The first is a short piece from The Chronicle of Higher Education titled, “Did You Publish Today?” It’s a light-hearted column intended for those people “who believe that academics have summers off, for those who argue that we have cushy jobs because we have to teach only a few classes a week for a couple of hours at a time, and for those who think that reading books isn’t work.”

If you have ever wondered what it is that academics (especially those in the humanities) actually do, “Did You Publish Today?” is a good place to start.

The second piece is less mirthful.

Written by the necessarily anonymous “Professor X” and appearing in the current issue of The Atlantic, “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” describes the routine frustrations encountered by the author while moonlighting as a composition instructor. Called upon to

teach young men who must amass a certain number of credits before they can become police officers or state troopers, lower-echelon health-care workers who need credits to qualify for raises, and municipal employees who require college-level certification to advance at work

Professor X finds that the majority of his “students” are grossly unprepared for the basic assignments expected of them. As he insists on maintaining academic standards, the results ain’t pretty:

For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.

If the essay is anywhere off the mark, it is in Prof. X’s apparent belief that the poor quality of his students is somehow related to their status as “non-traditional, adult learners” and the nature of the institution in which they are enrolled (a community college in the northeastern United States).

The unfortunate reality is that what Professor X has observed applies as well to far too many students at colleges and universities across the USA. It’s true of institutions both public and private, both famous and forgettable, and it is especially pronounced at academe’s bottom-feeders: those state-affiliated, cardinal point colleges of last resort where administrators measure success by ever-increasing enrollments while constantly lowering admission standards to attract more student-customers.

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What is to be Done?

For scholars who have themselves been forced to curtail (or forego altogether) archival work owing to a lack of institutional support, the relative decline in research money available to Russian historians may seem inconsequential. It may even occasion a not altogether unjustifiable case of schadenfreude. After all, having long benefited disproportionately from federal largess, scholars of Russia, it stands to reason, have little business whining about declining federal support as governmental attention shifts elsewhere.

Still, while it is certainly true that Russian historians have for many years enjoyed access to funds not available to their colleagues studying, say, Britain, France, or Germany, it is likewise true that Russian historians have not now (nor are they likely anytime in the near future to have) access to the kind of research support typically sponsored by Western European governments. Given how little the Russian state has done to support the work of its own native scholars, it is hard to imagine that it would ever consent to subsidizing research conducted by foreign graduate students and academics. What would happen to American Ph.D. programs in European history if, over the course of the next five years, the governments in Paris and Berlin reduced by one-half the number of Chateaubriand and DAAD fellowships available to U.S. scholars and graduate students needing to work in French and German archives? This may well be the fate awaiting Russian historians.

Moreover, indifference to the transformations now underway ignores the reality that continuing reductions in federal funding are likely to have negative corollary effects on scholars working in other regions and fields. To the extent that fewer NCEEER, IREX, and ACTR grants in history force aspiring Ph.D.s and established scholars to turn to other agencies for funding, it will mean a growing pool of applicants for the already intensely competitive fellowships open to all regions and disciplines available through ACLS, NEH, and similar agencies.

Then again, this may mean little to the field at large, save that there will be fewer Russian historians and area specialists. In this sense, “sea change” may simply be a reversion to the norm wherein departments which once housed two Russianists (Imperial and Soviet) will increasingly find that they can do well enough with just one. In other instances, newly minted-Ph.D.s specializing in the history of Central Asia or the Caucasus may be called upon to teach service courses pertaining to their regions’ “periphery.”

Whatever the case, it seems clear that the next generation of Russian historians will need to demonstrate more creativity in developing innovative methodologies rather than simply adapting approaches previously used by their colleagues studying Western Europe. They must also be more effective in explaining the significance of their research findings to policy makers within the halls of power and to educated, non-academic audiences across the nation. Here, senior scholars and professional organizations such as AAASS and AATSEEL have essential parts to play. They should assume more active roles in developing workshops, symposia, and other programs that will prepare rising graduate students not simply to function as faculty, but to serve beyond the ivory walls of academe as public intellectuals and stewards of their field. To this end, doctoral programs and dissertation directors would be well advised to encourage their student charges to pay closer attention to contemporary Russian politics, culture, and society. While dissertation subjects should not be determined on the basis of current policy debates, a basic awareness of the issues shaping those debates would better enable young scholars to compete for grant money in the current policy-driven environment. Likewise, graduate students and junior faculty must be prepared to articulate their ideas in language that can be understood outside the seminar room or conference panel. “Theoretically advanced” research does little good when it is made impenetrable by theoretical jargon.

Such measures might, indeed, benefit the historical profession as a whole. But for Russian history, such measures are essential. These steps would help to offset, in part, the further erosion of federal support for Russian area studies by better preparing the next generation of scholars to compete in a future that is certain to be different from the past. No less significant, encouraging young scholars to actively engage non-academic audiences would doubtless contribute to raising the profile of the field in the eyes of the reading public. In any event, why should the most popular books on Russia’s past continue to be produced largely by journalists and non-academic historians?

Another way in which the next generation of researchers may accomplish these tasks is by devoting more attention to a subfield too long overlooked by western scholars of Russia: the history of Russian technology and science. Despite its obvious significance in explaining the causes behind the Soviet Union’s collapse and its direct relevance to informing policy decisions regarding current and future developments in Russia, the history of technology and science has received scant attention in the field’s prevailing literature. Historians of science and technology are a distinct minority within AAASS.¹ Worse still, they have been poorly represented in the leading journals devoted to Russian history and area studies. Since 1999, Russian Review has published only two articles related to the history of Russian technology and science. Slavic Review has managed three.² While interpretations emphasizing politics, social movements, and cultural, gender, and ethnic identities have all enjoyed their heyday during the last three decades, arguably the most important approach to understanding why both the Imperial and Soviet paths to modernity failed has gone largely unexplored.

This is not to say that historians of Russian technology and science have failed to achieve distinction in their own right. Quite the contrary. During the 1970s and 1980s, Loren Graham, Alexander Vucinich, and the late Kendall Bailes produced a series of groundbreaking studies that drew attention to the important roles played by cultural, political, and social contexts in shaping the nature and direction of Russian scientific and technological development. Their writings have since attained canonical status among interested scholars.³ While Graham and Vucinich continued to influence the field, a second wave of historians followed in their wake. Along with David Holloway’s highly regarded history of the Soviet atomic project, Douglas R. Weiner’s studies of Soviet conservation, Joseph Bradley’s work on the Imperial Russian armaments industry, Jonathan Coopersmith’s investigation of the origins of Russian electrification, and Anthony Heywood’s account of the Soviet railroad industry demonstrated the many ways in which the history of science and technology sheds vital insight on such central concerns as diplomacy and foreign relations, technology transfer, the emergence of civil society, modernization, and economic development. Although Holloway’s book was awarded two prizes from AAASS, the broader contributions of these historians have drawn scant attention from the field as a whole. While Kritika, Russian Review, and Slavic Review and have recently dedicated special issues to everything from political violence and conservatism to diaries, tourism, and (in an upcoming volume) the film Borat [!] none has provided a platform for evaluating what, by all accounts, should be a major subfield within the discipline. Even the dean of Russian science and technology, Loren Graham, in a rare review essay on the history of Russian technology and science, elected to forego a discussion of western scholarship in favor of focusing on the contributions of Russian historians.⁴

Despite their enduring low profile, historians of Russian technology and science continue to produce perceptive, path-breaking, and policy relevant studies exploring the social, cultural, and political ramifications of science and technology within the Russian context. In Science for the Masses, a recent history of popular science and scientific education in the early Soviet period, James Andrews demonstrates how an “imaginative vision of public science” born of the late Imperial period was transformed into applied science and technology through the Stalinist “Great Break.” Among historians of the physical sciences, Michael Gordin has published a prize-winning biography of chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev. Alexei Kojevnikov has chronicled the difficult circumstances faced by Soviet physicists during the Stalinist era while Ethan Pollock has examined Stalin’s role in the “science wars.” In addition to providing scholars with an essential resources through his on-line “Virtual Guide to the History of Russian Science and Technology,” Slava Gerovitch has recently published the first comprehensive history of Soviet cybernetics. Meanwhile, one of the subfield’s most prolific young scholars, Asif Siddiqi, has already established himself as a preeminent expert on the history of space flight with his twin histories of Soviet rocketry, The Soviet Space Race with Apollo and Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge.

