Debates on Communist totalitarian regimes in the 20th century have received a new impulse as a result of the collapse of Communist regimes in Central Europe and the USSR. The historiography of Communism underwent an intricate evolution in terms of perspectives, approaches and areas selected for research. Its intellectual legacy is not reducible to what came to be called “Sovietology” or works written in a Totalitarian paradigm as often assumed by some of the scholars in post Soviet Russia. The dominant paradigm of the incipient phase of historiography that of history of the political regime and its ideology “viewed from without” was supplemented (and some would argue surpassed) by the history written “from within” that of people who built these regimes, struggled with them, accommodated to these regimes and renegotiated the external frameworks to their own ends.

This transformation of approaches to the Soviet history was initially linked to the impact of social sciences and theory of modernization and. New trends in Soviet studies acquired the name of “revisionism” (the term understood differently by those who use it to label the adversaries and those who appropriate it to underscore the positive potential of practiced history). Later a new focus emerged, which shifted the attention of historians to the cultural mechanisms, language and semantics at work in soviet society. This “cultural turn” in soviet studies is not only homage to the intellectual vogue of history writing in the last third of the 20th century. The optics of cultural history brings about a “humanizing effect” by way of depicting how people lived and what they felt through the hard years of the soviet regime. Thus it eschews the danger of reducing the vicissitudes of actually lived lives to the function and teleology of the modernizing process. Culture centered approach is also indispensable for studies of transitional periods (like those between pre and post 1917 and 1991) for changes of social and cultural practices lag behind those introduced by momentous political revolutions. At the same time cultural approach does not predispose scholars to a particular meta-interpretation of soviet history. Culture-centered analysis may lead to a reproduction of image of the unique mental universe and historically determined socio-political order. But it is equally capable of radical “normalization” of a given historical case by virtue of its interpretation of disciplinary and subjectivizing practices as generic for modern societies. It may “homogenize” the subjective experience of a given society as well as emphasize complex and invariably incomplete process of internalization, accommodation and subversion of the hegemonic socio-political order on the level of particular groups or individuals.

The late 1990s brought works by a new generation of historians (foremost by Jochen Hellbeck and Igal Halfin) which interpret the subjective world of the soviet citizens on the basis of autobiographic sources. They signal the coming of a new and promising turn in soviet studies, which however cannot be understood outside of the context of western debates on the nature of the Soviet Union. It is legitimate to view this trend as “the newest revisionism,” which aptly reflects some of the aspects of post-communist intellectual mindscape. This trend takes on methodology of cultural history and textual analysis as well as of the western conception of the modern subject, elaborated under the influence of M. Foucault’s writings. This subject is not a Cartesian holistic “ego” established in the process of self-denial and self-reflection. Neither it is a Kantian subject with the holistic self-consciousness and cognition of the world. Rather it is a product of the impact of discursive practices, a textual and dynamic structure. Working in what seems to be the most radical version of the linguistic turn, students of “Soviet subjectivity” rely on a selection of particular sources – autobiographic writings, questionnaires, diaries, in some cases, records of interrogation – which are read as a contiguous text, as a dialogue between two subjects. Viewing the history of soviet society from the vantage point of proposed methodology, Hellbeck and Halfin pose new questions and rethink established interpretations of the Soviet Union. They emphasize the dynamic, “creative” nature of the soviet project to build a new society and subject, point to the problematic character of the oft-assumed boundary between the public and private spheres, reconstruct the subjective motivations and value systems of soviet individuals and social groups.

The works of Hellbeck and Halfin are so rich in methodology and breathtaking in tackling the empirical cases so that they naturally invite to engage the authors in dialogue and bring about a series of questions on social and cultural mechanisms of totalitarian regimes. It is worth sketching out some of those problems, whose relevance is convincingly argued by Hellbeck and Halfin and which await further discussion in the light of cultural linguistic turn in soviet studies. First and foremost, the question arises whether it is possible for a human being to distance from the discourses that in the soviet context are imposed and controlled by the regime. To what extent those discourses are homogenous, given their complex conceptual genealogy in the context of the “liberation movement” of the 19th century, the 1905 revolution and the not that orthodox early soviet period? Is resistance to the totalitarian regime possible in the light of the formation of “self” in already given or inherited language of the soviet “civilizational” project? What is the influence of subject’s willing or forced involvement in the Bolshevik project on his/her attitude to the regime and other individuals? Was the Stalin’s Soviet Union a successful project for forging a new modern subject, formatted by the discursive practices and disciplined by the repressive regime? Can the results of this project be considered analogous to the modern subject of Western societies, even though the process of its formation was ridden with peculiarities of Eastern European history? Is it possible at all to apply the categories of post-structuralist analysis of European modernity to the history of the Stalinist regime?

The perspective proposed by the exponents of the “soviet subjectivity” touch upon the key problems of theory of historical analysis. Most notably, one encounters the question of existence of historical reality beyond texts, the context for understanding the historical semantics. It is also the problem of justification of selection of textual materials, which privileges one mode of textually and written documents of particular origin. The questions to be debated are whether it is possible to grasp the heteroglossia in the text, discover the connection between the authored text and other texts as well as the semantic palimpsest of used language, verify homogeneity or multifacetedness of structure and composition of a given text.

Some of these questions are debated in the forum, Ab Imperio presents in this issue. Editors express gratitude to J. Hellbeck and I. Halfin for their answers to the editors’ questions, which clarify and develop their methodological position in regard to studies of soviet subjectivity, earlier expressed in a number of articles. Editors also thank the authors, who contributed their commentaries and articles to the forum, which were conceived in response to the previous publications by J. Hellbeck and I. Halfin. Since the interview was produced simultaneously with the critical responses and articles, many theoretical positions of the authors of the new trend were not fully reflected in the text of the interview. We entertain a hope that the discussion of theoretical aspects and approaches in studies of cultural mechanisms of soviet society will contribute to the development of this direction of inquiry in historiography of Soviet history.

Editors of Ab Imperio:

I. Gerasimov
S. Glebov
A. Kaplunovski
M. Mogilner
A. Semyonov