I read Ben Eklof’s discussion of the divergent receptions of Boris Mironov’s Social History with great interest. I have known Ben since I was a graduate student at Indiana University; even though I was pursuing a graduate degree in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the time, I enrolled in Russian history courses as well, including a readings course in mostly nineteenth-century Russian intellectual history with Ben and a colloquium on Soviet history with Alexander Rabinowitch. Eventually I left Indiana and graduate study of Russian literature for a doctoral program in history (and humanities) at Stanford University, but stayed in touch with Ben (and Alex) over the subsequent years. Both of them continued to support me as I developed a dissertation topic and through the long process of grant applications and eventually job applications. Because my own research interests focused on the Red Army as a school, I benefited greatly from Ben’s contributions to the history of Russian education.
By way of responding to some of the substance of Ben’s reflections, I want to situate my own experience and intellectual and professional evolution as background. Although I agree with much if not most of Ben’s sober diagnosis of the asymmetry in relations between Russian and Western historians of Russia, my own experience leaves me with some different «readings» of the post-Soviet situation. Whereas Ben is widely known and respected as an historian of nineteenth-century social and cultural history, I started in a later period, the 1920s, and Soviet history more generally, and thematically have focused on cultural and social history in the context of civil-military relations. Since then I have moved somewhat backward chronologically to the late imperial period, but also to a new interest in empire and nation in modern Russian history. I have tried to retool in this new area by focusing on Ukraine and Russia in their historically dynamic relations and have had the pleasure of working in Ukraine and with Ukrainian scholars, in addition to my continued contacts with Russian colleagues and institutions. I hope that this more recent experience has helped me to think more comparatively and to reflect on what Ukrainian and Russian scholars (and their colleagues in the West who study their countries) share in common, as well as what has been different in their experiences.
Another important arena in which I have been involved has been area studies. Indeed, during my twenty-plus years at Columbia, my identity and professional associations were generally more closely tied to the area studies community (Harriman Institute, Slavic Department) than to the history department, which was my formal home (and where I was engaged over the years on search committees, as director of graduate studies, and, finally, as chair during my last year in New York). Much like Ben, too, I served on several interdisciplinary committees in the field of Russian and East European studies, including: the Kennan Institute’s advisory board; the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research; the Social Science Research Council; and others. Also like Ben, I have been involved in many Russian-American (and Ukrainian-American) collaborations and seminars, including summer schools in Russia and Ukraine, where my fellow instructors and the «students,» beginning college teachers looking to retool in some new area, included Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Belarusians, and Lithuanians. Although I have had wonderful experiences living and researching in Russia and Ukraine, I never had the sustained, multi-year experience that Ben and a few others did working at Progress, nor did I marry a Russian or Ukrainian. Other differences in our experiences will also likely emerge in the course of what follows.
Much of what Ben describes in his thoughtful and sensitive piece is hard to deny. For all the decline in the fortunes of American and European historians of Russia (according to a recent issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, historians’ salaries have slipped from slightly above the average for university professors to significantly below that average in the last couple decades), partly due to the end of the Soviet Union and the related reduction of the once considerable government and foundation largesse that funded much historical research, still the drastic decline in salaries and job security for our colleagues in Russia and other post-Soviet states is of an altogether different magnitude. It is a great irony that the same set of transformations that opened up the historical profession and the archives to greater possibilities for research also decimated the professional communities that were most responsible for rethinking and rewriting history.
No doubt many western historians treat their Russian and Ukrainian colleagues with some degrees of arrogance and even condescension, but in my experience there has also been a great deal of respect and genuine collaboration in the past dozen or more years. I suspect it helped that one of the pathbreaking living scholars of the field of imperial history was neither a Russian nor an American or British historian, but Andreas Kappeler. Kappeler, Swiss-born and educated, who spent most of his career in the German academic world, now occupies the senior position for Russian and East European history in Vienna. Kappeler’s work was translated into Russian several years ahead of its English version, so Russian colleagues had absorbed much of Kappeler’s new paradigms for writing about and teaching Russian imperial history before many of their American colleagues who didn’t read German.^[1] Because Kappeler’s interests extended from Russian-Tatar relations to Ukrainian history and to an overarching concern with Russian nation and identity, he bridges several communities on both sides of the Atlantic. Kappeler was the main European influence on my own thinking, but, thanks to a year at the Free University of Berlin as a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, a month at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and conferences over the years in Britain, Ireland, Italy, Austria, and elsewhere, much of this involved with aspects of imperial and, increasingly, comparative imperial history, I felt more often than not that I was learning along with my Russian and Ukrainian colleagues, and that we all started with some common Russian and Ukrainian «classics» as well.
