SUMMARY:

Alain Blum considers issues raised by Ben Eklof from the twofold perspective of French-Russian and French-U.S. academic communication, adding to these considerations regarding the nature and evolution of the French community of students of Russian history. He questions the choice of Mironov’s Social History as the basis for generalizing about patterns of academic communication and points to the contextualized nature of this book’s reception: its implicit audience in Russia and abroad differs and hence the differences in its reception. Blum rejects a colonial model suggested by Eklof and brings into the discussion generational, national (French) ideological and intellectual, and other multiple dimensions of scholarly dynamics. Blum asserts a supranational character of Russian history in the twentieth century with its major themes of Communism and Stalinism, and compares it to the historiography of Nazism as a complex supranational phenomenon in the history of European modernity. The study of Nazism is profoundly influenced and stimulated by international scholarship, and he observes the same productive challenge from outside in the historiography of modern Russia. This situation is far from a colonial domination of Western over Russian scholarship. Looking at different examples of the circulation of ideas, translations of Western texts into Russian, and participation in joint scholarly projects, Blum concludes that Russian-U.S.-French academic communication is based not on forms of domination but on mutual exchange. The current reorientation of some Russian scholars toward a more nationalistic and anti-Western interpretation of history cannot be understood, in his view, as a reaction to a previous stage of exchanges and integration – this is a consequence of Russia’s internal political and ideological development.