An Interview with Lewis H. Siegelbaum

Every generation of historians has its own distinctive profile, shaped by the historical context in which its members grew up, the academic orientation of their advisers, and their own family history. Lewis H. Siegelbaum, the Jack and Margaret Sweet Professor emeritus of History at Michigan State University, weaves together all three strands as he tells his story of personal and professional development. Siegelbaum entered graduate studies inspired, as he recounts here, by the leftist politics of both his family and the heady days of activism and protest against the Vietnam War. His intellectual interests were embedded in the history he lived: from Marxism and labor history to social history and material culture. Along the way, he penned studies that were essential reading for colleagues as well as graduate and undergraduate students.

Siegelbaum’s academic home was Michigan State University, where he taught from 1983 until 2018, but he actively pursued collaboration and contacts with graduate students and professors in areas that connected to his ever-expanding interests. Among graduate students at many different institutions, he gained a reputation as a generous mentor and supporter, inviting young scholars to participate in panels and then asking them to submit essays for collections. For the participants in those panels and essay collections, Siegelbaum’s support was essential to developing contacts and articles that ultimately helped land jobs and promotions, not to mention advancing scholarship in fruitful new directions.

The range of his publications spans the entire 20th century and includes groundbreaking works in labor history, social history, material culture, and the history of migrations and transnationalism. He is the author of books on industrial mobilization during World War I, the Stakhanovite movement of the 1930s, Soviet state and society in the 1920s, and the award-winning Cars for Comrades.¹ He is co-author with Leslie Page Moch of Broad Is My Native Land: Repertoires and Regimes of Migration in Russia’s Twentieth Century.² He has edited two books and co-edited six others, most recently Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands with Krista Goff.³ He also co-authored with James von Geldern the award-winning online sourcebook Seventeen Moments in Soviet History.⁴ The last, as much as Siegelbaum’s scholarship, illustrates one of the most distinctive features of his profile: his talent and penchant for collaboration and collegiality. The website has become an essential resource for instructors in Soviet history, providing readymade essays, primary sources, and compelling archival video footage. Thousands of students and instructors alike have saved time and money with this resource, creating a classroom learning environment that takes participants into the spirit and ethos of the distinctive periods in Soviet history.

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How did you get into this field? What were the most influential books you read as an undergraduate and/or graduate student?

The answer to the first question has changed over the years. I used to think it had to do with my family origins: my grandfathers hailed from Odessa and Riga and my step-grandfather grew up in Skvira, a town in Kiev Province. My maternal grandmother came from Kolomea (Kolomyia, in Ukrainian), a town in Galicia still under Habsburg rule when she left it around the turn of the century, and my father’s mother was from Białystok. Did I choose to pursue Russian history to learn more about my grandparents’ world? Not really. The impulse, I now am convinced, lay less in my connections to Russia’s Yiddish-speaking borderland Jewish minorities than to communism, and therefore in my father’s political orientation rather than his or my mother’s antecedents. Born in New York City in 1915, Morton (“Morty”) Siegelbaum entered City College in 1933 in the teeth of the Depression. Upon graduation in 1937, he became a social studies teacher in the New York City public school system. In college, he “flirted” (his word) with Trotskyism, but joined the Communist Party in 1939, the year of the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact. I always had trouble understanding how he could have done such a thing, especially as he frequently professed support for the Popular Front against...