In the field of imperial history and the «discovery» of the nationalities question, Russian, Ukrainian and western historians have been able to learn a great deal from one another because the subfield is relatively new (or at least re-discovered). A good indicator of this new atmosphere is the appearance of two journals, Ab Imperio in Russia and Kritika in the United States, that self-consciously cross borders, national and disciplinary. I have been proud to be associated with both these enterprises, as I have been with the collective that produced The Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700-1930^[2] (reviewed recently on the pages of this journal). That volume brought together young Russian, British, and American scholars who had a common base of knowledge in the Russian and western classics, but also were contributing their own original insights from newly accessible archives in the capitals and regions. Similarly, the multi-year collaboration with German, Canadian, and American funding that produced Culture, Nation, and Identity: The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter, 1600-1945,^[3] brought together Russian and Ukrainian colleagues with European and North American counterparts for a post-Soviet attempt at historical reconciliation between Russia and Ukraine. Both of these projects had their successors or, in some cases, predecessors, in conferences and volumes in Russia and Ukraine. Again, I think the relative novelty of approaching Russia as multinational and multiconfessional empire had a lot to do with what success was achieved in forging genuine intellectual links between Russian, Ukrainian, and western colleagues, despite often heated debates between the «Russian» and «Ukrainian» sides during the four conferences convened in New York City and Cologne, Germany.
The imperial/national thematic also helps explain the dynamism of such institutions as the Association for the Study of Nationalities, in which historians are a leading but not dominant group in what is a truly inter-disciplinary, inter-generational, and international collective. This is made clearer when we compare the ASN to an older, more institutionalized American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, which has been trying for many years now to involve more scholars from «the region» and more social scientists as well (and where I have just been elected vice-president/president-elect). The membership of the AAASS has, significantly, recently voted to change the name of the organization to: Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, thereby removing the «American» adjective and identification, but also acknowledging a region that has more than «Slavic» nations and communities within its boundaries. The presence of ever larger numbers of scholars from Europe, including Eastern Europe and Russia, as well as delegations from Japan and other countries, has begun to realize the aim of the Association’s leadership for greater «internationalization.»
I’d like to touch on my other comparative experience a bit now: the evolution of area studies since the end of the Soviet Union. History, in this case, has a mixed but relatively more positive record when compared with, especially, our colleagues in the social sciences. Both my experience in Russia and Ukraine as well as service on many interdisciplinary committees in the US and Russia left me relieved that my chosen field was history and not economics or, in particular, political science. While it is true that those fields, at least in their western understanding of the disciplines, did not exist in Soviet academic structures, I think the phenomenon of parachuting of «experts» into the former Soviet intellectual and policy-making space had much more wrenching effects in those two fields than in history. Western economists and political scientists imposed their paradigms and concepts with virtual impunity and have to a large degree recreated Russian and Ukrainian versions of rational choice schools in their image. The result has not been methodological diversity and pluralism in these fields, but the hegemony of the current quantitative, «scientistic» models shaped in imitation of a certain kind of late twentieth-century American economics. Languages and cultures have been virtually ignored, in part because they are not reducible to equations. Sociologists and anthropologists were far less colonizing; Soviet sociology, though constrained by campaigns of ideological purity and censorship, nonetheless had produced a respectable set of schools in major universities and research institutes that were able to make a rapid transition to new conditions. Western anthropology, especially cultural anthropologists, quickly judged Soviet «ethnography» to be a backward discipline in need of «internationalizing,» meaning in part at least the adoption of western theoretical models and language. Historians, it seems to me, were closer to colleagues in literature departments in their ability to establish relations of greater intellectual equality with Russian and Ukrainian counterparts.
