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Introduction: Making History and the Historian

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Every history is embattled in some sense, but perhaps none more than the history of Russia, particularly that of the Soviet Union. The history of the USSR in particular is public property in a way that histories of most other countries are not. As the American humorist Will Rogers said, “Russia is a country that no matter what you say about it, it’s true. Even if it’s a lie, it’s true. If it’s about Russia.”1 Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and since the cause for which the USSR stood no longer holds its former potency, there appears less incentive to try to tell the story in its full complexity and moral ambiguity. The market appreciates the simplified anti-Communist version, complete with the dramas and tragedies of Stalinism, the Gulag and the Terror. The central metaphor for the Soviet experiment is the prison camp, and the central figure is neither the state’s founder, Vladimir Lenin, nor the well-intentioned reformer who unraveled the system, Mikhail Gorbachev, but Stalin, the heir of the revolution and, for many, its gravedigger. While academic historians might still engage in subtle and elaborate explanations of the ambitions, successes, and failings of the Soviet regime, their publications find a small professional audience, while most popular accounts range from indictments to flat-out condemnations. The monster must be killed over and over again, for, like the killer in slasher films, it may rise again, perhaps in a new form, authoritarianism-light, capitalist but statist, headed by a small, fit, dour policeman.

“The past,” it is said, “is another country; they do things differently there.”2 For someone like me, who started studying the Soviet Union over half a century ago, at the beginning of the 1960s, the present seems to be another planet! It is not the world we anticipated. Then the objects of our study, the Soviet Union and Communist regimes in East Central Europe, were alive if not well, and few imagined that Lenin’s utopian vision, even after its descent into Stalinist nightmare, would collapse so abruptly at a moment of neo-liberal triumph. In those heady years when change really meant change, the interest in varieties of socialism and the analytical potential of Marxist approaches, particularly in the emerging field of social history, invigorated a generation of scholars, not only to attempt to understand the mysterious “Second World,” but to question the orthodoxies and complacency of Cold War scholarship and even Western liberalism. When I was a young professor at Oberlin College, a liberal oasis in northeastern Ohio, a senior professor of religion came into my modest office, past the larger-than-life-size poster of Lenin on the door, and asked me, “Is it true that you are a Marxist?” In those youthful days, confident in my radicalism, I assured him I was. “How quaint!” he said. “You know,” he continued, “you on the Left believe in the goodness of man and therefore are always disenchanted, while we who believe in Original Sin expect the worst and are never disappointed by what happens.”

For the Left, in so far as a Left actually existed in the United States, and for liberals as well, certainly the next few decades were ones of disappointment and disenchantment. The last spasm of hope for many of us came with the Gorbachev experiment in radical reform from above that ended only too quickly, in the catastrophic collapse, not only of Soviet Communism but of any real “third way” alternatives to the triumph of neo-liberal economics and, eventually, neo-conservative politics. The Soviet studies profession limped along, trying to find its feet in a much-disparaged field called “area studies.” Sovietology was discarded on the trash bin of history; economics of non-capitalist societies evaporated as a field of study; though, it should be noted, other disciplines revived—history benefiting from the newly opened archives and anthropology and sociology now able to benefit from field work in regions hitherto closed to investigation.

A new teleology shaped Soviet historiography, since, for many historians, failure and collapse appeared to be written into the story, even into the genetic code of the revolution. More consequentially than how Soviet socialism was interpreted, the end of Communism and the Soviet empire in East Central Europe dragged down virtually any socialist alternative to Western capitalism. Almost every form, from mild European Social Democracy to Third World revolutionary movements, was weakened or discredited. To be sure, the erosion of the post–World War II Social Democratic moment was already underway long before 1991, as neoliberal capitalism in advanced countries subverted unions and welfare programs in aid of a transnational competition that has been sanctified and naturalized as the inevitable, agentless force of history known under the anodyne rubric “globalization.” But the collapse of the USSR appeared to confirm the perversity of Marxism as political practice and a view of history. The principal critical analysis of capitalism and imperialism, the major opponent of Western capitalism in both Western socialist parties and in the Soviet support of national liberation movements and Communist parties—Marxism—was swept from politics in much of Europe and the United States, driven into universities where, enfeebled, it would occasionally be taught to freshmen through a process of inoculation: give them one short text to read, preferably a pretty dense one, and they will be immune to Marx for life.

