Stephen Kotkin

Modern Times: The Soviet Union and the Interwar Conjuncture

In Modern Times (1936), Charlie Chaplin plays a factory worker at the ElectroSteel Company, tightening nuts on a fast-moving conveyor belt. One scene shows a mechanical contraption designed to feed workers lunch while they remain on the assembly line, but it malfunctions, throwing soup in Charlie’s face. Other scenes depict a capitalist owner who maintains closed-circuit surveillance over the plant and demands increases in the speed of the line. Unable to keep pace, Charlie falls into the giant gears. He has a nervous breakdown, and loses his job. On the street, he’s mistaken for a communist leader and arrested. He accidentally prevents a jailbreak, is pardoned and released, but with his old steel plant idle, Charlie cannot find employment, and begins to long for the shabby security of incarceration. The political message of “Modern Times” would seem unmistakable.

1991 and the Russian Revolution: Sources, Conceptual Categories, Analytical Frameworks*

A man sets himself the task of drawing the world. As the years pass, the fills the empty space with images of provinces and kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, houses, and people. Just before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face. (Jorge Luis Borges)

The State—Is It Us? Memoirs, Archives, and Kremlinologists

People who are often written about but rarely heard from have here left detailed accounts of their lives.... Even when the respondents are barely literate ... they still know the names and biographies of their neighbors, they know who did what and sometimes can also tell why, and they remember trivial details, gossip, and scraps of conversation. Through these biographies we can observe the application of Soviet power ...

Historical Legacies of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe

1. The historical legacies of communism: an empirical agenda Stephen Kotkin and Mark R. Beissinger 2. Communist development and the post-communist democratic deficit Grigore Pop-Eleches 3. Room for error: the economic legacy of Soviet spatial misallocation Clifford G. Gaddy 4. Legacies of industrialization and paths of transnational integration after Socialism Bela Greskovits 5. The limits of legacies: property rights in Russian energy Timothy Frye 6. Legacies and departures in the Russian state executive Eugene Huskey 7. From police state to police state? Legacies and law enforcement in Russia Brian D. Taylor 8. How judges arrest and acquit: Soviet legacies in post-communist criminal justice Alexei Trochev 9. Historical roots of religious influence on post-communist democratic politics Anna Grzymala-Busse 10. Soviet nationalities policies and the discrepancy between ethnocultural identification and language practice in Ukraine Volodymyr Kulyk 11. Pokazukha and cardiologist Khrenov: Soviet legacies, legacy theater, and a usable past Jessica Pisano.THE PAST NOT ONLY MATTERS FOR SCHOLARS AND STUDENTS OF HISTORY, but generally speaking affects all systems and subsystems that humans create in order to organise communal life. This edited volume provides a research agenda and ten research-based empirical studies by well-known scholars applying the legacy argument to different fields such as law enforcement, economy, politics, culture and media. The strength of the volume is that it presents a broad overview of the study of legacies in the postcommunist space, focusing on the most relevant puzzles linked to the relationship between past and present. Grigore Pop-Eleches asks why the fairly high socioeconomic development of the Soviet Union did not lead to the emergence of democracy in Russia and all other former Soviet republics after 1991. Clifford G. Gaddy asks why Russia’s economic geography is distorted. For Timothy Frye the question is why was the privatisation of natural resource industries in Russia in the 1990s followed by the renationalisation of the 2000s. Alexei Trochev asks why judges in post-communist countries avoid acquittals. Anna Grzymala-Busse asks why churches in some post-communist countries have strong political influence, while they are weak in others. And finally, Volodomyr Kulyk asks why there is a discrepancy between ethnic identification and language use in Ukraine. By addressing these and other puzzles employing legacy arguments, the volume provides the reader with valuable insights not only into the variety of legacies and legacy mechanisms, but also its selective impact and, as a result, the diverse outcomes of development paths in Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia after 1989 and 1991. To the best of my knowledge, there is no publication that covers the broad, complex and ambiguous field of legacies in the post-communist space in such comparable depth and with such concentrated expertise, which makes it a useful purchase for both advanced students and scholars. The main weakness of the volume, however, is its lack of a comprehensive conceptual framework. The editors claim that this is ‘not needed’ (p. 3), and suggest a research agenda exploring the field ‘empirically, contextually, and with greater rigor’ (p. 3) instead. The consequence is the dilution of scientific concepts. Legacies are defined as ‘durable causal relationships’ between past and the subsequent present (p. 7) around at least one ‘macrohistorical rupture’ (p. 8). ‘Rupture’ is insufficiently conceptualised; it could be ‘revolution, state collapse, decolonisation, or major incidents of regime change’, the editors argue (p. 8). Still, in some of the empirical studies, the authors do not properly differentiate between legacies and continuities, legacies and development, and legacies and traditions. All merge into one, and sometimes the reader has the impression that Russian politics is, after all, still basically tsarist in its nature (as in the chapter by Eugene Huskey). This leads to another weakness: the temporal positioning of the (imagined) origin of legacies and subsequent research problems. The volume is, according to its title, addressing legacies linked to communism. However, many of the fields explored do not only have communist, but also precommunist legacies—which the authors point out. This is relevant, for instance, for religious influence on politics, nationalities policies, and pokazukha (‘window dressing’). In this respect, the title that refers to communist legacies only is problematic; moreover it reveals a methodological problem: how do we deal analytically with different layers of legacies (for example, pre-Soviet and Soviet), particularly when they are contradictory? How can we explain why in some cases pre-communist EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES Vol. 67, No. 5, July 2015, 831–844

World War Two and Labor: A Lost Cause?

Recent interpretations of World War Two have stressed the decisive role of economics in the success of the Allies and especially in the failure of the Axis. Yet the place of labor in the war remains under-appreciated. ILWCH commissioned several essays for a special issue on wartime labor mobilization, forced and free. This introduction briefly compares Nazi Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States, and highlights the implications of the differing wartime labor regimes for the postwar period.

No Answer (for the Economic Dynamism and Civic Freedoms of post-WWII Western Europe)

Given the uncivil reception that Uncivil Society has received from the academic establishment, the worry expressed in this forum that my analysis might be assigned in classrooms or even “become definitive” could be seen as witty. The dominant civil-society and dissident-centric interpretation of 1989 strikes me as far too congenial to the worldview and sentiments of scholars to ever be displaced. Still, a debate is a welcome turn. For the honor of organizing a discussion of my book and challenging me with substantive criticisms and questions, I thank the editors of East Central Europe and the four contributors. Please allow me to take them in order.