Graduate study of Russian history in the late 1960s and 1970s was heavily concentrated on the late imperial period. This was the case for my own Ph.D. program at Stanford, but the same generalization holds true for many friends and colleagues of my generation across the country. Some historians of that generation were interested in the multinational character of the empire, as I was in my studies of the Congress Kingdom of Poland, but the great majority of graduate students focused on issues of governance and society. The Russian revolutionary intelligentsia was also a subject of considerable interest, in good part because radical students and Utopian aspirations were part and parcel of every university milieu, with Berkeley and Columbia in the lead. The iconic texts for graduate students in that era were classics about the revolutionary intelligentsia such as Franco Venturi’s Roots of Revolution and Martin Malia’s Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism. The workers’ movement also attracted a great deal of interest, with Leopold Haimson’s influential articles on social mobility and the workers’ movement between 1905 and 1917 among the most discussed and useful models for undertaking a social history of the revolutionary movement. There was a loose “Marxist” understanding of the past among many graduate students. Even as undergraduates, most American students of modern history read the Communist Manifesto and Marx’s “humanistic” writings from 1844. (This is most definitely no longer the case.)
Of course, scholars who were trained in that halcyon period, when federal funding poured into the field and finding jobs at universities was relatively – I stress relatively – easy, will remember various constellations of influences that motivated their work. My studies were shaped a lot by the interests of Terence Emmons, my incredibly erudite and patient advisor, in the Russian liberal gentry, the peasant emancipation, the dynamics of political change surrounding the 1905 revolution, and the accomplishments of Russian historiography. We were also bound up, as were many graduate programs around the country, in the modified modernization theories of Barrington Moore Jr. and Shmuel Eisenstadt. Russia was the first third-world country to modernize, so the mantra went. Diverse paths toward modernity were defined by their social determinants. The revolutionary dictatorship of the Bolsheviks was seen as the direct heir to the march of revolutions that began in Paris in 1789. The question that was often posed, as it was most famously by Alec Nove and Theodore von Laue, was whether Stalin was necessary to complete the process.
Cold war politics played an important role in the attraction of graduate students to the study of imperial Russia. I think it is fair to say that in most cases this originated in the strong opposition among young people to Cold War realities, like the Viet Nam War, and to naive American assumptions about the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union that infused the political rhetoric justifying American intervention abroad. For a large number of novice historians, and I include myself in that group, the idea was to understand the Soviet Union – and thus, somehow, to ameliorate the inaccuracies of Cold War perceptions and lessen the threat of war – by examining its imperial predecessor. Many students came to the study of imperial Russia for essentially political reasons.
But another part of the attraction of many curious students to the field was the excitement of novelty and discovery. The study of Russia was relatively new in the universities, while West European and American history was seen as “old hat.” Moreover, one could go to the Soviet Union to do archival research in most subjects related to the imperial past. (Tsarist nationality policy was mostly off-limits, as was imperial foreign policy, especially when involving the periphery. No one could work in the archives on the Asiatic Department of the Foreign Ministry or on the history of Ukraine.) The opportunity to work in Soviet archives under the auspices of IREX (the International Research and Exchanges Board) became an important aspect of the professional formation of several generations of scholars of Russia, the vast majority of whom worked on late imperial topics. Going on IREX became, in fact, a kind of union card. It would have been hard to get a position in a university history department as a Russianist without this experience.
Some young American scholars had the good fortune of working under the tutelage of first-rate Soviet historians of the imperial past such as P. A. Zaionchkovskii in Moscow, who played an unusually important role in the development of American scholarship, or B. V. Anan’ich in Leningrad. Others had less fortunate experiences with their Soviet “scientific advisors.” But the experience of working in the Russian imperial archives, often with the help of first-rate archival professionals and superb archival finding aids, was the critical formative influence on the development of American historiography of tsarist Russia. The field was really driven by empirical archival work, in ways that were quite different from West European historiography at the time, which was more heavily influenced by the methodological innovations of French historians, in particular, and less bound to systematic archival work.
Individual scholars reacted differently to living in the Soviet Union itself during the Brezhnev period. The conditions were pretty bad and the food, the queues, and the crowded transport were hard to tolerate. At the same time, many young historians made lifetime friends among Russian scholars, students, dissidents, and others, and spent an inordinate amount of time sitting around the proverbial kitchen tables talking about all kinds of issues, most having to do with the Soviet experience and Soviet life. In the process, many historians of imperial Russia became more actively curious about Soviet history. Up to that point, political scientists had been most prominent in writing about the Soviet past; some – Leonard Shapiro, Adam Ulam, Robert Tucker, Stephen Cohen, and Alexander Dallin, for example – produced first-rate historical studies relying primarily on memoirs and articles in Soviet journals and newspapers. Robert Conquest and Bertram Wolfe, neither of whom were trained scholars, published some of the best work on Soviet history. But, with few exceptions – Sheila Fitzpatrick and Moshe Lewin, most notably – historians generally shied away from the Soviet period during this time.
