Alexander M. Martin

The Imperial Turn

Since roughly 1991, the Russian field has undergone numerous changes. In fact, one should now say the Russian and Eurasian field, for among the most striking developments has been the explosive growth of studies on what might be called the imperial dimensions to Russian and Soviet history. Much as Social Democrats in Russia at the turn of the 20th century used to put the “nationality question” last on the agenda at party meetings, so Russian and Soviet historians often marginalized—or did not consider at all—a range of issues relating to non-Russian nationalities, ethnicity and nationalism, borderlands and non-Russian groups, national identities and representations of empire. To be sure, fundamental studies appeared, but it is safe to say that this set of issues gravitated toward the margins rather than remaining at the center of the field’s attention. The imperial turn in the historiography occurred not just because the Soviet Union broke up into 15 newly independent states in 1991, but because that particular owl of Minerva came on the heels of a quantum leap in the general theory of nationalism and ethnicity in the human sciences. For many years now, study of Russia as a polyethnic state has been one of the fastest-growing and fastest-moving fields of scholarship in the Eurasian area. How has this changed the field?

An Interview with Leopold Haimson

As readers may recall, Kritika has initiated an interview series, run in our “From the Editors” column, with leading figures in the Russian field, asking them to describe the state of the field from the perspective of their own life trajectories. In the past we have interviewed Dan Davidson, James Billington, and Marc Raeff. In this issue we continue our series in an interview with Leopold Haimson. Leopold Haimson is professor emeritus of the Department of History and the Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of Eurasia at Columbia University. He earlier taught at the University of Chicago for ten years, from 1956 to 1966. Having received his BA from Harvard University in 1945 (in history and philosophy) and his PhD there (in history and social relations) in 1952, he served for several years as a research associate for Studies in Soviet Culture and Communications, a project directed by Margaret Mead, and in this connection published several articles on Soviet civilization. In 1955, his influential The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism appeared, and he subsequently published a stream of important articles and edited volumes on Russian political culture generally and on the history of Menshevism in particular, from its origins to its vital life in emigration. In 1964–65, his “The Question of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905–1917” appeared, a two-part article that set off one of the most productive and long-running

From the Editors: Journées d'études internationales

The “human sciences,” which encompass the social sciences and humanities, are a category that allows for consideration of disciplines frequently separated in today’s scholarly landscape. Historically, they very much belong together; the human sciences can be defined at their origins as the “science whose subject is ‘man.’ ” In this sense, their roots can be located in early modern Europe, where after 1600 there emerged a “substantial and profound literature on the subject ‘man,’ a subject that was later studied in ways driven primarily by a secular rather than a theological interest.” But in Western and Central Europe, the great period of ferment and disciplinary formation—what Reinhard Koselleck called the Sattelzeit, or period of makeover and accelerated change—came in the decades on either side of 1800. In European history, then, the “epistemic shifts” of the period 1750–1850 constituted a “great intellectual transformation” that marked the transition from general frameworks such as natural law and moral philosophy to modern disciplines like economics and anthropology. Yet Russia’s own Sattelzeit, of course, came significantly later, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: it was made possible by the rapid growth of the academic intelligentsia and intensive European exchange ushered in by the Great Reforms. Indeed, this is one reason the chronological emphasis of the current special issue of Kritika lies precisely here. To say that the history of the human sciences in Russia is intimately connected with the classic question of Russia’s relationship with Europe is only to gesture at the most general parameters of the issue. As in so many other areas,

Lost Arcadia: The 1812 War and Russian Images of Aristocratic Womanhood

The Napoleonic invasion of 1812 marks a watershed in the history of Russian aristocratic women. Their social position before 1812, while privileged and sometimes even quite autonomous, had mostly kept their political and social horizons narrow. In addition, eighteenth-century culture had presented them with competing, at times conflicting, models of aristocratic femininity. Based on memoirs by women who experienced the 1812 war, this article argues that the invasion disrupted their pre-war insular way of life and confronted noblewomen with traumas specific to their class and sex. In response, women reaffirmed the aristocracy’s stoic ethos and its claim to leadership in society, and represented women as gentle humanitarians but also patriots and fearless protectors of their loved ones. The women of the 1812 generation thereby helped to crystallize the emerging intelligentsia’s vision of ideal Russian womanhood, which in turn contributed to the rise of the Russian revolutionary movement.

New Wine in New Bottles

This special issue of Kritika is devoted to the “new political history.” What, then, is this beast, “the new political history”? Obviously, a political approach to Russian and Soviet history is not “new”—in fact, it was long the dominant mode of analysis. This was often political history in its traditional register: the study of “high politics,” deploying a top-down model of causality and, at times, drawing on methodologies from a field that produced many Sovietologists, political science. Owing to broader shifts in the historical field, as well as limitations in source material for both the imperial and Soviet periods, the focus then changed. “Traditional” political history, as Sheila Fitzpatrick discusses in her contribution to this issue, gave way first to the “heyday” of what was once known as the new social history, and then, more recently, to the new cultural history. The title of this special issue draws attention to the fact that since the collapse of the Soviet Union, political history has enjoyed something of a renaissance. Improved archival access and an invigorated interest in political history among Russian scholars have generated a spate of new work. Much of it builds on older forms of political history, but it has also pursued new directions such as those suggested by cultural studies and anthropology. In the broadest terms, the new political history can be understood as a multifaceted engagement with “the political” after an extended hiatus. Because of the explosion of different kinds of history in the intervening years, however, there can be no return to the status quo ante: “the political” now means something different. In the Russian context, the new political history posits the existence of a field of political practices that encompasses political parties but extends beyond them. While there are many ways of understanding this shift, the “new” political history seems to have several core features: an understanding of politics as a complex of interrelated practices, rather than simply government decrees and party resolutions; an attention to the interplay of high politics at the national level with everyday local politics, as demonstrated in

