Suchergebnisse

SUMMARY:
Alain Blum considers issues raised by Ben Eklof from the twofold perspective of French-Russian and French-U.S. academic communication, adding to these considerations regarding the nature and evolution of the French community of students of Russian history. He questions the choice of Mironov's Social History as the basis for generalizing about patterns of academic communication and points to the contextualized nature of this book's reception: its implicit audience in Russia and abroad differs and hence the differences in its reception. Blum rejects a colonial model suggested by Eklof and brings into the discussion generational, national (French) ideological and intellectual, and other multiple dimensions of scholarly dynamics. Blum asserts a supranational character of Russian history in the twentieth century with its major themes of Communism and Stalinism, and compares it to the historiography of Nazism as a complex supranational phenomenon in the history of European modernity. The study of Nazism is profoundly influenced and stimulated by international scholarship, and he observes the same productive challenge from outside in the historiography of modern Russia. This situation is far from a colonial domination of Western over Russian scholarship. Looking at different examples of the circulation of ideas, translations of Western texts into Russian, and participation in joint scholarly projects, Blum concludes that Russian-U.S.-French academic communication is based not on forms of domination but on mutual exchange. The current reorientation of some Russian scholars toward a more nationalistic and anti-Western interpretation of history cannot be understood, in his view, as a reaction to a previous stage of exchanges and integration – this is a consequence of Russia's internal political and ideological development.

SUMMARY:
This article proposes that there is such a collective memory, proceeding from the differentiation between post-socialism as a societal-institutional figuration and the post-communist condition as a discursive constellation that has abandoned communism as a regulative idea for the order of society. To clarify this argument, the post-socialism and post-communist condition are related to postcolonialism (as a societal figuration) and the postcolonial condition (as discourse), thus giving shape to the general features of a post-socialist memory that emerges between institutional figuration and discursive constellations as well as to the specific character distinguishing it from comparable memory practices, such as the postcolonial ones. In particular, the article concentrates on the following specific features of post-socialist and postcolonial collective memory: the appropriation of the nation-state and the national idea; the treatment of models of historical change; ways of representing empirical data in historiography; and the intellectuals' role in the formation of collective memory.

SUMMARY:
In his article Ronald Suny takes aim at a critical examination of relationship between modernity and the Soviet experiment, ideology and analytical apparatus employed for exploration of Soviet history, placing that examination in the context of historiographic discussions in the US Slavic field. The author takes as a point of departure the recent book by J. Scott and combines the analysis of Scott's argument with a scrutiny of major interpretative models used in American historiography for Soviet studies, namely the "Totalitarian" and "developmentalist" ones. He differentiates between the modernization trend, which focuses on processes of social change in Soviet society, revises the image of the 1917 revolution and the nature of the soviet political regime, and modernity trend, which emphasizes the legacy of enlightenment and modern rationality in the Soviet experiment, stressing the revisionist impact of both on the historiographic image of the Soviet history. However, the author notes that the collapse of the Soviet Union has reversed the balance between the "Totalitarian" and "developmentalist" interpretations of Soviet history to the advantage of libertarian perspective on modern state and society, which now necessitates a reconstruction of relationship between soviet socialism and European modernity. Identifying modernity as a normative discourse, Suny analyzes the interplay between modernism and antimodernism, asserting that soviet socialism was not an alternative to modernity but rather an alternative within the range of historic variations of modernity. He then reviews in detail two major contributions to Soviet history by US historians of Russia, M. Malia and S. Kotkin. While welcoming their approaches to the Soviet Union as a variant and modification of European modernity, he criticizes their way of reducing the Soviet experience to the Bolshevik ideological blueprints, offering instead an understanding of Soviet ideology (socialism) and politics as a dynamic, contingent, and eventually evolving discursive process.

SUMMARY:
Mark von Hagen's article offers an interpretation of the changes that occurred in the study of Russian and Soviet history, and suggests the concept of "Eurasia" as an anti-paradigm facilitating the description of the region that combines the legacies of multinational empires and of Soviet-style socialism. At the same time, "Eurasia" is an anti -paradigm because it points to a variety of ways to revise many assumptions about Russian, Soviet, and Eurasian histories.

For von Hagen, three separate processes heralded the arrival of new historiographical approaches. First, there is the increasingly prominence of works interpreting the history of Russia and the USSR not as that of a national state, but rather stressing its multinational and imperial character. Second, historians are constantly paying a greater attention to borderlands in the context of the prevailing view of boundaries as porous and fluctuating. Third, diasporas – including émigrés and exiles – have been "rediscovered" and their works are now returning to their countries of origin.

Von Hagen also analyzes what he considers as "two paradigms" of the historical perception of Russia and the USSR. The first, "Russia as Orient", attempted to present the Russian-Soviet historical experience as essentially rooted in centuries long Oriental and despotic traditions of Russia. Using Edward Said's concept of Orientalism, von Hagen argues that this perception of Russia as Orient helped sustain a Western "occidental" identity. It often walked hand in hand with a belief in the unique experience of Russian history, a belief that von Hagen terms "neo-Slavophile".

The second paradigm is that equates the Soviet Union with modernization. According to von Hagen, this paradigm was partly rooted in the liberal tradition of the Russian "state school" of historiography, which saw the privileged role of the state led by an enlightened bureaucracy as the driving force of Russia's path to modernization. Opposed to attempts to "essentialize" Russian history within the "Russia as Orient" paradigm, the modernization paradigm attempted to "normalize" the Soviet experience. Assumptions of the inevitable ethnic and national homogenization of the Soviet Union became prevalent in the modernization paradigm.

Von Hagen then explores the legacy of Eurasianist thinkers, a group of Russian émigrés who offered their vision of Eurasia as a space of interaction between the Russians and the Turkic and Finnish peoples. Their vision of Eurasia also implied a positive evaluation of the Mongol presence in Russian history and a critical approach to Eurocentric assumptions. Von Hagen asserts that, in his view, the new Eurasian anti-paradigm avoids problematic apects of the Eurasianist legacy, such as the political views of the Eurasianist thinkers and their geopolitical views. The new Eurasian anti-paradigm retains their critique of "essentializing" approaches to such concepts as Europe and Asia in order to offer an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the complex pasts of Central and Eastern Europe and Northern Asia.

For von Hagen, the Eurasian anti-paradigm has been profoundly impacted by the current "decentralization" of historical narratives, which is the result of interaction between historians and linguists, anthropologists, sociologists, etc. Eurasia allows one to part with the dominance of national narratives while accepting the importance of modern nationalism in historical processes. According to von Hagen, Eurasia does not coincide with the former Russian Empire or the former Soviet Union or with any other particular state. Its chronological boundaries are also not rigidly determined. In the age of globalization, von Hagen argues, it is important to remember that the great continental empires constituted an important element of global history.

In the last part of his article, von Hagen surveys literature that he believes attests to the emergence of the Eurasian anti-paradigm in Russian-Soviet history. According to the author, the Eurasian anti-paradigm does not preclude any specific approaches to the past; even less is it meant as a judgment about the likelihood of one or another country of joining the European Union, NATO, or for that matter any of the Asian organizations. It is meant as a concept that opens up new horizons in the study of history and signifies a return of the Eurasian space into global history after almost a century of isolation.