SUMMARY:

Ilya Gerasimov’s article discusses the parameters of a new Soviet history that would critically deconstruct the prevalent historical master narrative, which still bears traces of late twentieth-century Soviet and Western conceptualizations. Rather than advancing some normative theory or a particular conceptual model, Gerasimov outlines six general propositions that open up new research perspectives and pose new research questions without predicting any actual answers. First, he calls for the deconstruction and differentiation of key historical terms that are perceived as self-explanatory and self-evident. This includes a radical separation of the Soviet from the Bolshevik (communist), and Bolshevism from socialism. Second, he insists on readjusting temporality and revising historical periodization by explicating the origins of the Soviet project in the post-1905 political visions of national elites or clarifying the USSR’s role in World War II between September 1, 1939, and June 22, 1941. Gerasimov’s third point concerns decoupling historical processes from traditional explanatory schemes and labels. Thus, the familiar umbrella term “the civil war and foreign intervention” accurately accounts for only some of the manifold historical developments on the ruins of the Russian Empire in 1918–1922. Conversely, the concept of Holodomor, which has been squarely applied and studied only in the context of the Ukrainian famine in the early 1930s, invites comparisons with an even more horrible synchronous famine in Kazakhstan and also with the Kremlin-aggravated famine in besieged Leningrad. Such a comparison can expand our understanding of these phenomena and the logic of biopolitics and governmentality behind them. Gerasimov also argues that taking seriously the old Soviet preference for political economy over economics can offer a path toward a more perceptive Soviet economic history. Fourth, he calls for critically disentangling groupness and individual subjectivity: whatever the actual success of the regime in forging new groups or a historian’s belief in their reality, there is no methodologically grounded reason for identifying a person’s motivation with their belonging to a particular group. The fifth suggestion concerns acknowledging the incongruence of the centers of power and the centers of knowledge until their conjunction is proved empirically. This is not an idiosyncratic Soviet condition; it can be observed in any rapidly nationalizing multicultural society, just as in a deeply politically fractured one. Finally, Gerasimov proposes that the critical theory approach be integrated into a new Soviet history. He concludes that a critical theory is the most productive when it recovers human agency and subjectivities, particularly those of the oppressed, while avoiding direct identification with any hegemonic discourse, past and present. It helps to counter the para-academic extremes in assessing the Soviet period that deny the Soviets their subjectivity as simultaneously victims and perpetrators.