Imagining the West in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union

Chapter 12. Conclusion: Transnational History and The East-West Divide

258 This volume has preseNted ten chapters on the cultural and transnationalhistoryofRussia /USSRandEastCentralEurope.Fourofthemcentered on the USSR, two on East Germany, two on the Czech lands or Czechoslovakia , one on Hungary, and one on Poland. Long gone are the days when Russia and Eastern Europe were regularly studied in tandem and formed part of a more or less coherent area studies field. Since the breakup of the communist bloc in 1989, geopolitical, institutional, and academic imperatives have pushed the Russian and East European fields apart. The direct cross-fertilization present in this collection is now something of a rarity. To be sure, geopolitics was an even worse academic organizer during the Cold War than it is now, and it made little sense then for East European studies to be so exclusively linked to the Russian field. At the same time, current politics and the configuration of academic fields should not be allowed to handicap the study of the past. It is now far less likely for Russianists to be versed in East European historiography and vice versa; the dislocation is particularly meaningful for the communist period, when the histories of the two regions were most closely intertwined. Even in Germany, where the institutionalized field of “Osteuropa” incorporates Russia into the concept of Eastern Europe, the history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) is commonly cHaPter 12 conclusIon tranSnational HiStory and tHe eaSt-WeSt diVide Michael David-Fox peteri text3.indd 258 8/16/10 10:46 AM conclusion 259 studied either within a German-German framework or with surprisingly insufficient reference to directly related Soviet historiography. This book represents an attempt at fruitful reintegration.1 Only two of the ten chapters deal with the precommunist period, but each plays a crucial role in the volume, either by raising important issues and patterns in East European and Russian relationships with the “West” or suggesting how they were inherited or reconfigured by communist regimes and societies. Karen Gammelgaard’s study of Czech travelogues demonstrates some of the complexities of grappling with travel accounts and mental mapping, as in the course of her chapter she engages questions of genre, biography, audience , text, context, publication history, and, last but not least, the travelers’ experiences. Most interesting here is that Gammelgaard engages the “West” not, say, in regard to Britain or France but in terms of disillusioned Czech intellectuals’ views of Russia, which they explicitly or implicitly portrayed as non-European. By reversing the positive view of Russia conditioned by the Slavic solidarity prevalent in the Czech lands in the nineteenth century, the Czech travelers positioned their own country as part of Europe or the West. This first chapter suggests right away that the West not merely held the status of an external “other” in the countries of Eastern Europe but was readily accessible as an internal self-identification as well. Even in Russia, where variations of the classic split between Slavophiles and Westernizers were repeated for over a century and a half after the two groups appeared in the 1840s, Russians routinely portrayed themselves as European when it came, for example, to the non-Russian nationalities of the empire. In the communist period, in the words of Péteri, “the Occident was also part of the self; it asserted itself within, and appeared to be ahead rather than behind.” Second, Gamelgaard’s disillusioned Czechs inevitably portrayed Russia with another national group centrally in mind: the Germans, the familiar and traditional object of the Czech national struggle within the Habsburg monarchy . These kinds of triangles, and even more many-sided geometric figures, have been quite common in East-West imaginaries too frequently treated in terms of binary oppositions. Finally, Gammelgaard demonstrates, no matter how some tried, it was difficult if not impossible to disaggregate discussions of culture and identity, on the one hand, from the struggles of politics and foreign policy, on the other. All these insights that emerge from Gammelgaard’s treatment of the Czech travelogues are relevant and applicable to later periods, including the communist era. Incidentally, in the 1920s and 1930s, it was common knowledge among Soviet diplomats and cultural officials that the views of Sovietophilic Czechs were conditioned by the long-standing tradition of peteri text3.indd 259 8/16/10 10:46 AM 260 michael david-fox Russophilia. Circa 1948, it became a central communist strategy to promote Slavism and portray Czechoslovakia not as part of the West...