I attended my first conference as an undergraduate in the spring of 1988. It was a meeting held by a regional affiliate of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS). Since the early 1990s I’ve averaged at least one a year. Typically I present at the AAASS national gathering, but I’ve been to others, too: AATSEEL, SAH, AHA — as well as the occasional thematic conference dedicated to aviation or some aspect of Russian culture or history.

Regardless of the specific association or venue, scholarly conferences typically share a common structure and rituals: dozens of individual panels spread out over three or four days interspersed with official side trips to sites of (professional) interest; informal evening gatherings; the requisite banquet/keynote/awards ceremony and, of course, a book display. They also come with a common cast of characters: earnest young graduate students learning the ropes; arrogant Young Turks trying to “change the dominant paradigm,” jaded senior scholars looking forward to retirement; and workaday faculty enjoying their lone opportunity to escape from their teaching (only!) institutions — plus a slew of recent (and soon-to-be) Ph.D.s willing to sell their souls for their first tenure-track jobs.

After you’ve been around for a while and attended a handful or so, it becomes pretty obvious that if you’ve been to one academic conference, you’ve been to them all. You always know what to expect, until you encounter the unexpected.

I did just that this past weekend.

I spent Saturday and Sunday in Washington, DC at the national conference of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT). I was invited to participate on a panel devoted to “Revisiting Debates on Dictatorship and Technology”. The panel was organized by Dolores Augustine, author of the soon to be released book Red Prometheus: Engineering and Dictatorship in East Germany, 1950-1990 (MIT Press). Although the other two originally scheduled presenters were forced to cancel, the room was full, the audience engaged, and the discussion that followed lively. In short, it was just what one hopes for at these things.

My contribution was titled “Reassessing the History of Soviet Aviation Technology.” The short presentation summarized some of my major findings from DotA. As a backdrop, I argued that current Russian aviation policies reflect assumptions about modernization and state-directed development nearly identical to those that shaped both Soviet and Imperial-era policies. In short, I discussed the sorts of things that regular readers of this blog would have expected.

What I did not expect was the audience’s reaction.

The gist of the post-presentation comments was that I appeared not to appreciate the unique character of the Soviet period. More than one individual objected that I was “flattening” the differences between the Soviet and Imperial eras by failing to account for the role of Communist ideology in shaping society, culture, and politics. The result, one senior colleague suggested, was that I “seemed to be rationalizing Stalin’s policies.”

I was gob-smacked.

As I mentioned above, I’ve been presenting at conferences for more than a decade. For most of that time, my talks have focused on my Soviet-era research. Never, not once, have I ever been faulted for downplaying the significance of ideology in Soviet history or “rationalizing Stalin’s policies.” If anything, colleagues in Russian history have argued the opposite: that I devote too much attention to ideology while being too critical of Stalinist excesses. [I disagree, but that's another post.]

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

As the post-presentation discussion unfolded, two things occurred to me.

The first was that I had not summarized my views as effectively as I had hoped. To ensure that there would be plenty of time for Q&A I had to condense the longer paper I had written to right around twenty minutes. So I announced the argument, hit the broader points, and worked backward, from present to past, “unraveling” the origins of contemporary aviation policies by highlighting past precedents. As it was, I rushed through the last quarter or so of my presentation (on the Imperial era) to avoid exceeding my time limit.

Later, during the exchange with the audience, I defended my apparent short-shrifting of Stalinist politics by filling in the gaps. I also noted that I devote considerable space in DotA to discussing ideology’s role in shaping Soviet aviation. I urged folks to suspend final judgment until they’ve had a chance to read the book. Fair enough.

The second thing that occurred to me (though I didn’t mention it at the time) is the extent to which the nature and direction of that Q&A period suggests how differently scholars in separate historical sub-fields conceive and approach essential questions. Until rather recently, discussions of politics and ideology (or, “that ‘i’ word,” as I once heard it called) were highly unfashionable among professional Russian historians. [Again, a topic for another post]. Even today, the mere mention of the word “totalitarianism” is all but certain to induce snickers and groans from most quarters (and paroxysms of moral indignation from others). To avoid scandal, you’re better off not even mentioning it. But if you must, your only safe bet is to cover yourself by tying the word to a phrase such as “and other Cold War-era fantasies.”

That the SHOT audience was so keen to focus on ideology (and that references to totalitarianism slipped continuously and un-ironically off the tongues of almost everyone in the room) suggested to me how much differently these professional historians conceive Russian history. For all of the ink Soviet specialists spill trying to convince other Soviet specialists to accept their interpretive approaches, it seems that they have done little to influence how non-Russian specialists view Russia’s past.

It may be that I’m making more out of the exchange that is warranted. If not, I can’t help but think that this reflects negatively on how specialization can undermine history as a whole. Either way, I’d be curious to learn what books in Russian/Soviet history non-specialists are reading and what non-Russian histories Russian specialists are reading.

In light of the encounter in DC, I think we may want to consider spending less time revisiting historical debates and spend more time revisiting how we communicate with historians outside our subfields.

ScP