THE RUSSIAN FRONT

[This is the second of a four-part series of posts concerning “The Past, Present, and Possible Future of Russian History in America.” For background information on this series, click here. For Part One, here.]

From under the rubble

Although the years that immediately followed the demise of the Soviet system were accompanied by widespread and significant transformations in the field of Russian history, it cannot be said that these changes were themselves brought about by the historic events that transpired in and around 1991. A paradigmatic shift in Russian historiography was already underway by the time that the USSR had entered into its final stages of decay. Increasingly influenced by the “linguistic turn” that had earlier transformed the historiography of Western Europe, Russian historians were moving away from the issues and concerns that had defined the totalitarian–revisionist dispute towards cultural analysis based on methodologies devised by linguists and literary theorists.¹

One of the earliest and most influential works to incorporate the linguistic turn was Laura Engelstein’s acclaimed study The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (1992). Taking as its starting point Michel Foucault’s theory that “sexual categories and norms constitute at once a system of power relations configuring the social body and a way of thinking about power and organizing power through the medium of actual bodies” (3), Engelstein explored the extent to which public discourse regarding sexuality articulated by members of the trained professions and other shapers of civic culture in late Imperial Russia compared with similar efforts on the part of the European middle class. (9) Focusing, in particular, on educated Russians’ views about sexual deviancy, crime, and disease, Engelstein concluded that public discourse on sexuality revealed the contradictions, frustrations, and failures of Russian liberal thought in the years that preceded 1917. Her concomitant demonstration of the extent to which the views of liberal Russians differed significantly from those of their west European counterparts ultimately revealed the limitations of a “Foucauldian” approach to understanding the Russian context; a topic to which she returned in a 1993 article published in the American Historical Review.²

For her path-breaking effort, Engelstein won widespread scholarly accolades and a permanent position in Ph.D. reading lists across the United States.³ In retrospect, her work was no less important as a marker of the field’s ongoing shift away from established political and social history toward the history of culture writ large. Among the more significant monographs on Imperial history to appear in the early 1990s studies devoted to crime, the working class, the peasantry, and women similarly made use of the new cultural history to explore, in innovative ways, already well-established topics.⁴

The transformation of the field engendered by the new cultural history was of course greatly hastened by the increased access to archival sources that followed the implosion of the USSR. The loosening of Soviet-era restrictions on foreign researchers and the declassification of long-suppressed documents that began circa 1992 opened up many new avenues of research for scholars of Russia. As western academics and graduate students rushed to take advantage of the new openness, an “archival revolution” seemed to be in the offering. Ironically, however, the opening of Russian archives at first led to a re-opening of old debates regarding the Soviet system as the contestants in the “totalitarian-revisionist” controversies of the 1970 and 1980s looked to the newly available materials in search of silver bullets with which to slay their longtime historiographical foes.⁵ In short order, the dispute over the origins and nature of the USSR was transformed into a rather fierce debate over the cause of the USSR’s collapse and its meaning to the socialist tradition.⁶

Of the numerous contributions to this dispute, Martin Malia’s was the most noteworthy. An old-school intellectual historian who in 1961 authored one of Russian history’s greatest biographies (a study of Alexander Herzen, nineteenth-century Russia’s greatest thinker),⁷ Malia had followed up his first book with thirty years of professional silence. He re-emerged in 1990 as the initially anonymous author of an essay titled, “To the Stalin Mausoleum,” that forecast the failure of Gorbachev’s reform efforts and the inevitable collapse of the USSR. Following the fulfillment of this stunning prediction Malia plunged into the historiographical fray with the 1994 publication of an intentionally polemical book-length history of socialism’s failure in twentieth-century Russia. Tellingly titled The Soviet Tragedy, Malia’s first monograph in more than three decades took the revisionists to task for their earlier attempts to demonstrate the legitimacy of the October Revolution, to distinguish the “good” Lenin from the “bad” Stalin, and to establish the Soviet system’s capacities for modernization and reform. According to Malia, 1991 was proof that the questions motivating their approaches had been a priori false. The revisionists had fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the Soviet system. They had “ignored the possibility…that nothing went wrong with the Revolution, but rather that the whole enterprise, quite simply, was wrong from the start.” (10) In place of their mistaken emphasis on social modernization and upward mobility, Malia countered with a “concrete agenda” that “reasserted the primacy of ideology and politics over social and economic forces in understanding the Soviet phenomenon.” (16)

The professional silence that followed the appearance of Malia’s monograph was deafening. Although criticisms of The Soviet Tragedy began to circulate at conferences and in articles soon after its publication, Slavic Review, ostensibly the field’s leading journal, simply ignored the book. So, too, did the American Historical Review, the Journal of Modern History, and virtually every other scholarly publication in the nation. One of the few exceptions was America’s most important journal devoted to Russian history, Russian Review, which published a belated, but even-handed and generally favorable evaluation written by Yanni Kotsonis.⁸ As if adding insult to the injuries Malia had inflicted on professional sensibilities, The Soviet Tragedy was enthusiastically praised in the prestigious non-academic venues that reviewed the book.⁹

Whatever the merits of Malia’s polemical account of socialism in Russia, concurrent developments in the changing field were beginning to prove him right in one significant regard. “That I-word’” (as one of my revisionist colleagues once referred to it) was returning to prominence (though not quite dominance) in the study of Russian history. Even before the ink had dried on Malia’s page proofs, a new generation of historians hard at work in Russia’s freshly opened archives, was rediscovering the centrality of ideology and politics to the history of twentieth-century Russia.

