From Reform to Empire: Russia’s “New” Political History

In Russia, as in most post-communist societies except for East Germany, there was no purge of the academic profession after the collapse of the old system. But, unlike Poland and Hungary, neither was there an institutional reintegration of former dissident intellectuals or a return, however small in numbers, of émigrés to chairs in history or other social sciences. Yet the writing of Russian political history by Russian scholars has displayed some remarkable revisionist tendencies carried out by some of the same figures who occupied prominent, if not always "honored," positions in the Soviet academic community, as well as by younger scholars trained in the post-Soviet period. What amounts to a kind of paradigmatic shift (at least in the looser definition of the term) was not, like most such shifts in the historical profession in other countries, universal. Nor is it clear in all cases why it took place. But there are a few traces in the historiographical record that allow a modicum of informed speculation on the phenomenon.

My impression is that Russia's "new" political history (more later on what precisely this is) has two sources, one internal and the other external, one exemplifying continuity within the historical profession and the other representing forces for change coming from abroad. That any continuity at all could be preserved throughout 70 years of Soviet rule (or, in the case of historiography, 60 years of massive party intervention in the field) is something of a wonder. Clearly, there are not many good stories of survival. Those that exist illustrate a good deal of courage and no little optimism on the part of a small number of pre-revolutionary historians who chose to remain in the Soviet Union after the revolution. Their courage was in staying; their optimism in believing that they would be allowed to pass on their professional training to a new generation of students. The results disappointed them, mostly tragically so. But not all their efforts were in vain.

Two loci of the "new" political history that benefit from the continuity of the pre-revolutionary tradition are the Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg and the kafedra of imperial Russian history at Moscow State University. In the first case, the thin but firm line of descent extends back from such contemporary senior scholars as Boris Vasil'evich Anan'ich, Rafail Sholomonovich Ganelin, and Viktor Moiseevich Paneiakh to their teacher, Boris Aleksandrovich Romanov, and his teacher Aleksandr Evgenevich Presniakov. In Moscow, a similar line links Larisa Georgievna Zakharova to Petr Andreevich Zaionchkovskii and, more tenuously, to his early teacher Iurii Vladimirovich Got'e.

Both Romanov and Zaionchkovskii were able to maintain their intellectual integrity, although they were subject in different ways – Romanov more seriously – to pressures, criticism, and discrimination from both party hacks and their own colleagues. Their most precious legacy to their students was their own inheritance from the pre-revolutionary tradition, a fierce and uncompromising reliance on archival research. Seeking an ever broader source base for their work became, whether consciously or not, the only possible alternative to engaging in historical generalization that was bound to result in dull conformity or denunciation. But they had also been trained and were to pass on a critical attitude toward sources that had its roots in the great historiographical tradition of the 19th century and had very little to do with vulgar Marxism-Leninism. Beyond this both men devoted most of their research and writing to the state: Romanov to the Sudebnik of 1550 and Russian imperial policies in the Far East, Zaionchkovskii to the reforms and bureaucratic politics at the end of the 19th century. Both their sources and their subjects were to become focal points of the "new" political history.

From the outside the influences came from an unlikely source, cultural exchange. The evidence for this is more elusive and spotty, hence more impressionistic. Russian historians have written little about it; what information we have comes rather from the other side, that is the Americans and Europeans who experienced an influence on their work from...