In the absence of significant secular revolutionary or reformist alternatives to the “new world order” of Western capitalism and democracy, unanticipated new forces, much more conservative and religious, appeared, first in Iran in the revolution of the ayatollahs in 1979, in the Muslim Brotherhood movements in Egypt and elsewhere, in the mujahidin resistance to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, which metastasized into the jihadist radical Islamic movements of the present. A Green Menace replaced the Red. Enrollments in Russian and Soviet history courses dropped while professors scrambled to find hotter, more relevant topics to teach.

The conflation of the USSR with socialism, that served liberalism and conservatism so well, became the new common sense. The Soviet Union had in fact set itself up as the guardian of the faith, and liberals, conservatives, and Stalinists alike easily conceived of socialism as consonant with the practices and achievements of the USSR. Stalin incorporated his own version of Marxism even while he defanged Marx, eliminating the critical power of Marxism and transforming it into a legitimizing ideology for a repressive regime. For most post-Soviet Western observers of the USSR, Marxism was equivalent to what was done in Marx’s name in the last century. For a few, however, the original project of a critical analysis of society and economics, over which Marx had labored in the British Library, retained its power as an external standpoint from which to view the hegemonic social forms and practices of our time while preserving a cluster of values, norms, and practices that exposed what needed to be changed. Although it appeared unlikely in 1991, it seems in our current conjuncture of capitalist crisis a quarter century after the collapse of Soviet “communism” that Marx’s alternative vision of the common good, freed of the memories and legacies of the Soviet past, has in the new century acquired an unanticipated potency. Once again it is time to think about what is left (in both senses of the word) of Marx.

Communism in its Leninist or Stalinist forms is a historical fact, no longer an active threat to the capitalist world, and has lost its sting. Moreover, historians have done a good job unraveling the mysteries and myths of Soviet history and the relationship of what was done in Marx’s name by the one great power where his ideas were least appropriate. It is reasonable to expect that Marx would have been the most fervent critic, from the Left, of the disempowering of the working class and the exploitative character of the Soviet regime, as were many Western and (to their personal detriment) Soviet Marxists of the time. Russia was conceivably the worst place to attempt to build the kind of socialism that Marx had envisioned coming after capitalism had exhausted all its potential.

An understanding of Marx and the varieties of Marxism would seem to be indispensable to the subject of this book: the history as written by Western historians of the first great state that self-confidently proclaimed itself the bearer of his vision. Yet most Western historians of the Soviet Union never embraced Marxism as their principal mode of historical interpretation. For much of the Cold War period, 1945 to 1991, Marxism was dismissed as an ideology, in the sense of a partisan, unscientific approach that obscured or distorted more than it illuminated. One paid a price in the American academy particularly if one took Marx too seriously, or unwisely proclaimed that one was a Marxist. Better not to tell.

An Excursion into Autobiography

Marx warned his readers that they had to ask who educated the educator. In that spirit, I shall indulge in some auto-ethnography. I was born in Philadelphia of Armenian parents, my mother American-born, my father came from “the other side.” George (Gurken) Suny’s family had emigrated from the Russian Empire after the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik invasion of Georgia, and Arax Kesdekian’s had come to the United States before the Genocide of 1915—my mother’s father from the central Turkish town of Yozgat, my mother’s mother from Diarbakır, now a major city in Kurdistan. Most of their family who had remained in the Ottoman lands were massacred during World War I, though a few escaped to Iraq and made their way, eventually with our help, to the United States. There were stories, traumatic memories, but the family did not dwell on these matters or foster in their children a hatred of Turks and Kurds.

From my father I heard stories of his boyhood in Tiflis (Tbilisi, now the capital of independent Georgia), his memories of the revolution and the coming of the Bolsheviks. But the most constant theme through his tales was the enormous affection and respect for his father, the ethnomusicologist and composer, Grikor Mirzaian Suni. This fascinating, contradictory “maestro” (varpet in Armenian) combined high culture with an un-Armenian bohemianism and a dedication to revolution, Marxism, and Soviet Armenia. “Suni,” as he was always called, had died the year before I was born, but his legacy was stamped on me early in the 1950s when, provoked by my father, I gave a report to my seventh-grade class on the achievements of the Soviet Union: the victory over fascism, the rebuilding of dozens of cities after the war, the number of steel mills … The teacher in those frigid days of the Cold War was shocked, and wanted to know where I had come up with such ideas. My classmates rewarded me with the epithet “Comrade Suny” for the rest of my school years. A skinny, shy kid, I now had a kind of identity that I wore (and defended) proudly. For my father and me (but not in the same way for my mother and sister), the Soviet Union was an ideal against which the inadequacies of capitalist America, into which I seemed not to fit particularly well, were judged.

