Memorials, Memorials: Closing in on the 1917 Centenary

Centenaries have long been recognized as opportune times to reassess major historical events. The forum on the Russian Revolution in this issue comes out not long before the 1917 centenary and anticipates more retrospectives planned for the year 2017. The years just past have also been studded with important jubilees, most notably the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I. The field is now benefiting from the many articles and books that emerged from conferences addressing the causes and consequences of the Great War. Those centenaries—of World War I and the revolution—have already prompted deeper reflection in the wider scholarly community, as can be seen in a recent discussion of Joshua Sanborn’s new book, Imperial Apocalypse.¹ Participants in this issue’s forum on 1917 also reflect on the causal relationship between war and revolution. Those events provide chronological bookends for a wide-ranging discussion that stretches from the collapse of the Russian Empire during World War I to the traumas of the revolution and Civil War.

Naturally, the essays also suggest several other lenses through which scholars have viewed 1917: province versus center, the relationship of symbols and language to material reality and politics, the Russian and Soviet scholarly tradition versus Anglo-American scholarship, and the relationship of state coercion to demands for social and economic justice from below.

While recounting historiographical fashions and trends in both the Soviet Union and the West, the essays also draw attention to the contingency of historical scholarship itself. Scholarly subjectivities and experiences have clearly played a role in guiding the thinking of many historians. Inspired by the connection between the revolutionary past and the Soviet present, Russian thinking about 1917 in the late 1980s presumed that historical insight might reveal the path not taken—the one that might have averted, it was hoped, the Soviet Union’s enfeeblement in the so-called age of “stagnation” and its collapse under Mikhail Gorbachev. Knowingly or not, Western scholars also pursued their various political and personal agendas, seeking the popular roots of revolution or, conversely, of a totalitarian system in the making embedded within the ideology and certain state practices. All of this suggests, as Donald Raleigh puts it, “the merits of having historians see themselves as historical” (788). Raleigh echoes the famous words of Charles Beard’s 1933 address to the American Historical Association (AHA):

The supreme issue before the historian now is the determination of his attitude to the disclosures of contemporary thought. He may deliberately evade them for reasons pertaining to personal, economic, and intellectual comfort, thus joining the innumerable throng of those who might have been but were not. Or he may proceed to examine his own frame of reference, clarify it, enlarge it by acquiring knowledge of greater areas of thought and events, and give it consistency of structure by a deliberate conjecture respecting the nature or direction of the vast movements of ideas and interests called world history.²

Beard’s call to examine the relationship between the object of historical research and the scholar’s personal position has a special resonance in our field. As any scholar on a research trip to Russia knows, tensions between Russia and the West frequently intrude into the research process, especially when it comes to a topic as ideologically charged as 1917.

The connection between subjectivity and history writing is most apparent in Boris Kolonitskii’s contribution. Rejecting a position of phantom objectivity, Kolonitskii explicitly addresses the political and professional challenges that brought him to his research program. Kolonitskii both studied 1917 and lived through a radical reevaluation of the meaning of 1917 for the Soviet world he inhabited. The result was particularly fertile and fortuitous for the field in the 1990s, as he cross-fertilized archival research with various strands of Soviet and Western historiography. Meanwhile, as Raleigh suggests, global ideological shifts influenced a radical change in perspective for Westerners too.

Beyond the issue of the historian’s subjectivity, the authors illustrate the astounding body of scholarship that has resulted from the opening of provincial and central archives with the collapse of the Soviet Union...