In part this has to do with one of the issues that Ben raises in his piece, the matter of «restoring continuities» in national traditions. In both Russia and Ukraine, the legacy of the «fathers» of national historiographies had been challenged, distorted, or banned during the Soviet period. The legacies of Sergei Soloviev, Vasilii Kliuchevskii, Sergei Platonov, and other Russian historians, as well as Myhailo Hrushevsky,Viacheslav Lypynsky and other Ukrainian historians, were preserved in the West and helped shape several generations of American and European scholars of these two national histories. I, for one, was trained both at Indiana and at Stanford, to have respect for the work of our Soviet colleagues, above all Petr Zaionchkovskii, whose collected works I read in seminars with Terence Emmons, who considered himself a student of the Moscow historian. Although I never had a chance to meet Petr Andreevich (he died during my IREX year in Russia), I have felt privileged to have met Boris Ananich, Rafael Ganelin, Larissa Zakharova (for the imperial period), and Viktor Danilov and Albert Nenarokov (for the twentieth century), just to name a few important «teachers» of my generation. The writing of imperial history, of course, suffered relatively less than the Soviet period, which was much more constrained by ideological controls and very limited archival access for Russian and Ukrainian historians in their own countries; hence, many of the «great questions» of the twentieth century were debated outside the Soviet Union and without the benefit of «normal» archival access or «normal» contact with Soviet colleagues. But even during my training in Soviet history at Indiana, Alex Rabinowitch had us read Soviet historians on the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, the Civil War, and NEP, and, once again, my work was shaped in part as a response to these works as it was to their equivalents written by Western historians.
Once Russian and Ukrainian historians were able to start entering the archives and without the communist party censors approving, revising or banning their work, the gap between western and post-Soviet scholars diminished considerably. My sense is that this difference among the social science and humanities disciplines goes some way to help explain the very different experiences of historians in the post-Soviet period from their colleagues in most of the other social sciences. In short, what we in the west were «bringing» to Russia and Ukraine was considerably less «foreign,» or at least was possible to be perceived as less «foreign» than our colleagues in economics and political science, to take the extreme case. Even our colleagues in literature departments could appear as more foreign than historians in their fascination with «theory» that was not part of any «restored continuity» except in the remarkable cases of Mikhail Bakhtin and the Tartu School of semiotics. Other theories that held sway in most literature departments (and not just Russian and Slavic ones) were sometimes used by western scholars to dismiss the value of their Russian and Ukrainian colleagues. History, while not immune from theoretical obsessions, has been generally less self-consciously monomaniacal on that score. Indeed, one of the most influential recent American works in imperial history, that of my former Columbia colleague and co-teacher Richard Wortman, was significantly shaped by the Tartu school of semiotics, particularly the work of Iurii Lotman, Boris Uspenskii, and Viktor Zhivov.^[4]
Of course, all has not been a picture of harmony and mutual respect in my experience, even in the historical field. During my brief tenure as president of the International Association for Ukrainian Studies (I was elected in Chernivtsi in 2002 and presided over the next international congress in Donets’k in 2005), I found myself at the center of multiple intellectual, institutional and political battles. One was between the Soviet-trained historians in Ukraine and their diaspora counterparts, mostly from the US, Canada, and Great Britain. Among the major accomplishments of the diaspora academy have been the rapid reintroduction to contemporary Ukraine of the major rival paradigms of national history, those of Hrushevsky and Lypynsky, together with the financial support for the translation of several classics of European historiography into Ukrainian; moreover, particularly Canadian and US-based Ukrainian academic institutions subsidized the research visits of dozens, if not hundreds by now, of Ukrainian scholars in all periods, which exposed the Ukrainian historians to the norms of Anglo-American historical practice and the vast libraries of modern Ukrainian scholarship. (Germany also welcomed Ukrainian scholars, but largely without direct ties to the Ukrainian diaspora.) Still, this academic hospitality went together with a condescension and even suspicion of Soviet-trained scholars, which had its origins in long periods of the Soviet «struggle with bourgeois historiography» and its counterpart in the West. (Both Serhy Yekelchyk, currently at the University of Victoria, and Serhy Plohy, currently the holder of the Myhailo Hrushevsky Chair at Harvard, have told me stories of how they were treated with some hostility when they first arrived in the West and often much later, not only by diaspora historians but by their North American colleagues in other fields of history.)