Part of that misfit came as well from the other side of my family, the side we socialized with almost exclusively. My mother’s mother, Azniv (noble, in Armenian), was a woman of saintly simplicity and kindness, whose world was bounded by the Armenian community in Philadelphia, and her love for her people and for the land (historic Armenia, eastern Turkey today) from which her family had been driven was simply part of her nature, unconscious, assumed, and unquestioned. She told me of the death of her sister whose throat had been cut during the 1894–96 massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. But much more impressive was her confidence that we Armenians were a special people, privileged to speak a language that had not only been the first language of human beings, spoken before the Tower of Babel, but still the lingua franca of heaven. Thus began my life-long struggle with the intricacies of a language assumed to be my “mother tongue.” Grandma always insisted that my sister and I “marry Armenian,” and she made it clear that “menk hai enk,” (we are Armenian), but “anonk amerikatsi en” (they are American). The Americans, it was understood, were odar (foreign). Here we were in America, and we considered the Americans, at least those who were not Armenian, to be foreigners! Thus, from an early age I had a double sense of distance from the society and the nation in which I actually lived, as an Armenian and a person of the Left.

Armenians, whose self-representation is often that of the victim and martyr, in the United States were an “invisible diaspora,” not particularly persecuted and often not seen at all. There was always great delight when someone notable turned out to be Armenian or something Armenian was recognized by others. I felt no essential conflict between my Armenian and American identities, both of which were simply available for use in different situations and complemented each other almost everywhere, with no need to choose between them. American was different from what we considered Armenian, but it was accepting and inclusive, and as long as one tried to fit in, to conform, West Philadelphia and its suburbs in the 1950s were safe, secure, comfortable homes. It was not until my freshman year in college that I first heard an odar refer to me, the son of an immigrant, as a “foreigner.”

For most of my growing-up years, the opportunity to both be a part of and yet stand apart from either of my “national” identities gave me a freedom from unquestioning American patriotism—particularly during the Cold and Vietnam Wars—as well as from the congested nationalism of the Armenian community. My parents gave my sister and me wide choice in defining ourselves, never forcing on us the stamp of ethnicity. Eventually Linda married a Greek, learned modern Greek, and for some time distanced herself from things Armenian. In our family, being different was something worth preserving, even celebrating. Outside there were limits, of course. As a naïve, idealistic seventeen-year-old, I wrote a commencement speech about the need for non-conformity which was gently rejected as “too controversial.”

When it came time to make the decisive choice of what career to select—in my case between theater and the academy—the decision to go to graduate school in history was deeply shaped by the need to know more about the Soviet Union. Socialism remained in my young adulthood a utopia that first-hand knowledge of the actualities of the Soviet system did not tarnish. For me, as for many who drifted from Old to New Left, the USSR was no longer the model of socialism but a distorted or degenerate failure to realize the emancipatory promise of Marxism. Still, when I finally arrived in the Soviet Union in 1964, I experienced no disillusionment, only a concrete confirmation that socialism lay in the future. I was traveling with my father’s brother from relatives in Tashkent to others in Leningrad on the day that Nikita Khrushchev fell from power. Our plane was pulled down in Cheliabinsk, where we waited for hours until released to go on to Leningrad. There was no news about Khrushchev’s removal on radio or television, my thoughts were that if only I were in New York I could find out what was happening.

The people I met in the Soviet Union the next year, when I was an exchange student with Moscow and Erevan State universities, seemed to live a more authentic life than my compatriots back home: struggling, to be sure, with the material poverty of the early Brezhnev years, but at the same time maneuvering through the restrictions on public life and preserving a rich interior, private life marked by a deep humanism, a sense of social justice, and faith in a better future. That mid-1960s moment, living with students at the university dormitories, was my first and most durable experience of a non-capitalist world, a place free of commercialism and concern for money, marked by a rough equality. My enthusiasm for the Soviet experience was not shared by most of my fellow American exchange students who complained incessantly about the petty discomforts—no toilet paper, for example—that plagued our daily lives. Upset when I discovered I was being followed by plainclothes police, I confided in one of my fellow students, only to find out soon afterwards that he had betrayed my confidence and reported me to the American Embassy. When I applied to stay a second year on the exchange, the Soviets agreed but the Americans refused.

