I was pleased and flattered that the editors of Ab Imperio agreed to host this round-table discussion of my polemical depiction of what I call a “hegemonic” even colonial relationship between American and Russian historical professions. When I myself occasionally pontificate, my Russian friends will playfully nudge me, “Akh vy, Amerikantsy, tak liubite nas uchit!” In my own experience working occasionally as an informal adviser to the Minister of Education, I cringed at the missionary tone American educators often took in their efforts to help Russia modernize its own schools. And at the very top level of my own country’s political culture, candidates for office preach to Russian leaders that they “need to learn to behave” if they want to be respected. There is no doubt that some American historians – such as William Rosenberg and Mark von Hagen have worked hard to bolster ties in the post-Soviet world, to re-integrate the Russian [Ukrainian, etc] historical profession into the international “republic of letters,” and to promote grant-giving networks based on merit rather than patronage. Nor is there any doubt that a proportion of Russian historians, including the distinguished A. B. Kamensii, like Boris Mironov, are now “players” on the world stage. But I stand by my assertion that for those living in the regions outside Moscow and St. Petersburg, with very few exceptions, the collapse of the Soviet Union has, paradoxically, resulted in declining real opportunities to participate in international scholarship. Professor Kamenskii asserts that my information on the Russian academic profession is out of date, but in fact it was based on a thorough sociological survey led by Sheregi in 2000, and many of these conclusions have recently been confirmed by extensive survey research conducted by sociologist Anna Smolentseva of Moscow University. Most scholars can seldom afford sojourns to the big cities. Most have an e-mail address, but only episodically get the opportunity to go on-line to check their messages and are not able to use resources on the web requiring broadband connections. Most libraries have minuscule budgets for book purchases and few have subscriptions to major search engines providing full text access to scholarly literature.^[1] From my home in Indiana, I have far greater access to Russian scholarly literature, never mind Western journals, than do the Russian historians I have met in the past two years in Kirov, Kazan, and elsewhere. Outside Moscow and St. Petersburg, the bookstore carrying scholarly works is indeed very hard to find and historians wanting to publish their own monographs ordinarily have to find sponsors or themselves provide subventions. It is heartening, however, to read Professor Kamenskii’s account of the establishment of regional internet centers and, in nine regions, “libraries which many higher institutions in Moscow and St. Petersburg would envy.” Both Mark von Hagen and William Rosenberg, in their generous commentaries which can stand on their own without my annotation, add nuance and detail to these positive developments.
I confess I was puzzled by the tone of both Kamenskii’s and Becker’s essays. It is perhaps understandable why Dr. Kamenskii would chafe at my generalized depictions of his peer cohort in Russia – few people enjoy being stereotyped, especially by outsiders. Moreover, I mistakenly identified this distinguished Russianist as an Europeanist. Yet I fear that some of his reaction was provoked by misunderstandings, whether caused by language differences or by my own failure to make fully clear where I stand. First, and this pertains to Becker’s acerbic comments as well, it is completely understandable why Soviet historians, given the demoralizing ideological constraints imposed by official Soviet Marxism, looked to the West for new perspectives. My concern was to examine why this asymmetrical exchange of knowledge persists with such tenacity well over a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union. (Why, as Becker claims, this reveals my “leftish” inclinations and even what that means in these times or why it is relevant, I haven’t a clue.^[2]) More importantly, both Kamenskii and Becker seem to believe that I buy into Mironov’s global perspective on the evolution of the Russian Empire, on its modernization, on the normalization of Russian history, and even that the purpose of the article was to “propagandize” (Kamenskii) such a view. In fact, I noted in my essay, perhaps insufficiently, that I find Mironov’s global arguments about Russia’s evolution problematic and see the real worth of his scholarship in the many “middle-level generalizations” he makes on a wealth of topics. I agree entirely with Rosenberg’s comments here about the unsatisfactory treatment in A Social History of the late Imperial period. But the aim of the article was not to analyze, never mind propagandize, A Social History or its author’s perspective, but rather to examine the markedly different reception it received in the United States and Russia. My conclusions about “a usable past” and “normalizing” Russian history were intended neither to validate nor undercut, but to understand.^[3] When I wrote empathetically about Russia’s evolving history with the European Union, Jan Kusber seemed to agree that this is part of a multi-sided “heated contemporary debate on the boundaries of the European Union and on the cultural foundations of Europe.” Kusber introduces us to the German side of the debate, which largely seems to be “excluding Russia and leaving aside sober arguments and empirical research.”
Concerning the issue of language use and language competencies, one can acknowledge that the world must have a lingua franca for scientific communication without conceding that the asymmetry need be as salient as it is.^[4] Kamenskii argues that it is the responsibility of Russian scholars to post their research in English as well as in Russian, that it is unreasonable to hope that Russian-language scholarship will find its way into, say, The American Historical Review, unless the topic specifically concerns either Russia or the United States. Yet his comment that “most American historians” speak at least one, often more, foreign languages reveals that in all probability he is personally interacting either with European scholars or with American historians of Europe or of Russia. In reality, like the American public, very few American historians of U.S. history, who make up the bulk of our profession, speak a language other than English. Yet this is the very group we should be using as a “yardstick” here; they, like their counterparts in Russia who study Russian history, generally know only their own language and display little interest in finding out how others interpret “their” history.
Comments by Blum (France) and Kusber (Germany) as well as by Von Hagen (Ukraine) and Rosenberg (both he and Von Hagen, as well as Kamenskii, speak from first-hand experience about the impact of international funding agencies on the Russian historical profession) all stand on their own, illuminating other historiographies and adding nuances or welcome correctives to what I have written. Indeed, as the editors of the journal Ab Imperio recently noted, we need to avoid “projecting ‘national’ categories on our increasingly international field.”^[5] It is fitting to close my response acknowledging the growing presence of a cohort of transnational historians, often trained both in Russia, Central Europe, Central Asia, Germany, France, Italy, Japan as well as the United States, who are professionally employed in one of these countries or regions. This remarkable development, which has already produced an important body of scholarship, indeed finds its voice with Ab Imperio, whose pages in its first seven years have hosted more than 500 authors (about thirty percent from Russia and thirty percent from North America) from virtually every major Russian and Eurasian center of research in the world. If this trend continues, the polarities described in my essay will soon become moot.