Anglophone Russian Studies and the German Question

In a recent contribution to H-Russia, Andreas Umland decried “an unfortunate lack of attention to the relevant German-language literature” in English-language studies. In a carefully phrased formulation, he noted that “the quality of German historical research on modern and contemporary Russia is often comparable and sometimes superior to that of the eminent Anglophone and Russian scholars.” Umland also made the following observation: “An odd disparity between the Angloand Germanophone communities is, moreover, that as a rule, the German authors are (often, fully) aware of the English-language literature while not all Anglophone scholars read, use, and quote the relevant German studies.” This complaint, while perhaps unusually public and direct, is hardly new. For decades, our German colleagues have patiently observed that important German studies in the field do not get the attention they deserve, in part because the Anglophone (and perhaps particularly, American) scholarly world does not place sufficient emphasis on language study. In the past half-decade, in a related but different case, a constant refrain in Kritika reviews of Russian books has been that many Russian scholars have not read or assimilated the relevant English-language or Western literature. Such criticisms, of course, are driven by the reasonable expectation that greater familiarity can alter conceptual frameworks and affect empirical conclusions. One perhaps should not also exclude a certain element of wounded pride—how could they not recognize or even know how important our studies are? The “German question” turns the tables on English-speaking specialists who skewer Russians for their inability sufficiently to incorporate “Western” literature. While the contexts (American and Russian academic and intellectual life) are very different, underlying both situations is the issue of linguistic competence. Just as there are obvious historical reasons why some Russian historians, especially those of the older generation, cannot read these lines,

From the Editors: Post-Post Historiography, or the Trends of the "Naughts"

With this number of Kritika we complete our fifth volume of the journal and stand at the midpoint of the first decade of the 21st century. Although such landmarks often provide grounds for stocktaking, some of it useful, we have always been a bit skeptical of jubilees, anniversaries, institutional histories, and the other celebratory accessories of the historians’ craft. In these columns we have also tilted against the “fetishization of the decade as the default chronological unit of analysis” and historians’ congenital reluctance to transcend conventional chronological boundaries. It is possible, however, that our skepticism has been less than rigorous when it comes to historiography. Like many others, we have often thought in terms of the literature of “the 1970s and the 1980s,” the post-Soviet historiography of the “1990s,” and so on, even though it is clear that many subtle and not-so-subtle continuities often underlie the much-ballyhooed paradigm shifts in the field. Now we would like to take the occasion to raise another question, one that, for a change, is framed by scholarly silence rather than prescriptive proclamations. Why, halfway through the new decade, has no one begun to discuss the historiographical characteristics of the 2000s? Is it simply because, as much remarked in the popular press, no accepted name for the new decade has taken hold? Some refer to the “double-ohs,” the “naughts,” and even more contrived appellations, but the more formal “first decade of the 21st century” and the “two-thousands” seem a bit too clunky to generate pithy prognostications. We suspect that this nameless decade’s anomalous status—that is, the societywide pattern of talking less about the cultural styles of the 2000s than about those of the decades that preceded it—has something to do with the lack of discussion in our area about how it is distinguishing itself from the 1990s. In addition, two years or so of the new decade were effectively lost to the pundits with the flurry of scholarly anniversaries of the first ten years of post-Soviet historiography, which took place

An Interview with Dan Davidson

With this issue we inaugurate a new, occasional format for our “From the Editors” column in which we pose questions about current issues affecting the field to people whose perspective we believe will be interesting and informative to Kritika’s readership. We are especially pleased to begin with Dan E. Davidson, who as President and co-founder of American Councils for International Education: ACTR /ACCELS has played a remarkable role in the fields of Russian, second language acquisition, and post-Soviet educational reform. He has also been active and influential in creating and maintaining funding opportunities for historical, humanities, and social science research in Russian and Eurasian Studies in the United States. Dan Davidson received the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Harvard University, and since 1983 he has held the rank of full professor in Russian and Second Language Acquisition at Bryn Mawr College. He is the author or editor of 26 books and more than 40 scholarly articles, including a 20-year longitudinal, empirical study of adult second language acquisition during study abroad. He has directed or co-directed 23 Ph.D. dissertations in the fields of Russian and second language acquisition. In 1992–95, Davidson also served as co-chairman of the Transformation of the Humanities and Social Sciences Initiative sponsored by the philanthropist George Soros. The program produced over 400 experimental textbooks for schools and colleges in Eurasia. The exchange that took place on 17 June 2004 was an “electronic interview”: we submitted questions by e-mail to Professor Davidson, and he sent us his responses.