And it would be remiss also not to forget the condescension of many Russian and Ukrainian historians toward their colleagues in the West – a condescension that might sometimes be justified by the inexperience and relatively brief archival research stays that shape the scholarship of many Western historians, but is I think almost as often grounded in a «faith» that only Russians can «understand» Russian history and only Ukrainians can really understand Ukrainian history, bringing us back to that often misunderstood quotation from Fedor Tiutchev that Ben starts his essay with: «Russia cannot be understood,» but most certainly not by foreigners. Another «struggle» I have been often at the center of has been the Russian-Ukrainian battles over the past. On the one hand, many of my colleagues in Russian history, both in Russia and in the West, have viewed my own turn to an interest in Ukrainian history with great skepticism; I have been called, half-jokingly, a Mazepist and a Petliurist (not yet a Banderite!). In my view, a familiarity with Ukrainian history, among other things, has made me a better historian of Russia, since I now have a comparative framework for several periods, and at least some sense of regional variations in the vast territory of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. On the other hand, much of the diaspora-influenced new historiography (and its political impact through a series of new commemorations and monuments) in Ukraine has been written within a largely anti-Russian paradigm, much less so with an anti-Polish worldview. Although many of my colleagues and friends in Russia have a rather complex understanding of Russian imperial and national identities, I would venture that most Russian historians are closer to a position of national imperialism that has its most immediate roots in Stalin-era historiography (but goes back to early nineteenth century origins) and understand much of what they read or hear about in Ukraine to be part of a campaign to rewrite the history of Ukraine so that it is as distinctive from Russian historical processes and developments as possible. Many Ukrainian historians, too, especially those who were fundamentally shaped by Soviet-era paradigms of «friendship of peoples» and «two Slavic brothers» remain very resistant to any «nationalist deviations,» but above all those that make Russia into an historical enemy.
My first experience of the emotionally charged nature of these issues came actually in Kazan’ many years ago, when a joint American-Russian-Tatar conference explored issues of empire, nation, religion, and others over a ten-day period. At some point, a young Tatar member of the Tatar Academy of Sciences rose to reply to a call by the Russian liberal historian Natalia Pirumova for more civil dialogue between Russian and Tatar participants with the following, «when I hear any reference to the old slogan of friendship of peoples, I want to take out a machine-gun and mow everyone down!» This caused quite a stir in the audience; in the end, Boris Ananich and I were asked to summarize the meetings with some effort at reconciliation, in the name of historical scholarship; the result for me was my concluding essay in the volume edited by Boris Gasparov, Alexander Ospovat, Catherine Evtukhov, and myself.^[5]
Quite often the Russian-Ukrainian debates, whether about the legacy of Kyivan Rus’, the nature of the hetmanate and the Pereiaslav accord, Mazepa and Emperor Peter I, or, in more recent eras, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-Ukrainian Partisan Army, the famine in Ukraine of 1932-33, and Stalinist repression in Ukraine, are just as, if not more hostile, than the Russian-Tatar confrontation that was my first exposure. What many of us find ourselves caught between is the state-sponsored and often awkward efforts to craft a new post-Soviet (and often post-Russian) national narrative in Ukraine and a still largely unreflected national-imperial narrative that reigns among Russian historians (and, again, not only in Russia). What this translates into is that the attitudes that our Russian or Ukrainian colleagues take toward us and our scholarly positions often depend on whether we’re on the «right side» of that struggle. This is not only a generational issue, since younger historians have entered the fray on the Russian imperial or Ukrainian national sides with little nuance or self-critical reflection. But I feel fortunate to have colleagues who, for the most part, even when they might disagree with me on certain questions, can still view me as a colleague and are willing to share their own views and scholarship with me (and even teach together with me when possible). Indeed, as concerns my «imperial-national turn» I feel much closer intellectually to many colleagues in Russia, Ukraine, and Germany, than to many of my American colleagues; we read much of the same literature, review each others’ works, attend conferences and workshops together, etc.
