"The Communal Experience": The Role of Groups in Geoffrey Hosking's Understanding of Russian Society

Just over a decade ago, the late Richard Stites—who, like Geoffrey Hosking, had a deep familiarity with Russian history both before and after the 1917 divide—published an article describing the paradoxical tendency of Russian "work collectives" to cram themselves into tiny corners of enormous spaces. As he observed, "After a half-dozen years of perestroika and almost a decade of political freedom and the market, I for one am persuaded that not all the peculiarities of Russian spatial and work culture are attributable solely to Soviet socialism. Perhaps historians and literary scholars will someday uncover the deeper layers."¹ Richard Stites's own concern with discrete phenomena in Russian history (notably, the women's movement and other areas of utopian socialism and cultural production, from serf theaters to the estrada of the Brezhnev days) meant that "uncovering the deeper layers" was marginal to his work. For Geoffrey Hosking, in contrast, "the peculiarities of Russian culture"—or rather, the "specificities," to use a less loaded term—have been an abiding preoccupation.

There may be biographical considerations here. Geoffrey Hosking (henceforth GH, to avoid the overfamiliarity of the first name alone and the officiousness of the surname) began his academic career studying modern languages, a subject that in traditional British universities used to (and in some, such as mine, still does) emphasize the specificity of culture in comparative perspective. This has left traces in several characteristics of GH's intellectual background. The first is his wide knowledge of Russian culture in the broadest sense. It is hard to think of anyone whose work has had comparable impact across the range of disciplines constituting "Russian studies." The second inheritance of GH's first specialization is his excellent command of at least three major European languages. GH's knowledge of French and German goes a long way beyond the "reading knowledge" to which many of us can lay claim. He can present papers and argue a case in both languages. As for his Russian, I remember being told by the writer Zinovy Zinik, a producer in the BBC's Russian Service, that GH was the only British contributor whose radio performances never had to be edited before being broadcast. This near-native fluency, alongside his detailed command of Russian history over three centuries, and his capacity to pose large questions (as in his recent project on the historical role of trust in Russian culture), helps explain his (again highly unusual) level of authority in Russia itself.

Immersion in Russian culture also enabled GH to grasp some factors in the volatile period of transition more quickly than most Westerners. While many (Rogers Brubaker, for example) were speaking of nationalism in "dog that didn't bark" terms, GH was already, in 1990, describing Russia as "a nation traumatized by its own past": "Standing in a modern Soviet street, I sometimes feel as if I were in a society afflicted by communal amnesia."² Rulers and Victims: The Russians in the Soviet Union was a brilliant examination of some of the underlying social tensions in the vanished empire (take, for instance, the comments offsetting institutionalized patronage, i.e., the personalization of transactions and the "welfare compact," which assumes a more diffuse understanding of how benefits are dispersed).³ But it also captured certain central points in the Russian "national myth," particularly the neo-Slavophile belief in self-sacrifice and exploitation that consistently colored dissemination of the Soviet ideal.

However, although this is what Russians call "a jubilee," and encomium is appropriate, the most sincere tribute to intellectual comradeship is to argue with someone's ideas. In these brief remarks, I will take GH to task on one particular point—not because it is necessarily representative in an overall sense of the large and important body of work that he has created, but because it relates to issues that are widely debated in Russian studies at the moment.

The enduring existence of communitarianism in Russian culture is something about which GH has written, directly and indirectly, on many occasions. Much of his work has looked...