has been perpetuated in the post-Soviet era,» reproducing an attitudinal asymmetry that continues to inhibit a mutual «republic of letters» (292).
Condescension, I’m afraid, is an affect of academic discourse everywhere. (Once when I was worrying before presenting a doklad about whether my poor Russian would be adequate to the task, a close friend reassured me that none of his colleagues thought Americans really knew anything about Russian history anyway so I shouldn’t be concerned.) So is the absence of «critical self-examination among Western historians on the process of judging» both themselves and others, as Eklof puts it nicely (290). But there are larger issues here that concern not so much a «colonial» cultural divide as the nature of history itself and its uses, both in scholarly and socio-political terms. My own points of entry into the discussion are consequently not the contrasting ways Mironov’s work was received or the implications of this in terms of our broad scholarly collective, but the more important differences between scholarly description, representation, and interpretation, on the one hand, and the complex questions of historical understanding and its uses – the issue of «usable pasts» – on the other. And my points of departure are not Eklof’s impressive familiarity with post-Soviet public and higher historical education. They are instead the impressions I’ve gained struggling along with colleagues at the European University and the Institute of History in St. Petersburg over issues of curriculum and conceptualization; working with leading figures in history and humanities from Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine in awarding research grants through the ACLS-Carnegie Humanities Program; and seeing firsthand the determined efforts of these scholars to create in a new International Association of Humanists (Mezhdunarodnaia Assotsiatsiia Gumanitariev – MAG) the kind of scholarly republic in which lively discussion and constructive intellectual conflict can help preserve independent thinking, teaching, and research. However unsystematic, my own experiences have led me to positions quite different from those Ben Eklof has so thoughtfully presented.
Let me start with the first question my colleague Eklof poses himself: why was it that erudite, distinguished scholars in the Soviet Union encouraged their best students to look at Western monographs to learn about Russian history (291)? Eklof takes this «privileging» of English-language works as the underpinning of an American scholarly hegemony, one that has been perpetuated in the post-Soviet period. To my mind, however, the «privileging» was not about learning Russian history from Western scholars, but about interpreting its patterns and processes and understanding its complex and historiographically contentious lines of development. It is fair to say, I think, that while Zakharova’s students, like those of Zaionchkovskii, Diakin, Anan’ich, Ganelin, Anfimov, and other eminent scholars, did not learn much substantive Russian history from Western scholars on topics they were free themselves to pursue, the best among them, as well as the best historians at every level, understandably chafed against restrictions on the topics they could explore and the interpretative frameworks they were forced to adopt. (I was momentarily stunned myself in 1967 when I picked up the new issue of Istoriia SSSR in the pervyi zal of the Leninka and found my own early work on the Kadets sharply criticized by a first rate Soviet scholar, Natalia Dumova, who later openly deplored the position she felt she had needed to take in order to continue her own work on the topic.) And all of us, Soviet and non-Soviet alike, understood the academic politics embedded in obligatory and ideologically loaded citations. What distinguished fine scholars like Zakharova from most of their peers was that they recognized the importance of interpretive freedom in the writing of good history.
Did this mean that American scholarship «exerted a hegemonic role,» as Eklof suggests (292, my italics)? Certainly not in my view if one means by «exerted» that Americans pressed their interpretations on their Soviet colleagues in the ways imperial understandings were pressed on colonial perceptions of power, race, social values and relations, or the nature of economic transactions. Perhaps yes, however, if one substitutes «played» for «exerted,» since the best Soviet historians understood the deep intellectual satisfactions that could come from writing and thinking as one pleased. With Eduard Burdzhalov, Viktor Danilov, and others silenced after the Khrushchevian thaw, their bi-weekly trips to the Institute being a perpetual ritual of humiliation until glasnost, even occasional encounters with Western studies (and, more rarely, Western scholars) also stirred painful experience and suppressed hopes. Even here, though, certain new interpretative currents managed to struggle against the grain, such as those about mnogoukladnost’ among agrarian historians in the 1970s (on which Mironov initially cut his teeth), or the contesting positions of Diakin, Avrekh, and Anfimov on the Stolypinshchina and the Duma system. As far as archival research was concerned, however, both in terms of access to materials and the freedom to use them, Western scholarship was almost always in a subordinated position, so much so that Richard Pipes publicly deplored the very efforts of American students to rely on Soviet archives since there was no vouchsafing the kinds of materials they could see.^[1] (In one sense Pipes was not wrong, of course, since Soviet archivists were instructed not to let Westerners see any dela that Soviet historians had not already examined. During a very informal and well-lubricated lunch in a GARF khranilishche a few years ago my own stories of how Americans tried to label their projects in ways to assure maximum archival access (mine was «krizis verkhov») were countered by tales of how these rubrics were «deconstructed» by Soviet archivists in order to provide just enough good material to «keep the Westerners happy».)