One other aspect of my presidency of the International Association of Ukrainianists that has no doubt shaped my view of the politics and even political economy of the production of historical knowledge was my interaction with the Kyiv-based National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and the Ukrainian government, particularly the Ministries of Higher Education and Culture and the deputy prime ministers for humanities affairs. The planning for the Donetsk congress had as its background the Orange Revolution (with Donetsk, of course, the bastion of the Party of Regions, the anti-Orange coalition). I worked with two different governments, the late-era Kuchma administration and Dmytro Tabachnyk; later the Yushchenko government and deputy prime minister Mykola Tomenko; and the presidium of the National Academy of Science of Ukraine. The other important institutional player was our host university, Donets’k National University and its rector Volodymyr Shevchenko. The board of the Association, leading scholars in Ukrainian studies from Ukraine and abroad, wanted to take advantage of my presidency (the first non-Ukrainian of either diaspora or native origins) and the presence of several «reformist» vice presidents to make the congress more of a modern international meeting of humanities and social science scholars, starting with an open self-nominating process for any scholar or group of scholars who wanted to form a panel. Because the Association bore the heavy imprint of the culture of the Soviet Academy of Science, it was much closer to international congresses in the natural sciences; importantly, past congresses’ programs had been set by the Kyiv offices of the Ukrainian Academy of Science. What we were proposing as a democratization measure was taken as an affront to the hierarchy of the Academy who quickly mounted a fierce resistance to our efforts (again, not all Academy members, but a significant and active group; after all, the outgoing president of the Association, Mykola Zhulyns’kyi, then director of the Institute of Ukrainian Literature, former deputy prime minister, and deputy to the Rada, had been an advocate of my own candidacy for the presidency and had lined up support among his Ukrainian colleagues for my election) and had the advantage of being on the ground in Ukraine to better control the situation. Still, we found ourselves forming a group to fight the Academy of Science that was based on an axis of Donetsk, Lviv (Yaroslav Hrytsak was the first vice-president from Ukraine and, in effect, vice-president of the Association), and New York. We felt we had an obligation to represent the non-Academy scholars who worked mostly in universities and other higher educational institutions and mostly outside of Kyiv. Many of my American and Canadian colleagues were caught in between these axes because their most important contacts were often with colleagues in the Academy. In this case, I think the Kyiv academic hierarchs won out; though I was asked to consider another term, I felt it best for the organization to continue a pattern of rotating presidents. My successor was an astrophysicist from the Ukrainian Academy of Science. The last congress, scheduled for three years to be convened in Simferopol’, was moved at virtually last minute to Kyiv, thereby effectively excluding many international scholars and most non-Kyiv-based Ukrainian ones. By all reports, the congress was back to the old ways and very poorly managed. The Academy had reasserted itself with a vengeance.
Though I have had analogous experiences as an American working in Russia, because of the level of my involvement in the Ukrainianists’ organization, I probably felt the struggles in Ukraine more acutely. Americans were involved in a set of institutional and generational battles in which even the considerable resources of western institutions did not make the ultimate difference. It did occur to me at times that I was trying to impose some kind of western agenda in Ukraine, whether imperialist or of some other nature, and this at a time when «American» models and «advice» were received against a backdrop of the unilateralist policies of the Bush administration and its paternalistic advice to struggling democracies. After all, we were trying to introduce «international norms» to a post-Soviet academic culture. Still, the younger generation of Ukrainian scholars, especially those who had not been invited to the Academy, appeared to have welcomed the changes, however brief they were. My presidential address was to a large degree a critique of the Ministries and Academy for their conservatism and reluctance to do more than express lip service to the serious structural problems threatening Ukrainian studies in Ukraine itself.
