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).
