Michael David-Fox

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?

The Implications of Transnationalism

When Kritika published a special issue in 2001 on the state of the field ten years after the end of communism, it was logical to include a reassessment of the October Revolution and two pieces on the rapidly developing investigation of the Stalin period. (1) Transnational history went unmentioned, along with international and comparative approaches, for they did not yet appear crucial to the state of the field. If culture was everywhere in the Russian history of the 1990s, talk of the transnational became ubiquitous in the 2000s. (2) In retrospect, however, the first post-Soviet decade laid the groundwork for the proliferation of cross-border and cross-cultural approaches by furthering a closely related phenomenon: intensive investigation of comparative dimensions to Russian and Soviet history. (3) This essay argues that the interpretive implications of the transnational trend that crystallized in the second post-Soviet decade are most profound for the study of the revolutionary and communist period. This is for two reasons. First, the grand narratives of Soviet history have been focused internally from the fields outset, heightening the impact of cross-border research. Second, communisms intense ideological engagement with the outside world, combined with the effects of isolation from it, has the potential to generate a certain kind of transnational history centering on the interacting effects of models, contacts, and ideas--including rejections and misunderstandings. At the same time, from the perspective of 20 years after, transnational history in the Russian and Soviet field is still very much an unfinished scholarly revolution. The Western scholarship on Russia of the 1990s raised the question of Russian and Soviet modernity as a conceptual frame. The problem of modernity is still very much with us, but its initial posing centered on state violence, practices of state intervention, and the agendas of intelligentsia experts. (4) Institutionally, it was virtually inevitable after the end of the Cold War that Russia would be studied in ways that made its history more relevant to scholars in other fields. In post-1991 Russian-language scholarship there were equally compelling reasons to investigate Russias international connections, first and foremost with European countries: the combination of interest in previously restricted areas, Yeltsin-era Westernization, and the controversy over Russias osobyi put (special path) produced a wave of books under the title of Russia and the West and a research boom on cultural relations with individual European countries) Another major impulse to comparative history has been the imperial turn, which stimulated comparative studies of empire. (6) But what, in fact, does the term transnational mean? In 2006, the American Historical Review ran a discussion entitled On Transnational History. The resulting forum appeared to fit the Russian field, to paraphrase Stalin, like a saddle on a cow: featuring fine-tuned distinctions among transnational, global, and world history, it centered on the meaning of transcending something Russia never was, the nation-state. Of course, insofar as transnational (or any other) approaches are disciplinary-wide trends and methodologies, Russianists need not necessarily define them differently. Understanding the focus of transnational history as the movement of goods, technology, or people across national borders, although it is perhaps most geared toward opening up the boundaries of fields such as U.S. history, is certainly relevant to any area. (7) However, this formulation notably omits explicit mention of the exchange of culture and ideas, not to mention models, practices, and images. These assume heightened significance for the history of both Westernization and a Soviet order that severely restricted borders and movement. I would like to argue that Russian Westernization in the imperial period and the Soviet Unions place at the center of the communist second world impart a particular valence to cross-border research that can make a distinct contribution to transnational history as it is being developed more generally. …

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

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

Bolshevik Millenarianism as Academic Blockbuster

Marx was the prophet, revolutionaries were the preachers, ideology was faith, revolution was the Last Judgment. Yuri Slezkine’s interpretation of Bolshevism as a millenarian sect in his monumental House of Government could be rendered in both soft and hard versions. Both would start with the observation that Bolshevik revolutionaries and religious sects displayed profound faith in the coming of a newworld. In a less categorical version, Bolshevik collectivism and the revolutionary trajectory would be analyzed anew in light of remarkable parallels – and differences – with the history of those sectarianisms that attempted to become established religions. The contours of such a “soft” analogy between religion and politics were described in Igal Halfin’s well-known work on Soviet Marxist eschatology (remarkably, not cited by Slezkine): “Any comparison I suggest between Christianity and Marxism serves an analytical, not historical function. My reference to biblical terms throughout is no more than a heuristic device intended to evoke the deep plot of the eschatological master narrative.”1

Opiate of the Intellectuals?: Pilgrims, Partisans, and Political Tourists

The interpretation of Bolshevism as a political or secular religion has a complicated and fragmented genealogy. Long before the Russian Revolution, Russian philosophers were already interpreting politics as a form of religion. Vladimir Solov ́ev, in his 1878 Lectures on Godmanhood, wrote that socialism and positivism were substitutes for “rejected gods”; in emigration, Nikolai Berdiaev applied a similar equation to communism, famously comparing the Third Rome to the Third International in his 1937 book, The Origin

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,

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.