I reveled in the warmth of close Russian and Armenian friends, who helped in dozens of different ways to ease the material and bureaucratic difficulties of Soviet life. These friendships were deep, reinforcing, and have been maintained until the present. The mid-1960s were still a time when many intellectuals and most ordinary people supported the gradual reforms evident since the death of Stalin, maintained their belief in progress toward socialism, and remained both curious toward and suspicious of the West. Much of that immediate post-Khrushchevian affection for the system on the part of those I knew would soon disappear. Inequities and corruption grew in the next decades, along with social pessimism and inertia. Still, my own take was that the USSR was fundamentally a healthy society, that was struggling to overcome the legacy of Stalinism, but required radical reform to open its constricted public sphere. In my first published article (in a New Left journal published by Oberlin College students), I wrote about the need for a “bourgeois democratic revolution” in the USSR, more openness and protections for those in the embryonic civil society struggling to emerge. Paradoxically, the greatest sense of distance I felt in the Soviet Union was in Armenia itself, where I was received as a long-lost relative but was immediately aware of how different I was from the “we” that insisted I was one of them.

At Oberlin College in the late 1960s and through the 1970s, I was the young firebrand professor, the “Red-in-Residence” on that isolated Ohio campus, a self-proclaimed “Marxist” (who was just beginning to struggle through Capital, the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, and the Grundrisse). The Marxism of that time was that of the young Marx along with the socialist humanism of Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, György Lukács, and Leszek Kolakowski, providing a compelling theoretical tradition that informed my work on Soviet history. Intellectually, the most innovative writing was by the new social historians, particularly British Marxist labor historians, and again I found a standpoint outside the society in which I lived from which to observe, analyze, and advocate. Teaching and scholarship, even in northeastern Ohio, was, I believed, a kind of political activity that required the most meticulous scholarly engagement: faithful attention to the evidence, as neutral and objective as possible a construction of narrative and analysis, and awareness that one came to the work with values of one’s own. “Truth was revolutionary” (in Régis Debray’s phrase), and honest scholarship on the USSR was essential for the activist Left, which all too often was overly apologetic or content to be just plain ignorant. We were confident that the student anti-war agitation and the civil rights movement were merely the first steps toward a more radical restructuring of American society. These were infectious thoughts, and I was an active participant, even from the precarious perch of an untenured assistant professor. The History Department slapped my wrists firmly when they refused to put me up for tenure, but in the best traditions of that liberal college the faculty pressured reconsideration.

Without much self-reflection, I wrote about class and nationality, which now seems to have come out of my own life experience as a leftist Armenian in America. After more than a decade as a Soviet historian at Oberlin, I moved to the University of Michigan, where I was appointed to a chair in modern Armenian history. I became a “professional Armenian,” that is, I taught Armenian history largely to Armenian students, lectured to the Armenian community, and tried to elevate a rather parochial sub-field to the standards of the discipline. My interests in Transcaucasia and nationality problems in the Soviet Union continued to be marginal among mainline Russianists, until the explosion of national resistance in 1988. Suddenly, I was given my “fifteen minutes of fame,” as I glided from radio to television to appearances in Washington as the “expert on the Caucasus.”

The promise presented by the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev was extraordinarily consequential for those of us in Soviet Studies who had argued against the demonization of the Soviet Union and for a more “détentist” approach in foreign policy. At that effervescent moment of the late 1980s, “actually-existing socialism” seemed about to become modern and humane, against the pessimistic predictions of most of the Sovietological community, which was convinced either of the permanence of the Stalinist infrastructure or the inevitability of collapse. Gorbachev’s failure, in part because of the emergence of separatist nationalisms, had a catastrophic effect on the identities that I had formed over much of my life. The Soviet Union disappeared; Armenia became independent; socialism was (at least temporarily) thrown on the trash heap of history. When someone innocently congratulated me that now I had a country, I told him coldly, rashly, no, I have lost my country. I remember with sadness my father’s query to me shortly before his death, would socialism come back again? I told him, not in the short run, though as long as capitalism existed there would be some kind of socialist opposition.

But just as the reality of the Soviet Union did not diminish the ideal of a more egalitarian, socially just, and participatory social order beyond “actually-existing democracy,” so its disappearance did not scour the political landscape of alternatives or bring history to an end. America had not changed as we had wanted in the 1960s, and the post-Soviet Union metamorphosed into something more like what we hoped to avoid. But the optimism and security of family and children, of satisfying work, prevented political despair. Indeed, my marriage to Armena Marderosian (an Armenian to be sure!) kept me afloat, even when tragedy—the death of our first child, Grikor—nearly drowned us. For a decade, I shifted identities slightly, from Soviet and Armenian historian to Soviet and post-Soviet political scientist (at the University of Chicago), interested in nations and nationalisms, and then back to history (returning to Michigan). I continue to search for new places from which to observe. I remain a foreigner, an odar, in my native land, but that distance seems to be a propitious place to look beyond the political limits that the present offers us, and explore how I and my colleagues in Soviet history have understood the country we seek to explain.