Among the more notable new works in this regard was Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain. A sweeping micro-history of Magnitogorsk (the Stalinist-era planned city intended to serve as the center of Soviet iron processing and industrial development), Magnetic Mountain employed a wide array of new sources unearthed in recently opened regional archives together with local and factory newspapers, unpublished histories, and oral interviews in depicting the origins and nature of “Stalinism as a civilization.” Borrowing heavily from concepts first developed by Foucault (to whom the book was dedicated), Kotkin set out to describe the vision and reality of Soviet daily life by applying Foucault’s notion of “subjectivity’ (“the process by which individuals are made, and also make themselves, subjects of the state”) to an empirical study of local citizens’ accommodation and resistance to the mechanisms of Soviet power (22-23).

Kotkin divided his monograph into two sections. The first, titled “Grand Strategies of the State,” outlined the broader process of Soviet industrialization, describing the manner in which the Magnitogorsk complex was planned, constructed, populated, and managed. The second section, on “The Little Tactics of the Habitat,” examined such workaday issues as food and housing, shop-floor conditions, and the administration of justice, from the standpoint of citizens living and laboring within the context of the state’s grand design. Together, the two sections vividly portrayed the vision and reality of “socialist construction,” illustrating the process through which Bolshevik values, behaviors, and beliefs were articulated in the Party’s official ideology only to be resisted, adapted, or accepted by the men and women living in the shadow of the “Magnetic Mountain.” Although several reviewers correctly observed that the book’s broader arguments regarding the Stalinist system’s Enlightenment roots and theocratic structure were hardly original, Kotkin’s reassertion of the importance of ideology to understanding the Soviet experience resonated with scholars in ways that Malia’s polemic had not.

Ideology has since figured prominently in other studies of the Soviet past. In his award-winning monograph, Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions, Stephen Hanson explained the rise and decline of the Soviet Union as resulting from a peculiar vision of time grounded in Marxist ideology. Arguing that Marx’s theory and Soviet practice were characterized by a paradoxical “charismatic-rational” teleology that saw time as a force to be transcended through “time-disciplined” revolutionary action (131-32), Hanson proposed that the history of the USSR could be understood as the product of the Soviet leadership’s inability to make human relationships and institutions conform with their broader ideas regarding the nature and process of development. Ideology played a similarly consequential role in David Brandenberger’s study National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of National Identity, 1931-1956, which explored the myriad ways in which Russian nationalist elements formed a constituent part of official Soviet propaganda. According to Brandenberger, Soviet officials undertook an “ideological about face” in the mid 1930s, abandoning their previous, idealistic efforts to mobilize public support through exhortations of proletarian internationalism in favor of a strident, pragmatic, and more successful emphasis on Russian nationalism. Ultimately, Brandenberger concluded, the emergence of “russocentric etatism” as a chief feature of Stalinist-era ideology unintentionally laid the groundwork for the emergence of a modern Russian identity.

The reincorporation of ideology into the study of the Soviet past was only one of the many ways in which the archival revolution of the early 1990s reinvigorated Russian history. Like their more politically inclined colleagues, social historians also benefited from access to new sources and documents. Particularly valuable to scholars of Soviet society were svodki, informational summaries produced by the Party and secret police organs, which detailed the attitudes and moods of the populace. Along with svodki, vast quantities of personal complaints, letters, denunciations, private diaries, and other previously inaccessible items were disgorged from the archives and made available for researchers’ use. Armed with this new cache of materials documenting the interactions of Soviet citizens with the organs of the party-state, researchers expanded considerably understanding of the social and institutional mechanisms that shaped the lives of Soviet citizens during the 1920s and 1930s. The result was a number of innovative works devoted to such topics as daily life, popular opinion, public demonstrations, and social ostracism.¹⁰

The same was true for specialists focusing on the armed forces. Largely ignored amid the “totalitarian-revisionist” cacophany of the 1970s and 1980s, Russian military and diplomatic history has experienced a renaissance of sorts since the mid-1990s thanks to the emergence of a small but talented group of young scholars. Among this cohort, David Shimmelpenninck van der Oye, Joshua Sanborn, Eric Lohr, and Jonathan Grant contributed important new books on, respectively, the intellectual origins of the Russo-Japanese War, social mobilization during World War I, wartime treatment of non-Russian minorities, and the Putilov armaments company. Meanwhile, senior historian Peter Gatrell has written extensively on the period of the Great War, producing three significant monographs on the relationship between tsarist state and industry, wartime refugees, and the socio-economic history of Russian involvement in the conflict.