What was perpetuated after 1991 was thus not a relationship of Western scholarly domination, as I understand it, but something rather different: the contention between appreciation of the value of historical theory and interpretation as opposed to the value of grounded empirical representation. It is hardly surprising that a move toward Western theorization was taken up by Mironov, Boris Kolonitskii, Mikhail Krom, Sergei Iarov, Ekaterina Pravilova, Vladimir Buldakov and other younger scholars exposed by Zakharova and others to Western historiography, nor that their sometimes overly enthusiastic embrace was welcomed by Western grant providers as part a mutual transformational effort. (In my own experience, the effort to find just the right theoretical buzz words was characteristic of as many American grant applications after the various theoretical «turns» of the 1980s and 1990s as it was of post-Soviet applications, with comparable misspellings of «Foucauldian».) Indeed, one only has to look at the achievements of the whole Ab Imperio collective to appreciate how conceptually sophisticated post-Soviet scholarship rapidly became. Like its American cousin Kritika, the journal itself took a lead in raising new conceptual issues as well as critically probing older ones (although somewhat oddly, given Eklof’s emphasis on the improprieties of Western scholarly domination, only Kritika is referenced in his footnotes). Here and elsewhere a new generation of historians clearly made its mark not only as accomplished aspiranty in Western as well as Russian universities and institutes, but as scholars and teachers in both places as well.
It is also hardly surprising, however, that many accomplished scholars both in Russia and the West resisted what an acerbic colleague of mine at Michigan publicly lamented as «whoring after theory,» since some of its trendiest forms seemed to threaten the very science of empirical, archivally based, research. To the distinguished American Europeanist Gertrude Himmelfarb, for example, the «distortions» of postmodernism were a politicized «flight from fact»: «Postmodernism, even more overtly than Marxism,» she wrote just after the collapse of the Soviet Union «makes of history – the writing of history rather than the ‘praxis’ of history – an instrument in the struggle for power. The new historian, like the proletariat of old, is the bearer of the race/class/gender ‘war’ – or rather ‘wars’,» a position no serious historian could now tolerate.^[2]
Among Russian scholars, the defense of empiricism was particularly acute in St. Petersburg during the 1990s, where theoretically trendiness seemed to challenge the respected traditions of the St. Petersburg «Historical School;» and also among medievalists and early modernists like the distinguished Moscow scholar Alexander Kamenskii to whom Eklof refers. At the time, this was not so much because of the nature of theory per se, as Mironov’s own work and the subsequent development of the profession more broadly would reveal, but because the most significant achievements of archival scholarship during the Soviet period depended on leaving theoretical questions to the Institute politicians, selecting topics from the medieval, early modern, and imperial periods that were more or less theoretically «neutral,» and concentrating as closely as possible on the sources. In many ways, the archive was the serious (scientific) Soviet historian’s place of refuge and scholarly integrity.
