Given that available surveys both in the Russian and Western languages are outdated and inadequate, a comprehensive account on Russian historiography has been a desideratum until recently. Thomas Sanders’ efforts to reintroduce the “rarely seen cross-country cousins” [like Solov’ev or Kizevetter] to the students of Imperial Russia can only be warmly welcomed.
On some 500 pages “Historiography of Imperial Russia” presents the main evolutions in historical interpretation within the empire from the age of the Enlightenment into the first decades of the Soviet rule, as far as individual fate of the presented scholars inside and outside the USSR are concerned. Some of the material presented was printed before, a larger portion was originally written for this volume. There is no introduction explaining the principles of construction properly speaking, but the presentation is rather self evident: Part 1 covers the general trends in the development of historical consciousness and practice, with a strong emphasis on the academic background. Part 2 introduces individual “pillars” of Imperial Russian and emergent Ukrainian historiography. Part 3 generalises selected non-Russian historical visions – Jewish, Muslim, and, again, Ukrainian. Part 4 returns to the present state of art in studies of the history of Imperial Russia. Thomas Sanders’ very short introductory remarks “A Most Narrow Present” refrain to a brief explication of the historical conditions under which Russian historiography evolved. The essential notions is “maturation”, read: growing professionalism, resulting in “alienation”, that is the isolation of the intellectual discourse and mass consciousness. Given the historical-political background, the lack of vertical and horizontal integration of the elites and the society as a whole in late Imperial Russia, the missing of a “comprehensive, inclusive national narrative satisfying to the majority of the empire’s inhabitants” (p. 6-9) seems quite understandable, and the lack of a comprehensive overview of competing Imperial and national narratives is certainly deplorable. The inclusion of Ukrainian, Jewish and Muslim (Central Asian modernist) historiography is a first step to fill the gap, others have followed. (cf. Natsional’nye istorii v sovetskom i postsovetskikh gosudarstvakh. Moscow, 1999)
The majority of essays in the first part of the volume reflect a considerable interest of Western scholars in the development of the academic milieu against the background of discussions on the possible emergence of Civil (if local) society and publicity in late Imperial Russia. Allison Katsev’s contribution on “M. T. Kachanovskii and Professional Autonomy in Pre-Reform Russia” is a case in point. Exploring the Moscow professor’s habit in public disputes during the 1820’s and 1830’s, he concludes that the quest for independent and critical academic standards under the roof of professional autonomy and the dependence on the State to bolster them were not (yet) the contradictory forces. This clue, however, is hardly surprising in an article following Cynthia Hyla Whittakers systematic inquiry on “The Idea of Autocracy Among Eighteenth-Century Russian Historians.” Whittaker very convincingly shows that precisely the enlightened critical attitude of historians towards autocracy led them to understand this form of government as serving the country’s interests best. As the most effective tool of modernisation and westernisation the idea of autocracy was transformed into a dynamic concept, inspiring subsequent generations of state sponsored reformers well into the 19th century. Thomas Sanders’ “The Third Opponent: Dissertation Defences and the Public Profile of Academic History in Late Imperial Russia” is very closely connected to the mentioned civil society discussions, too. He identifies the public zashchita at least for some periods as the major link between the academic inner circles and what was understood as “society” in the major university cities . Even when access was limited, the admitted public developed “in conjunction to the professoriate an elaborate body of etiquette and expectations concerning disputes.” While socialising effects on the local obshchestva cannot be doubted, Sanders unfortunately seems less interested in interpreting these rituals as “ceremonial ordinations of new priests,” in exploring their importance for the formation of academic habits.
