3/2014

Sergei I. Zhuk sees the same reason as an explanation for why many American experts in Russian studies and Russian scholars oppose the Ukrainian revolution and solidarize with the foreign policy of Putin’s regime. In their historical imagination, the Ukrainian Maidan became the real last anti-Soviet revolution, which rejected and destroyed the traditionally accepted Moscow-centered and Russian-focused (in fact, Russian imperialist) approaches to an analysis of recent political, social, cultural, and economic developments in the post-Soviet space. As such, this revolution challenged nonconfrontational, conformist, and “emotionally positive” approaches to the analysis of Soviet and post-Soviet society and culture, which have become the most popular theoretical model and have dangerous epistemological and methodological consequences. Unwilling to discard their favorable historiographical concepts of the conformist late socialist Soviet past, many American and Russian scholars preferred to distance themselves from “controversial” Ukrainian developments, denying their historical validity, and associating themselves with more familiar and predictable developments in post-Soviet Russia. Thus, a particular epistemological choice necessitates a very special political decision.