Anna Krylova

The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies

American scholars of Soviet Russia have demarcated their scholarship of the 1990s as a distinct period in Soviet studies. Scholarly work set itself off from the previous academic period by the events of 1991, newly available documents from Russian archives, and innovative interpretive frameworks. “New” has become the defining word of the decade. The emphasis on novelty announced the break with the past and, simultaneously, admonished contemporary scholars to distance themselves from previous schools of interpretation. In a review article in the Journal of Modern History, entitled “1991 and the Russian Revolution: Sources, Conceptual Categories, Analytical Frameworks,” Stephen Kotkin exemplifies this tendency and exhibits its problematic consequences. His stated project, to reinterpret the entire Soviet period against previous scholarship rather than in dialogue with it, results not only in a dismissive vocabulary regarding the “caricaturish notions” of the totalitarian school of the 1950s and the 1960s and the “clumsiness” of the revisionists of the 1970s and the 1980s, but in simplifications of the pre-1991 conceptual legacy. However, attempts to efface the past often backfire: by obscuring from the reader (and perhaps the author himself) intellectual indebtedness to the discipline, they reduce the conceptual escape to empty rhetoric. While appreciating the innovative contributions of scholarship on the Soviet Union of the 1990s, this chapter questions the claims of sharp “epistemological breaks” with the scholarly past and explores conceptual continuities in Soviet studies since World War II. My vehicle for this investigation is the genealogy of the category “Soviet man.” I focus on the ways that American scholars researching the 1930s have conceptualized the Stalinist subject, and particularly on the political and cultural roots of their conceptualizations.

Soviet Modernity: Stephen Kotkin and The Bolshevik Predicament

‘Modernity’ has long been a working category of historical analysis in Russian and Soviet studies. Like any established category, it bears a history of its own characterised by founding assumptions, conceptual possibilities and lasting interpretive habits. Stephen Kotkins work has played a special role in framing the kind of scholarship this category has enabled and the kind of modernity it has assigned to twentieth-century Russia. Kotkins 1995 Magnetic Mountain introduced the concept of ‘socialist modernity’. His continued work with the concept in his 2001 Kritika article ‘Modern Times’ and his 2001 Armageddon Averted marked crucial moments in the history of the discipline and have positioned the author as a pioneering and dominant voice on the subject for nearly two decades. Given the defining nature of Kotkins work, a critical discussion of its impact on the way the discipline conceives of Soviet modernisation and presents it to non-Russian fields is perhaps overdue. Here, I approach Kotkins work on modernity as the fields collective property in need of a critical, deconstructive reading for its underlying assumptions, prescribed master narratives, and resultant paradoxes.

Gender Binary and the Limits of Poststructuralist Method

In contemporary gender history, the story about the making of the gender category is inseparable from the concept of ‘gender binary’. It at once signifies a research agenda and constitutes a persistent problem pervading feminist analysis itself. On the one hand, it points to the massive historical record of persistent inequality between the sexes. On the other hand, the concept of ‘gender binary’ undergirds gender historys analytics, which empowers historians to pursue, expose and deconstruct the binary organisation of gendered – woman/man – identities as well as social relations and discursive formations that produce them. In both capacities, the concept carries a rich repertoire of connotations, which informs and influences the gender category: those of radical distinction, opposition, mutually exclusive and exhaustive differentiation, hierarchy, domination, oppression – in all their myriad historical forms. As a result, it captures the entanglement of gender – in theory, an open-ended category – in binary, that is, negatively and positively determined connotations of feminine and masculine and, consequently, in a particular, historical form of heterosexual subjectivity, the one structured like a binary system. The entanglement of gender historys foundational category – gender – in the binary systems of assigning difference has had many critics. What has been left unexamined however and what gives this article its focus is the poverty of gender as a binary device to analyse those gendered identities that constitute heterosexual relations but do not fit the binary matrix. The goal in this article is to enable the conditions for the continuous development – not abandonment – of the gender category and our theoretical framework. To do that, I explore how the gender category became a binary category, tightly identified with connotations of asymmetry and hierarchy, by undertaking a deconstructive rereading of a foundational work by one of the disciplines most influential poststructuralist theorists – Joan Scott. I conclude by arguing that in order to address the problem of gendered, heterosexual identities that do not fit the binary matrix we need to revisit the concept of dichotomy and differentiate it from binary connotations of difference found in heteronormative gender systems.

Imagining socialism in the soviet century

Abstract Much of the current conversation about social justice, economic responsibility and individual self-realization is informed by an explicit or implicit comparison between capitalist and socialist modernities. The Soviet Union’s variety of socialism understandably serves as a critical master referent in this conversation. In this regard, a dominant historical narrative that ties the history of Soviet socialism to the Bolshevik origins imposes serious limitation to available depictions of socialism and histories of the twentieth century. This article turns the Bolshevik fundamentals assigned to the Soviet project into a problem of historical analysis and argues that the Soviet experience has more than one normative vision of socialism to offer. The goal is to foreground the divergence of normative conceptions of the socialist society and individual by historicizing the two principal and presently closely identified ideological-educational undertakings: those of the New Man and the ‘New Soviet Person’. By tracing the histories of the two projects, the article shows how the collectivist ethos of the Bolshevism of the 1910–1920s that rejected the ontological differentiation between the individual and his or her social milieu failed to retain its ideological, institutional, and cultural currency even during the 1930s, not to mention throughout the Soviet period.

Introduction: The Economic Turn and Modern Russian History

The revival of academic interest in economic history and the analytics that the field has to offer to historians perhaps could have been predicted. Initiating a conversation about the conceptual currency of socio-economic methodologies, a number of scholars have pointed out that the protracted global economic crisis has once again rendered the invisible visible—that is, made the power of invisible economic dynamics to structure our everyday existence vividly real and undeniable.1 The prominent academic approach of the past three decades that declared everything and everyone “culturally constructed” and encouraged scholars to shift their agendas to the questions of representation has been proven ill-equipped to handle these pressing questions of socioeconomic processes that are changing our lives and, surely, have not spared the lives of our historical subjects in the past. In the field of modern Russian history, the limits of cultural analysis are felt particularly acutely as scholars shift their attention to the postwar, and especially, post-1950s period and reach out into the present. In striking contrast with the thriving and, for the last three decades, sidelined research on socio-economic transformations of the prewar decades, the post-1950s years constitute largely an uncharted territory. Thus, the persistent efforts of socioeconomic historians of several generations working on the margins of the profession have ensured that we possess a rich corpus of scholarship on the