The following three contributions address the problem of “historiographical schools” in Imperial Russia. Gary Hamburg’s “Inventing the "State School" of Historians, 1840-1995” analyses the career of the term “State school” up to the 1990’s and convincingly shows that it was and is predominately used without direct references. It is hardly surprising, on the other hand, that interpretations of the historical role of state and narod in the works of Solov’ev’, Chicherin, Sergeevich and Gradovskii are far more complex then the vulgarised label of “State school” accounts for. While Hamburg’s account remains strictly limited to the historians’ works, Terence Emmons’ “Kliuchevskii's Pupils” and Boris Anan'ich’s and Viktor Paneiakh’s “The St. Petersburg School of History and Its Fate” include the social and institutional dimensions of the notion “school”. Emmons agrees that there has been no Kliuchevskii-school properly speaking. Nevertheless, he insists that Kliuchevskii effectively demonstrated to his pupils the range of fields and topics that historical research could and should cover. For Emmons Kliuchevskii was an annalist avant la lettre and stands for modernity of late Imperial Russian historiography. His pupils, regardless of their respective political worldviews, shared the preparedness to exploit “eclectic” approaches. Anan'ich and Paneiakh credit the merits of St. Petersburg historians in a more conventional report. Their narrative concentrates on the fate of the “St. Petersburg school” under the Soviet regime, a subject recently covered in several monographs and source-books.
The first section closes with two essays pursuing a rather different approach. Terence Emmons‘ second contribution “On the Problem of Russia's ‘Separate Path'’ in Late Imperial Historiography” underlines the crucial importance of Russia’s relations to Europe for historical writing. Moreover, by analysing the works of the convinced liberal and European Miliukov, he demonstrates how inadequate is any classification of Russian historiography along the traditional dichotomy of “Slavophiles” and “Westernisers.” Marc Raeff’s “Remembrance of Things Past: Historians and History in Russia Abroad” reconstructs the fate of exiled Russian historians after 1917. He demonstrates that the lack of access to the sources and the intellectual isolation condemned even the most talented to write history of “relatively unoriginal and uncreative character.” Their individual reliance on the methods and interpretations developed before 1917 impeded the development of a coherent anti-Soviet historical narrative by the exiled historians. At best they could contribute to the development of East European studies in their host countries.
Ana Siljak’s “Christianity, Science, and Progress in Sergei M. Solov'ev's History of Russia” opens the second part of the book on the “Individual Practitioners,” which is more focused onbiographies of eminent Russian and Ukrainian historians. So does Siljak, although her contribution concentrates on the influence of the contemporary French historian Guizot on Solov’ev, for example in the notion of progress as “a continued advance to a higher degree of civilisation.”. This was the notion of which Kliuchevskii was sceptical, as Robert F. Byrnes in Kliuchevskii's “View of the Flow of Russian History” demonstrates. Kliuchevskii did not deny the idea of evolution in general, but he rejected it as a discernible principle beyond the historical development. His interpretation of history as a matrix, as an “endless series of facts in an endless variety of combinations” sounds thoroughly modern and paved the way for sociological approaches that characterised the works of Kliuchevskii’s student -- Miliukov. Melissa K. Stockdale’s extract from her monography on Miliukov, “The Idea of Development in Miliukov's Historical Thought”, explains the interplay between what Miliukov saw as general trends (i.e. evolution) and the particular (the respective sociological milieu). Margarita Vandalkovskaia’s chapter on “Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Kizevetter” and Aleksei Tsamutali’s contribution “Sergei Fedorovich Platonov (1860-1933): A Life for Russia” combine biographical outlines with generalising overviews of approaches and issues raised in the work of both historians.
Thomas Prymak, Frank Sysyn and Bohdan Klid continue to present important stages in the development of a distinct Ukrainian historiography during the second half of the 19th and the early 20th century. “Mykola Kostomarov As a Historian” demonstrates that Kostomarov’s ethnographical approach to history almost inevitably brought him into conflict with the prevailing trends in Imperial historiography of Moscow or St. Petersburg. Kostomarov’s discovery of Ukrainian historical distinctiveness reflected his contemporaries’ inclination for romantic idealisations of the narod as well as the political ideology of an emergent Ukrainian nationalism. Sysyn’s “Introduction to Mikhailo Hrushevsky's History of Ukraine-Rus” presents Hrushevsky both as the initiator of a truly independent Ukrainian national historiography and as an intellectual leader of the Ukrainian political movement. As a historian Hrushevsky came to challenge the prevailing historical narratives on the allegedly similar origins and development of Russians and Ukrainians by differentiating between the histories of states, peoples, and territories. As a populist, Hrushevsky continued to write the history of the narod and claimed both Kievian Rus and the Cossack hetmanates as genuine examples of state-building by the Ukrainian people. Why Klid’s account on “Volodymyr Antonovych: Ukrainian Populist Historiography and the Cultural Politics of Nation Building” follows Sysyn’s article, contrary to the chronological order, remains unclear. Klid explicitly mentions the role of the populist “regional historian” and “transitional figure” Antonovych for the formation of Hrushevsky’s nationalist interpretations.
