THE RUSSIAN FRONT

[This is the final part 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. Previous installments: Part One, Part Two, and Part Three]

What is to be Done?

For scholars who have themselves been forced to curtail (or forego altogether) archival work owing to a lack of institutional support, the relative decline in research money available to Russian historians may seem inconsequential. It may even occasion a not altogether unjustifiable case of schadenfreude. After all, having long benefited disproportionately from federal largess, scholars of Russia, it stands to reason, have little business whining about declining federal support as governmental attention shifts elsewhere.

Still, while it is certainly true that Russian historians have for many years enjoyed access to funds not available to their colleagues studying, say, Britain, France, or Germany, it is likewise true that Russian historians do not have now (nor are they likely anytime in the near future to have) access to the kind of research support typically sponsored by Western European governments. Given how little the Russian state has done to support the work of its own native scholars, it is hard to imagine that it would ever consent to subsidizing research conducted by foreign graduate students and academics. What would happen to American Ph.D. programs in European history if, over the course of the next five years, the governments in Paris and Berlin reduced by one-half the number of Chateaubriand and DAAD fellowships available to U.S. scholars and graduate students needing to work in French and German archives? This may well be the fate awaiting Russian historians.

Moreover, indifference to the transformations now underway ignores the reality that continuing reductions in federal funding are likely to have negative corollary effects on scholars working in other regions and fields. To the extent that fewer NCEEER, IREX, and ACTR grants in history force aspiring Ph.D.s and established scholars to turn to other agencies for funding, it will mean a growing pool of applicants for the already intensely competitive fellowships open to all regions and disciplines available through ACLS, NEH, and similar agencies.

Then again, this may mean little to the field at large, save that there will be fewer Russian historians and area specialists. In this sense, “sea change” may simply be a reversion to the norm wherein departments which once housed two Russianists (Imperial and Soviet) will increasingly find that they can do well enough with just one. In other instances, newly minted-Ph.D.s specializing in the history of Central Asia or the Caucasus may be called upon to teach service courses pertaining to their regions’ “periphery.”

Whatever the case, it seems clear that the next generation of Russian historians will need to demonstrate more creativity in developing innovative methodologies rather than simply adapting approaches previously used by their colleagues studying Western Europe. They must also be more effective in explaining the significance of their research findings to policy makers within the halls of power and to educated, non-academic audiences across the nation. Here, senior scholars and professional organizations such as AAASS and AATSEEL have essential parts to play. They should assume more active roles in developing workshops, symposia, and other programs that will prepare rising graduate students not simply to function as faculty, but to serve beyond the ivory walls of academe as public intellectuals and stewards of their field. To this end, doctoral programs and dissertation directors would be well advised to encourage their student charges to pay closer attention to contemporary Russian politics, culture, and society. While dissertation subjects should not be determined on the basis of current policy debates, a basic awareness of the issues shaping those debates would better enable young scholars to compete for grant money in the current policy-driven environment. Likewise, graduate students and junior faculty must be prepared to articulate their ideas in language that can be understood outside the seminar room or conference panel. “Theoretically advanced” research does little good when it is made impenetrable by theoretical jargon.

Such measures might, indeed, benefit the historical profession as a whole. But for Russian history, such measures are essential. These steps would help to offset, in part, the further erosion of federal support for Russian area studies by better preparing the next generation of scholars to compete in a future that is certain to be different from the past. No less significant, encouraging young scholars to actively engage non-academic audiences would doubtless contribute to raising the profile of the field in the eyes of the reading public. In any event, why should the most popular books on Russia’s past continue to be produced largely by journalists and non-academic historians?

Another way in which the next generation of researchers may accomplish these tasks is by devoting more attention to a subfield too long overlooked by western scholars of Russia: the history of Russian technology and science. Despite its obvious significance in explaining the causes behind the Soviet Union’s collapse and its direct relevance to informing policy decisions regarding current and future developments in Russia, the history of technology and science has received scant attention in the field’s prevailing literature. Historians of science and technology are a distinct minority within AAASS.¹ Worse still, they have been poorly represented in the leading journals devoted to Russian history and area studies. Since 1999, Russian Review has published only two articles related to the history of Russian technology and science. Slavic Review has managed three.² While interpretations emphasizing politics, social movements, and cultural, gender, and ethnic identities have all enjoyed their heyday during the last three decades, arguably the most important approach to understanding why both the Imperial and Soviet paths to modernity failed has gone largely unexplored.