So, What Is Left of Marx and Socialism?

Historians of my generation grew up in the Cold War decades in a world divided between (what Marxists call) bourgeois democracy, on one side, and statist socialism, on the other, and the dichotomy between a utopia of exclusively political rights versus a utopia of social and economic rights. We learned from the Soviet and East European experiments the bitter lesson that there is no real socialism without political democracy, and some of us concluded from our own political experience in countries polarized between the very wealthy and the rest that there is no real democracy without some kind of socialism. Perhaps not for most of those in the Soviet historical profession, but for a minority of practitioners Marx remained an inspiration, a provider of questions rather than a priori answers.

Marx himself was many things in his life—a post-Hegelian radical searching for the source of the expected German revolution; an Enlightenment rationalist who believed in naturalistic explanations of social and natural phenomena, rather than in supernatural or religious causes; a social scientist with a deep faith in empirical research; a moral philosopher, a secular humanist, who thought he could provide a factual, real-world basis for such normative categories as exploitation, inequality, and emancipation; a historical sociologist avant la lettre who believed he had discovered the laws of social motion in the class struggle as well as the instrument of human liberation from capital, the proletariat. Here one might argue that science was superseded by eschatology, and that in its futurism, Marxism became a religion done up in scientific drag.3 For scholars today, Marx is most importantly a poser of questions, the formulator of a vast research program that he himself had too little time to realize. His questions, his critiques, his values, and his moral vision remain part of a legacy that encompasses a powerful specter still haunting global capitalism and bourgeois democracy at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Those questions, critiques, and values continue to inspire people in many parts of the world who without them would be even more disempowered before the onslaught of global capitalism and American hegemony.

Whether or not they were Marxist in orientation themselves, the generation of historians that was educated in the 1960s and entered the Soviet studies profession in the 1970s had a particularly intense engagement with Marx and Marxist historiography. Theirs was a moment of exploration of the new social history that came out of Britain and France, some of it overtly socialist history, the replacement of the older emphasis on structure with a gravitation toward appreciation of human agency, experience, culture, and later of discourse and the problem of meaning. All those influences—whether Eric Hobsbawm’s revealing study of primitive rebels, E. P. Thompson’s concern with experience, the feminists’ radical deconstruction of naturalized identities, the scholars of nationalism’s constructivist assault on primordialized communities—had the cumulative effect of historicizing what had been taken for granted, undermining what common sense told us had always been the way it was now. They gave one a sense that intellectual work was more than academic, and could have real effects on the real world; that scholarship, even in its need to be apolitical or extra-political, as neutral, objective, and evidence-based as possible, had a politics that could not be denied. Our generation rejected a Marxism that reduced ideas and politics to economics, dismissed the base/superstructure model of determination, and echoed Engels who in his last letters repeatedly denied that he and Marx were economic determinists.

This generation puzzled over the “relative autonomy” of politics and the state, was infatuated at first with the young Marx and the problem of alienation and the fulfillment of human potential. From the notion of an early and late Marx, many tried to integrate the humanist utopianism of the 1844 manuscripts with the materialist structural analysis of Capital; we trudged through the Grundrisse with Hobsbawm’s assistance, looked to Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci and György Lukács for aid (and comfort), and tried to find substitute proletariats—African-Americans, women, Chinese or Vietnamese peasants—when the White working class of America put on their hard hats and joined Richard Nixon and his racist “Southern Strategy.” Perhaps the moment of realization for me that the American Left was in trouble was when at the University of California, Berkeley, I heard the writer Imamu Amear Baraka, the former LeRoi Jones, reduced to quoting from the selected works of Enver Hoxha and the Albanian Communist newspaper Zëri i Popullit. It was an exhilarating journey that ended up with becoming a tenured radical (first at Oberlin and later at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago) just as the “revolution” turned into Reaganism. Disappointment, yes; discouragement and disillusionment, no—at least not for many of us. Marx, if he gives you anything, provides an appreciation of contradictions and a sense of historical progression (not necessarily progress, as it turned out) that guards against mistaking the present for the future, within a radical historicist sense that all that seems natural is historically constructed, constantly changing and being replaced. “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”