Zenon Kohut’s The Development of a Ukrainian National Historiography in Imperial Russia from the third part of the book comprehensively summarises this stage to stage development and introduces less known Ukrainian historians. It may be said that problems of conceptualisation of Ukrainian and Russian-Jewish history were comparable, given the tight links to ethnic diaspora beyond the confines of the Russian Empire and the dominant state-orientation of 19th century historiography. But as Benjamin Nathans’ “On Russian-Jewish Historiography” aptly demonstrates, Russian-Jewish historians had to elaborate their concepts completely outside the academic institutions and could not simply resort to a subversive national narrative of Jewish history in Russia, since at least two modernist political concepts competed among the emerging Jewish intelligentsia: a possible integration into the surrounding Russian milieu or an autonomisation as one of the Empires national and confessional minorities. Added to this, Nathans reminds us that the “Jewish question” in late Imperial Russia remained hopelessly intertwined with other social issues such as the development of capitalism, Russian nationalism or the revolutionary movement. On these grounds Nathans labels Dubnov’s history of the Russian Jewry as a secular achievement, since Dubnov succeeded in locating Russian-Jewish history within the larger framework of four thousand years of Jewish history in general and in the context of the contemporary situation of stateless East-European nationalities in particular. The title of Adeeb Khalid’s “The Emergence of a Modern Central Asian Historical Consciousness” is to a degree misleading, as the essay provides us with a short account of premodern Muslim historiographical traditions, too. Interpreting the “new historiography” as deeply rooted in those traditions, Khalid eschews simplistic interpretations of the Muslim renovation movement. The historicisation of Islam emerged as a result of Jadid historiography and was by no means the intention of the reformers. European or Russian influence shaped Muslim historical consciousness rather indirectly.
The final chapter of the book returns to the present day situation. While Manfred Hildermeier’s “Russian History at a Turning Point: Notes from a Benevolent Distance”, presents a somewhat detached and sceptical discussion of the impact of gender studies and the linguistic turn on contemporary historical studies, Marc Raeff’s second contribution, “Toward a New Paradigm?” attempts to generalize on the observations made earlier. To begin with the obvious defects of Russian Imperial historiography: one cannot but agree with Raeff that Russian Imperial historiography generally neglected the international context as well as the polyethnic or local dimensions of Russia’s history. Equally underrepresented are histories of the church and religion in general. The author is certainly right when he describes as typical features of prerevolutionary Russian historiography (as in many other parts of contemporary Europe) the belief in historical evolution towards prosperity, higher culture, and political liberalisation, identified as “vast impersonal forces”, and a positivist, if not historicistic methodological stance. Finally, Raeff deplores the lack of interest of Imperial historiography to the possibilities of alternative developments. Raeff’s surprising conclusion is that contemporary historians should create a greater variety of perspectives on the basis of the elaborated historical paradigm of Imperial history, rather than to proceed to the development of new ones. Given the mutual exclusiveness if only of the presented Russian and Ukrainian historiographical visions, this conclusion is hardly sustainable.
In sum, the book offers students and specialists a comprehensive and reliable survey on Imperial Russian and major competing non-Russian historical visions. Not only this wide scope, but the treatment of historiography in broader sense - the inquiry into the working conditions as well as the representation of theoretical and methodical assumptions and summaries of major works – distinguish individual contributions and the volume as a whole.