Historians across Borders: Writing American History in a Global Age

9. Reflections from Russia

174 Chapter 9 Reflections from Russia ivan kurilla Russia occupies an unusual position with respect to the European historiography of the United States. First, put bluntly, there is the question of whether it belongs to Europe as Europe is usually understood. Russia is an Asian country as well as a European one, belonging, for example, to the Eurasian Economic Community. Russian scholars have at times been regarded as part of European academia and at other times not, such as during the Cold War. So do Russian historians of the North American colonies and the United States belong to the community of scholars discussed in this book, or do we contemplate European historians from the outside? Or, to put it another way, are Soviet and Russian historiography European? There are arguments for both positions. In principle it should be possible to develop a historiography that stops at the current borders of the European Union or the Schengen zone, but even in this case one would need to remember that the period of the most rapid development of the study of U.S. history in Europe coincided with the Cold War, when the continent was split apart and political forces heavily influenced American studies. (This helps to explain why Russia for many years now has had a large contingent of American history specialists.) Second, Russia has developed its own way of approaching the United States, its own counter-Orientalism (playing on Edward Said’s term), its distinctive view of the American past. Soviet studies of American history were numerous; hundreds of monographs were published; tens of Reflections from Russia | 175 dissertations were defended. The Soviet version of American history became a kind of hegemonic discourse in Eastern Europe during the Cold War and has subsequently been rejected by the majority of those countries, at least in the political sphere, while surviving in the works of some academics. Finally, my favorite (constructivist) methodology obliges me to be attentive to the use of academic history in constructing national identities . In Russian studies of the North American colonies and the United States, one can locate the elements of identity politics; indeed, such elements can be clearly seen. This book in its turn is an attempt to research or perhaps shape some “European” approach to U.S. history. The authors do not regard themselves as participating in a great project of constructing a European common identity, but others of us may be intrigued by what their exercise could suggest about the possible emergence of “Europeanness.” Historians study where and why the American and European experiences were different and similar, thus engaging in the debate on national identity. Going a bit further into identity analysis, we find an intriguing problem. When inserting Russia into the equation, we get three identities , with Europe in the center and the United States and Russia providing the two extremes of European history, representing virtual limits that demarcate Europe’s shape (Europe being “neither Russia nor America ”). Russian and American world views differed markedly. Russia and the Soviet Union on the one hand and the United States on the other played the mutual roles of significant Others, helping to define the national identity of each for the greater part of the twentieth century . Europe (as commonly understood) played a lesser role in the creation of these two polar identities in the Cold War standoff. Such intensive use of U.S. history and politics in Soviet discourse made the connection between the Soviet domestic agenda and the academic study of the United States closer in the Soviet Union than in other European countries. Russian and European scholars studying U.S. history pursue many common themes. However, they also have differences. Without digging deeply into Russian historiography, let us recall some turning points. In December 1825, a group of Russian nobles mutinied against the new emperor, Nicholas I, demanding the introduction of a constitution. They elaborated several constitutional projects with clear resemblances to the U.S. Constitution. The Decembrist rebellion was smashed; many 176 | Chapter 9 participants were executed or exiled to Siberia. However, their interest in U.S. models prompted one scholar to characterize the rebellion as “a mutiny of Americanists.”1 Russian interest in U.S. history took academic shape in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the two countries had similar problems and political and social agendas, including slavery and serfdom, territorial expansion, and social reform. These issues...