THE RUSSIAN FRONT

William Odom has just died.

He was a giant of our field, but he was more than that to me. I did my Ph.D in Soviet military history at a school (Yale) that didn’t have anything you could describe as a program in Soviet military history. As a result, I was enormously fortunate in my fellow graduate students, and particularly in more senior scholars who were willing to form an advising kollektiv of wonderful helpfulness and flexibility–Jeff Burds, Paul Bushkovitch, Paul Kennedy, and . . . William Odom.

Though Odom was a political scientist, and a career military man, he was tremendously giving of his time and support to me and to a number of other graduate students headed through Yale. What struck me most, particularly in comparison to other academics, was Odom’s fearlessness. It’s always seemed to me that the professoriate as a group has startlingly little to fear. Once we’re tenured, provided we manage to keep our hands off the undergrads, we are cursed with a living wage, near complete control over how we apply our time and energy, and the privilege of reading and talking and writing about subjects we love, not to mention job security unheard of in other walks of life. Continue Reading »

I hope my colleagues will forgive me a brief digression from Russian history, though it does concern academia and the teaching of history.

In between grad school at Yale and my current position at Kansas State, I had a one-year visiting position at Hamilton College at upstate New York. In every respect but the weather, it was a wonderful opportunity. I got a lot of lecture writing done, met some very bright students, had supportive colleagues, and worked out the kinks in my teaching before I was at a place where it counted for tenure. The library even delivered books to the departmental office on request.

The chair of the department when I taught there was Bob Paquette. His students worshiped him, though he made them work like dogs. It was no secret, since he and everyone else in the department acknowledged it, that in political and ideological terms he was far apart from most of his fellow faculty. In all dealings I had with him, he was utterly and fully professional, in the best sense of the word, and prized that in others.

Which makes this triply ironic that he was penalized in May 2007 with a zero percent raise–not because the school was suffering from financial exigency, but for lack of service and collegiality. This lack of service involved raising large sums of money for an academic center at Hamilton, and then going public when the plug was pulled. There’s a long history of the disputes around this center and the academic politics involved, and anyone interested can track down the sordid story very easily. My point is that this action by Hamilton is clearly a penalty for ideological nonconformity, precisely what academic freedom and intellectual inquiry are supposed to celebrate. For the particulars, see this story.

What makes it even more ironic is that Paquette is mates in the History Department with Maurice Isserman. Isserman, likewise an exemplary colleague in my brief time at Hamilton, is an outlier to the left as Paquette is an outlier to the right, and has likewise critiqued Hamilton College and its intellectual culture. Has Isserman suffered for his views? If yes, we have even better evidence of mandated conformity; if no, a double standard for dissent on the left and on the right.

US News is the latest venue to weigh in on the sad state of military history. What I am struck by, once again, is the relentless failure to quantify, coupled by a distinct lack of historical perspective. The money quote, from my point of view, is this:

The field that inspired the work of writers from Thucydides to Winston Churchill is, today, only a shell of its former self. The number of high-profile military history experts in the Ivy League can be counted on one hand. Of the more than 150 colleges and universities that offer a Ph.D. in history, only a dozen offer full-fledged military history programs. Most military historians are scattered across a collection of midwestern and southern schools, from Kansas State to Southern Mississippi. “Each of us is pretty much a one-man shop,” says Carol Reardon, a professor of military history at Penn State University and the current president of the Society for Military History.

Several things leap out at me. First of all, the claim that the field is a shadow of its formal self has absolutely no documentation. That claim requires showing what was the case in the past, and what is the case now, and there’s no effort to do that. At what point in the past did the Ivies have lots of military historians on staff? At what point were there more than a dozen full-fledged military history programs? I apologize for ruthless self-promotion, but I’m waiting for someone to come up with better numbers than the ones I’ve presented on this blog and on H-War, suggesting that MORE institutions have military historians today than in 1975, and that the absolute number of military historians has tripled.

Carol Reardon is of course correct that the vast majority of military historians are one-man shops, but the vast majority of all types of historians at the vast majority of institutions are one-man shops.

Clearly lots of people want to show that military history is a field in decline. Can they produce some numbers, instead of anecdotes, to show that?

[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.
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[This is the third 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 and Part Two]

Revenge of the Nationalities?

Despite the impressive work being done in the broad subfields of cultural, political, social, and military history, the most important trend to have emerged since 1991 has been the growing interest in the geographic and cultural “peripheries” of both Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. Recently awakened to the place of non-Russian ethnic groups in the history of the country (thanks to their role in the collapse of the USSR) and increasingly influenced by the methodologies of geographers, anthropologists, ethnographers, and comparative sociologists, erstwhile Russian historians and newly emerging scholars have been at the forefront in developing scholarship relating to ethnicity and nationality within Russia proper and in those regions that Russians today refer to as their “near abroad:” Central Asia and the Caucasus.
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