An Interview with Leopold Haimson

As readers may recall, Kritika has initiated an interview series, run in our "From the Editors" column, with leading figures in the Russian field, asking them to describe the state of the field from the perspective of their own life trajectories. In the past we have interviewed Dan Davidson, James Billington, and Marc Raeff. In this issue we continue our series in an interview with Leopold Haimson.

Leopold Haimson is professor emeritus of the Department of History and the Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of Eurasia at Columbia University. He earlier taught at the University of Chicago for ten years, from 1956 to 1966. Having received his BA from Harvard University in 1945 (in history and philosophy) and his PhD there (in history and social relations) in 1952, he served for several years as a research associate for Studies in Soviet Culture and Communications, a project directed by Margaret Mead, and in this connection published several articles on Soviet civilization.¹ In 1955, his influential The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism appeared, and he subsequently published a stream of important articles and edited volumes on Russian political culture generally and on the history of Menshevism in particular, from its origins to its vital life in emigration.² In 1964–65, his "The Question of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905–1917" appeared, a two-part article that set off one of the most productive and long-running debates in the field of modern Russian history.³ While retaining an interest in political culture, Haimson moved in the 1970s and 1980s toward social and quantitative history, publishing articles in French and English on the dynamics of strike movements in a comparative perspective.⁴ In these years he also edited an influential book on "the politics of rural Russia."⁵ Beginning in the 1970s, he became increasingly active in Russian academic life. He continues to publish actively in both Russian and English.⁶ He is currently completing a study on the relationship between political and social conflicts at the end of the old regime (1900–17).

A distinguishing feature of Haimson's career has been his role as the organizer of collaborative research projects that have brought together scholars from different disciplines and different academic cultures, especially those of the United States, France, and Russia.⁷ In addition to his work with Margaret Mead, from 1960 to 1965 he served as the director of the Inter-University Project on the History of the Menshevik Movement. For nearly two decades, he was director of the International Project in Comparative Labor History, based at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme (Paris), Later he also served as co-chairman of the International Commission for Joint Projects in Modern Russian History. He helped organize a regular series of workshops in Russia that brought together American, European, and Russian scholars and has been a visiting lecturer at Moscow University, at the Institute of History, and at the European University in St. Petersburg.

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Kritika: In your own work, you have paid great attention to questions of identity and subject position. What is your own relation to Russian history, in terms of your personal background and how you came to study it? Given your enduring attention to how others see or define themselves, how do you see and define yourself?

Haimson: This strikes me as a remarkably prescient set of questions. As for my personal background: I was born and brought up in Brussels, Belgium, where I resided up to the age of 13, when the German invasion in 1940 caused my family to escape, first to unoccupied France, and eventually to the United States. My parents were immigrants from Russia, of sharply different backgrounds, and animated by very sharply different interests and attitudes. Indeed, they would not have met but for the Bolshevik seizure of power, which caused them to take refuge in Harbin and to move after their marriage to Berlin, and eventually to Brussels. My father, born in Borisov, in the Jewish Pale, had received permission to move to St. Petersburg after graduating from the University of Warsaw. My mother was a...