While the importance of this was not particularly well recognized by the Western foundations that hoped to transform social and humanistic scholarship in the post-Soviet region, my impression is that almost all of even the most theoretical minded younger historians continued to revere – and work with – their distinguished «traditionalist» elders. The conflicts that occurred at many international colloquia in the 1990s and early 2000s were about the historical importance of new approaches and concepts, not in any way about the unimportance of archival research. In my own experience, the give and take was for the most part collegial, respectful, and mutual, even if often quite heated. At a noisy history faculty meeting I attended in the late 1990s at the European University in St. Petersburg, the determination of the new Chair, Mikhail Krom, and other younger faculty to introduce historical anthropology into the curriculum and to add courses on gender history and oral history to those on source analysis, historiography, and more traditional subject offerings was passionately resisted by Krom’s own mentor (and predecessor as Chair), Viktor Paneyakh and other seniors who were equally determined to stem the curriculum’s «Americanization.» Yet the proof here and elsewhere in post-Soviet Russia was soon apparent in the remarkable «pudding» of dissertations these otsy i deti jointly and cooperatively produced. Accommodation to new conceptualization was not its embrace. Nor did it in my view resemble a «colonial» or «post-colonial» subordination to Western intellectual hegemony. «Catching up» was not a matter of «rising» to Western analytical levels, but of digesting different kinds of learning in history. The same was true in all fields of enquiry both within and outside the humanities and social sciences that had not been immune from Soviet hegemonic theory. In other words, it reflected the willingness of serious, committed, and accomplished scholars at all levels of a destabilized academic hierarchy to let well-reasoned and carefully researched arguments speak for themselves.
Which brings me to Boris Mironov and his Sotsial’naia Istoriia – a tour de force without question and a remarkable accomplishment of methodologically sophisticated research that is rich in unconvincing interpretations, at least to me. While my task here is not to further discussion of the work itself, let me say that I think Louise McReynolds has it right when she calls it «one of the most useful histories of the imperial period to appear in any language.» (297) This is so not only because Mironov presents so much interesting and important material on so many social subjects, but also because serious historians of Russia simply cannot avoid grappling with his overarching argument. As Eklof details so well, there is little question that a singular achievement of Mironov’s effort has been to rekindle the great debates about the course of imperial Russian development, along with their Vekhi subtexts about the historical roles of individuals, the intelligentsia, and social groups more broadly.
Since these were so brutally repressed after 1917, and with such tragic personal and collective consequences, their rekindling also necessarily evokes an even more difficult set of considerations about the kinds of accommodation Soviet individuals and social groups themselves made to these losses, including historians. And since rekindling creates heat, even some of the most severe criticism Mironov’s work has received is not in my view so much the consequence of Western «imperial» condescension as Mironov’s own accomplishment in raising the discussion to a level where criticism could be offered without fear that it was contributing in any way to the polarizations of cold war politics. Certainly as Eklof insists, echoing McReynolds, Mironov deserves acclaim, even «far more acclaim for what he has accomplished than [criticism] for what he left aside.» (298) But wouldn’t it actually be condescending to lavish the acclaim without the criticism? Should Mironov’s colleagues treat his effort, after all, any less critically within or outside Russia than one should treat other efforts to build a «grand» synthetic narrative, like for examples the Soviet one?
It is in these terms, I think, that Eklof himself is a bit off base in his comments about the criticism of Mironov for not being sufficiently familiar with Western writing on European history. Whether he is (Zelnik) or is not (Okenfuss) matters not because of «in-built hierarchies of knowledge and power, a remarkable conceit» in presuming he should be, as Eklof suggests, but because the European character of imperial Russian development is the lynchpin of Mironov’s interpretative narrative. As he argues both in Sotsial’naia Istoriia and again in his recent study of biological changes in the Russian population from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, Russia changed for the better as a «European» country throughout the imperial period in correspondence with the changes occurring elsewhere in Europe, both in the broader sense of contemporary cultural demands and tastes as well as in what Mironov’s understands as the more particular senses of industrialization, urbanization, the development of private property and market relations, the democratization of civil society, a law abiding regime, and biological statistics (height, health, social welfare indices, birth and death rates). If historians are to be persuaded that the progressive phenomena of modernization encompassed all of Europe, presumably from the Urals to the Atlantic, such assertions require not only Mironov’s demonstrated erudition about Russian social and socio-political characteristics but a full understanding of the European points of comparison as well, something much harder for Russianists anywhere, in the U.S. or the Russian Federation, to come by.
