This volume of the Cambridge History of Russia deals with the twentieth century in the Russian world chronologically and thematically in order to provide readers with clear narratives as well as a variety of interpretations so that they may sort through the various controversies of the Soviet past. The volume is not simply a history of the ethnically Russian part of the country but rather of the two great multinational states - tsarist and Soviet - as well as the post-Soviet republics. Although inevitably the bulk of the narrative will deal with Russians, the conviction of the editor is that the history of Russia would be incomplete without the accompanying and contributing histories of the non-Russian peoples of the empire. Among the unifying themes of the volume are: the tensions between nations and empire in the evolution of the Russian and Soviet states; the oscillation between reform and revolution, usually from above but at times from below as well; state building and state collapse; and modernisation and modernity For the historians and political scientists who have contributed to this work, understanding the present and future of Russia, the Soviet Union and the non-Russian peoples can only come by exploring the experiences through which they have become what they are.
Reading Russia and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century: how the 'West' wrote its history of the USSR
RONALD GRIGOR SUNY
From its very beginnings the historiography of Russia in the twentieth century has been much more than an object of coolly detached scholarly contemplation. Many observers saw the USSR as the major enemy of Western civilisation, the principal threat to the stability of nations and empires, a scourge that sought to undermine the fundamental values of decent human societies. For others the Soviet Union promised an alternative to the degradations of capitalism and the fraudulent claims of bourgeois democracy, represented the bulwark of Enlightenment values against the menace of Fascism, and preserved the last best hope of colonised peoples. In the Western academy the Soviet Union was most often imagined to be an aberration in the normal course of modern history, an unfortunate detour from the rise of liberalism that bred its own evil opposite, travelling its very own Sonderweg that led eventually (or inevitably) to collapse and ruin. The very endeavour of writing a balanced narrative required a commitment to standards of scholarship suspect to those either militantly opposed to or supportive of the Soviet enterprise. At times, as in the years just after the revolution or during the Cold War, scholarship too often served masters other than itself. While much worthy analysis came
My gratitude is extended to Robert V Daniels, Georgi Derluguian, David C. Engerman, Peter Holquist, Valerie Kivelson, Terry Martin, Norman Naimark, Lewis Siegelbaum, Josephine Woll and members of the Russian Studies Workshop at the University of Chicago for critical readings of earlier versions of this chapter. This essay discusses primarily the attitudes and understandings of Western observers, more precisely the scholarship and ideational framings of professional historians and social scientists, about the Soviet Union as a state, a society and a political project. More attention is paid to Anglo-American work, and particularly to American views, since arguably they set the tone and parameters ofthe field through much of the century This account should be supplemented by reviews of other language literatures, e.g. Laurent Jalabert, Le Grand Debat-.les universitaires frangais - historiens etgeographes -etlespays communists de 1945 a 1991 (Toulouse: Groupe de Recherche en Histoire Immediate, Maison de la Recherche, Universite de Toulouse Le Mirail, 2001).
from people deeply committed to or critical of the Soviet project, a studied neutrality was difficult (though possible) in an environment in which one's work was always subject to political judgement.
With the opening of the Soviet Union and its archives to researchers from abroad, beginning in the Gorbachev years, professional historians and social scientists produced empirically grounded and theoretically informed works that avoided the worst polemical excesses of earlier years. Yet, even those who claimed to be unaffected by the battles of former generations were themselves the product of what went before. The educator still had to be educated. While the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union permitted a greater degree of detachment than had been possible before, the Soviet story - itself so important an ingredient in the self-construction of the modern 'West' - remains one of deep contestation.
The prehistory of Soviet history
At the beginning of [the twentieth century]', wrote Christopher Lasch in his study of American liberals and the Russian Revolution,
people in the West took it as a matter of course that they lived in a civilization surpassing any which history had been able to record. They assumed that their own particular customs, institutions and ideas had universal validity; that having showered their blessings upon the countries of western Europe and North America, those institutions were destined to be carried to the furthest reaches of the earth, and bring light to those living in darkness.[1]
Those sentences retain their relevance at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Western, particularly American, attitudes and understandings of Russia and the Soviet Union unfolded in the last hundred years within a broad discourse of optimism about human progress that relied on the comforting thought that capitalist democracy represented the best possible solution to human society, if not the 'end of history'. Within that universe of ideas Russians were constructed as people fundamentally different from Westerners, with deep, largely immutable national characteristics. Ideas of a 'Russian soul' or an essentially spiritual or collectivist nature guided the interpretations and policy prescriptions of foreign observers. This tradition dated back to the very first travellers to Muscovy. In his Notes Upon Russia (1517-1549)
Sigismund von Herberstein wrote, 'The people enjoy slavery more than freedom', observations echoed by Adam Olearius in the seventeenth century, who saw Russians as 'comfortable in slavery' who require 'cudgels and whips' to be forced to work. Montesquieu and others believed that national character was determined by climate and geography, and the harsh environment in which Russians lived had produced a barbarous and uncivilised people, ungovernable, lacking discipline, lazy, superstitious, subject to despotism, yet collective, passionate, poetical and musical. The adjectives differed from writer to writer, yet they clustered around the instinctual and emotional pole of human behaviour rather than the cognitive and rational. Race and blood, more than culture and choice, decided what Russians were able to do. In order to make them civilised and modern, it was often asserted, force and rule from above was unavoidable. Ironically, the spokesmen of civilisation justified the use of violence and terror on the backward and passive people of Russia as the necessary means to modernity.
The most influential works on Russia in the early twentieth century were the great classics of nineteenth-century travellers and scholars, like the Marquis de Custine, Baron August von Haxthausen, Donald Mackenzie Wallace, Alfred Rambaud, Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu and George Kennan, the best-selling author of Siberia and the Exile System.[2] France offered the most professional academic study of Russia, and the influential Leroy-Beaulieu's eloquent descriptions of the patience, submissiveness, lack of individuality and fatalism of the Russians contributed to the ubiquitous sense of a Slavic character that contrasted with the Gallic, Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic. American writers, such as Kennan and Eugene Schuyler, subscribed equally to such ideas of nationality, but rather than climate or geography as causative, they emphasised the role of institutions, such as tsarism, in generating a national character that in some ways was mutable.[3] Kennan first went to Russia in 1865, became an amateur ethnographer, and grew to admire the courageous revolutionaries ('educated, reasonable self-controlled gentlemen, not different in any essential respect from one's self) that he encountered in Siberian exile.[4]For his sympathies the tsarist government banned him from Russia, placing him in a long line of interpreters whose exposures of Russian life and politics would be so punished.
1
Christopher Lasch,
2
Marquis de Custine,
3
David C. Engerman,