This situation changed dramatically with perestroika and especially with the fall of the Soviet Union. Now graduate students in Russian history were more attracted to the Soviet rather than to the imperial period. In addition, many scholars who had worked in the imperial period also began to work on aspects of Soviet history. Part of the reason, of course, was the new availability of Soviet-era archives for research in the Russian Federation. Much like the excitement of the first decades of the exchange, when pioneering work could be done on the imperial period, it was now possible to do the same for aspects of the Soviet period. Despite some remaining restrictions, it was enormously exciting to be able to work in the party archives (RGASPI and RGANI) and in the generally accessible state archives (GARF). Many of the skills learned while working in the imperial Archives – patience, diligence, and perseverance – paid off in working the Soviet archives, as well. Part of the reason for the shift to the Soviet period was also the changing tastes of undergraduates, who clamored for more contemporary history courses. Nineteenth-century history – whether of Russia or Germany and France – was attracting fewer and fewer students in the classroom. Additionally, the study of imperial Russia, in a period when the Soviet Union was undergoing such interesting and important changes and eventually a complete meltdown, seemed an ever more arcane subject of study, though it seemed so relevant in the late 1960s and 1970s. Few students were interested in Russian radicals any more, and the Russian Revolution of 1917, given the collapse of the Soviet Union, lost most of its drawing power in the classroom.
One could sell more books; one could reach more readers; one could see more reviews in print; one could lecture to more students; one could meet the requirements of more job applications – if one worked in the Soviet field versus the imperial one. Especially in the American university – which, for a variety of reasons, is more highly susceptible to issues of “demand” than its European counterparts – the field of imperial Russia faded quickly as a hiring priority. Those who retired in the field were not replaced; Soviet history took precedence. There were, however, important exceptions. The four decades or so of building Russian history programs in major universities meant that the field, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and with it the Cold War justification for Russian studies, had become a lively intellectual enterprise that could sometimes justify itself in those terms alone.
Even in the field of Soviet history, it is remarkable how quickly the bulk of research has moved forward from the 1920s and 1930s to the wartime period, from the 1940s and 1950s until, now, many young Ph.D.s are working on the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods. The Revolution of 1917 in this context seems like ancient history! Some of this is attributable to the continuing restless ambition of younger Russian historians to stake out new territory for themselves and to find relatively fresh archival sources for research. However, the remarkable stability of the Putin era may well see the overwhelming preponderance of the Soviet period in the graduate studies of Russia diminish in favor of a reconsideration of imperial Russia. Contemporary Russian politicians and thinkers themselves tend to draw their historical inspiration from imperial Russian models rather than Soviet ones. From the role of the Russian Duma to the structure of the Russian economy, imperial precedents appear to be much more powerful than Soviet ones. Graduate students in the United States today seem to be drawn to the study of the Russian past by having experienced directly the Russian present, something that was impossible in the Soviet period. Sometimes, they are émigrés or offspring of émigrés; sometimes, American students have had the opportunity to live, travel, and work in the Russian Federation or in the former Soviet space. Many applicants to graduate school these days have spent long periods in Russia, Ukraine, and elsewhere in the region. They speak excellent Russian and have a very good feel for the area, something one could not say about most beginning graduate students of earlier generations. As they try to understand Putin’s Russia and post-Soviet reality, they will inevitably be drawn to the imperial period.
In short, it is too early to ring the death knell of imperial Russian history. There are several very good reasons why it is important for the academy to foster the field’s development and for universities to hire young scholars dedicated to its study. Some of these arguments are more internal to the field and the academy; some relate more broadly to the “relevance” of this knowledge to society and international affairs. In no particular order, let me enumerate a few.
1. Even if young scholars would prefer to work on the Soviet period, they must be thoroughly trained in the imperial Russian field in order to understand the basics of their own subject. (One could make a similar argument for the foundational importance of the medieval and early modern Russian field – Kievan and Muscovite history – but this is not the place to explore this particular issue, which is also salient in the academy.) From the workings of the Soviet bureaucracy and the dynamics of the Soviet “autocracy” to the question of the nomenklatura and how it relates to class and estate politics, the structure of Russian history, as explored by Michael Cherniavsky and Edward L. Keenan decades ago, helps us understand the Soviet experience, not to mention the post-Soviet one. Soviet foreign policy was based on its imperial precedents. The Russian legal tradition was interrupted in some ways by the Soviet regime, but carried on in others. The Russian religious order and its relationship to the state can only be understood in the longue durée. And so on. In order to assess the enormous impact of the Soviet state on Russia, one would have to know and be able to analyze what came before.