What I find problematic about the need for convincing comparisons here, however, is not so much the difficulties of doing so, nor even the unavoidable selectivity in what does and does not warrant comparison in order to make the case for Russia’s European nature. Given the revolutionary unrest before, during, and especially at the end of World War I in Italy, Germany, Spain, Hungary, France, and elsewhere, for example, one might make an equally comparative argument that imperial Russia endured similar kinds of social and socio-economic stresses as industrializing Western European countries, struggled reluctantly with their necessary structural transformations, suffered comparatively incompetent state administrations at critical moments, failed to find sufficient civil strength or liberal democratic commitment to confront pressing issues of social well-being, blundered for similar reasons into the unprecedented miasma of deprivation and loss after 1914, and escaped German, Spanish, and Italian fascism only by virtue of its Soviet authoritarian alternative. While such an argument would be equally reductionist, it would also have to be demonstrated by careful comparisons and comprehensive understanding of multiple literatures. I suspect, however, that the reception such an alternative comparative narrative would produce would be conditioned not by its simplifications, but by the ways it acts to restore the Soviet «aberration» within the broader and now politically incorrect teleologies of pan-European socio-political struggle, structural (path) determinism, authoritarian impulse, and dialectical change.
While this is hardly the place to argue the plausibility of such an alternative interpretation, I suggest it to point to an essential, and to my mind problematic aspect of Mironov’s «normalization» of Russian history (and the Russian historical profession) that Eklof seems to applaud (311). One can appreciate that for some, Mironov’s interpretative teleology has given Russians «back our past». I suspect, however, that this is not because his prodigious research has unearthed a trove of new social data, which it certainly has, nor because Mironov has used sophisticated econometric methodologies and even some economic anthropology to arrive at his many fascinating observations. (His impressive mastery of quantitative analysis in the Annales tradition, by the way, is not entirely a mastery of «western tools», as Eklof suggests (307), since quantitative study had firm roots in Leonid Borodkin’s Moscow University laboratory and elsewhere, and played a role in several important Soviet historiographical debates.) Rather, it seems likely to relate to the way Mironov’s progressive, liberal, and normalizing Russian past links the naturalizations of post-soviet rule to those of the imperial period, legitimizing its social values and political norms through their ostensible historical antecedents, and also because it implicitly relegates the whole Soviet period to something resembling a catastrophic historical anomaly. As such, the «Russia» in Soviet Russia can only be constructed as a tragic, historical victim. The tsarist socio-political system is relieved of any historical responsibility, path-determined or otherwise, and so, more importantly, is the broader, victimized, Soviet society itself, since Russia’s natural trajectory, its «normal» course, was progressively European. The past Mironov’s narrative constructs is thus exceptionally «usable» for the purposes of legitimizing the often rather idiosyncratic forms of Russian «Europeanization,» whatever their actual correlations in Western European countries in terms of political institutions, social relations, or socio-cultural values and norms. It thus acts as well to relieve contemporary social groups and individuals of the need for any real sense of historical understanding about what they have done to themselves.
As we know, the linkages between the idealization of «normative,» progressive European pasts and the expiation of twentieth-century historical «guilt» have been the source of great controversy in Western European historiography itself.^[3] Comparisons in this regard between post-war Germany and contemporary Russia might therefore also be the source of much additional discussion, although it is not obvious to my (non-Russian?) sensibilities that «guilt» or «blame» has much redemptive value beyond the levels of historical awareness and understanding. As Dina Khapaeva argued powerfully in an Annales piece over a decade ago, however, the idealized image of the West born by many members of the post-Soviet intelligentsia «is a vague representation of a society free of all faults of the Soviet system and thus an incarnation of moral and aesthetic perfection as well as human relationship (rapports)… [in which] the ideal image of the West has served as the foundation not solely for their own socio-cultural identity, but also for their professional identity, those in sum who symbolize the Westernization of Russia.»^[4] For Khapaeva and others, believing «the West will be tomorrow» is actually a turn away from history, one that serves (and has served) to occlude any number of post-Soviet institutional and ethical distortions and to encourage historical «forgetting.» While this is certainly not Mironov’s intention, it may well be the consequence of his narrative becoming, as Eklof seems to hope, the «suitable framework» for Russian history that academic and textbook historians have both been struggling to find (312).
