The Civil War—Russian Version (II): The Soviet Historians

THE CIVIL WARRUSSIAN VERSION (II): THE SOVIET HISTORIANS Joseph A. Logsdon The Russians currently pose no threat of "closing the gap"—at least in the field of Civil War scholarship. Soviet writers, nevertheless, well aware of our own heightened interest in the war during these centennial years, have themselves recently produced a number of works dealingwidi its history and significance. These books and articles, moreover , seem to reflect a growing interest in American history and culture among Soviet scholars generally. Few Americans are even aware of Russian research in American history, and these few have gained their knowledge despite severe handicaps, since access to Soviet materials is very limited. Little is known, for example, about programs of study in Russian universities, numbers of professors and students specializing in American history, or the size of resource collections. Publication and graduate dissertation lists, however, do give us some indication of the content of work being produced.1 A review of titles alone is enough to demonstrate a strong emphasis upon American diplomatic history and "imperialism," with each new international crisis precipitating new Soviet studies on American foreign relations with the particular area or nation involved. A second obvious emphasis is on Russian-American relations, particularly during the period of their 1917 revolution, where, of course, Soviet scholars have access to sources unavaüable to Westerners. In this one-sided concern with recent American diplomatic history, Russian writers have neglected the development of our domestic institutions and internal history—especially for the period before about 1890. This indifference is surprising in light of the recognition by Lenin and other Soviet leaders of America's preeminent role among capitalist Joseph A. Logsdon, a University of Chicago graduate, is now working for his Ph.D. in recent American history at the University of Wisconsin. 1 Comparable to our own Publishers' Weekly, the periodical Knizhnaia Letopis fists all books and pamphlets published in the Soviet Union. A special section includes graduate dissertations written at Russian universities. 365 366JOSEPHA. LOGSDON nations. Some Soviet scholars recognize this deficiency. In 1955 Aleksei V. Efimov, a senior member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, called attention to the imbalance, and sought to conect it with his Survey of U.S. History; from the Beginnings of America to the End of the Civil War.2 The publication of Efimov's pioneering effort has been followed by a steadily growing number of studies of American domestic development in the earlier eras. A small group of apparently young Soviet scholars has turned particular attention to the Civü War and Reconstruction . The importance now given to our Great Conflict is ülustrated by die fact that the Civil War is the only event which receives any considerable special attention in the official Soviet encyclopedia.3 There are several motives for this new interest. First, the Civil War satisfies the Soviet search for conflict and revolutionary traditions in our history. Second, the war and its aftermath lay bare the origins of the modern racial problem which so preoccupies Russian critics of contemporary American society. Third, and perhaps foremost, both Karl Marx and Frederick Engels—the fathers of world communismobserved and commented at length upon the war. As in all Russian historical writing, the Soviet scholar plots his research within the general analysis laid down by Marx and Engels. This is particularly true of the Civd War specialist in Russia. Interested European observers of the American wartime scene, the two German socialist intellectuals maintained a running commentary. In the first two years of the conflict their views appeared in articles by Marx for the New York Tribune and the Vienna Presse, thereafter confined to their private correspondence. As in most of their extended remarks upon contemporary events, Marx and Engels were always provocative, often perceptive. In their opinion, the war was caused by the slavery question—in the political and economic (rather than the moral) sense. Whether Northerners were moved by sympathy for the down-trodden Negro seemed far less important than, in Marx's words, "whether the twenty million free men of the North should subordinate themselves any longer to an oligarchy of three thousand slaveholders. . . ." The war was not undertaken to put down slavery, since...