Vom Wir zum Ich: Individuum und Autobiographik im Zarenreich, and: Stalinistische Subjekte/Sujets staliniens/Stalinist Subjects: Individuum und System in der Sowjetunion und der Komintern, 1929–1953 (review)

Subjectivity is the order of the day, and accordingly the study of memoirs, diaries, letters, and other “ego-documents” is flourishing. Soviet historians in the United States set the trend, but here we have two valuable European contributions. Vom Wir zum Ich, a collection of articles on the self and self-representation in Russia in the tsarist period edited by Julia Herzberg and Christoph Schmidt, celebrates 50 years of the study of East European (including Russian) history at the University of Cologne; it contains 15 contributions, all in German, from 12 authors. Stalinistische Subjekte, edited by the Swiss scholars Brigitte Studer and Heiko Haumann, deals with the Stalin period both in the Soviet Union and in the Comintern and international communist movement; its 24 contributions are in German, English, and French, with a substantial editors’ introduction in both German and English and abstracts of each essay in English at the back.

Julia Herzberg’s excellent opening contribution in Vom Wir zum Ich, a 47-page article on “The Autobiographical as a Historical Source in ‘East’ and ‘West,’ ” deserves to be translated and used as an introductory text in the courses on Russian autobiography that have proliferated in the United States in the past ten years, for there is no comparable historical and analytic study in English. Herzberg notes the peculiarities of the genre of Russian memoirs, which has historically tended to be less a self-exploration than some sort of commentary on public life: in Alexander Herzen’s formulation, a way of conveying to posterity those things that might otherwise (because of the workings of the censorship) remain hidden. For all the memoirists’ disinclination to explore the personal, however, Russian historians have often viewed memoirs as a dangerously subjective historical source, not to be compared in terms of solidity and respectability with the bureaucratic, legal, and statistical documents in state archives. In the 1920s, Soviet Marxist historians briefly departed from this pattern with their collection of workers’ and revolutionaries’ memoirs—valuable, as one contributor to the contemporary journal Proletarskaia revoliutsiia remarked, not “in connection with the personality of their author, but only in their relation to a particular epoch of party life” (50)—whose great virtue was that they compensated for the lacunae and biases of imperial state archives. But this moment soon passed, and a stern attitude to the non-representative and subjective character of memoirs prevailed through much of the postwar period, waning only in the 1980s. Then came perestroika, with its extraordinary burst of enthusiasm for memoirs, especially memoirs of the Great Purges, as an aid to rethinking Soviet history. By the 1990s, the wheel had come full circle from the 1920s, as the “particular credibility and authenticity” of memoirs was contrasted with the lacunae and biases of Soviet state archives.

The Herzberg article also contains discussion of the useful concept of “ego-documents,” used more widely in Europe than in the Anglophone world and defined in the 1950s by its originator, the Netherlands historian Jacob Presser, as “historical sources of a personal character” in which “the I that writes and the subject that is written about are the same” (17). This is followed by an account of German discussions on self-framing (Selbstthematisierung) and testimony about the self (Selbstzeugnisse) that non-German readers unfamiliar with the work of Alois Hahn and other German theorists should find particularly helpful. The volume also contains an interesting historiographical essay by Alexander Kraus on identity studies, focused particularly...