Ronald Grigor Suny

Constructing Primordialism: Old Histories for New Nations

“Oi, mister! Indo-Aryans . . . it looks like I am Western after all! Maybe I should listen to Tina Turner, wear the itsy-bitsy leather skirts. Pah. It just goes to show,” said Alsana, revealing her English tongue, “you go back and back and back and it’s still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It’s a fairy tale!”1

Provisional Stabilities: The Politics of Identities in Post-Soviet Eurasia

The comfortable notion that deep-lying stable cultural differences are fundamental to ethnic and national conoicts has taken a beating in recent scholarship. Essentialist, holistic, homogeneous conceptions of culture, such as agure in the popular works of Robert Kaplan and Samuel Huntington, have been seriously undermined by theoretical and empirical historical work.1 Rather than appearing coherent and uniform as it might look from afar, ethnicity at closer range looks fragmented, its cultural content contested and conoicted. Rather than primordial and organic, the nation has been reassessed as relatively modern, the product of deliberate intellectual and political work. And ethnic conoict, rather than the modern repetition of “ancient tribal struggles,” is seen as more contingent, requiring other kinds of causal explanation. This article employs a constructivist approach to analyze the ouidity and multiplicity of identities as they function in national formation and the practice of internal and foreign policy. Rather than conceiving of nations and states as possessing single identities from which their interests and behavior follow, the approach here proposes that political actors are capable of employing various identities, constituted both historically and by elites, that shape their attitudes and actions in domestic and international arenas. Because, arguably, interests are tied to identities— that is, what we think we need is connected to who we think we are—the

Comintern and Soviet foreign policy, 1919–1941

The Bolsheviks had been conducting a fierce campaign to spread the revolution among invading Allied troops since the autumn of 1918 under the Central Executive Committees Department of Propaganda, which was then moved over into the Communist International (Comintern) on 25 March 1919. The failure of the Allied war of intervention, signalled by the British decision to pull out by the end of 1919, effectively ensured the survival of Bolshevik rule in Russia and the greater part of its former empire. The Janus faces of Soviet foreign policy emerged: on the one side the face of appeasement and statecraft, the policy of accommodation to the capitalist world; on the other the contrasting face of violence and revolution to uproot and supplant capitalism in its entirety. The legitimacy of the October Revolution in Russia never depended exclusively on what it could do for Russia. France was on the front line against Fascism in 1934.

Rehabilitating Tsarism: The Imperial Russian State and Its Historians A Review Article

The discussion of the literature in this essay was influenced by the papers and commentaries delivered at the Third Meeting of the National Seminar for the Study of Russian Society in the Twentieth Century, held in Philadelphia, 29-30 January 1983, and particularly by the introductory remarks of Michael Confino. Neither Professor Confino, however, my colleague Geoff Eley, Daniel Field, nor John Dewald, who read an earlier draft of this review, is responsible for the views or conclusions here presented.

Making states and breaking states: Kosovo and the Caucasus in 2008: Introduction

Two events in 2008 shaped the political map of the Caucasus: the West’s decision on the independence of Kosovo and the Russo–Georgian War. First, on 17 February, Kosovo authorities unilaterally declared the independence of what was at the time a UN protectorate. This declaration enjoyed much support in the West, including near-immediate recognition by key states such as the US, Germany, France, the UK, and a dozen others. But it also faced strong opposition from Serbia and Russia and strong skepticism from prowestern countries such as Georgia. Russia opposed not only the Kosovo declaration itself but more importantly the western adoption of it. From the Russian perspective, by supporting Kosovo’s accession to sovereignty western states were violating the rules set at the moment of collapse of the federal states of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union: to invite the former union republics to join the international clubs of sovereign states, but not extend such invitation to any other sub-units. In other words, Azerbaijan, Croatia, Kazakhstan, and Russia became members of the United Nations, but sub-entities like Chechnya, Kosovo, or Tatarstan did not receive the same recognition. The American and European recognition of Kosovo independence, without a UN mandate, broke the rules of state recognition as they had been practiced since the collapse of USSR and Yugoslavia. In a complex manner, the western recognition of Kosovo as an independent state reshaped the conflict lines in the Caucasus. If the old rules did not apply, were there new ones? How was it going to impact conflict resolution processes globally, and more specifically in the Caucasus region? The Caucasus was highly relevant as it was a region that witnessed intense ethno-territorial conflicts similar to the one in Kosovo, and therefore the Kosovo case could be seen as a precedent to conflict resolution in the Caucasus. A number of conflicts remained unresolved in the Caucasus, especially in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two entities that had declared their independence from Georgia, and Mountainous Karabakh, which had declared its independence from Azerbaijan. Russia faced a similar situation in the North Caucasus, with Chechnya the obvious example, but more latent centrifugal forces were present in the entire region, from Daghestan in the east to Karachayevo-Cherkessia in the west. Azerbaijan and especially Georgia were progressively integrating their security into the space of the Euro-Atlantic alliance. Yet, and in spite of western insistence on the “exceptional” case of Kosovo independence, Azerbaijan and Georgia did not hide their displeasure with the rapid recognition. Western capitals disregarded the impact of this recognition on the conflict resolution processes in

