Has Post-Modernism Come to Russia? Comments on the Anthology "American Russian Studies"

Michael David-Fox, ed., Amerikanskaia rusistika: Vekhi istoriografii poslednikh let. Imperatorskii period: Antologiia. Samara: Izdatel´stvo "Samarskii universitet," 2000. 331 pp. ISBN 5230061995.

Michael David-Fox, ed., Amerikanskaia rusistika: Vekhi istoriografii poslednikh let. Sovetskii period: Antologiia.Samara: Izdatel´stvo "Samarskii universitet," 2001. 375 pp. ISBN 5864651850.

The compiler of this anthology, Michael David-Fox, ¹ has collected some outstanding work into two volumes. ² The essays are well translated into Russian, and David-Fox's excellent introductions acquaint the reader with the authors, describe their work, and explain why these particular items have been chosen instead of other research. The introduction to the first volume, entitled "Fathers, Children, and Grandchildren in the American Historiography of Tsarist Russia," is particularly interesting. David-Fox offers a periodization of postwar American Russian studies based on a generational principle: the fathers (late 1940s-mid-1960s), children (late 1960s-late 1980s), and grandchildren (1990s). These dates apply not to the historians' years of birth but to their active professional years. The classification criteria are very approximate, since many professional historians work for 30 or 40 years after their dissertation defense and, during their professional lives, they alter their intellectual orientation, if not their historical outlook. It would surely be more accurate to speak not of generations, but about stages in the development of Russian studies. These too are related to one another as fathers, children, and grandchildren are. For this reason, hereafter when I say "fathers," I mean the years from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s; "children" refers to the period from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and "grandchildren" refers to the 1990s. Each chronological segment is at once a stage and a generation, since at each stage, the dominant group of historians consists of a single age cohort. Although a convention, this particular classification makes sense. It reflects changes in ruling paradigms, or, as David-Fox prefers to say, structural shifts in the historiography. There is a logic to the generational succession; the attitudes of the "fathers" and the "children" are, in David-Fox's opinion, related as thesis is to antithesis, whereas the relationship among the three generations, in my opinion, is like thesis-antithesis-synthesis. The fathers wrote history from the top down, the children from the bottom up, and the grandchildren prefer to write history "from within." The fathers underscored the particular role of politics, outstanding personalities, and ideologies; the children built their interpretations around "social forces"; while the central point for the grandchildren might be ideology and personalities and social groups. An inalienable part of the fathers' approach was to emphasize the chance nature of Bolshevism and the possibility of liberal alternatives; the children wrote more readily about social necessity and about the interaction of the people with the revolutionary parties; the grandchildren concede any possibility. The fathers were anti-communist and anti-Marxist; the children held more leftist views, not excluding Marxism, and used the data and postulates of official Soviet historiography; the grandchildren belong to various parties. The fathers studied predominantly the political history of the late 19th-early 20th centuries: high politics and its primary actors, meta-ideas, parties, state, elites, sources of and alternatives to revolution, the revolutionary movement, and Russian Marxism. The children preferred social history from the Great Reforms to 1917. The grandchildren like to study the "blank spots" of the Soviet era, as well as the 18th and early 19th century, the empire and non-Russian peoples. In terms of intellectual orientation, the fathers preferred Leopold von Ranke's principle: "to establish how, in sober fact, it all happened." The children upheld the paradigms of Western social history, built on quantitative and sociological methodologies and interdisciplinary approaches. The grandchildren can be called eclectics. They do not reject comparative history and interdisciplinary approaches, although they honestly prefer literary analysis, semiotics, and cultural...