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.
Back and Beyond: Reversing the Cultural Turn?
In social science, if you are not “bringing (something) back”—class, the state, whatever—you are probably already moving “beyond”—beyond Orientalism, beyond identity, and now beyond the cultural turn.1 For those of us who made the cultural or linguistic or historical turn not so long ago, it is dismaying that all our efforts to catch up and bring back are still leaving us behind. Or are they? Back and beyond are metaphors for movement through space and time, in this case an intellectual journey from one practice of social analysis to another, abandoning certain ways of thinking and including, often reintroducing, others. The presumption is that travel is indeed broadening, not to mention deepening, and that experienced analysts will want to enrich their investigations with whatever insights, tools, and data can be gathered along the way.
From the heights of political history, the move in the late 1960s and 1970s was to step down into society and include new constituencies in the narrative (or get rid of narrative altogether). From social history, with its often functionalist or mechanistic forms of explanation, the shift was to plunge even deeper into the thick webs of significance that make up culture. In the narrative proposed by Beyond the Cultural Turn, “the new cultural history took shape in the 1980s as an upstart critique of the established social-economic and demographic histories.”2 The turn began, many would argue, with Edward Thompson’s introduction of a notion of culture into labor history, the bastion of Marxist social history, and Clifford Geertz’s redefinition of culture in anthropology, a move that proved particularly seductive to historians.3 At the same time that all this moving was going on among historians and anthropologists, and to a lesser extent among historical sociologists, it found little resonance among political scientists, as the self-proclaimed “core” of the discipline moved closer to economics, formal modeling, game theory, and rational choice. Old fault lines hardened, between disciplines and within disciplines, even as appeals to interdisciplinarity sounded. Yet, at the same time, social science could not go back, for the various turns had created heightened awareness of and sensitivity to matters of agency and subjectivity, contingency, the constructed nature of social “reality,” textuality, and the need for self-reflexivity on the part of the investigator.
In this chapter, I trace, first, some of the genealogy of the cultural turn, particularly in Marxist social history and in the aftermath of Geertz’s essays; second, I outline what I believe are the principal approaches and insights of the cultural interpretivists; and, finally, I explore the relative absence of this kind of work within political science, with the exception of a few political theorists and constructivist international-relations theorists.
Marxism and the Moves Within Social History
For many of my generation, the coming of age in the 1960s was both politically and professionally connected with an initiation into the new forms of Marxism (often unacknowledged as such) that were disrupting the academy. The momentary revival of an intellectual Marxism, particularly among historians, derived, on the one hand, from the hot wars into which the Cold War establishment had taken young Americans and, on the other, from the exciting achievements of British social historians—Eric J. Hobsbawm, George Rudé, and Edward Thompson were the most important—that expanded the focus of historians of the modern era in both topics and methods. Given the realities of American academic life, at a moment when the market for scholars was shrinking, social history in the United States was never as openly socialist as it was in Britain, but the research agenda that celebrated revolution, the working class, precapitalist forms of community, and alternatives to the dominant and seemingly immovable social order was closely allied and deeply indebted to the British Marxists. What made this alliance possible was that both historiography and intellectual Marxism were undergoing transformations that permitted divergent and open-ended explorations. What made it necessary was that Marxism as it existed failed to answer the most important questions it itself posed: How does class formation take place? What are the sources of consciousness? What makes a revolutionary situation? Why nation and not class? Thompson called these “the real silences of Marx.”4
At the beginning of the new millennium, Marxism appeared to have lost both its inspirational power and the confidence with which its loyalists had been able to defend the vilest acts as political necessities. Still, for many in the generation of the 1960s, a particular