Judging by the quality of writing and breadth of research demonstrated in these works (most of which have been published within the last three years), the history of Russian technology and science may be poised to guide the broader field through a difficult period of intellectual and institutional transition. Still, nothing so facile as a “paradigm shift” will undo more than a decade of relative decline. Until policymakers and foundation boards in Washington, DC and elsewhere are made to realize that Russia remains vital to US interests, interest in things Russian (and funding for its scholars) is unlikely to rebound. There are no sure-fire solutions for rejuvenating Russian history. Even so, the first step on the road to reversing the field’s declining status is to acknowledge that the field has a problem. Russian history in the United States has reached a crossroads. Where it will go in the future depends upon a great many factors, not the least of which is the willingness of its practitioners to acknowledge where they now stand.

1. Of the 2,884 unique, domestic AAASS members who completed registration forms during the period 2004-2006, 1,353 (46.9%) identified “History” as a field of specialization. Of these, only 42 (3.1%) also identified “Science & Technology” as an area of research
2. Douglas R. Weiner, “Struggle over the Soviet Future: Science Education versus Vocationalism during the 1920s,” Russian Review 65:1 (2006): 72-97; Slava Gerovitch, “Russian Scandals: Soviet Readings of American Cybernetics in the Early Years of the Cold War,” Russian Review 60:4 (2001): 545-565; Lewis Siegelbaum, “Soviet Car Rallies of the 1920s and 1930s and the Road to Socialism,” Slavic Review 63:2 (2005): 247-273.; Daniel R. Stone, “The Cable Car at Kasprowy Wierch: An Environmental Debate in Interwar Poland, Slavic Review 63:3 (2005): 601-624 and Kristin Roth-Ey, “Finding a Home for Television in the USSR, 1950-1970,” Slavic Review 66:2 (2007): 278-306.
3. Loren Graham, Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union (New York: Knopf, 1972) and The Academy of Sciences and the Communist Party, 1927-1932 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967); Alexander Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture 2 vols. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1963-1970) and Empire of Knowledge: The Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1917-1970 (Berkeley, CA: University of Califronia Press, 1984) and Kendall Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: The Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917-1941 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978)
4. Loren R. Graham, “The Birth, Withering, and Rebirth of Russian History of Science,” Kritika 2:2 (2001): 329-340

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.

Although hardly the first work to address the issue of ethnicity, Yuri Slezkine’s 1994 monograph Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North was a path-breaking and immensely successful study aimed at portraying the efforts of indigenous peoples to maintain their native identities in the face of Russian political and cultural encroachment. Covering more than 400 years of history, Slezkine’s account transcended the standard Imperial/Soviet divide in depicting the evolution of Russian policy in the Far North from the sixteenth century until the collapse of the USSR. In addition to providing a comprehensive study of the region’s peoples, Slezkine’s work was important as a marker of the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of post-1991 historiography as it utilized anthropological methodologies in tracing the cultural and intellectual history of the Russian conquest and administration of Siberia.

The number of studies devoted to colonial encounters, ethnic identity, and the inherent tensions between Russians and non-Russian nationalities has ballooned since the publication of Arctic Mirrors. Among historians of the Imperial era, Thomas M. Barrett, Michael Khodarkovsky, and Austin Jersild have written on Russians’ interaction with, respectively, the Terek Cosssacks of the North Caucasus, the nomads of the Central Asia steppe, and the mountain peoples of Georgia. Williard Sunderland has explored Russian popular and state initiatives aimed at colonizing the Black Sea-Caspian steppe, while Robert Geraci and Paul Werth have examined the intersections of ethnic identities and popular religious culture in separate studies of Russian colonization in the Volga-Kama region.

Nationalism and ethnicity have attained growing prominence in the work of Soviet-era historians, as well. Terry Martin’s Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 is only one of many recent studies to examine the difficulties encountered by Communist Party officials as they attempted to craft a single “union” from among the multitude of ethnic groups that populated the lands of the USSR. Focusing on early Soviet efforts to manage and control national identities while constructing the framework of their newly emerging state system, Martin’s monograph chronicles the often contradictory policies adopted by the Soviet authorities as they attempted to promote the national cultures of minority populations while dictating the content of those cultures to those same populations. Complimenting Martin’s broad examination of the origins and institutional development of Soviet nationalities policy, Douglas Northrop, Adrienne Lynn Edgar, and Paula Michaels have recently published more focused studies documenting the tensions that emerged between local inhabitants and central authorities as the state moved to replace “backward” ethnic customs and practices with a new, unified Soviet culture peopled and produced by “new” Soviet men and women. Nationality and ethnicity play similarly consequential roles in Matthew Payne’s monograph on the construction of the Turkistan-Siberian (Turksib) railway and Francine Hirsch’s examination of the rise of Soviet ethnography. When one adds to this already sizeable list of works focusing on Central Asia and the Caucasus recent monographs on the Polish and Ukrainian borderlands, the Soviet Jewish community, and various collected editions, a small library tied to issues of nationalism and ethnicity quickly emerges.¹

The sudden and rapid growth of scholarship involving ethnicity and nationality has been accompanied by a number of broader developments which may have significant long-term effects on Russian history as a field. As established scholars and a new generation of graduate students move away from the Russian “center” to the non-Russian “periphery,” they open up for study and scrutiny an array of regions and cultures previously “marginalized” in academic literature. To the extent that research interests influence teaching, one can expect that students around the country will be provided with increasing opportunities to enroll in university courses focusing on the histories, the cultures, and (to a somewhat lesser extent) the languages of Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Russian Far East.² From the standpoint of liberal study writ large, these are positive developments which will serve to broaden understanding of as yet little known subjects. Whether the boom in scholarship on nationalities and ethnicity bodes well for Russian history and Russian historians, however, is an issue that bears discussion.

In marked contrast to previous changes in the field, the current infatuation with nationality and ethnicity has been accompanied by a series of developments which suggest that something more than a simple “paradigm shift” is well underway. The establishment of new journals, like the independent quarterly Ab Imperio, is but one case in point. A peer-reviewed humanities and social sciences journal, Ab Imperio is specifically “dedicated to interdisciplinary and comparative study of nationalism and history of empire and nationalities in the post Soviet space.” Published since the summer of 2000 by an editorial team of five scholars trained in Russian, European, and American institutions (and counting many leading historians as members of its editorial board), the international journal typifies the field’s movement “from the center to periphery.” Although not devoid of content pertaining to Russia proper, Ab Imperio’s coverage has heavily favored Central Asia and the Caucasus, a fact that is not at all surprising given the journal’s stated mission of promoting broader scholarly awareness of nationalities and nationalism.