This is also not the place to argue about what was and was not «normal» or aberrational about the 1917 revolution and its aftermaths, and even less about Eklof’s suggestions that if Russia is to become part of the European Union, Russians and Europeans both should think of Russia as part of the European realm, and that the framework of progressive modernization («with all of its deficiencies») should be «amply broad, inclusive and open-ended to allow Mironov, despite all of the contradictions of his interpretation… to present a passionate and patriotic (but not nativistic) vision of Russian history acceptable to both scholarly and lay audiences» (315). Suffice it simply to note my unease with the historical naturalization of the kinds of social inequities, institutionalized political and socio-economic stratifications, and even the ahistorical or anti-historical thinking that seems to characterize so much of contemporary Russian society, as it did the late imperial period. One thing we can all recognize about the Soviet epoch, moreover, is that it was one in which history itself deeply mattered for a change, although not for the best of reasons. Indeed, it is not too much to say that since history is always about the present and future as well as really and not-so-really lived pasts, not least among the reasons for its collapse was the ways in which the Soviet regime’s own legitimizing grand narrative ceased to be a convincing set of arguments about what was and what would be.
But do we really need «grand narratives» at all to make the past «usable?» Doesn’t the very effort to find «usable pasts» through grand narratives reflect Soviet historiographical practice in a worrisome way? Eklof asks «what will the master narrative be?» (312), and echoes the Odysseus roundtable contributions in suggesting that (regardless of its content?) it is «essential to the stability and very survival of Russia» (314) and a path to «national healing» (297). Can any Russian past be «usable» in progressive, liberalizing ways if it fails to provide, or at least try to provide, an adequate historical understanding of the horrors as well as the strengths of the Soviet regime, its magnetic attractions as well as repulsions, its social and cultural complicities as well as resistances, including the internalization of its «great story?» Would not it perhaps be better in Russia’s current complex process of transition from what we should not obscure to what we cannot clearly perceive for there to be a multiplicity of contending narratives whose very plurality might itself mark social stabilization as well as healthy, healing, scholarly growth? One does not have to embrace a postmodern suspicion of «natural» progress to see advantages in the fact that at least until now, post-Soviet Russia has avoided embracing any singular «great story,» any one embracing narrative with its friends and foes, victors and vanquished, heroes and villains, and the casting of historical blame. One can lament or not the canonization of Nicholas, Lenin’s continued place of prominence in Red Square, or the rise and fall of democratic (or not so democratic) socialism, just as one can follow or not Mironov’s lead in stressing the progressive teleology underlying the virtues or failures of tsarism. All of this interpretative pluralism would seem to be a very good thing. It would certainly even be more so if Russia’s current, less-than-fully «European» regime was not itself so resistant to full public discussion about its «European» or «non-European» practices, institutions, and official values.
Given this tenuous state of contemporary Russian civil society and open discourse, however, with all of its worrisome historical implications, one has, finally, to agree fully with Eklof on the peril of «fragmented, disjointed, and only episodically maintained» professional contacts that are indeed «so essential to the professional practice of history» (303), and on the importance of strengthening a broad and mutually committed community of humanistic regional scholars. The Mezhdunarodnaia Assotsiatsiia Gumanitariev organized recently after a series of meetings in Russia and Ukraine and with an office in Kharkiv, is a vital step in this direction, if it can only find the means to survive. (One of its accomplishments that should assuage Eklof’s concerns about the process of awarding Western-funded research grants is its assumption of full responsibility for administering the last two years of the Carnegie-ACLS Humanities Project competition. In April 2008, its Selection Committee awarded some 40 individual and 16 publication grants to historians and others in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine from more than 250 applications using precisely the kind of criteria employed by its Western predecessors. Hopefully, the resources will be found to allow this urgent project to continue when the Carnegie funds expire.) Equally vital, of course, is Ab Imperio itself, the collective as well as the journal, which is again providing precisely the kind of open forum good scholarship needs to survive. Russia and its history may not be fully understandable by the mind alone, to rephrase Eklof’s reference to Tiutchev, but forceful, constructive, and respectful discussion of scholarly efforts like Mironov’s and Eklof’s in forums like this one are the only good way to try.