I served as commenter on a panel loosely defined as veterans in Russian and Soviet history, but ended up being a wider ranging discussion on war and society in broad terms. One paper by Andrew Ringlee, a graduate student at North Carolina, looked at the Red Cross and its de facto role as the Russian Army’s medical service prior to World War I.

Though Ringlee’s research is still in its early stages, he has some intriguing findings. The Russian Red Cross might have been the largest and most significant of the various national chapters, and likewise might have invented the modern concept of disaster relief: stay tuned for the dissertation for full discussion of that point. On the specific question of the Russian military, the Russian Red Cross had its first experience handling sick and wounded soldiers in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, where its performance was remarkably good and well-regarded by the Russian educated public. Despite the normal frictions and difficulties we extent under such circumstances, the results were clearly positive. In 1904-05, however, the Russo-Japanese War proved quite different. The Red Cross was less effective, in part because of the remote theater of war and in part because the Russian Army’s failure to properly integrate the Red Cross into its planning. More importantly, the Russian public believed the Red Cross to have failed, and to have squandered its resources through incompetence and corruption.

What struck me about the story Ringlee told was the way in which the Russian high command expected its medical needs to be met by the Red Cross, and yet made no effort to integrate the Red Cross into its contingency planning or to provide it with the information and resources it would require to deal successfully with the challenges of war. Part of the reason seems to have been a deep official mistrust of Russian civil society. Though Ringlee has not yet taken his research into the First World War, there are clear parallels to the poisonous relationship between state and civil society we see in that period.

Peter Waldron (University of East Anglia) picked up the story in a roundtable on health and living standards in World War I and World War II by looking specifically at epidemic disease in the First World War. Many of the themes of Ringlee’s work–relatively successful efforts by Russian civil society to deal with a crisis, and tsarist indifference or hostility–were equally clear in Waldron’s.

Waldron provided a wealth of welcome data on the nature of disease in the war–of the five million hospitalized Russian soldiers during the war, just under half were there because of contagious disease. The biggest killer was cholera, which killed a third of all those it infected and accounted for 20% of all disease fatalities, but the most prevalent disease was typhoid. Despite the difficult conditions of wartime, Russian public health had made remarkable strides even since the 1890s. A cholera epidemic in 1892 had killed half of those it infected, rather than the third who succumbed during the war.

The pattern of disease is what we might predict: concentrated behind Russian front lines and in big cities, particularly Moscow. Though the precise reasons for this remain to be determined, Waldron found that while wounded soldiers were widely scattered around Russia, infected soldiers were concentrated in Moscow. It’s difficult to know what to make of this: given the city’s importance as an industrial and transportation center, and the huge numbers of vulnerable refugees in Moscow, dumping disease-carriers there would seem a really bad idea. This is hard to imagine as a result of deliberate policy. Of course, we are talking about Nicholas II, so deliberate policy is certainly a possibility.

In terms of the bigger theme, though, Waldron amply confirmed the pattern of the Russian state having a terrible time working effectively and productively with private initiatives. While Waldron did not discuss the Red Cross, he did bring in the Union of Towns, which had a great deal of responsibility for aiding the sick. Desperate for assistance, the Union of Towns begged for help in setting up hospitals, only to find the the tsarist government slow and grudging in its responses. In a remarkable range of circumstances, not simply care for sick and wounded soldiers, this seems to be the rule.

In summer travels, I found myself stuck without a wide selection of reading material, but came across an old Modern Library edition of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. Since that’s a book far more often referenced than read, and I didn’t have lots of other options, I decided to plow through it.

The book lived down to my expectations. It’s positively Hegelian in its grand rhetorical flights of fancy about capital-H History, and in its impenetrable style. On the bright side, once you get the hang of what Spengler is up to, the book’s easy to skim through very quickly. I may comment on some of his substantive arguments anon, what struck me was a single line on p. 387 in the chapter on “Philosophy of Politics”:

The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious.