Still more significant have been institutional changes such as the recent formation of the Central Eurasian Studies Society (CESS), a relatively new scholarly organization devoted to promoting research and teaching involving the history, languages, and cultures of Central Asia and the Caucasus. Tracing its origins to a series of annual workshops begun in 1996 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, CESS emerged as a formal institution during the course of its inaugural conference in October 2000. Since incorporating as a non-profit and receiving tax-exempt status in mid-2001, CESS has growth considerably in size and stature. Currently hosted by Harvard University’s Program on Central Asia and the Caucasus and supported, in part, through the budgetary contributions of eight leading international and area studies centers, CESS boasts a membership of 1,588 scholars representing nearly 70 countries. Its twice yearly publication Central Eurasian Studies Review (appearing since January 2002) has quickly developed into a leading interdisciplinary journal. The rapid growth of CESS parallels recent developments in the longer standing Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN). Since its inaugural world convention in 1995, in which no more than a dozen panels and perhaps 100 participants took part, the event has grown considerably. In 2005, the organization’s world conference included more than 100 panels comprised of 455 participants drawn from 42 countries.³

The development of CESS and ASN stands in considerable contrast to the fortunes of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS), the nation’s leading scholarly organization for (what else?) advancing scholarship in Slavic-related fields. Originally founded in the late 1940s for the purpose of publishing an American journal pertaining to Slavic issues (Slavic Review), the association subsequently became a membership organization in 1960. Bolstered by widespread interest in the USSR and indirectly underwritten by the Title VI funds that flowed into academia during the height of the Cold War, AAASS grew in the decades that followed into the premier private organization devoted to Russia, Eastern Europe, and, by default, regions now identified as the “former Soviet Union.” An interdisciplinary association from its inception, AAASS and its many American regional affiliates attracted members from across the humanities and social sciences as well as non-academics affiliated with government, the military, and, to a lesser extent, the private sector.

More recently, AASSS has fallen on hard times. During roughly the same period in which CESS and ASN logged impressive growth, AAASS registered considerable decline. Between 1997 and 2007 the association saw its membership shrink from 3,610 to 2,640.⁴ Standard disclaimers that “correlation does not equal causality” notwithstanding, the concomitant expansion of organizations such as ASN and CESS coupled with a more than 25% drop-off in the ranks of AAASS suggests that Slavic area studies (and, by extension, Russian history) has, indeed, been adversely effected by rising interest in the non-Russian “periphery.”⁵ At the very least, the sea change underway in the field appears to have produced an identity crisis of sort for AAASS. At the organization’s annual conference in 2006, a special “Presidential Panel” convened to consider whether the organization should be renamed in a fashion that would more appropriately “fit the times.”⁶ Among the several suggestions floated by the panel’s participants and audience members, the descriptor “Eurasian” (intended to denote the society’s inclusion of Central Asia and the Caucasus) figured most prominently. At the time of this writing, the jury is still out on the “fate” of AAASS. Whatever the result, one need not be a believer in the post-modern nostrum “language = power” to recognize in the debate over the AAASS moniker an admission that “power” is drifting away from Russia and the Slavic world.

Far more disconcerting than the growth of newer societies and the (potential) re-branding of older ones has been the relative decline in funding opportunities for graduate training and scholarly research in Russian history. In recent years, funding agencies long relied upon by Russian historians have increasingly dispersed growing portions of their shrinking monies to projects involving Central Asia and the Caucasus. An important case in point is the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), a non-profit organization founded in 1968 for the specific purpose of coordinating scholarly exchanges with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Through its Short-Term Travel Grant (STG) program and three- to nine-month Individual Advanced Research Opportunity (IARO) fellowships, IREX has long been the principal funding agency for doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers in Russian history and area studies. No longer devoted solely to facilitating scholarly exchanges to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, IREX now supports programs in the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. Today, the organization has offices and representatives in over 125 cities of Europe and Eurasia administering programs to advance education, support independent media, promote Internet development, and build civil society.

Even though IREX remains an essential resource for scholars and students of Russia, as the organization has revised its mandate to include broader world regions so, too, has it shifted its attention within the region known as the “former Soviet Union” away from Russia proper to the Caucasus and Central Asia. As the records available through the IREX web site reveal, recent years have seen a growing percentage of IREX fellowships and grants awarded to projects devoted in whole or in part to Central Asia and the Caucasus. Of the 107 IARO fellowships dispensed over the three-year period from 1999-2000 to 2001-2002, 40 awards (or 37%) were designated for projects with a Russian-only focus while only 12 grants (11%) went to projects concentrating on Central Asia or the Caucasus. The most recent five-year period (2002-2003 to 2006-2007) reflects a growing emphasis on the “borderlands” as the number of funded projects involving Central Asia and the Caucasus exceeded those focusing on Russia. Of the total 146 IARO fellowships awarded by IREX during this period, 33 (or 22%) went to Russian projects as opposed to 40 (27%) for those focusing on Central Asia/Caucasus. The same general trend applies to the IREX Short-Term Travel Grant program. Where the 2001 competition cycle saw 18 of the 42 (43%) available grants earmarked for Russian projects as opposed to only 4 (9%) for Central Asia and the Caucasus, by 2005 the gap had narrowed to 31% for Russia (9 grants) compared to 17% (5 grants) for Central Asia and the Caucasus. These trends continued in the following two grant cycles. Of the 26 grants awarded in 2006 an equal number, 6 (or 23%) went to “borderlands” and Russian projects. The following year, 4 borderlands projects were funded (17%) as opposed to only 3 (13%) on Russian topics. In other words, amid a significant decline in the total number of STGs available (42 in 2001 versus only 23 in 2007), the absolute number of awards earmarked for Central Asia and the Caucasus remained the same while the number of STGs for research in Russia has fallen more than 80%. It is likewise worth noting that as IREX support for non-Russian projects has increased, the number of grants awarded for the study of history (all regions) has declined significantly. In each of the three years between 2000 and 2002, IREX awarded STGs to 10 applicants in history. During the following five years, historians accounted for only 3 (2003), 8 (2004), 6 (2005), 4 (2006), and 2 (2007) STGs.

The relative decline in IREX funding for Russian projects is not an isolated development. Other grant agencies with longstanding interests in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, such as the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER) and the American Councils for International Education (originally incorporated as the American Council of Teachers of Russian), are likewise devoting larger percentages of their available funds to projects focusing on non-Russian regions. The causes and effects of this phenomenon emerged as central topics at a roundtable discussion held at the 2006 national conference of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) in Washington, DC. Titled, “Policy Relevance and Humanities Grants in Slavic Studies,” the roundtable brought together chief administrators from four leading funding agencies to discuss how recent trends are effecting humanities research focusing on the regions of Russia and East Europe.⁷ When directly questioned by this author on the perceived shift away from Russian topics toward Central Asia and the Caucasus, each of the roundtable participants acknowledged that the shift is real and of relatively recent vintage. While such explanations as “broadening intellectual curiosity,” “increased access to non-Russian regional archives,” and “new methodologies” were cited in the discussion that followed, all of the participants acknowledged that the single most important factor behind the decreasing number of awards granted to Russian historians and cultural specialists has been a fundamental change in the way that grant agencies themselves are funded.

According to Robert Huber, President of NCEEER, cutbacks in funding for the National Endowment of the Humanities since the mid-1990s have significantly effected the number and types of fellowships agencies award to prospective applicants. When, in years past, block grants from the NEH underwrote a substantial amount of their scholarly programs, institutions such as NCEEER, IREX, ACTR, and the Wilson Center enjoyed considerable flexibility in making funds available to worthy humanities projects. Provided that applicants demonstrated that their research would contribute in some fashion to “advancing knowledge in the humanities” (broadly interpreted), foundations were more or less free to disperse awards as they saw fit. Since 1995, Congressional cutbacks to the NEH budget have forced agencies to turn elsewhere to generate the funds necessary to underwrite their grant activities. Increasingly, these agencies have come to rely on the institutional support of the Title VIII program.⁸ Administered by the U.S. Department of State, the mission of Title VIII is “to sustain the fields of Eurasian and Central and East European studies, support the national capability for advanced research of highly trained and experienced professionals, and make this expertise available for service in and out of government.” [emphasis added] As NCEEER’s web site explains, this last item means supporting “projects that produce readable analysis, reliable information, and lively debate about current economic, political, and international issues. Applicants must demonstrate, directly or indirectly, how their research impacts upon policy debates and research on such issues.”⁹