The Gorbachev era

No period in peacetime in twentieth-century Russia saw such dramatic change as the years between 1985 and 1991. During this time Russia achieved a greater political freedom than it had ever enjoyed before. The Cold War ended definitively in 1989 when the Central and Eastern European states regained their sovereignty. One of the most important developments in the Soviet Union following Mikhail Gorbachevs selection as General Secretary was a change of political language. New concepts were introduced into Soviet political discourse and old ones shed the meanings they had been accorded hitherto by Soviet ideology. The most immediate stimulus to change in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Gorbachev era was the long-term decline in the rate of economic growth and the fact that the Soviet economy was not only lagging behind the most advanced Western countries but also was being overtaken by some of the newly industrialising countries in Asia.

Reading Russia and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century: How the ‘west’ wrote its history of the USSR

From its very beginnings the historiography of Russia in the twentieth century has been much more than an object of coolly detached scholarly contemplation. Many observers saw the USSR as the major enemy of Western civilisation, the principal threat to the stability of nations and empires, a scourge that sought to undermine the fundamental values of decent human societies. Through the inter-war years the Soviet Union offered many intellectuals a vision of a preferred future outside and beyond capitalism, but contained within the hope and faith in the USSR and communism were the seeds of disillusionment and despair. The image of an imperialist totalitarianism, spreading its red grip over the globe, was at one and the same time the product of Western anxieties and the producer of inflated fears. As the Cold War consensus of the 1950s gave way to a growing discomfort with American policy, the Soviet Union itself was evolving away from Stalinism.

The Russian civil war, 1917–1922

A generation ago, the nature of available sources as well as dominant paradigms in the historical profession led Western historians of the civil war to focus on military operations, allied intervention and politics at the top. The origins of the Russian civil war can be found in the desacralisation of the tsarist autocracy that took place in the years before the First World War. War, geopolitics and the prolonged crisis beginning in 1914 shaped the emerging Bolshevik party-state, which differed radically from the utopian views of the commune state that Lenin had formulated in 1917 in his State and Revolution. Bent on retaining power and the symbols of legitimacy, the Bolsheviks disagreed over how best to implement new cultural practices, which they saw as essential to the success of their revolution. Centring on procurement, Bolshevik economic practices alienated the peasantry and contributed to the famine of 1921-23.

Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History

INTRODUCTION I Civil War and Social Revolution New Perspectives on the Civil War Sheila Fitzpatrick Civil War and the Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth-Century Russia Leopold H. Haimson II The Social and Demographic Impact of the Civil War Introduction: Social and Demographic Change in the Civil War Diane P Koenker oThe City in DangerO: The Civil War and the Russian Urban Population Daniel R. Brower Urbanization and Deurbanization in the Russian Revolution and Civil War Diane P. Koenker The Effects of the Civil War on Women and Family Relations Barbara Evans Clements Commentary: The Elements of Social and Demographic Change in Civil War Russia William G. Rosenberg III Administration and State Building Introduction: Bolshevik Efforts at State Building Victoria E. Bonnell The Petrograd First City District Soviet during the Civil War Alexander Rabinowitch Bread without the Bourgeoisie Mary McAuley State Building in the Civil War Era: The Role of Lower-Middle Strata Daniel T. Orlovsky The Rationalization of State KontolO Thomas F. Remington Commentary: Administration and State Building Ronald Grigor Suny IV The Bolsheviks and the Intelligentsia Introduction: The Bolsheviks and the Intelligentsia Peter Kenez The Professoriate in the Russian Civil War James C. McClelland Natural Scientists and the Soviet System Kendall E. Bailes Intellectuals in the Proletkult: Problems of Authority and Expertise Lynn Mally Commentary: The Revolution and the Intellectuals Diane P. Koenker V Workers and Socialists Introduction: Workers and Socialist Allan K. Wildman Social Democrats in Power: Menshevik Georgia and the Russian Civil War Ronald Grigor Suny The Social Background to Tsektran William G. Rosenberg Commentary: Circumstance and Political Will in the Russian Civil War Reginald E. Zelnik VI The Legacy of the Civil War The Legacy of the Civil War Sheila Fitzpatrick The Civil War: Dynamics and Legacy Moshe Lewin GUIDE TO FURTHER READING CONTRIBUTORS INDEX

Reconsidering lenin: What can be said about what is to be done?

Lars Lih’s explication of the intended meaning of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? is not only the most sophisticated to date, it is also unlikely to be surpassed in the foreseeable future. Lih’s portrayal of Lenin as a democratic ‘Erfurtian’ Marxist undoubtedly poses a powerful challenge to those would suggest that Stalinism can be deduced from the arguments of the book. Nonetheless, there exists contemporary evidence to suggest that not only Mensheviks but also some Bolsheviks interpreted Lenin in a way not too dissimilar from what Lih calls the ‘textbook-interpretation’.