THE RUSSIAN FRONT

What’s the golden brain?  The name I heard applied in Moscow to the Russian Academy of Sciences building.
The good folks at RFE/RL have gotten ahold of a document that suggests what the campaign against falsification really means (thanks to Brian Whitmore at the Power Vertical).  They present a letter from Valerii Tishkov, head of the history section of the History-Philology Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in which Tishkov requests his subordinates to provide lists of falsifiers in their various fields of expertise, as well as to report on what they’ve been doing to combat falsification.

Evidently Tishkov is claiming the letter is only a draft.  Of course, the very need to compose such a draft is in itself instructive.  A couple things I would point out (scan of Russian original available here)

First, Tishkov gives his people three days to come up with their lists of falsifiers.  Clearly this is not a matter for careful weighing and sifting of archival evidence.

Second, and more significantly, Tishkov’s letter significantly broadens the scope of what Medvedev’s commission is formally charged with doing.  Medvedev’s commission’s title seeks out “attempts at falsifying history in harm to the interests of Russia.”  Tishkov’s version asks the Russian Academy of Sciences to find “falsifications AND historical-cultural concepts, damaging to the interests of Russia [emphasis added].”  What’s the difference?  Tishkov wants to know about historical ideas that are damaging to Russia, whether or not they’re false.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into a single word.  If I’ve mistaken Tishkov’s intent, I look forward to hearing his clarification.

Sometime back, we introduced readers of The Russian Front to a new scholarly initiative aimed at re-examining Russia’s central role in shaping modern history. “Russia’s Great War & Revolution, 1917-1922: The Centennial Re-Appraisal” is an international project comprised of forty leading historians from Russia, North America, Europe, and Japan. They are working to develop a more complete understanding of how Eurasia’s “continuum of crisis” marked by war, revolution, and civil war transformed history and laid the foundations of the twentieth century.

The project’s ultimate contribution will be a series of peer-reviewed volumes expected to be published (both in analog and digital formats) during 2014-2017 — in time to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Russia’s world-altering events. Additional outcomes, including an interactive website containing images, maps, digitized texts, and audio-visual resources designed for the general public and public school teachers, are also in the works.

Professional historians and advanced graduate students whose research focuses on any aspect of the Russian past from 1914 to the early 1920s are urged to contact series editors.

Followed the highlighted link to make you way to the official Call for Papers.

And tell ‘em The Russian Front sent you.

Thanks to Ralph Luker at Cliopatria for pointing out a NYTimes article in the expanding category of “academic history under siege,” this time about diplomatic rather than military history.  This does have at least a little bit of quantification (one of my perennial complaints) behind it, with regard to the proportion of departments who have a diplomatic historian on staff.  There’s a slight problem in these figures with shifting self-identification, including a number of people who would traditionally have been called diplomatic historians who for a number of reasons reject the label, in favor of international history or something else.  I’m not thrilled with “diplomatic” only because the journal Diplomatic History is so closely identified with American history that it’s tough for someone focusing on Europe to feel entirely at home.  I have some hunches, but they’ll have to wait until I get my hands on a AHA guide to history departments.

My chief concern lies elsewhere.  The article quotes Thomas Zeiler, echoing a similar claim by Victor Davis Hanson, as saying that fewer refereed articles are published in diplomatic history than before.

What is the empirical basis for that claim?  If we go back to the alleged good old days, maybe the 1950s or 1960s, you had Diplomatic History, more or less exclusively focused on American diplomacy.  You didn’t have the International History Review (thirty years old), Diplomacy and Statecraft (twenty years old), Cold War History
and Journal of Cold War Studies (both about ten years old).  Each is primarily devoted to publishing diplomatic history.  So where exactly is the fall in publication?

Ralph Luker at Cliopatria has pointed to an intriguing study of undergraduates at Oxford University. It finds
1. There’s an inverse relationship between grades and sex (more sex, worse grades, and vice-versa). [so what else is new?]
2. History students get more action than any others. [wait, what?]
At Kansas State, our undergraduate enrollments in history are quite healthy. But my colleagues at places where classrooms aren’t full might consider this as a recruiting tool.

Over the last couple of years, there have been two jobs come open for endowed chairs in American military history at major research universities: the Mason Chair at Ohio State and the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair at Wisconsin.  Ohio State’s failed the first time around, and Wisconsin’s travails made the popular press; both went outside of traditional academia to draw on military officer-academics when they finally succeeded in making a hire.  Ohio State brought in Peter Mansoor after a brief stint in Baghdad; Wisconsin has just hired John Hall, a major who’s taught at West Point.

Is there a pattern here?  Given what we so often hear about academia’s supposed hostility to things military, why did these two plum jobs go to men with long military careers?   After all, while Ohio State has been friendly to military history for many years, Wisconsin’s history department gave its name to, a certain brand of populist, anti-imperial critique of American policy.
For one, this suggests that the supposed hostility to the military might not be so intense, after all.

For two, military officers might indeed have an advantage on the academic job market.  Measured in terms of scholarly output, Peter Mansoor is on par with an associate professor (one monograph and a memoir) and John Hall with a newly-minted Ph.D (one book in press).  But they come with an entire previous career’s worth of gravitas that most nervous applicants could only wish to possess, and significant undergraduate teaching experience.

Military history in the Soviet Union was an exclusively military preserve for decades, with pernicious effects on the quality and independence of scholarship.  The dialogue between military and civilian practitioners in the West is a much preferable state of affairs.  Civilian Ph.Ds have long taken positions in military educational and research institutions; movement in the other direction is only natural.

But are young Ph.D candidates in American military history discouraged by this?  I honestly don’t know, but would welcome enlightenment.