The requirement that projects underwritten by Title VIII be geared toward policy relevant research has given scholars employing social science methodologies a distinct advantage in the competition to secure funding. Similarly, individuals focusing on regions of the world perceived to be strategically important owing to geographic location and/or natural resources are likely to benefit from the Title VIII mandate. In contrast, scholars whose projects reflect less practical, humanistic approaches, or that pertain to Eurasian countries not currently in vogue may face a more challenging struggle in their quest to secure funds. This is not, of course, to say that projects lacking intellectual rigor or scholarly merit have been taking precedence over others simply because of “policy relevance.” Nor is it to say that Russian historians cannot obtain Title VIII funding, only that it is becoming more difficult for them to do so. In this regard, Mark Pomar, President of IREX, reported that the fallout from the shift to Title VIII can clearly be seen by comparing IREX awards in 2000-2001 with those from the most recent grant cycle, 2004-2005. According to Pomar, 2000-2001, “the last year of the NEH funding boom,” saw IREX award fellowships and grants to 70 project, of which 35 (50%) were in the humanities. By contrast, during the 2004-2005 cycle, in which IREX funded 60 projects, the number of awards in the humanities plummeted to only 9 (15%). As NCEEER’s Robert Huber quipped at the conclusion of the AATSEEL roundtable, while the “median” researcher in the field “probably remains a historian of nineteenth-century Russia, big problems loom for Russian historians” if major funding agencies are long forced to continue relying heavily on Title VIII to underwrite their fellowship programs. Still, Huber did note that NCEEER, recognizing the shift in IREX funding, has managed to support a larger number of humanities grants it did in times past. Provided that scholars are able to identify the link between their subjects of research and contemporary regional issues, it is possible to support humanities research under Title VIII. Moreover, in cooperation with ACTR, NCEEER administers an NEH-sponsored grant devoted exclusively to supporting the humanities by funding projects involving at least one colleague from the region and research in the region itself.

1. Serhy Yekelchyk, Stalin’s Empire of Memory: Russian-Ukrainian Relations in the Historical Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderlands to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Jeffrey Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001). Recent collection of essay include: Daniel R. Brower and Edward Lazzerini, eds., Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700-1917 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997); Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, eds., A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Robert Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky, eds., Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Imperial Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001)
2. A representative sample of course syllabi pertaining to Central Asia and the Caucasus can be found on the Central Asian Studies World Wide
3. Membership figures for the Association for the Study of Nationalities were not available. My thanks to Gordon N. Bardos, Executive Director of the ASN, for providing information on the growth of the association’s annual convention.
4. Statistics provided to the author via e-mail on 19 December 2007 by Luke Zentner, Membership Cooridinator of AAASS
5. Although the professional and scholarly interests of AAASS include such regions as the Balkans, the Baltic States, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, according to the organization’s rough calculations over 72% of its members’ interests lie in the Slavic word with Russia topping the list at 29%. Those interested in Central Asia account for only 7% of the AAASS total membership
6. An overview of the panel and its ensuing discussion was subsequently published in the AAASS newsletter. See, Katherine Verdery, “What’s in a Name and Should We Change Ours?,” NewsNet 46:2 (March 2006): 1-4
7. The roundtable participants were: Dan Davidson, Executive Director of ACTR, Robert Huber, President of NCEEER, Mark G. Pomar, President of IREX, and Margaret Paxson, Senior Associate at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies (Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars)
8. In 2005, for example, the Title VIII program provided $801,000 to IREX, $715,000 to the Woodrow Wilson Center, and just over $1 million to NCEEER
9. The quotation comes from NCEER’s public announcement for the 2008 National Research Competition

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

One of the earliest and most influential works to incorporate the linguistic turn was Laura Engelstein’s acclaimed study The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (1992). Taking as its starting point Michel Foucault’s theory that “sexual categories and norms constitute at once a system of power relations configuring the social body and a way of thinking about power and organizing power through the medium of actual bodies” (3), Engelstein explored the extent to which public discourse regarding sexuality articulated by members of the trained professions and other shapers of civic culture in late Imperial Russia compared with similar efforts on the part of the European middle class. (9) Focusing, in particular, on educated Russians’ views about sexual deviancy, crime, and disease, Engelstein concluded that public discourse on sexuality revealed the contradictions, frustrations, and failures of Russian liberal thought in the years that preceded 1917. Her concomitant demonstration of the extent to which the views of liberal Russians differed significantly from those of their west European counterparts ultimately revealed the limitations of a “Foucauldian” approach to understanding the Russian context; a topic to which she returned in a 1993 article published in the American Historical Review.²

For her path-breaking effort, Engelstein won widespread scholarly accolades and a permanent position in Ph.D. reading lists across the United States.³ In retrospect, her work was no less important as a marker of the field’s ongoing shift away from established political and social history toward the history of culture writ large. Among the more significant monographs on Imperial history to appear in the early 1990s studies devoted to crime, the working class, the peasantry, and women similarly made use of the new cultural history to explore, in innovative ways, already well-established topics.⁴

The transformation of the field engendered by the new cultural history was of course greatly hastened by the increased access to archival sources that followed the implosion of the USSR. The loosening of Soviet-era restrictions on foreign researchers and the declassification of long-suppressed documents that began circa 1992 opened up many new avenues of research for scholars of Russia. As western academics and graduate students rushed to take advantage of the new openness, an “archival revolution” seemed to be in the offering. Ironically, however, the opening of Russian archives at first led to a re-opening of old debates regarding the Soviet system as the contestants in the “totalitarian-revisionist” controversies of the 1970 and 1980s looked to the newly available materials in search of silver bullets with which to slay their longtime historiographical foes.⁵ In short order, the dispute over the origins and nature of the USSR was transformed into a rather fierce debate over the cause of the USSR’s collapse and its meaning to the socialist tradition.⁶

Of the numerous contributions to this dispute, Martin Malia’s was the most noteworthy. An old-school intellectual historian who in 1961 authored one of Russian history’s greatest biographies (a study of Alexander Herzen, nineteenth-century Russia’s greatest thinker),⁷ Malia had followed up his first book with thirty years of professional silence. He re-emerged in 1990 as the initially anonymous author of an essay titled, “To the Stalin Mausoleum,” that forecast the failure of Gorbachev’s reform efforts and the inevitable collapse of the USSR. Following the fulfillment of this stunning prediction Malia plunged into the historiographical fray with the 1994 publication of an intentionally polemical book-length history of socialism’s failure in twentieth-century Russia. Tellingly titled The Soviet Tragedy, Malia’s first monograph in more than three decades took the revisionists to task for their earlier attempts to demonstrate the legitimacy of the October Revolution, to distinguish the “good” Lenin from the “bad” Stalin, and to establish the Soviet system’s capacities for modernization and reform. According to Malia, 1991 was proof that the questions motivating their approaches had been a priori false. The revisionists had fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the Soviet system. They had “ignored the possibility…that nothing went wrong with the Revolution, but rather that the whole enterprise, quite simply, was wrong from the start.” (10) In place of their mistaken emphasis on social modernization and upward mobility, Malia countered with a “concrete agenda” that “reasserted the primacy of ideology and politics over social and economic forces in understanding the Soviet phenomenon.” (16)

The professional silence that followed the appearance of Malia’s monograph was deafening. Although criticisms of The Soviet Tragedy began to circulate at conferences and in articles soon after its publication, Slavic Review, ostensibly the field’s leading journal, simply ignored the book. So, too, did the American Historical Review, the Journal of Modern History, and virtually every other scholarly publication in the nation. One of the few exceptions was America’s most important journal devoted to Russian history, Russian Review, which published a belated, but even-handed and generally favorable evaluation written by Yanni Kotsonis.⁸ As if adding insult to the injuries Malia had inflicted on professional sensibilities, The Soviet Tragedy was enthusiastically praised in the prestigious non-academic venues that reviewed the book.⁹

Whatever the merits of Malia’s polemical account of socialism in Russia, concurrent developments in the changing field were beginning to prove him right in one significant regard. “That I-word’” (as one of my revisionist colleagues once referred to it) was returning to prominence (though not quite dominance) in the study of Russian history. Even before the ink had dried on Malia’s page proofs, a new generation of historians hard at work in Russia’s freshly opened archives, was rediscovering the centrality of ideology and politics to the history of twentieth-century Russia.

