Convergence, Expansion, and Experimentation: Current Trends in Muscovite History-Writing

Since 1991 a major accomplishment in the Muscovite field, as in many others, is that scholars have moved beyond the bifurcation that characterized the Soviet era. The Muscovite field seems to me to be now a more or less cohesive intellectual community, subdivided no longer by a priori categories of nationality or ideology, but by the issues that traditionally divide historians – method, topic, sources, interpretive framework, and the like. Furthermore, Russian and Western scholarship has embraced new themes and approaches that integrate us not only with each other but with current trends in historiography in general.

Certainly, of course, our Russian colleagues continue to have special issues to contend with that lend unevenness and a certain special character to some recent work. Basic interpretive tools – such as a common terminology, theory of historical change, or an overall understanding of the course of Russian history – are more in flux for post-Soviet scholars than for Americans and Europeans, making it difficult for established historians to orient their work in some significantly new way. As a result, many in our field in Russia persist in the tried and true: empirical, by and large political history, freed at least of Marxist jargon. Alternatively, they devote themselves to the area of the field's traditional strength, source study (istochnikovedenie). Publications of documents (which, in the 1990s, included pistsovye and perepisnye knigi, chronicles, land transactions, legal records, and foreign travelers' accounts) may not be cutting-edge historiographically, but they build the foundation of future work. It is good that this work continues. Meanwhile, the younger generation in Russia, thinned out though its ranks are, experiments with all possible new trends. Thus the unevenness – current work can look boringly familiar, or startlingly radical.

The "special character" alluded to comes from the search for interpretive context. Many in the Russian historical profession seek to replace Marxism with yet another totalizing scheme. Thus, Eurasianism, totalitarianism, and in the 1990s nationalistic debates on "Russian civilization" and the Russian Sonderweg have had their vogues.¹ Although Muscovite specialists in Russia do not seem to have taken an active role in these debates, it is the context in which they work, and arguably one that has shaped Russian history-writing for the last two centuries.² This theorizing lends some Russian scholarship a high level of abstraction and a tendency towards didacticism, neither of which is very helpful in the long run. The "macro" habit of mind needs to be consciously confronted.

Muscovite scholars are actually doing so, consciously or unconsciously. They have transformed the field in the 1990s, in part by adopting an eclectic range of approaches and new themes. This is evident even in the important remedial activity that the last decade witnessed in Russia, that is, the rehabilitation of earlier generations. Under-appreciated Soviet scholars such as Vladimir Borisovich Kobrin, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Zimin, and Aleksandr Lazarevich Stanislavskii were honored with conferences, publications, and festschrifts in the 1990s. Classics of 19th-century Russian historiography – works by Platonov, Presniakov, Pavlov-Sil'vanskii, Zabelin, Miliukov, and others – have been reissued. Russian scholars are also expanding access to Western scholarship, even sponsoring the translation of some Western work, including some volumes of George Vernadsky's History of Russia and Richard Hellie's book on Muscovite slavery.³

This retrospective activity is well-deserved homage to good historians, but it also helps to dislodge stale paradigms. The great fin-de-siècle generation of historians just enumerated introduced into historical discourse new categories and tools of analysis, not to debunk their large-scale paradigms, but to make them more complex. They studied social classes and structures, they did micro-analysis and local history, and they integrated material and geographical forces. European historians in the 20th century, especially in the post-war period, took this sort of work further, deploying it precisely to replace paradigms in which they had lost faith, notably traditional political history and grand teleologies such as Marxism. Historians and anthropologists searched out the history of "lost peoples" – lower classes, women, minority groups, colonial subjects – developing methods as various as historical...