Thanks to a youthful flirtation with alternative rap, I recognized this as a line from PM Dawn’s 1991 song “Comatose.” I was pretty sure Spengler hadn’t stolen from PM Dawn, but I found it only slightly less surprising that PM Dawn was citing Spengler. To google I turned . . .

. . . to find to my surprise that the quotation is widely attributed to Marcus Aurelius (for example, here, here, here, and here), both in collections of military quotation and especially in business books. One organization even made it their official slogan, complete with a bust of Marcus Aurelius on the home page.

To add insult to injury, Marcus Aurelius wins the citation wars by a ratio of about 5:1 over Spengler.

The problem is that there’s no evidence that Marcus Aurelius ever uttered or wrote the words in question. It’s nowhere in his Meditations, and no one ever gives a real citation. The dubious prize for earliest misattribution to Marcus Aurelius (at least according to google books) goes to Jay Levinson and David Perry’s Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters.

Of course, in terms of the popularity of the quotation, Marcus Aurelius is a lot better than Spengler. The one is a philosophical emperor, one of the last good one the Romans had. The other was an obscurantist pessimist, and while not the Nazi he’s often painted as being, was no friend to democracy, capitalism, or liberalism. It’s tough to imagine management theorists being quite so eager to Spengler for inspiration.

Bureaucracy and lines are the obvious ones, but there’s more. We now have access to archival catalogs, but we are still subject to the whims and affections of archivists when it comes to the documents we can see, or perhaps even more important, where we ought to be looking for them. As Fitzpatrick remembers, the archivists were quite choosy about whom they might assist: “after a while, if they thought you were a hard worker and therefore a real scholar (not a spy), the archivists would cautiously begin to help you.”

This is precisely my experience, which is why I was so fortunate to be funded in 1994-1995 in a way that let me go to Moscow and stay for sixteen months, long enough to really establish my iron-assed credentials as a serious researcher. Fitzpatrick also was lucky enough to burst into tears at the right moment to get some additional material. I didn’t do that, but I did unwittingly benefit from the pitying maternal instincts of archivists who couldn’t imagine how a poor boy, all alone in Moscow, might manage to keep body and soul together.

Fitzpatrick also notes how historians can’t help to some degree identifying with the worldview and priorities of the people and institutions they study. Tongue-in-cheek, she remarks that the secret police would have been better off to

give Western scholars access to the most taboo of Soviet archives, the NKVD’s, so that the scholars would stop slandering this fine institution and see things from its perspective: the Central Committee cadres department reassigning any Gulag officers who showed signs of competence and sending the Gulag administration nothing but duds, the difficulties in setting up native-language kindergartens for Chechen deportees to Kazakhstan, and so on.

I found the same thing–going native–happening to me. It wasn’t that I decided that Stalin was a good guy (I didn’t), but that I began to sympathize with Stalin’s bureaucrats. They had tough jobs, and worked hard to solve real problems. Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Stalin’s minister of industry, was quite the cold-hearted bastard when it came to the politics of his native Georgia. I studied him, though, when he was trying to build steel mills and tractor factories amidst shortages of everything. He drove himself and others mercilessly, built real esprit de corps, and finally killed himself in despair over Stalin’s Great Purges. I couldn’t help liking him.

In the Red Army, Stalin’s long-time minister of defense Kliment Voroshilov never struck me as anything but an idiot far out of his depth. I likewise never warmed to the ostensible genius Mikhail Tukhachevskii. He was happy to persecute those with suspect pasts, was quite out of his mind on a number of questions related to tank production and military technology, and popularized the ideas devised by brighter minds junior to him. But lesser-known figures like Ieronym Uborevich and Innokent Khalepskii–they were bright, hard-working, and effective. Stalin had them killed, of course.

