From the Editors: A Remarkable Decade

Someone once said that revolutions – moments of great intensity, during which everything seems transformed – are the sex of history. If so, the ten years since the fall of Soviet communism have been the sex of historiography. As the human sciences in general were buffeted by far-reaching changes in the 1990s, they were doubly compounded in our area by the "opening of the archives" and the implications of 1989 and 1991. Even as the archival euphoria faded into sober assessments of the hard empirical, theoretical, and organizational challenges that lie ahead, it has sometimes seemed that the archival revolution and the post-communist vistas on which we perch might allow virtually any historical topic to be approached anew – or at least bombarded with new evidence without the blinkered, specialized caution that is the scourge of less turbulent fields. Needless to say, the "morning after" arrived some time ago.

Vivid fragments of memory pass before our mind's eye: a minor riot in a store over a cart of butter at the height of the economic collapse of the early 1990s, Solzhenitsyn's return and the Stolypin craze, the White House under assault by tanks, a warm cabbage pirozhok at Russkoe bistro, the pawed-over list of declassified fondy at GARF in the mid-1990s. The rise and fall of the mysteriously-named "Bim Bom" visible from the reading room windows of the erstwhile sanctum sanctorum, the Central Party Archive. In the end, the historical and the historiographical are inextricably intertwined; for those students of Russia whose intellectual and scholarly lives intersected with this period of cognitive flux and world-historical change, it has certainly been a remarkable decade.¹ Indeed, this journal might well be considered one of its results.

Every once in a while it makes much sense to take stock. In this case, the cult of the decade – that "decimal-oriented chronological marker that is said to possess distinctive cultural characteristics," a unit of time that often insidiously molds understandings of popular culture and historical change alike – can serve a valuable purpose.² (It should be noted, however, that in some cases we are really talking about a bit more than a decade. The "long 1990s" in our field began with the acceleration of perestroika circa 1987 and arguably continues into the 21st century.) When we commissioned pieces from leading scholars in a range of fields, some defined thematically and some chronologically, we really did not know what to expect. All we did was invite a range of interesting and accomplished figures to assess the achievements and the failures of historical research in their field in the last decade. We realized that we could not include all areas, and the mix was intended to be suggestive rather than comprehensive. We made efforts to include a number of Russian and European commentators as well as a range of scholarly approaches and positions, although in both cases last-minute withdrawals prevented us from publishing quite as much as we would have liked. We take pride in including certain fields (military, economic, history of science) that have sometimes been ignored in historiographical discussions. Others (such as quantitative social history) may have been marginalized a bit more recently, yet, as becomes clear, the reports of their deaths have been greatly exaggerated. The two review articles in this number should also be read in conjunction with the other pieces. The article-length treatment on the new/old cultural history by Laura Engelstein was originally intended as a "Ten Years After" contribution before it blossomed into a much larger statement; the piece on interpretations of the end of communism by David Rowley addresses a burgeoning literature on 1991 in several fields, the implications of which many historians have yet to confront.

The picture that emerges from this exercise in stock-taking is instructive in several ways. The assessments, reflecting not only the differing dynamics of various fields but also the various attitudes of different scholars, are notable for their range: some qualify their enthusiastic optimism only very lightly, many others picture the glass just about half empty or half full, still others are frankly pessimistic...