of capitalism allow for the retention of hope for development beyond. But any optimism must be tempered by the post-modernist sensitivity to the arbitrariness of any progressive master narratives that give easy confidence in a democratic, egalitarian, socially just future.
From its very beginnings, the historiography of Russia in the twentieth century has been much more than an object of coolly detached scholarly contemplation.1 Many observers saw the USSR as the major enemy of Western civilization, 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 colonized 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, traveling its very own Sonderweg that led eventually (or inevitably) to collapse and ruin. The very endeavor 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 other masters than itself. While much worthy analysis came 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 judgment.
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.2
Those sentences retain their relevance at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Western, particularly American, attitudes to 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 dates back to the very first travelers to Muscovy. In his Notes Upon Russia (1517–1549), Sigismund von Herberstein wrote, “The people enjoy slavery more than freedom,” an observation echoed by Adam Olearius in the seventeenth century, who saw Russians as “comfortable in slavery” and requiring “cudgels and whips” to make them 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 uncivilized 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 behavior 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 civilized and modern, it was often asserted, force and rule from above was unavoidable. Ironically, the spokesmen of civilization 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 travelers 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.3 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, like Kennan and Eugene Schuyler, subscribed equally to such ideas of nationality, but rather than climate or geography as causative, they emphasized the role of institutions, like tsarism, in generating a national character that in some ways was mutable.4 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.5 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.6
Russia as an autocracy remained the political “other” of Western democracy and republicanism, and it was with great joy and relief that liberals, including President Woodrow Wilson, greeted the February Revolution of 1917 as “the impossible dream” realized. Now the new Russian government could be enlisted in the Great War to make “the world safe for democracy.”7 But the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd turned the liberal world upside down. For Wilson’s Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, Bolshevism was “the worst form of anarchism,” “the madness of famished men.”8 In the years immediately following the October Revolution, the first accounts of the new regime reaching the West were by journalists and diplomats. The radical freelance journalist John Reed, his wife and fellow radical Louise Bryant, Bessie Beatty of the San Francisco Bulletin, the British journalist Arthur Ransome, and Congregational minister Albert Rhys Williams all witnessed events in 1917 and conveyed the immediacy and excitement of the revolutionary days to an eager public back home.9 After several trips to Russia, the progressive writer Lincoln Steffens told his friends, “I have seen the future and it works.” Enthusiasm for the revolution propelled liberals and socialists further to the left, and small Communist parties emerged from the radical wing of Social Democracy. From the right came sensationalist accounts of atrocities, debauchery, and tyranny, leavened with the repeated assurance that the days of the Bolsheviks were numbered. L’Echo de Paris and the London Morning Post, as well as papers throughout Western Europe and the United States, wrote that the Bolsheviks were “servants of Germany” or “Russian Jews of German extraction.”10 The New York Times so frequently predicted the fall of the Communists that two young journalists, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, exposed their misreadings in a long piece in The New Republic.11
The Western reaction to the Bolsheviks approached panic. Officials and advisors to the Wilson administration