This is not to say that historians of Russian technology and science have failed to achieve distinction in their own right. Quite the contrary. During the 1970s and 1980s, Loren Graham, Alexander Vucinich, and the late Kendall Bailes produced a series of groundbreaking studies that drew attention to the important roles played by cultural, political, and social contexts in shaping the nature and direction of Russian scientific and technological development. Their writings have since attained canonical status among interested scholars.³ While Graham and Vucinich continued to influence the field, a second wave of historians followed in their wake. Along with David Holloway’s highly regarded history of the Soviet atomic project, Douglas R. Weiner’s studies of Soviet conservation, Joseph Bradley’s work on the Imperial Russian armaments industry, Jonathan Coopersmith’s investigation of the origins of Russian electrification, and Anthony Heywood’s account of the Soviet railroad industry demonstrated the many ways in which the history of science and technology sheds vital insight on such central concerns as diplomacy and foreign relations, technology transfer, the emergence of civil society, modernization, and economic development. Although Holloway’s book was awarded two prizes from AAASS, the broader contributions of these historians have drawn scant attention from the field as a whole. While Kritika, Russian Review, and Slavic Review and have recently dedicated special issues to everything from political violence and conservatism to diaries, tourism, and (in an upcoming volume) the film Borat [!] none has provided a platform for evaluating what, by all accounts, should be a major subfield within the discipline. Even the dean of Russian science and technology, Loren Graham, in a rare review essay on the history of Russian technology and science, elected to forego a discussion of western scholarship in favor of focusing on the contributions of Russian historians.⁴

Despite their enduring low profile, historians of Russian technology and science continue to produce perceptive, path-breaking, and policy relevant studies exploring the social, cultural, and political ramifications of science and technology within the Russian context. In Science for the Masses, a recent history of popular science and scientific education in the early Soviet period, James Andrews demonstrates how an “imaginative vision of public science” born of the late Imperial period was transformed into applied science and technology through the Stalinist “Great Break.” Among historians of the physical sciences, Michael Gordin has published a prize-winning biography of chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev. Alexei Kojevnikov has chronicled the difficult circumstances faced by Soviet physicists during the Stalinist era while Ethan Pollock has examined Stalin’s role in the “science wars.” In addition to providing scholars with an essential resources through his on-line “Virtual Guide to the History of Russian Science and Technology,” Slava Gerovitch has recently published the first comprehensive history of Soviet cybernetics. Meanwhile, one of the subfield’s most prolific young scholars, Asif Siddiqi, has already established himself as a preeminent expert on the history of space flight with his twin histories of Soviet rocketry, The Soviet Space Race with Apollo and Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge.

Judging by the quality of writing and breadth of research demonstrated in these works (most of which have been published within the last three years), the history of Russian technology and science may be poised to guide the broader field through a difficult period of intellectual and institutional transition. Still, nothing so facile as a “paradigm shift” will undo more than a decade of relative decline. Until policymakers and foundation boards in Washington, DC and elsewhere are made to realize that Russia remains vital to US interests, interest in things Russian (and funding for its scholars) is unlikely to rebound. There are no sure-fire solutions for rejuvenating Russian history. Even so, the first step on the road to reversing the field’s declining status is to acknowledge that the field has a problem. Russian history in the United States has reached a crossroads. Where it will go in the future depends upon a great many factors, not the least of which is the willingness of its practitioners to acknowledge where they now stand.

1. Of the 2,884 unique, domestic AAASS members who completed registration forms during the period 2004-2006, 1,353 (46.9%) identified “History” as a field of specialization. Of these, only 42 (3.1%) also identified “Science & Technology” as an area of research [↩]
2. Douglas R. Weiner, “Struggle over the Soviet Future: Science Education versus Vocationalism during the 1920s,” Russian Review 65:1 (2006): 72-97; Slava Gerovitch, “Russian Scandals: Soviet Readings of American Cybernetics in the Early Years of the Cold War,” Russian Review 60:4 (2001): 545-565; Lewis Siegelbaum, “Soviet Car Rallies of the 1920s and 1930s and the Road to Socialism,” Slavic Review 63:2 (2005): 247-273.; Daniel R. Stone, “The Cable Car at Kasprowy Wierch: An Environmental Debate in Interwar Poland, Slavic Review 63:3 (2005): 601-624 and Kristin Roth-Ey, “Finding a Home for Television in the USSR, 1950-1970,” Slavic Review 66:2 (2007): 278-306. [↩]
3. Loren Graham, Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union (New York: Knopf, 1972) and The Academy of Sciences and the Communist Party, 1927-1932 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967); Alexander Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture 2 vols. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1963-1970) and Empire of Knowledge: The Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1917-1970 (Berkeley, CA: University of Califronia Press, 1984) and Kendall Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: The Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917-1941 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978) [↩]
4. Loren R. Graham, “The Birth, Withering, and Rebirth of Russian History of Science,” Kritika 2:2 (2001): 329-340 [↩]

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