To be sure, there are limits to going native. I was looking at industrialists and military men. All modern societies have and need armies and industry, and so I could look at them to some degree independently of the regime they served. If, on the other hand, I had been studying those who carted kulaks and their families off to Siberia, I doubt I would have been quite so sympathetic.

To the outside observer, this would sound like two opposed organizations. This being Russia, of course, appearances can be deceiving. Only a few of the speeches and statements have been released, but what’s available so far suggests that there was much more about openness and access than there was about secrecy. Being generally bitter and cynical by nature, I was expecting only boilerplate (and there was, to be sure, plenty of that), but there was a remarkable amount of substantive information on offer. In particular, historians of Russia owe it to themselves to read the speech of Rosarkhiv head A. N. Artizov in full.

Chair of the meeting was S. E. Naryshkin, head of Medvedev’s Presidential Administration. His remarks were quite brief, and opened with a very vague set of goals for the meeting: “perspectives on the development of archival affairs, working out and realization of a series of measures directed at supporting a just and objective representation of Russian history.” This is, of course, not especially enlightening.

It did get better though. Naryshkin conceded that the falsification and anti-Russian history that Russian political leaders have been getting so worked up about are largely the result of bad access to documents. In Naryshkin’s words, “lack or inaccessibility of information becomes the condition and reason for falsification.” This makes the most important step “further declassification of archival documents.”

Naryshkin also set priorities for the Russian archival system. His first was electronic access–both the preservation of newly-generated electronic documents (not a big deal for most historians, at least not now) and improving electronic access to existing collections.

Next came access to documents, in which Naryshkin actually referred to the “society’s right of free access to information.” This was immediately followed by a qualification to “strictly provide for the security of the state and respect the rights of citizens,” but the very idea of treating access to archival information as a right, even if phrased in social rather than individual terms, is a major step.

A. N. Artizov’s speech was much heavier on concrete information. He noted the particular problems Russian archives face: finding qualified staff, and coping with the mass of records created by the totalizing nature of the Soviet state. Nonetheless, he touted the achievements of Russian archives in the last few years, including declassification and scholarly publication. Scans of key documents on the Katyn massacre achieved two million hits per day when made available to the public.

Veterans of reading rooms know that many of the people there are seeking to document the work or military service records of themselves or their relatives. Rosarkhiv has a new website where such inquiries can be submitted electronically. Historians of limited time and unlimited funding should note the ability to submit thematic requests for information as a paid service.

Thanks to Artizov, fans of the political use of history can look forward to a document collection that Artizov has promised will be coming soon: “the collaboration of Ukrainian nationalists with the Nazis”

Artizov had quite a bit to say about declassification. He cited 10 million files declassified since 1991, but noted how slow and labor-intensive the process is. He claimed that 1.7 million files remain classified, 1.1 million of those Communist Party or USSR government files. I should note that those numbers sound low to me. They could be true, I suppose, if they exclude some very important archives that are outside the Rosarkhiv system: the military, the foreign ministry, and the security services.

New files come in to the Rosarkhiv system at the rate of 1.5 million per year. Most notably, Artizov says the Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev fonds have all been transferred from the Kremlin’s Presidential Archive to Rosarkhiv. The bulk of the remaining Politburo archive will make the same transfer in 2010-12. Transfer doesn’t mean declassification, of course, but certainly the move from presidential to archivist hands is a good thing for researchers.

Artizov also gave some updated information on the major World War II archive that he discussed back in March. I was skeptical of this on practical and scholarly grounds, and remain so. Artizov is remarkably specific, though, which suggests that efforts proceed apace to make this archive happen. The plan for the new archive is to build it on the grounds of the existing Ministry of Defense Archive in Podol’sk. While this will certainly make the physical transfer of MoD records much simpler, it makes life much tougher for foreign researchers, who will be faced with the unenviable choices of either taking a daily elektrichka trek out from Moscow, or living all the way out in Podol’sk.

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.

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.

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.”

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 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.