Kritika Comes of Age!: Twenty-One Years and Counting …

We are on the eve of an important year for Kritika—just a few months from now, we turn 21. It is an important year, a coming of age, not to mention the legal drinking age in many parts of the United States. So, in the spirit of the moment, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on how we got here and express our gratitude to all of you who have helped us along the way.

We should start by being precise: Kritika as a whole is not turning 21. It is the current edition of the journal that is having the birthday. Our predecessor, the original Kritika, was founded by Russian history graduate students at Harvard in 1964 as a forum for offering longer than conventional reviews of Soviet historical scholarship that tended to be ignored by Western journals. Since the book reviewers were those very same grad students and their colleagues and successors, the journal also became a valuable training ground for critical and editorial practice. By the time the publication closed in 1984—as one of the founders, Edward L. Keenan, noted in the first issue of the new Kritika—some 85 students had published reviews in the journal, 62 of whom went on to become college professors. Some of those—like Keenan himself and Richard Pipes, the true spiritus movens of the journal—taught at Harvard itself. Many of the rest also pursued careers related to Russian and Soviet studies.¹ In this way, the first Kritika, Kritika the Elder, had a clear impact on the Russian history field in the United States. When our new Kritika was founded, it aimed to extend this tradition.

The times were different, however, and the structure and ambitions of the new journal were different as well. For starters, when Kritika relaunched in 2000, there was no longer a USSR, hence the adoption of a new subtitle underscoring the journal's focus on "Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History."² Also, although young, like the first generation, the new founders—Marshall Poe, Michael David-Fox, and Peter Holquist, all of them under 40 at the time—taught at different universities and designed their Kritika to feature not only long reviews of recent Russian and Western scholarship but also original research articles, effectively guaranteeing that the new journal would have a far wider purview and range of contributors than the original version.

So much seemed to be unfolding in the field at the time, partly in reaction to the momentous changes of the 1990s—unprecedented access to archives across the former USSR, new East-West collaborations, new scholarship in languages from Estonian to Tatar, and a general uptick in publishing in Russian history in Western countries—that it seemed like a perfect time for a new journal. Plus, the hopefulness of the new millennium was in the air. The new editors were committed to building on the achievements of the past, while at the same time shaking things up. As they wrote in their initial "From the Editors," "If we were … to put all of Kritika's goals together into a single overriding aim, it would be to preserve and promote in Russian Studies the vehicles and virtues of intellectual exchange" by overcoming, among other things, the "insularities of national particularism, hyperspecialization, fads, herd mentalities, close-minded disciplinarity, and, last but not least, garden-variety academic myopia."³

The first editors also laid out a discrete research agenda, underscoring that they aimed to promote "comparatively-informed and international history" as a way of undoing the blinders of national history, to introduce "medieval, early modern, and long-term perspectives into the mainstream … as an antidote to chronological short-sightedness," and to bring together "approaches and perspectives from various fields and subfields in order to expand disciplinary horizons."⁴ This is quite a mouthful—and a lot to take on. Now that we have been at it for 21 years and have made it to the verge of our first legal tipple, it is fair to ask: Has Kritika preserved and promoted intellectual exchange? Have we helped bring down...