THE RUSSIAN FRONT

According to the Telegraph, Polonsky has raised the possibility of legal action against Figes:

Dr Polonsky said she was intending to recover costs from Prof Figes. She said: “There have been some large legal costs built up in the last week which I hope to retrieve from the Figes family.” She added: “I understand that he is claiming that he has been traumatised by the research he did with victims of the Russian gulags which caused him to behave like this. I think it is horrific to use one of the greatest acts of criminality in history to excuse his bad behaviour. In any case he has been behaving like this for years beforehand.”

Meanwhile, Robert Service says the whole thing calls for reform of libel law in the UK:

The public interest in this squalid little story is that if someone is wealthy and malicious enough it is possible to tread on the throat of free and open discussion in this country almost with impunity. I was close to caving in at times simply because I lacked Figes’s financial resources. We have a set of libel laws seemingly designed to produce another Robert Maxwell. At the same time we have electronic media that enable the ink to flow from poison pens. In my case, these two features of our culture were wrapped around each other like a vicious weed. Legislative reform is urgently required.

Update: Figes has admitted that he himself was the author of the nasty reviews, contrary to his earlier statements.
——————————
Noted UK public intellectual and historian of Russia Orlando Figes has found himself in a rather embarrassing situation that’s big news in the UK, where the private lives of historians get the kind of publicity we Americans can only dream of.

It seems as though Figes’ wife was posting nasty anonymous reviews on amazon.com of competing historians, notably Robert Service and Rachel Polonsky. After Polonsky got suspicious, she and Service did detective work up the electronic trail to find Figes’ wife.

So why was Polonsky singled out? Best guess–back in 2002, she wrote a scathing review of Figes’ Natasha’s Dance for the Times Literary Supplement. In it, she was careful not to accuse Figes of plagiarism. There’s a track record of legal action under plaintiff-friendly English libel law when that happens. (To be fair, Polonsky has also used English libel law to her benefit.) Nonetheless, Polonsky made it clear that she found unattributed borrowing in Natasha’s Dance, much as Richard Pipes had when he reviewed Figes’ A People’s Tragedy in the New Republic.

I had a rather striking moment along those lines myself in grad school. I had read Mark Von Hagen’s Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship (1990), which included a memorable anecdote about Dora Elkina, who was trying to teach Red Army soldiers to read with childish sentences about Masha eating kasha:

After some frustrating moments that brought her close to tears, she hit upon the idea of turning the lesson into a political discussion and explained to the soldiers why they could not be with their Mashas and why the country was experiencing a shortage of kasha. (p. 103)

So I was struck when reading Figes’ A People’s Tragedy (1997) to find this without a reference to Von Hagen:

Close to tears, she hit upon the idea of turning the lesson into a political discussion and explained to the soldiers why they could not go home to their Mashas, and why the country was short of kasha. (p. 601)

Years later, I ran across this. Richard Pipes’ The Russian Revolution (1990) has this character sketch of Lenin:

The first impression he [Lenin] made on new acquaintances, then and later, was unfavorable. His short, stocky figure, his premature baldness . . . his slanted eyes and high cheekbones, his brusque manner of speaking, often accompanied by a sarcastic laugh, repelled most people. Contemporaries are virtually at one in speaking of his unprepossessing, “provincial” appearance. On meeting him, A. N. Potresov saw a “typical middle-aged tradesman from some northern, Iaroslavl-like province.” (p. 348)

Figes’ People’s Tragedy has this, also without a reference to Pipes:

At first, Lenin made a bad impression on the Marxists in St. Petersburg. Many of them were repelled by this short and stocky figure with his egg-shaped, balding head, small piercing eyes, dry sarcastic laugh, brusqueness and acerbity. Lenin was a newcomer and his musty and ‘provincial’ appearance was distinctly unimpressive. Potresov described him at their first meeting as a ‘typical middle-aged tradesman from some northern Yaroslavl’ province.’ (p. 147)

UPDATE: the Times of London has an anonymous discussion of the legal intricacies behind the poison pen reviews.

The Russian Government appears uneasy with criminalizing historical opinions, though the justification given below seems quite narrowly technical and not what would be a more principled position–that freedom of thought and freedom of speech are incompatible with state authorities determining which historical views are acceptable. From Ekho Moskvy, 14 January 2010, via BBC monitoring and Johnson’s Russia List:

The Russian government has refused to endorse a draft law criminalizing denial of the Soviet Union’s victory in World War II, Russian Ekho Moskvy radio station reported on 14 January, quoting a report by the business daily Vedomosti.

