Red Flag Unfurled
History, Historians,and the Russian Revolution
RONALD GRIGOR SUNY
To my daughters,
Sevan Siranoush Suni and Anoush Tamar Suni,
who have been through it with me
First published by Verso 2017
© Ronald Grigor Suny 2017
‘‘The Empire Strikes Out’’ by permission of Oxford University Press, USA
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-564-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-567-3 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-566-6 (UK EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Suny, Ronald Grigor, author.
Title: Red flag unfurled : history, historians, and the Russian Revolution / Ronald Grigor Suny.
Description: Brooklyn, NY : Verso Books, 2017. | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017027209 (print) | LCCN 2017026935 (ebook) | ISBN 9781784785642 (hardback) | ISBN 9781784785673 (US ebook) | ISBN 9781784785666 (UK ebook) | ISBN 9781784785673 (E-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Soviet Union—History—Revolution, 1917–1921—Historiography. | Soviet Union—History—Revolution, 1917–1921—Influence.
Classification: LCC DK265.A553 .S74 2017 (ebook) | LCC DK265.A553 (print) | DDC 947.084/1072—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017027209
Typeset in Monotype Sabon by Hewer Text Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Contents
Introduction: Making History and the Historian
PART I. HISTORY AND HISTORIANS
1.Back and Beyond? Reversing the Cultural Turn
2.Reading Russia and the Soviet Union in the Twentieth Century: How the “West” Wrote Its History of the USSR
3.The Empire Strikes Out: Imperial Russia, “National” Identity, and Theories of Empire
PART II. RUSSIA’S REVOLUTIONS
4.Toward a Social History of the October Revolution
5.Revision and Retreat in the Historiography of 1917: Social History and Its Critics
6.Breaking Eggs, Making Omelets: Violence and Terror in Russia’s Civil Wars, 1918–1922
Notes
Index
Introduction: Making History and the Historian
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