Among the more notable new works in this regard was Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain. A sweeping micro-history of Magnitogorsk (the Stalinist-era planned city intended to serve as the center of Soviet iron processing and industrial development), Magnetic Mountain employed a wide array of new sources unearthed in recently opened regional archives together with local and factory newspapers, unpublished histories, and oral interviews in depicting the origins and nature of “Stalinism as a civilization.” Borrowing heavily from concepts first developed by Foucault (to whom the book was dedicated), Kotkin set out to describe the vision and reality of Soviet daily life by applying Foucault’s notion of “subjectivity’ (“the process by which individuals are made, and also make themselves, subjects of the state”) to an empirical study of local citizens’ accommodation and resistance to the mechanisms of Soviet power (22-23).

Kotkin divided his monograph into two sections. The first, titled “Grand Strategies of the State,” outlined the broader process of Soviet industrialization, describing the manner in which the Magnitogorsk complex was planned, constructed, populated, and managed. The second section, on “The Little Tactics of the Habitat,” examined such workaday issues as food and housing, shop-floor conditions, and the administration of justice, from the standpoint of citizens living and laboring within the context of the state’s grand design. Together, the two sections vividly portrayed the vision and reality of “socialist construction,” illustrating the process through which Bolshevik values, behaviors, and beliefs were articulated in the Party’s official ideology only to be resisted, adapted, or accepted by the men and women living in the shadow of the “Magnetic Mountain.” Although several reviewers correctly observed that the book’s broader arguments regarding the Stalinist system’s Enlightenment roots and theocratic structure were hardly original, Kotkin’s reassertion of the importance of ideology to understanding the Soviet experience resonated with scholars in ways that Malia’s polemic had not.

Ideology has since figured prominently in other studies of the Soviet past. In his award-winning monograph, Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions, Stephen Hanson explained the rise and decline of the Soviet Union as resulting from a peculiar vision of time grounded in Marxist ideology. Arguing that Marx’s theory and Soviet practice were characterized by a paradoxical “charismatic-rational” teleology that saw time as a force to be transcended through “time-disciplined” revolutionary action (131-32), Hanson proposed that the history of the USSR could be understood as the product of the Soviet leadership’s inability to make human relationships and institutions conform with their broader ideas regarding the nature and process of development. Ideology played a similarly consequential role in David Brandenberger’s study National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of National Identity, 1931-1956, which explored the myriad ways in which Russian nationalist elements formed a constituent part of official Soviet propaganda. According to Brandenberger, Soviet officials undertook an “ideological about face” in the mid 1930s, abandoning their previous, idealistic efforts to mobilize public support through exhortations of proletarian internationalism in favor of a strident, pragmatic, and more successful emphasis on Russian nationalism. Ultimately, Brandenberger concluded, the emergence of “russocentric etatism” as a chief feature of Stalinist-era ideology unintentionally laid the groundwork for the emergence of a modern Russian identity.

The reincorporation of ideology into the study of the Soviet past was only one of the many ways in which the archival revolution of the early 1990s reinvigorated Russian history. Like their more politically inclined colleagues, social historians also benefited from access to new sources and documents. Particularly valuable to scholars of Soviet society were svodki, informational summaries produced by the Party and secret police organs, which detailed the attitudes and moods of the populace. Along with svodki, vast quantities of personal complaints, letters, denunciations, private diaries, and other previously inaccessible items were disgorged from the archives and made available for researchers’ use. Armed with this new cache of materials documenting the interactions of Soviet citizens with the organs of the party-state, researchers expanded considerably understanding of the social and institutional mechanisms that shaped the lives of Soviet citizens during the 1920s and 1930s. The result was a number of innovative works devoted to such topics as daily life, popular opinion, public demonstrations, and social ostracism.¹⁰

The same was true for specialists focusing on the armed forces. Largely ignored amid the “totalitarian-revisionist” cacophany of the 1970s and 1980s, Russian military and diplomatic history has experienced a renaissance of sorts since the mid-1990s thanks to the emergence of a small but talented group of young scholars. Among this cohort, David Shimmelpenninck van der Oye, Joshua Sanborn, Eric Lohr, and Jonathan Grant contributed important new books on, respectively, the intellectual origins of the Russo-Japanese War, social mobilization during World War I, wartime treatment of non-Russian minorities, and the Putilov armaments company. Meanwhile, senior historian Peter Gatrell has written extensively on the period of the Great War, producing three significant monographs on the relationship between tsarist state and industry, wartime refugees, and the socio-economic history of Russian involvement in the conflict.

Military historians of the Soviet period have proven every bit as productive as new archival discoveries and a few sensationalist works encouraged work in a subfield already popular with the broader reading public. As Bruce Menning noted in a recent survey of Russian military historiography, intercessions on behalf of foreign scholars by the late Dmitrii Volkogonov and the publication of Viktor Suvorov’s controversial Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War? helped spur successful efforts to declassify and make available archival materials relating to the Second World War.¹¹ Historians subsequently took advantage of the new openness to explore a host of topics dealing with military issues. Understanding of the inter-war period has been clarified thanks to Lennart Samuelson’s and Sally Stoecker’s separate studies of military planning and innovation, Raymond Leonard’s history of Soviet military intelligence, and David Stone’s award-winning Hammer and Rifle: The Militarization of the Soviet Union, 1926-1933. No less significant are Amir Weiner’s Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution and William Odom’s account of The Collapse of the Soviet Military.

Of all the scholars working on Soviet military history, however, none have been more prolific than David Glantz and Roger Reese. As major contributors to the prestigious Modern War Studies Series from the University Press of Kansas (one of the nation’s leading academic publishers of military history), Glantz and Reese have been responsible for a remarkable array of deeply researched and path-breaking books relating to Soviet operational history (Glantz) and the history of the Red Army (Reese). In addition to having written (with Jonathan House) the definitive one-volume history of military operations on the Eastern Front, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler, Glantz soundly rebutted Suvorov’s Icebreaker claims in his 1998 study, Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War, now the standard account of the USSR’s military ineptitude in the face of its conflict with Germany. Subsequent works on the rebirth of the Red Army during the War and a series of impressive studies of Operation Mars and the separate battles for Leningrad, Ukraine, and Kursk (among others), have established Glantz as the West’s foremost authority on Soviet military history. Where Glantz’s work has clarified understanding of combat operations during the Second World War, Reese’s scholarship has focused on the institutional history of the Red Army. His first monograph, Stalin’s Reluctant Soldiers: A Social History of the Red Army, 1925-1941, challenged established interpretations by arguing that the rapid and chaotic expansion of the Soviet armed forces during the 1930s (and not Stalin’s 1937-38 purge of the officer corps) was the principal cause behind the Red Army’s 1941 collapse. Reese followed his inaugural book with a concise history of The Soviet Military Experience, 1917-1991 and, most recently, the first comprehensive study of the Soviet officer corps.

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
2. Laura Engelstein, “Combined Underdevelopment: Discipline and the Law in Imperial and Soviet Russia,” American Historical Review 98:2 (1993): 338-353
3. For a representative sample of opinions regarding the book, see Irina Paperno, editor, “Symposium,” Slavic Review 53:1 (1994), 193-224
4. Joan Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900-1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Mark D. Steinberg, Moral Communities: The Culture of Class Relations in the Russian Printing Industry, 1867-1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Cathy Frierson, Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) and Barbara Engel, Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work and Family in Russia, 1861-1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
5. The most candid statement in this regard belongs to historian Robert Conquest, author of a classic 1968 study of the Stalinist Terror that was subsequently criticized by the revisionist camp. When asked by his publisher to suggest a title for the revised 1991 edition of the book Conquest replied, “How about I Told You So, You Fucking Fools”? Ultimately, the press settled on the less prosaic The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Conquest’s comment is documented in Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (New York: Hyperion, 2002)
6. Walter Laqueur, The Dream that Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). See also The National Interest 31 (1993) and Daedalus (Spring 1992) both of which are devoted entirely to the issues surrounding 1991. For a detailed discussion of the interpretive approaches that emerged to explain the Soviet collapse, see David Rowley, “Interpretations of the End of the Soviet Union: Three Paradigms,” in Kritika 2:2 (2001): 395-426
7. Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812-1855 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961)
8. See, Yanni Kotsonis, “The Ideology of Martin Malia,” The Russian Review 58:1 (1999): 124-130
9. Cf. The New York Review of Books 41:15 (September 22, 1994): 20; The New Republic 210:15 (April 11, 1994): 35-39
10. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda, and Dissent, 1934-1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Elena Zubkova, Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945-1957 (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1998); Karen Petrone, Life has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000); Golfo Alexopoulos, Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926-1936 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003)
11. Viktor Suvorov, Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War? Translated by Thomas B. Beattie (New York: Viking, 1990). Suvorov argued that the German invasion of the USSR was a preemptive response to on-going Soviet preparations for an attack on Germany. See, Bruce W. Menning, “A Decade Half-Full: Post-Cold War Studies in Russian and Soviet Military History,” Kritika 2:2 (2001): 341-362

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.

