THE RUSSIAN FRONT

UPDATE: The pummeling continues. At an LSE blog, Artemy Kalinovsky reiterates the problems with Stroilov and Berlinsky’s overblown claims. He adds an additional point: what will the reaction of Russian archivists be to people bragging of sneaking documents out of Russia? Most likely, banning scanners, closing off collections, treating foreign scholars with even more suspicion.
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UPDATE: Ron Radosh, whose anti-communist credentials are not exactly open to question, does a thorough demolition job on Berlinsky, Bukovsky, and Stroilov. Ouch. Hat tip to Tom Nichols for the pointer.
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Claire Berlinsky, writing in the City Journal, has asked why more people aren’t paying attention to revelations from the Soviet archives. She presents two individuals who smuggled documents out of the Soviet Union. One of them, Vladimir Bukovsky, has at least posted his documents online so that people can see for themselves what kind of material he’s got available.

The other person Berlinsky mentions, Pavel Stroilov, hasn’t put any of his material on the web, at least as far as I’ve been able to find. But as Berlinsky presents his claims, he’s got lots of terrific and untapped documents, like Georgii Shakhnazarov’s Politburo minutes and Anatolii Cherniaev’s diaries. Here’s the problem: a 700-page book in Russian has been published, based on those Politburo minutes from Shakhnazarov and others. Cherniaev’s diaries were published in the journal Novaia i noveishchaia istoriia, and are even available in English. They aren’t exactly tough to find–type “Cherniaev diaries” into google and see what pops up.

So at least some of the hot, secret material Berlinsky says Stroilov possesses is neither hot nor secret, and representing it as hot and secret is misleading. It’s tough to know whether Berlinsky or Stroilov is responsible. Berlinsky herself admits she doesn’t know any Russian.

The next big problem is that in many cases, Stroilov is pushing on an open door, and Berlinsky seems simply unaware of what scholars have known for quite some time. For example, Stroilov’s documents on German reunification (as presented in late 2009) show that Margaret Thatcher didn’t want to see it happen. Of course, that’s the same conclusion established by more or less all the scholars who’ve worked on the subject, including most notably Philip Zelikow and the hardly obscure Condoleezza Rice, who showed quite conclusively in 1997 in Germany Unified and Europe Transformed that France and Britain opposed German unification and only strong efforts by Helmut Kohl and George Bush the elder made it happen. Helmut Kohl himself in his memoirs, published four years before Stroilov’s big unveiling, said exactly the same thing.

Berlinsky says Stroilov’s documents describe “most shockingly” that Francois Mitterand wanted a socialist Germany under French and Soviet domination. Since Mitterand was a socialist, and French politicians since de Gaulle have wanted to see Germany under French domination, I don’t see how this qualifies as shocking.

Last, it’s clear that Berlinsky is writing with a particular political agenda–to discredit the European left, question European unification, and cast doubt on the continental European social model while at the same time pummeling the dead horse of Communism. I don’t have any problem with that. My problem comes when pursuing that political aim results in doing violence to historical perspective. One example: Berlinsky finds it scandalous that Joaquin Almunia, current member of the European Commission, was strongly opposed to Ukrainian independence. Know who else was opposed to Ukrainian independence? George Bush the elder.

On the heels of this week’s revelations regarding Orlando Figes’ sock-puppet denunciations of “rival” historians via Amazon.com comes breaking news of yet another scandal involving a “best-selling popular historian.” In this case, the shenanigans in question involve the late Stephen Ambrose (1936-2002) author of nearly two dozen books (including widely-heralded accounts of the Lewis & Clark expedition, the D-Day landings, and the American Trans-Continental Railroad) and adviser to Stephen Spielberg’s Academy Award-winning epic Saving Private Ryan (1998).

As Richard Rayner notes in an April 26, 2010 piece for The New Yorker titled “Channeling Ike,”

Ambrose spoke often, on C-SPAN or “Charlie Rose” or in print interviews, about how his life had been transformed by getting to know the former President and spending “hundreds and hundreds of hours” interviewing him over a five-year period before Eisenhower died, in 1969.

The only problem? The claims aren’t true. A recent investigation of President Eisenhower’s papers by Tim Rives, Deputy Director at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum (Abileen, KS) has uncovered an alternate reality, namely “that Eisenhower saw Ambrose only three times, for a total of less than five hours. The two men were never alone together.”

The issue might be brushed off as an unfortunate (if gross) embellishment of the record by an otherwise well-regarded historian save for two things.

First, Ambrose’s early career was built upon his prodigious writing as the “official” historian of the Eisenhower presidency. The discovery that he did not, in fact, have sustained and personal contact with Ike as he long claimed will doubtless call into question the voluminous notes and references in his books that cite these non-existent interviews.

Second, this is hardly the first time that Ambrose has been found to have acted in a manner that might be charitably be described as “less than scrupulous.” In 2002, he was infamously forced to admit to having copped numerous passages of his book The Wild Blue from other authors without attribution. [History News Networked exhaustively chronicled that earlier controversy here.]

