Stuck on Communism: Memoir of a Russian Historian by Lewis H. Siegelbaum (review)

In 1999 Jeremy D. Popkin published an article titled "Historians on the Autobiographical Frontier." In the piece, which would later be developed into a comprehensive monograph,¹ he presented his observations regarding the (re)emergence of interest among professional historians in writing memoirs in the late 1980s. He concludes, "Historians' autobiographies do remind us that history is written by human beings, all of whom have their own unique personal histories and their own individual reasons for finding meaning in the history they write."² The memoir of the leading American Sovietologist Lewis H. Siegelbaum was published by Cornell University Press in 2019. It appeared in the Northern Illinois University series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, edited by Christine D. Worobec. In the introduction, the author explains the provocative, catchy title and also raises the same question that Popkin did: on intersections between history writing and autobiographies and the meaning that historians' memoirs could have for themselves as well as for their readers:

Writing the memoir thus proved a not entirely unfamiliar exercise. As with most historical writing, I found the material engaging in a dialectical dance with the themes/arguments, each determining and delimiting the appropriateness of the other. Issues of sequentiality, causality, and consequentiality – so central to the history enterprise – cropped up early in preparing the text. The notion that no matter what historians take as their subject they are always writing about themselves suddenly took on a retrospective validity I could not have imagined earlier.

(Pp. 4–5)

Following familiar patterns, the memoir is organized chronologically into eight chapters with an introduction and an epilogue ("Unfinished Thoughts"); unlike the majority of (nonhistorians') memoirs, it also includes extensive notes (Pp. 171–193). Popkin addressed historians' uneasiness with the autobiographical genre: "This freedom to write in a non-academic style comes at the price of abandoning scholarly conventions about documentation, a departure that causes some authors evident anxiety."³ Siegelbaum is one such author, so he documents his memoirs painstakingly and cites his own studies, his personal and working diaries, the lecture notes he took as a student, syllabi of courses he was enrolled in as well as those that he taught, his personal and professional correspondence, conference programs, conversations, other historians' mentions of him, reviews of his studies, and so forth.

The memoir "provides an account of an academic self, shaped by family background, the political tenor of changing times, and multiple mentors" (P. 4) from his birth in the Bronx in 1949 through to retirement from his professor emeritus position at Michigan State University in 2018. This is a self-reflective story of professional becoming with all the necessary components thereof. We learn of the author's student years and of his fateful decision to become a historian and to study imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. Everyone and everything that has influenced and shaped his professional growth and choices is contained in these pages: ideological engagement ("love for communism"), university professors and their courses, books that he read, fellow historians and his discussions with them, collaborations, conference conversations, research trips, and, importantly, libraries and archives. The author remembers his unrealized projects, explains his versatile interests in history, and depicts in detail how his major studies and projects came to life and were received by academia.

This professional autobiography is part of other stories and also fits into much broader contexts. The author's family is included in it – parents and grandparents, two wives, and sons – but they are given primary focus only insofar as they are important for the historian's story. Therefore, he allows more space for his Marxist father than for his loving mother; he speaks much more about his second wife, with whom he also shared a professional life, than about his first, who gave birth to his two sons. The author's personal story is part of the history of American...