Given the highly tense geopolitical atmosphere that coincided with the earliest years of the Cold War, it is not surprising that the majority of work undertaken by the first generation of post-war Russian historians focused on attempting to explain the nature and origins of the Soviet Union’s political system. Building upon interpretations developed by liberal Russian émigré historians such as Michael Florinsky and Paul Miliukov in the years that preceded World War II and employing methodological models developed by theorists and social scientists including Hannah Arendt and Jacob Talmon, the first “school” of American-born historians of Russia saw clear parallels between the dictatorial origins of the Soviet state and the similarly dictatorial systems that had emerged in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany.⁴ Characterized by a totalist ideology, a single party state, and a fully developed secret police possessing monopoly control over mass communications, operational weapons, social organizations, and the economy, the USSR, in this view, was one of three “totalitarian” political systems that had emerged in the first half of the twentieth century to challenge American and European representative democracy.⁵

Largely denied access to Soviet archival documents, this first generation of post-war American historians developed their understanding of the Soviet past by focusing on the memoirs, treatises, and published sources left by the Communist Party’s founding figures.⁶ They argued, accordingly, that the origins of the Soviet Union’s social and political system could be traced to the intellectual inheritance and dictatorial methods of the Bolshevik Party. As with the Fascists in Italy and the Nazis in Germany, the Bolsheviks’ rise to power was understood to have been an unnecessary tragedy that derailed Imperial Russia’s slow (but democratic) development and propelled the country down an uncharted path toward centralized planning, one-party dictatorship, and state-sponsored terror. In contrast to Soviet Marxists who claimed that the Revolution was the product of a broad-based proletarian uprising, these American historians saw October as little more than a coup d’état occasioned by the crises that accompanied the First World War and orchestrated by a conspiratorial, disciplined, and monolithic Bolshevik Party under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin. Having seized power illegally and unable to win the support of the population at large, the Bolsheviks proceeded to impose their will on an atomized country through campaigns of terror, political repression, and mass murder.

Beginning in the late 1960s, the paradigms employed by the first generation of post-war Russianists were abandoned in favor of new approaches that emerged from methodological innovations and the partial opening of Soviet archives made possible by détente. In contradistinction to the top-down, state-centered political approach of the so-called “totalitarian school,” these newer approaches emphasized the agency of social and economic factors in producing historical changes “from below.” Influenced by the Annales school and the work of British labor historian E. P. Thompson, this second generation of social historians sought to repeal the canon enunciated by their predecessors and to establish a new research agenda that shifted attention “away from political elites [toward] the people in the streets.”⁷ Although these self-proclaimed “revisionist” social historians, like the Cold War scholars they criticized, were themselves driven by basic ideological assumptions concerning the nature of the Soviet experience, their paradigmatic shift produced a number of important studies that broadened historical methodology while simultaneously uncovering new aspects of the nation’s past.⁸

Spearheaded by Leopold Haimson’s 1964 essay on class polarization in late Imperial Russia, the newer cohort of Russian scholars inverted previous suppositions concerning the historical roots of Russian social, political, and economic development.⁹ In Haimson’s view, the widening and deepening social antagonisms seemingly evident in the decade leading up to 1914 were indications of the Imperial state’s failure to adapt to the growing challenges of industrial and political modernization. Unlike the advanced nations of Western Europe (which had managed to achieve considerable degrees of social and political stability), the apparent distention of class tensions in urban Russia prior to the outbreak of the First World War was evidence that the tsarist system had proven incapable of transcending deep-seated antagonisms produced by the maintenance of its traditional estate-based (soslovie) society.

The effect of this interpretive innovation was not unlike Marx’s reading of Hegel (in which the German economist was said to have turned the philosopher “on his head”) as Haimson reversed long-held assumptions concerning the fundamental nature and evolution of Imperial society. Central to his argument, Haimson maintained that contradictions within the Imperial order actually prevented the further fruitful development of Russian political, economic, and social life. In this view, October 1917 was understood not as an unfortunate (and avoidable) coup resulting from Bolshevik conspiracy and the dislocations of war, but rather as a popularly supported and socio-economically conditioned revolution. This revolution, in turn, made possible the transformation of Russian society from the archaic tsarist system into a new society of workers and peasants that would reestablish Russia on the path to modernity through the construction of socialism. As a result of October, Russia had corrected its wayward historical trajectory. From these conclusions the view emerged that, in the wake of the Revolution, Soviet Russia was just another modernizing country attempting to attain the common European goal of a developed industrial economy, albeit along a path distinct from that pursued by the capitalist West.¹⁰

Arguments concerning the manifest failures of tsarism notwithstanding, the subsequent evolution of the one-party state, the purges, and show-trials produced a dilemma for scholars sympathetic to October and the cause of social history. If Soviet Russia indeed represented an alternative path towards modernization, made possible by a revolution undertaken from below, how could one explain the destructive state-directed developments of the Gulag and Terror? The attempt to address this apparent inconsistency led to new directions in the study of the Soviet past that focused increasing attention upon the 1920s and 1930s.

In order to account for the excesses of the thirties, some revisionist scholars drew distinctions between the more-or-less democratic order intended by Lenin and the authoritarian reality associated with Stalin.¹¹ They argued that the popular social revolution inspired by the Russian people and guided by Lenin had been fundamentally transformed by the social and political pressures increasingly placed upon the Party in the years that followed the Civil War. In support of this view, attempts were made to identify possible “alternatives” to the horrific events of the 1930s by investigating the policies and personalities that had been defeated by Stalin during the course of the 1920s.¹² Particular attention was devoted to the “New Economic Policy” (NEP) of 1921-1925 as an indication of the alternative direction that the country might have taken had other figures triumphed or had Lenin lived.¹³ Ultimately, these scholars endeavored to demonstrate that the popularly supported social revolution launched in 1917 was thrown off-track by the aberration of Stalinism. By decoupling Stalin’s real crimes from Lenin’s alleged intentions, these revisionists hoped to preserve the moral legitimacy of socialism while simultaneously demonstrating that the system, despite a temporary detour into terror, had the capacity to return to its democratic and progressive roots.

