From the Editors: Moving on, Back to the Future

17 Ab Imperio, 4/2007 From the EDITORS It is a strange feeling to live in a country of déjà vu. In Russia, for a number of years already, it has been the Groundhog’s Day of the year 1975: police provocations against a handful of dissidents, the omni-present ideological curtain of “sovereign democracy,” and the opportunism of the masses overwhelmed with the local version of consumerism, pampered by insane oil prices. The state – allegedly weak, even impotent throughout the 1990s – controls the economy and “re-asserts” itself internationally against the background of a setback of the international reputation of the US. Whether this development is part of the larger, global trend of autocratic consumerism or a peculiarity of Russia’s post-Communist development owed to her “undemocratic” genetic cultural code is largely irrelevant. The problem of the historian’s responsibility, or, to be more precise, of one’s need to be attuned to the political context, is not. It is indeed uncomfortable, even disconcerting and disturbing, to realize that at least some responsibility for the Russian “revenge of the past” should be shared by many of us in the field of Russian history, both in Russia and outside it. Whatever happened to the “Weimar Russia” rhetoric of the 1990s, by the early 2000s, the past as it was presented in the profession came to haunt us. MOVING ON, BACK TO THE FUTURE 18 From the Editors One of the historiographic achievements of the 1990s was the ultimate discreditation of the “sacred cow” of Soviet historiography and the dominant American tradition of history-writing: the cult of radical intelligentsia and obshchestvennost’ as the embodiment of Modernity and progress in Russian history. A well-received study delivered a blow to the myth of sacred and sacrificial revolutionary terrorism, while another influential current revealed a Foucauldian strive for symbolical power behind the seemingly benign and virtuous service to the people by Russian professionals. These studies were followed by the deconstruction of the entire culture of “Underground Russia” and by attempts to reveal a darker side of Russian modernism, which had allegedly evolved directly to the early Stalinist utopia. Valerii Podoroga’s early calls “to use Foucault against the empire” appeared naïve at a time when deconstruction of modernity reigned in academia and Russian humanities amazingly quickly forgot what they knew of Marxist tradition. Various editions of “civilizational approach” dominated the scene, ranging from “politarism” to “Eastern modes of production.” The best studies of the past are being written with a message for the present . We thought that the key for stability of the new post-1991 democratic Russia was to get rid of the century-old legacy of ideological dictate, to set its citizens free of any collective and collectivist patterns of behavior, to make them focus on their private lives and private property. In the wake of the turmoil of late perestroika and the early 1990s, this was seen as a sine qua non of political stability and economic prosperity. Somehow, the notorious year 1913 and the then recently rehabilitated epoch of bezvremenie came to be seen as an ideal of the future in the past. “Normalcy” of Russian history – its Europeanization under the Tsars or modernization under the Soviets – transferred from the sphere of academic debates on the Sonderweg to the political air of the country. Well, we praised a large-scale political demobilization in the past, and we got one in the present. Even the Fourth State Duma with its Progressive bloc appears as a torch of parliamentarism in contemporary Russia. There are certainly many other causes for the present-day state of affairs, but we should focus on the one that directly concerns our profession. Regardless of the personal ideological preferences and biases of historians, there was a fundamentally flawed methodological assumption built into much of the historical studies in the 1990s and early 2000s. The realities of Russia’s (and other post-Soviet countries’) transition in the 1990s should have given us a hint to how a semi-modernized, under-institutionalized heterogenous society operates and evolves, and how it escapes the categorizing power of 19 Ab Imperio, 4/2007 modern social sciences. The master...