2. The subject of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia is relevant once again to the understanding of the world around us. This time it is less the thought and actions of the Marxists and labor activists than it is the radicalism of young people and their proclivities toward terrorism. Every analytical primer on terrorism begins with Russian terrorism and ends with Islamist violence. The psychology of the terrorists, of terrorist sympathizers, and of the terrorists’ government opponents in the imperial period all have something to teach us about the contemporary fascination with the topic in Russia itself, and around the world. The ways in which laws of the land were used and abused by the imperial government to battle terrorism under the tsars teach important lessons about how best to counter extremism. The role of the media in the representation of terrorism and its effects are nicely highlighted by the study of the Russian past. Even Russian police counterterrorist activities in the late imperial period can be profitably studied in connection with contemporary counterterrorist policies and practices. In pointing out the relevance of the study of Russian terrorism to understanding contemporary dilemmas of counterterrorism, it is also important to note the many differences between Islamist terrorists and Russian terrorists.
3. Russian culture of the late imperial period remains one of the most dazzling achievements of world civilization. Despite some trends in postmodern literary studies, it makes no sense at all to study those achievements – most famously the poetry of Pushkin, the novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, the theater of Chekhov, and the artistic innovations of the Silver Age – detached from the context that produced them. There is, of course, a universal value in reading the greats of Russian fiction or engaging Russian opera on a purely artistic level. But the history in which these works are nested provides an understanding of the authors’ meaning and intent beyond the broader themes of world literature, just as the authors, literature, and culture (“high” and “low”) serve as integral parts of the historical narrative of imperial Russia.
4. To study the Russian Empire is to engage in a many-faceted exploration of the problems of nationhood and nationality in multinational states. The complex and contingent ways in which the empire talked and thought about “Russians” (Russkii and Rossiiskii) is instructive about the nature of nationality on a number of levels. Comparisons also immediately come to mind with other great land empires such as the Ottoman Empire or the Habsburg Empire and their dominant elites. Comparisons with overseas empires, like those of Great Britain and France, are also useful in this context and others. Soviet nationality problems (and supposed solutions) can be understood only in the context of the imperial state, what Marx called “the prison house of nations.” There is simply no way the struggle of Moscow today with extremists in the Northern Caucasus (and vice versa) can be grasped without a deep knowledge of the failed colonial ventures of both imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in that region. The Russian Federation now has its own history of missteps and miscalculations to deal with.
5. The multiconfessional nature of the Russian Empire also provides both insights into and understanding of the struggle between Islamic peoples of the Northern Caucasus and Central Asia and Moscow. The ways in which tsarist Russia incorporated and integrated these regions in its administrative, political, and legal structures of the empire established patterns of interaction that continue to influence attitudes toward Russia in the Islamic regions – both negative and positive – today. They also provide guidelines for the way these relations can and perhaps should be pursued, both within the Russian state and between Russia and the Central Asian states.
6. As mentioned earlier, the complex character of Putin’s Russia cannot be understood without a firm grounding in the imperial past. The panoply of factors involved in gosudarstvennost’ – the supremacy of the state – were embedded in the Russian polity during the imperial period, underlined in the Soviet period, while theoretically subordinated to the communist party, and have reemerged in spades under Putin. Meanwhile, the Russian Orthodox Church seeks in some ways to return to the role in society that it held in the pre-Soviet period. Even the schizophrenic attitude of the Russian leadership these days toward the “West” not only has its roots in the imperial past but has many of the same characteristics, with some political leaders advocating more the distinctiveness of the Russian path, while others seem more ready to work with and join the West.
7. One does not need to hold completely to the tenets of the modernization model to find in imperial Russian history the introduction of numerous markers of modernity that are sometimes assumed to have come about only with the Soviet period. The beginnings of the rule of law were introduced in the late imperial period, as were ideas of modern government practice. The use of statistics, demographic analyses, modern censuses – all were part of a move on the part of tsarist bureaucracy to rationalize functions in the name of a modern state. The Russian military similarly modernized its organization and strategy; the Russian universities and Academy of Sciences led Europe in many fields of scientific inquiry. Some of the Russian communications and transport, despite the general “backwardness” of the country, were as up to date as any on the continent. In part, it this contrast between the cities and the countryside, the modern and the premodern, the advanced and the more primitive, that makes imperial Russia so interesting.
8. The inherent fascination of the imperial period will inevitably attract graduate students back to its study. Not only are there many topics that were insufficiently researched during the heyday of its study in the 1960s and 1970s (foreign policy, center–periphery relations, Islam in the empire and in the borderlands, military strategy, Jewish history, Orthodox spirituality, among many others), but new methodologies can be brought to bear on areas that were more systematically researched. There is still much interesting work to be done about the serf economy as it persisted in the post-Emancipation period. The study of gender and law has grown by leaps and bounds, but there is more to learn about the relationship between social and gender history. The history of the Russian right, of Russian science and technology (and its relation to Orthodoxy), and of Russian philosophy remain areas where new connections can be made. Notions of imperial citizenship need to be examined and analyzed. Literary studies continue to offer fertile ground for understanding the way Russians – and inhabitants of the Russian Empire – thought about themselves and their neighbors. Newer work makes much less of the caesura of the Bolshevik revolution. Some topics move seamlessly from late imperial into early Soviet history. This, too, provides interesting challenges to new generations of imperial Russian historians, for whom the preoccupations of the “glory days” of American Russian historiography will seem – as they should – increasingly irrelevant.