A more intrepid explanation for the advent of Stalinism was articulated by Sheila Fitzpatrick. In a radical departure from those revisionists eager to distance “true” Bolshevism from Stalinism, Fitzpatrick acknowledged that Stalin’s excesses were, indeed, the real fulfillment of the Leninist legacy. Focusing on the pressures produced by economic problems and social conflicts during the 1920s and 1930s, Fitzpatrick contended that answers to the Stalinist conundrum could be found not in politics, but in the dynamic relationships between distinctive social groups and classes. In her view, the origins of (and support for) Stalinist excesses were located “below,” amid the ranks of the populace competing for power, status, and apartments during a period when the Soviet regime was busily constructing its governing administration. In this view, the Soviet Union of the 1930s appeared much like any other state operating under difficult circumstances. Fitzpatrick concluded that the meaning of the Russian revolution could be identified by the formula of “terror, progress, and upward mobility.”¹⁴ Following the path blazed by Fitzpatrick, other historians would attempt to normalize the madness of the 1930s by downplaying Stalin’s role in the purges and the number of his victims.¹⁵

The questions raised and conclusions reached by the practitioners of the revisionist school of social history produced a contentious (and sometimes personal) debate in which scholars on both sides of the historiographical divide attempted to demonstrate the moral, political and/or methodological shortcomings supposedly evident in their opponents’ scholarship. In numerous essays, roundtables, and polemics, historians contested each other’s findings and motivations all the while professing the accuracy and objectivity and their own research.¹⁶ In many respects, the debate engendered by the partisans “from below” was a helpful development that enlivened Russian history by introducing new methods and raising new questions. In other respects, however, the debate proved damaging by polarizing the profession along largely generational lines. Still, by the mid-1980s the historiographical shift had been completed as the revisionists found themselves entrenched as the field’s prevailing orthodoxy.

Ironically, the greatest challenge to the interpretive approach developed by social historians came not from a contrary band of historians, but from the vicissitudes of history itself. With the collapse of the USSR in 1991, those who had searched for divergent paradigms within the system suddenly found themselves without a system from which to draw their paradigms. In the aftermath of The Fall, questions concerning the “legitimacy” of the October experiment and (dis)continuities between Lenin and Stalin quickly became irrelevant. In a similar vein, attempts to “assess the usefulness or otherwise” of Soviet “alternatives” no longer appeared particularly profitable.¹⁷

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
4. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian, 1958) and Jacob Talmon, The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952)
5. Carl J. Friedrich, “Totalitarianism: Recent Trends,” Problems of Communism 17:3 (1968), 33. Two of the earliest works produced by the “totalitarian” school of Russian historians are: Carl J. Friederich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956) and Raymond A. Bauer, Alex Inkeles, and Clyde Kluckhohn, How the Soviet System Works: Cultural, Psychological, and Social Themes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956)
6. See, for example, Adam B. Ulam, The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia (New York: Macmillan, 1965); Merle Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953) and Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York: Random House, 1960)
7. Ronald G. Suny, “Towards a Social History of the October Revolution,” American Historical Review 88 (1983): 51
8. Among the more important early works of the revisionist historians are, Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968); Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976); Marc Ferro, October 1917: A Social History of the Russian Revolution, trans. by Norman Stone (London: Routledge, 1980) and David Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Seizure of Power: From the July Days 1917 to July 1918 (London: Macmillan, 1984)
9. Leopold Haimson, “The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917,” Slavic Review 23 (1964): 619-642 and 24 (1965): 1-22
10. One excellent example of the attempt to describe Soviet politics in terms of the institutional patterns of developing societies is Jerry Hough’s metathesis of Merle Fainsod’s How Russia is Ruled. See Jerry F. Hough and Merle Fainsod, How the Soviet Union is Governed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). Other works that reflect this approach include: Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York: Pantheon, 1985); J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) and Susan G. Solomon, ed., Pluralism in the Soviet Union: Essays in Honor of H. Gordon Skilling (New York: St. Martin’s, 1982)
11. For one such early attempt see Stephen F. Cohen, “Bolshevism and Stalinism,” in Robert C. Tucker, ed., Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York: Norton, 1977), 3-29
12. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1937 (New York: Knopf, 1973) and Moshe Lewin, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates: From Bukharin to the Modern Reformers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974)
13. Lewis Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society Between Revolutions, 1918-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch and Richard Stites, eds., Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991) and Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1968) among others. The social historians’ fundamental tenet concerning the reformability of Soviet socialism was seemingly valorized during the mid-1980s when the NEP was seized upon by Mikhail Gorbachev as a legitimating symbol for the reforms of perestroika. On this see Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994), 418-419
14. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 1917-1932 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 8. Fitzpatrick’s position has undergone significant modifications in subsequent editions of this book
15. Gábor T. Rittersporn, Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications: Social Tensions and Political Conflicts in the USSR, 1933-1953 (New York: Harwood, 1991); J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges and J. Arch Getty and Roberta Manning, eds., Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
16. The number of published works that address these issues is immense. Among the more noteworthy contributions to the debate are: Vladimir Andrle, “Demons and Devil’s Advocates: Problems in Historical Writing on the Stalin Era,” in Nick Lampert and Gábor T. Rittersporn, eds., Stalinism: Its Nature and Aftermath (New York, 1992), 25-47; Martin Malia, “The Hunt for the True October,” Commentary 92 (1991): 21-28; Edward Acton, Rethinking the Russian Revolution (New York: E. Arnold, 1990); Walter Lacquer, The Fate of the Revolution: Interpretations in Soviet History from 1917 to the Present, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1987); Abbot Gleason, “‘Totalitarianism’ in 1984,” Russian Review 43 (1984): 145-159 and the previously cited, Suny, “Towards a Social History of the October Revolution.” In addition, multiple-article discussions appear in the following: The National Interest 31 (1993): 68-122; Slavic Review 47 (1988): 599-626 and Russian Review 45 (1986): 355-413 and 46 (1987): 375-431
17. Lewis Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society Between Revolutions, 3

The DotA e-book is more than just a scanned version of the “book book.” ACLS selected DotA for inclusion as the first Russian history title in its special collection of XML books. These electronically tagged texts contain tools, functions, and capabilities, that (among other things) make make them fully searchable and linked to external internet resources.

Better yet, the ACLS edition contains a host of new stuff including nearly two-dozen additional photographs, full-color posters, digitized archival materials, and never before translated poems and short stories. It also comes with an extra chapter (on pre-WWII Soviet aviation films) that’s accompanied by half a dozen rare video clips.

So, how do you get yours?

ACLS XML titles are not for sale. But if you’re affiliated with one of the nearly 600 individual universities and consortia that subscribe to ACLS Humanities E-Book, you can access it for free through your institution’s library. Just click here.

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One of the few exceptions to the rule is Catherine Merridale, Professor of Contemporary History at Queen Mary University of London.

I’ve just finished reading Merridale’s most recent book, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 which recounts the experiences and emotions of front line soldiers during the Great Patriotic War. As with her earlier (2000) study, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia, Ivan’s War benefits from Merridale’s consummate skill as an oral historian and her enviable ability to produce gripping prose. It is the kind of book that you just can’t put down and that you really wish you had written yourself.

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Digital publishing has been a hot topic for some time, but it’s received a good deal of attention as of late thanks to a series of recent developments. This year’s meeting of the American Association of University Presses, for example, devoted a panel to the subject. Meanwhile, Rice University has just announced plans to launch the first all digital university press. In a slightly different (though related) context, rumors abound that the next generation of Apple’s immensely popular iPod will possess the ability to download, store, and read book content.

Clearly, the movement toward digital content delivery is gaining steam. And, as such, it is not surprising to read that the technology’s more vocal enthusiasts are forecasting nothing short of a revolution in academic research, teaching, reading, writing, and publishing once it becomes ubiquitous.

Over at if:book, the collective blog of the “Institute for the Future of the Book,” commentators have had a great deal to say about the immense transformations that digital delivery and on-line publishing will effect on the academy and academics.

Particularly instructive is the institute’s “MediaCommons,” a “project-in-progress” aimed at “exploring the future of electronic scholarly publishing and its many implications, including the development of alternate modes of peer -review and the possibilities for networked interaction amongst authors and texts.” In support of this goal, the if:book collective spent a good deal of time this past spring meeting, brainstorming, and discussing the possibilities of a “new model of academic publishing.” They even “wrote a bunch of manifestos” (apparently, the irony of resorting to such a distinctly 19th-century device as the “manifesto” was lost on them). Still, when one filters out the soul-deadening jargon about “authentic learning opportunities,” “self-reflexivity,” “mediated environments,” etc. that permeates their posts, it’s clear that the blog’s authors and readers are thinking creatively and earnestly (although rather pretentiously) about the prospects of the digital age in transforming academic writing.

