An Interview with Geoffrey A. Hosking

Geoffrey Hosking (b. 1942) studied modern languages at King's College Cambridge before gaining his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. From 1966 to 1984, he taught politics and history at the University of Essex. His career since then has been spent at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, where he was Professor of Russian History from 1984 to 2007 and has been Emeritus Professor since 2007. In 1993, he was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy.

Professor Hosking is well known for his ambitious long-range treatments of Russian history: A History of the Soviet Union (1985), Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917 (1997); Russia and the Russians: A History (2001), and Rulers and Victims: The Russians in the Soviet Union (2006).¹ He also has a wide range of interests in cultural and social history, as demonstrated notably by Beyond Socialist Realism (1980) and his current work on trust (see below).² In addition to his major publications, he has a distinguished record as commentator on Russian affairs: he was the 1988 BBC Reith Lecturer; in 1993, he served on the jury for the Russian Booker Prize; and he has written prolifically over the years in the broadsheet newspapers as well as making regular appearances on radio and television.

The single most prominent theme in this body of work is the relationship between nation and empire in Russian history—a subject given extended treatment in the forum later in this issue. In the present interview we invite Professor Hosking to reflect more broadly on his intellectual background and trajectory. Since the publication of his first monograph, The Russian Constitutional Experiment (1973), his most significant historical work has been done in an unfashionable academic genre: magisterial synthesis.³ Whereas many of his Anglophone contemporaries debated the significance of Soviet history with one another in learned journals, Professor Hosking made his contribution by lecturing in Russian on the BBC Russian Service. Few scholars of his generation can match either his intellectual range or his ability to engage the interest of an educated public on both sides of the former Iron Curtain. This alone suggests that Professor Hosking has much to tell us about the past (and present) of our field.

Kritika:

You had a lengthy stay in the USSR in the late 1960s. How would you characterize your experience? In what ways was it typical of that cohort of Western (mainly American) scholars, and in what ways distinctive? How did it affect the development of your scholarship in the following years?

Hosking:

Living for nearly a whole year in the Soviet Union was revelatory. Before I went, I had imagined that Russians would be cowed and intimidated by the totalitarian system under which they lived. In fact, I found that most of the Russians I met, students and others, were very forthcoming with their opinions—at least in conversation. (Writing was, of course, a different matter.) I found (and continue to find) most Russians imperiously sure of their own opinions and very reluctant to listen to alternative ones. I came to value all the more Nikolai Andreev, my Cambridge supervisor, who always listened to me attentively and good-humoredly even when he disagreed with me.

Then, of course, there was the lively oral culture—the constant anekdoty. One of my favorites at the time was called "The Balding of Marxism": a slip of paper was passed round depicting in a row first Marx, his face surrounded by flowing locks and full beard, and passing by way of Engels, Lenin, and Stalin to Khrushchev, bald and without beard. Irreverent, but hardly very critical. It is true that I tended to meet people in informal settings, not in the work situation, where I am certain their behavior would have been much more circumspect.

I also learnt from Soviet students the riches of the contemporary Russian colloquial language—very different from Cambridge Russian. (I remember my bafflement at first reading Solzhenitsyn's Ivan Denisovich.) The new knowledge I gradually acquired was enriched by the Moscow State University (MGU) Faculty of Russian for Foreigners, which turned out...