Vedomosti has obtained a copy of the relevant resolution, signed by Deputy Prime Minister Sergey Sobyanin, which reads in particular that the ministers have failed to understand the part of the bill dealing with distortions of the verdict of the Nuremberg Trials, because “it is unclear to them how a document that has already come into force can be distorted”, the report said.

The draft law was submitted to the State Duma about two years ago by several leading members of the One Russia party, including Emergencies Minister Sergey Shoygu and Boris Gryzlov, the State Duma speaker and chairman of the party’s supreme political council. In May 2009 the relevant parliamentary committee recommended the bill for passage but things have not progressed since then. The report quoted a source in the State Duma as saying that “from the very start (the bill) was a fairly controversial initiative proposed exclusively in connection with Shoygu’s vociferous statements (demanding that denial of the Soviet role in World War II be made a criminal offence)”.

On May 15^th 2009 I had the opportunity to give a lecture to a group of about 100 members of the History faculty and students at Huazhong Normal University in Wuhan, China. The lecture was based on new archival research conducted in support of a recently published two-volume set The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero which I edited along with several colleagues.

After briefly summarizing the operational history of the War, I offered ten reasons why new research findings justify the conclusion that the Russo-Japanese War should be considered World War Zero.

1. Like World War I, the origins of the Russo-Japanese War were rooted in imperialistic competition between world powers

2. As in August 1914, when the Russo-Japanese conflict began, it was fought in a neutral country(s) (China and Korea)

3. In the midst of the conflict and in the area where combat occurred, governmental structures broke down and the emergency was greeted with a response by non-governmental agencies such as the Red Cross

4. The conflict was marked by the use of sophisticated, complicated, and (above all else) lethal industrial weapons such as machine guns, rapid fire infantry assault weapons, rapid fire artillery, mines, and torpedoes. These were accompanied by the logistical infrastructure needed to keep ammunition and other essential supplies flowing to modern fielded armies

5. The natural product of the War’s deadly battlefields — mass casualties — required levels of aid which no medical corps of the period had the ability to help. The sheer numbers of men in need of aid overwhelmed these units.

6. The duration of battles at the beginning of the War lasted two or three days (The Yalu and Nanshan) and were contained to relatively small areas.  By the end of the war the battles of Liaoyang and Mukden lasted weeks and featured battlefields that extended for kilometers.  [NB: In terms of duration and brutality, the six to seven-month siege of Port Arthur foreshadowed what later happened at Verdun in 1916.]

7. The cost of fighting such a technologically demanding war required the formation of international syndicates of bankers simply to derive the credit needed for both the Japanese and Russians to keep purchasing and producing weapons and munitions.

8. Like WWI, the Russo-Japanese War was widely reported on and represented in all forms of visual presentations, from photographs to wood block prints.

9. Like Versailles, the Treaty of Portsmouth occurred only after one belligerent (Japan) ran out of men, materials and credit, and the Russians found themselves in the midst of a Revolution.  Perhaps more to the point, the treaty itself resolved little beyond ending hostilities and, worse, created circumstances that fueled grievances that culminated in future conflict.

10.  When the war concluded and the peace was signed the strengthening of the pan-Asian movement continued to fuel animosities that further destabilized the world.

How well did my Chinese audience accept the logic of the Russo-Japanese War as World War Zero?  While the faculty liked the idea, they accepted it with much circumspection.  More surprising were the questions I received from the students which suggested that they had little knowledge of the conflict in general.  Whatever the case, the students were far more interested in discussing Japan’s role in the Asian world during the first half of the 20^th century.  The students were particularly curious to know my thoughts on to possible re-emergence of Japan as a world power in the 21^st century.

As for the concept of World War Zero, most western military historians continue to view the Russo-Japanese War as a regional conflict rooted in the age of imperialism. Historians in Asia, appear much more respective.  I remain a World War Zero advocate. And I look forward to continuing public discussion of the War’s legacy, especially when that discussion is conducted within a new international frame of reference.

I’ve been reading some history of history in preparation for my next round of handling my department’s introductory graduate course in historiography.  I very much enjoyed John Burrow’s A History of Histories
by the way, and recommend it for anyone looking for a look at the development of the discipline that’s actually pleasant to read.

But in looking at another navel-gazing history of history, I ran across a nugget relevant to the ongoing question of the neglect of political, military, and diplomatic history, including a recent New York Times article that produced a lot of reactions across the blogosphere, including here.

Harry Barnes, discussing Herodotus in his History of Historical Writing, writes that “his prestige and importance have been enhanced in our generation as a result of the growing popularity of the history of culture and the gradual eclipse of the long-popular episodical military and political type of history which prevailed from Thucydides until . . . our era.” (p. 29)

So when did Barnes write this account of the decline of military and political history?

1937.

Maybe the good old days weren’t so good after all.