Military historians of the Soviet period have proven every bit as productive as new archival discoveries and a few sensationalist works encouraged work in a subfield already popular with the broader reading public. As Bruce Menning noted in a recent survey of Russian military historiography, intercessions on behalf of foreign scholars by the late Dmitrii Volkogonov and the publication of Viktor Suvorov’s controversial Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War? helped spur successful efforts to declassify and make available archival materials relating to the Second World War.¹¹ Historians subsequently took advantage of the new openness to explore a host of topics dealing with military issues. Understanding of the inter-war period has been clarified thanks to Lennart Samuelson’s and Sally Stoecker’s separate studies of military planning and innovation, Raymond Leonard’s history of Soviet military intelligence, and David Stone’s award-winning Hammer and Rifle: The Militarization of the Soviet Union, 1926-1933. No less significant are Amir Weiner’s Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution and William Odom’s account of The Collapse of the Soviet Military.

Of all the scholars working on Soviet military history, however, none have been more prolific than David Glantz and Roger Reese. As major contributors to the prestigious Modern War Studies Series from the University Press of Kansas (one of the nation’s leading academic publishers of military history), Glantz and Reese have been responsible for a remarkable array of deeply researched and path-breaking books relating to Soviet operational history (Glantz) and the history of the Red Army (Reese). In addition to having written (with Jonathan House) the definitive one-volume history of military operations on the Eastern Front, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler, Glantz soundly rebutted Suvorov’s Icebreaker claims in his 1998 study, Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War, now the standard account of the USSR’s military ineptitude in the face of its conflict with Germany. Subsequent works on the rebirth of the Red Army during the War and a series of impressive studies of Operation Mars and the separate battles for Leningrad, Ukraine, and Kursk (among others), have established Glantz as the West’s foremost authority on Soviet military history. Where Glantz’s work has clarified understanding of combat operations during the Second World War, Reese’s scholarship has focused on the institutional history of the Red Army. His first monograph, Stalin’s Reluctant Soldiers: A Social History of the Red Army, 1925-1941, challenged established interpretations by arguing that the rapid and chaotic expansion of the Soviet armed forces during the 1930s (and not Stalin’s 1937-38 purge of the officer corps) was the principal cause behind the Red Army’s 1941 collapse. Reese followed his inaugural book with a concise history of The Soviet Military Experience, 1917-1991 and, most recently, the first comprehensive study of the Soviet officer corps.

[On to Part Three]

1. John Toews, “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience,” American Historical Review, 92 (1987): 879-907 [↩]
2. Laura Engelstein, “Combined Underdevelopment: Discipline and the Law in Imperial and Soviet Russia,” American Historical Review 98:2 (1993): 338-353 [↩]
3. For a representative sample of opinions regarding the book, see Irina Paperno, editor, “Symposium,” Slavic Review 53:1 (1994), 193-224 [↩]
4. Joan Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900-1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Mark D. Steinberg, Moral Communities: The Culture of Class Relations in the Russian Printing Industry, 1867-1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Cathy Frierson, Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) and Barbara Engel, Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work and Family in Russia, 1861-1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994) [↩]
5. The most candid statement in this regard belongs to historian Robert Conquest, author of a classic 1968 study of the Stalinist Terror that was subsequently criticized by the revisionist camp. When asked by his publisher to suggest a title for the revised 1991 edition of the book Conquest replied, “How about I Told You So, You Fucking Fools”? Ultimately, the press settled on the less prosaic The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Conquest’s comment is documented in Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (New York: Hyperion, 2002) [↩]
6. Walter Laqueur, The Dream that Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). See also The National Interest 31 (1993) and Daedalus (Spring 1992) both of which are devoted entirely to the issues surrounding 1991. For a detailed discussion of the interpretive approaches that emerged to explain the Soviet collapse, see David Rowley, “Interpretations of the End of the Soviet Union: Three Paradigms,” in Kritika 2:2 (2001): 395-426 [↩]
7. Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812-1855 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961) [↩]
8. See, Yanni Kotsonis, “The Ideology of Martin Malia,” The Russian Review 58:1 (1999): 124-130 [↩]
9. Cf. The New York Review of Books 41:15 (September 22, 1994): 20; The New Republic 210:15 (April 11, 1994): 35-39 [↩]
10. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda, and Dissent, 1934-1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Elena Zubkova, Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945-1957 (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1998); Karen Petrone, Life has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000); Golfo Alexopoulos, Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926-1936 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003) [↩]
11. Viktor Suvorov, Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War? Translated by Thomas B. Beattie (New York: Viking, 1990). Suvorov argued that the German invasion of the USSR was a preemptive response to on-going Soviet preparations for an attack on Germany. See, Bruce W. Menning, “A Decade Half-Full: Post-Cold War Studies in Russian and Soviet Military History,” Kritika 2:2 (2001): 341-362 [↩]

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