THE RUSSIAN FRONT

[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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[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
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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 [↩]

[This is the first 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.]

A brief history of Russian history, 1945-1991

Although the scholarly study of Russia’s past may be said to have begun as early as the mid-eighteenth century with the publication of Mikhail Lomonosov’s Short Russian Chronicle (1760), Russian history, as an established academic field, is a relative newcomer to the United States.¹ Originating in Slavic language programs created near the turn of the twentieth century first at Harvard (1896) then, later, Berkeley (1901) and Columbia (1915), Russian history did not truly come of age in the United States until well after the Second World War.² After languishing for over half a decade as a woefully under funded and exotic subject principally of interest to the children of immigrants, Slavics rocketed to academic prominence thanks to the 1958 National Defense Education Act (NDEA). Passed in response to the USSR’s launch of Sputnik in 1957, Title VI of the NDEA aimed to address America’s perceived national security needs by providing for the training of international experts, especially those possessing skills in less commonly taught languages viewed critical to the nation’s geopolitical interests. Under the initial terms of the congressional mandate, the federal government funded nineteen “language and area centers” to facilitate the expansion of language instruction and related subjects in higher education. Title VI simultaneously created three other programs: modern foreign language fellowships (today known as Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships); international research and studies; and language institutes. Along with the language and area centers, these programs “formed a comprehensive approach to foreign language and world region education intended to prepare the United States for current and future global challenges.”³ Even though Title VI was international in scope and intentionally designed to promote the study of regions around the globe, owing to the centrality of the USSR to then contemporary American domestic and foreign policy considerations, the study of Russian language, culture, and history benefited greatly from the initial and subsequent reauthorizations of the program. More than any other factor, Title VI was responsible for the rapid development of Russian history in the United States.
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1. George Vernandsky, Russian Historiography: A History. (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1978), 3 [↩]
2. For a brief account of these earliest programs, see Horace G. Hunt, “On the History of Slavic Studies in the United States,” Slavic Review 46:2 (1987): 294-301 [↩]
3. A brief history of Title VI programs is available on the home page of the U.S. Department of Education. See, http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ope/iegps/history.html. The number of language and area studies centers (or, National Resource Centers as they are now known) has grown to over 165 today [↩]

About this time last year, The Journal of the Historical Society published an essay of mine devoted to recent trends in the field of Russian history. Although the article (”Scholarship at the Crossroads: The Past, Present, and Possible Future of Russian History in America”) was commissioned by the Journal’s editor, George Huppert, for the purpose of introducing non-Russian historians and general readers to developments in the field, I believe that many of the issues raised in the piece may be of interest to specialists as well.

Beginning late tomorrow and continuing over the course of the next ten days or so, I will post a series of installments containing the main text of the JHS essay. I welcome TRF readers to comment on the points made in the article or, at least, to think about the developments that the article addresses.

The TRF version of “Scholarship at the Crossroads” does differ from the original in several respects. For example, I have eliminated many of the footnotes appearing in the journal article by providing direct links to works mentioned in the text. In other cases I have updated (or added) information to reflect more recent events.

[Note: The definitive version of this essay is located at: www.blackwell-synergy.com. To access it, click here.]

Following up on David Stone’s “Glass Half-Full” piece of 30 August, I submit the following conclusion to a commentary that will appear in a special January 2008 issue of The Russian Review devoted to the Russo-Japanese War. My piece is one of three commentaries written in response to three articles on the conflict, two of which are in the realm of cultural history. The other is by a social historian. As you can see, I had the same thought as David when I read Robert Townsend’s piece in Perspectives last January. I would be interested to know if there are any military historians in our field who do feel beleaguered.

LET A HUNDRED FLOWERS BLOOM
None of the three essays directly addresses military history. This fact might well confirm the worst fears of its practitioners, who periodically lament their field’s decline. In a recent editorial, the Classics scholar Victor David Hanson lamented “the loneliness of the military historian,” a sentiment shared by Frederick Kagan in his essay, “Why Military History Matters.” The discipline incontestably suffered in North America as a result of Vietnam War-era distaste for armed conflict. However, a recent American Historical Association study demonstrates that between 1975 and 2005 the number of history departments on U.S. campuses with at least one specialist in the field has risen from 29.9 percent to 36.2 percent. The study of war has also benefited from the growing awareness among scholars that social, cultural, intellectual, and other disciplinary approaches not commonly associated with the former both enrich the former and enhances its legitimacy. In this regard, the three essays should encourage the military historian in the knowledge that she or he is not so lonely after all.

-from David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, “Rewriting the Russo-Japanese War: A Centenary Retrospective” The Russian Review 67 (Forthcoming in January 2008), 87.