To this end, if:book is making considerable noise about Mackenzie Wark’s GAM3R 7H30RY, a “monograph” (their scare quotes, not mine) hosted by the institute that goes beyond even the relatively newfangled notion of the e-book toward a new über-standard in digital publishing: the “networked book.” Wark’s in-progress project (an “exploration” of whether computer games may “serve as allegories for the world we live in”) is being undertaken entirely on-line, enabling interested readers (and more than a few gamers) to post continuous live commentary as Wark uploads drafts to the web. Such an approach, if:book contributor Kathleen Fitzpatrick has announced, creates an “openness and interconnection” that will

allow us to make the process of scholarly work just as visible and valuable as its product; readers will be able to follow the development of an idea from its germination in a blog, though its drafting as an article, to its revisions, and authors will be able to work in dialogue with those readers, generating discussion and obtaining feedback on work-in-progress at many different stages. Because such discussions will take place in the open, and because the enormous time lags of the current modes of academic publishing will be greatly lessened, this ongoing discourse among authors and readers will no doubt result in the generation of many new ideas, leading to more exciting new work.

In the end, transparency, interconnectedness, and immediacy will emerge strengthened by the new digital regime.

Then again, there are obvious downsides to such an approach. GAM3R 7H30R1S7 Wark has already received nearly 400 comments. That’s fine as far as it goes. But the time devoted to responding to those commentators (learned, not-so-learned, and dumb-as-a-post) is time not spent on other, profitable, scholarly pursuits. In any event, one suspects that this is not a model that would transfer well to, say, scholars writing about neoplatonic epistemology or the symbolic meanings of Malawi’s Chongoni rock art.

Still, projects like MediaCommons and GAM3R 7H30RY raise an important question: Will digital content delivery and the emergence of e-books and “networked books” bring about a revolution in the way that scholars research, write, and communicate their ideas?

Perhaps.

But, then again, perhaps not.

I’m not entirely sold on the claims being made by the most fervent advocates of digital delivery. As is often the case when a technology is still in its infancy, enthusiasts tend to exaggerate a technology’s ultimate impact in transforming culture and society. Frequently, proponents fail to contemplate (because it is often impossible to foresee) the obstacles and unintended consequences that inevitably surface as efforts are made to popularize a favored device among the masses (trans-oceanic dirigible tours or flying cars, anyone?). It strikes me that, at present, the transformative potential of digital publishing in academe is being oversold and, in many cases, misunderstood.

Just as digital publishing and new technological delivery systems will make possible the broader dissemination of academic writing, so too, will they make possible the broader dissemination of non-academic texts and visual content. Purveyors of the types of academic projects esteemed by if:book will continue to face stiff competition for attention and audiences should “iReaders” become as popular as iPods. If historians of science and technology have learned anything, it’s that new technologies have the capacity to change the world for good or for ill. Or, not at all. [I am prepared to bet a great deal of money that the development of an iReader, for example, will prove much less of a boon to academics than to purveyors of porn and self-help guides.]

Similarly, the emphasis that contributors to if:book seem to place on the “transparency” of scholarship and “immediacy” of publication made possible by digital delivery misses a very important point. There is much value to be found in not releasing one’s ideas to peers and public while those ideas are still half-baked. In many respects, the instantaneous delivery of “new media” writing is at odds with the solitude, meditation, and patience that are the hallmarks of traditional scholarship. Perhaps this is less true in if:book’s favored field (media studies), but it is manifestly not so for such disciplines as history, philosophy, and the like. Nor should it be. One can build a convincing case that, in the current age of instant analysis, self-absorbed “experts,” and ubiquitous 24/7 live blog feeds, the last thing that the academy needs is to embrace transparency and immediacy.

This is not to say that the effects of the digital revolution will not be profound, only that they are likely to be different from what enthusiasts currently believe. As yet, very few scholarly monographs have been “born digital.” While it’s clear that given the on-going economic pressures faced by academic publishers the movement toward digital delivery will continue (if for no other reason than it may cut costs for cash-strapped university presses), how this will all play out (for good, for ill, or for naught) is not currently clear. It will be clear eventually, but only after it has already taken place.

I am not a Luddite. I am not opposed to the efforts of if:book enthusiasts to consider and to explore the potential benefits that digital content delivery may bring to academic research and writing. If:anything, I am in favor of the growth of electronic publishing (after all, my own monograph is being published as part of the ACLS History E-Book Project).

Still, digital disciples would do well to temper their exuberance. They should at least begin to consider the many ways in which a move to all digital content delivery will adversely affect the academy and academic researchers.

Besides, the “book book,” that old-fashioned delivery system consisting of wood pulp, ink, and glue has proven to be a remarkably resilient and rather useful technology itself. It is not going to disappear anytime soon (or, perhaps, ever). Moreover, its perceived “limitations” may, in fact, turn out to be real strengths when it comes to preserving the contemplative attitude, dispassionate study, and patient reflection that are essential to lasting scholarship.

Analytical Works
The number of analytical secondary sources written for popular audiences is much smaller. Generally speaking, these are books written by journalists or professional writers who, while they may have an interest in aviation, are also widely published on other subjects as well. What sets these sources apart from the “aircraft inventories” is that they begin to consider the airplane within a broader historical context, or they advance a novel argument/thesis about aviation. Recently, a number of very good popular analyses have appeared. Near the very top of the list is Stephen Budiansky’s excellent Airpower, a survey of military airpower doctrine from Kitty Hawk through the Second Gulf War. Others examples include Richard Overy’s short work on The Battle of Britain and Lee Kennett’s The First Air War, 1914-1918.

Scholarly works
The final group of secondary sources are those written by professional historians and published by academic presses. In contrast to analytical popular histories, these works undergo a rigorous process of “peer review” before they’re accepted for publication. The manuscripts are sent out to two other professional historians who are experts in the field. These reviewers then check facts, challenge arguments, and offer detailed written assessments for revising, expanding, or otherwise improving the manuscript. To encourage an honest and candid assessment of the manuscript, the peer review process is “blind”. This means that the identity of the reviewers is kept secret from the author. He (or she) receives the evaluations of the manuscript not knowing who wrote them.

[Note: It is not uncommon for a manuscript to undergo not one, but two rounds of review, as the author, reviewers, and editor(s) debate the contents of the reviews and the author's responses to them. The blind peer review process explains, in part, why it takes longer to publish an academic history than it does to publish a "popular" one. This additional layer of "quality control" can add anywhere from 4-8+ months to the publication process.]

Although the number of scholarly works about aviation is nowhere near as large as the number of “inventories” and popular histories, scholarship on aviation and flight has really “taken off” over the course of the last decade. Many of the newer works [including Dictatorship of the Air] are devoted to what I refer to as flight or aviation “culture” (and others call “airmindedness“). Inspired by Joseph Corn’s path-breaking 1982 study, The Winged Gospel (now available in a 2002 reprint) these histories have paid increasing attention to the cultural, social, and political influence that aviation and the airplane have had in shaping the twentieth century.

Particularly noteworthy in this regard has been the contribution of UCLA professor Robert Wohl who is currently at work on the final installment of his three-volume trilogy concerning “Aviation and the Western Imagination.” The first two volumes, A Passion for Wings (1996) and The Spectacle of Flight (2005) have set the standard for historians focusing on Western European and American aviation.

Other leading professional aviation historians include: John D. Anderson, Roger Bilstein, Tom Crouch, Richard Hallion, Peter Jakab, Michael Neufeld, Dom Pisano, and Robert van der Linden.

Last (but certainly not least!), Von Hardesty, writing widely on both the Imperial and Soviet eras, has proven to be Russian aviation’s most prolific historian. In addition to having published numerous articles and essays on military aviation, Reina Pennington is author of Wings, Women, and War, the definitive account of Soviet women aviators in the Second World War. Insightful analysis of the contemporary, post-Soviet scene can be found in the writings of Jake Kipp and Benjamin Lambeth.