Marx’s view of history, unlike liberal modernization theory, did not end with capitalism or legitimize the present as the best of all possible worlds. Even in his appreciation of the power and productivity of capitalism, he aimed to subvert and supersede bourgeois society in the interest of a more egalitarian, socially just, and democratic form of society. This vision certainly contains within it a utopia, as does any politics except conservative acceptance of the way the world exists at any one time. That utopia, that different and better future which the overwhelming one-dimensionality of the liberal political imagination renders ridiculous, retains enormous power, even for those who would not think to align themselves with Marx, as an immanent critique of the limits, mystifications, apologetics, and deceptions of bourgeois democracy and market capitalism. Utopia, in other words, might be thought of not in the usual sense of an impossible dream, but rather as a far-off goal toward which one directs one’s political desires, even if the ultimate objective might never be reached. My personal goal, for instance, might be perfect health, immortality. Even though I know neither is possible, that does not stop me from going to the gym for a workout.

For those who embrace its positive meaning, socialism is a utopia—not in the sense of an unattainable goal but rather in the sense of a direction toward which people might point their political desires. The political goal, whether reachable or not, is the empowerment of all the people, social justice, and equality (not only of opportunity, as liberals believe, but of reward, as much as is practically possible). Socialism stands opposed to the proposition so central to classical liberal (now conservative) economic ideology, that individual greed will magically produce the greatest good for the greatest number and that capitalism is the end of history. Moreover, by resurrecting a politics aimed at the common good, socialism—in contrast to liberalism but closer to some forms of conservatism, religion, and nationalism—seeks the restoration of a social solidarity fractured by the individualizing effects of competitive market relations. That utopia remains a telos for socialist politics.

Historians and other scholars also operate in a utopian context. As a discipline, history provides what knowledge we can have about how the present was made and what human beings might or might not do in the future. It contributes both to how we understand what nations and societies are, and to the intellectual constitution of our imagination of political communities, which could not exist without the narratives that make up national and social histories. Even as historians seek to render an objective understanding of the past and propose a critique of what they consider to be “mythological” formulations, they are forced to accept that they too are products of historical pasts and historically constituted presents. The educator was educated somewhere and at some time. Accuracy and balance may be the closest we can come to objectivity and neutrality. None of us is without political commitments; some of us are more engaged than others; but those commitments and engagements can contribute to the seriousness with which we do history.

In the essays that follow the reader may feel the tension between the utopian goals of objective, neutral history and the influences of the temporal, spatial, and political contexts that shape the historian. In no historiography is this more palpable than in the history of Russia, the Soviet Union, and Communism. As produced both in the USSR and the West, that body of work has proven almost impossible to free from the tension between the historian’s noble ideal of objectivity and the partisan political arena in which that history has been written. Both in the case of Western historians of the Soviet Union, as well as their more constrained Soviet counterparts, partisan frames and political preferences have been particularly difficult to eliminate. Not only was the USSR the principal enemy of democratic and capitalist Europe and America, but post-Soviet Russia inherited many of the images and negative constructions that had marked the Soviet Union. The essays in this book, written and revised over four decades, review much of the historiography that has shaped understandings of Russia, the Soviet Union, and Communism. Overcoming obstacles that historians of other countries were not required to face, Sovietologists and Soviet historians created a body of writing that could not be written in the USSR. The achievements by serious researchers have been exemplary contributions to our knowledge of a world that was difficult to penetrate and whose authorities obstructed both domestic and foreign critical investigations of its history. Foundational in how the West constructed its understanding of the socialist alternative, the history and historians examined in this book were at once products of their own world and producers of the imaginary of that world regarding its principal alternative.

Most of the chapters in this book deal with the Soviet Union and how it was understood, imagined, and constructed by Western historians and social scientists. The first chapter—“Back and Beyond: Reversing the Cultural Turn?”—deals more broadly with the nature of history and how new paradigms, like nationalism, social history, and the cultural turn shaped the ways historians think and work. This chapter delineates the wider professional and intellectual universe in which historians of Russia and the Soviet Union operated. When most of these essays first appeared, they were meant to throw light on the intense discussions that at the time determined and divided us in the Soviet field. The hundredth anniversary of the revolution that gave birth to Leninism, Stalinism, Gorbachev, and the Soviet Union seems a good time to re-examine how we who made it our life’s work to examine and interpret the USSR learned about what went on, and why, across the ideological divide.

Red Flag Unfurled

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