On the whole, a rather dismal week for the historical discipline.

It has been a tough week for Orlando Figes. In recent developments,

Rachel Polonsky contributed her story to the Daily Mail.

Oliver Kamm on the London Times blog looks at 2007 edits to Figes’ wikipedia entry:

In 2007, a Wikipedia user called “Orlandofiges” created two sock-puppet accounts, called “DavidPricesolicitors” and “Penguinchristie”. David Price is Figes’s solicitor. Sarah Christie was publicity manager at Penguin Books, Figes’s publisher. “Orlandofiges” edited the entry on Orlando Figes using all of these accounts betweeen 22 and 24 October 2007. The edits have a predictable pattern to them: “Figes’s mastery of the big narrative and his literary style have won many prizes and critical acclaim”, and so on. The description “a historian of Russia” is amended to “one of the world’s leading historians of Russia”. The sock puppet “DavidPricesolicitors” weighs in to remove a statement that is “false and defamatory” about the subject.

And another academic has spoken with the Independent about a sourcing dispute with Figes:

An American academic, Priscilla Roosevelt, said yesterday she had written to complain to Figes about his apparent use of sources from her book Life on the Russian Country Estate in his award-winning A People’s Tragedy, some of which were so obscure she could not believe he had come across them himself. “You can’t prove these things absolutely, but the experience left me shocked and demoralised,” she said. “He sent me a one-line response.”

Update: Figes has admitted that he himself was the author of the nasty reviews, contrary to his earlier statements.
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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.

Head of Rosarkhiv Andrei Artizov has announced plans to create an enormous new archive to unite all Russian materials relating to the Second World War. Slated for completion by the 70th anniversary of victory, i.e. 2015, the new collection will include 13 million files.

The only English-language coverage I found was from Voice of Russia, and the translation isn’t entirely correct. 13 million files in the Russian original becomes 13 billion documents in English, for example.

Artizov gives no concrete reason for the policy beyond the general Good Thing of bringing together all materials relating to the Great Fatherland War. It’s not difficult to imagine, though, what’s driving this plan. The Putin-Medvedev administration has made World War II a central part of the regime’s project of self-justification, and something grandiose to commemorate the war is a logical step. As seems typical for the current government in Russia, this big idea appears to have come out of nowhere with little public discussion or preparation. Though Artizov says that the necessary legislation is in the works, I searched in vain on Rosarkhiv’s website for any indication of the potential for such a major step. Clearly some preparatory work has been done–Rosarkhiv does feature a compilation of all photographic records of the war under the heading “Pobeda [Victory], 1941-1945.”

The problems in Artizov’s scheme are many, though–practical, scholarly, and political. Many of the practical issues are laid out quite clearly in an article in Vedomosti. Artizov uses the phrase 13 million files, and suggests the intent is to unite ALL materials on the war. But the Ministry of Defense Archives in Podol’sk have ten million files by themselves, to say nothing of the host of archives around Russia with relevant documents. A new complex capable of holding that amount of material, plus its selection and transportation, all within five years, AND at the same time that the regime has a number of other big projects on its plate, seems a trifle ambitious.

From the scholarly point-of-view, the organizing principle of the proposed new archive strikes me as dubious. Archivists (and historians) like the functional principle of organization–keep papers as their creators kept them. There’s a point to preserving materials as far as possible in the organizational scheme used by those who originally created the documents. That’s the best way to get into the flow of paper, which reflects the flow of work and power of the original institution. The proposed new archive violates that by organizing itself around an event (making it the only event-centered archive in the Russian archival system) and eviscerating the institutional and thematic archives which are already well-established. The plan seems to be to take World War II military materials from the Ministry of Defense, partisan staff and State Defense Committee documents from the Party Archive (RGASPI), and so on. This might extend, if we take this to its logical conclusion, to pulling all 1941-1945 documents from Volgograd, say, which would do terrible violence to the integrity of archival collections all over Russia. It just isn’t clear exactly what sort of selection principle Artizov has in mind.

Putting the problem that way–the archives which will be forced to give up their documents–makes the political problem plain. I can’t imagine that the heads of archives within the Rosarkhiv system are happy about having big chunks of their collections taken from them. A number were present at the press conference at which Artizov made his announcement–Sergei Mironenko (State Archive of the Russian Federation), Oleg Naumov (Social-Political History, i.e. the Party Archive), and Elena Tiurina (Economics Archive). They had NOTHING to say about Artizov’s big plan, though they were quite happy to talk about what their archives were doing to commemorate victory. The elephant in the room, of course, is the Ministry of Defense. Artizov says that the Ministry of Defense is perfectly happy to hand over its World War II materials to civilian archivists, but the notorious difficulty of getting materials from the Ministry of Defense’s archive at Podol’sk makes me skeptical of this.

I welcome comments from anyone who has a better sense of the politics behind this.