Earlier experiences with the Russian Academy of Sciences had already made me critical of the Academy structures. As a young professor at Columbia University, I was assigned responsibility for maintaining the scholarly exchange of the Harriman Institute with two post-Soviet counterparts, the Institute of National («Fatherland») History (formerly History of the USSR) and the Institute of World History. While relations with the latter were generally positive, in large measure thanks to its director, Alexander Chubarian; relations with the former broke down quickly, eventually leading the Harriman to terminate the exchange after a couple years. Our main contact with the Institute of Russian History was Alexander Sakharov, at the time deputy director but shortly thereafter director. Sakharov was a very conservative scholar who was reputed to have been involved in a counter-Academy of Sciences that would be more «Russian» and less «cosmopolitan» than the existing Academy, and affiliated with the Pamiat’ movement. While discussing future visits of Columbia scholars to the Institute, Sakharov let me know that Leopold Haimson, my senior colleague, was not welcome. (Haimson had been the key Columbia professor behind the negotiation of the exchange.) When I asked why, Sakharov suggested that they didn’t need his kind of history. Other colleagues at the Institute translated this for me: Haimson’s Menshevik sympathies and his Jewish nationality were at odds with the leadership’s vision of how Russian history should be written. I had affirmation of that evaluation when I was invited to attend one of the first Russian-American conferences on the New Economic Policy. At a final banquet that was, in characteristic fashion, lubricated with very generous toasts of vodka and cognac, my dinner companion, a major player in the historiography of the 1920s, decided that I, as von Hagen and somehow German, would be sympathetic to her highly conspiratorial view of American Soviet studies as dominated by Jews (and she had the names to prove it), something she complained had long been the case in the Soviet Union too (where she pointed to the example of Isaak Mints, who for many years headed the Institute’s section on the revolution and civil war). I tried to explain to her that things were not quite so simple, but she was not to be convinced. It took me quite some time to recover from that encounter, and I subsequently refused to step foot in the Institute’s building on Dmitry Ulianov street, though I continued to see colleagues who were good friends outside the premises of that institution.
The Russian experience where I felt most divided in my loyalties involved my work as a consultant to the Russian Archives project (which eventually extended to Ukraine and Poland) of Primary Source Microfilms/the Gale Group during the 1990s. I found myself in the position of persuading the directors of Russian archives to allow large parts of their archival collections to be microfilmed for sale to largely western universities and scholars, on the condition that the original of the microfilm would remain with the archive; moreover, each archive was promised royalties on all sales and advances of $10,000 on completion of the microfilming even if there were no sales. Along the way, I learned a lot about many archives I would normally never step foot in, but I tended to be more sympathetic with the Russian archivists who weren’t used to such massive commercial projects in their state archives; they still preferred the printed collections of documents that were annotated by specialists in the topic. It was also my job to identify, together with the Russian archivists, collections that would: 1) sell the best in the west; 2) offer materials in emerging sub-fields of Russian history; 3) highlight the strengths of their own collections and serve as a good advertisement for them; and several other factors. The representatives of the American microfilming company did not know much Russian or East European history and had no experience in Russia and Ukraine prior to my involvement. For me, then, it was as much a process of «educating» my American partners as it was learning from Russian counterparts. Not surprisingly perhaps, the Americans assumed they knew a lot more than they did and often interpreted Russian hesitations or reluctance as willful resistance, even anti-Americanism, rather than trying better to understand Russian scholarly traditions and archival practice. And this is probably where I saw the greatest arrogance of the kind that Ben described. In part the Russian archivists put up little fight at the beginning, despite their considerable misgivings, because their economic situation was so desperate that any infusion of funds was a life-saver. Later in the 1990s, when the Russian economy was more stable and the first signs of prosperity had appeared, the archivists began to drive a harder bargain, but the American businessmen too had also learned a great deal as well and made headway faster than in the early years. After several mergers, reorganizations, and personnel replacements, Primary Source and its parent organization, the Gale Group, appear to have lost most of its initial interest in the Russian Archives Project.
I’m not sure whether the experiences I have described are properly understood as successes or failures in international scholarly understanding, but because my own trajectories have taken me to different sites of Russian-Western and Ukrainian-Western encounters than have Ben’s, our evaluations of the current situation might also differ somewhat, if not significantly. I have tried in all these episodes to exercise as much tact and understanding as possible, but I have not always been successful in maintaining that stance. As has been the case for the transformations of politics, society, and economics since the end of the Soviet Union, so too in the historical field, there has been much positive and negative, and that includes the relationships of western scholars with their Russian and Ukrainian counterparts.