Remembering Natal′ia Pirumova: On Writing History in the Stalin and Post-Stalin Eras

Remembering Natal'ia Pirumova:

On Writing History in the Stalin and Post-Stalin Eras

Natal'ia Mikhailovna Pirumova (1923–97) was an illustrious member of a constellation of Russian historians who spent their youths under Soviet power, studied in Soviet institutions, inhabited prestigious positions in Soviet cultural life during the post-Stalinist period and yet maintained in some considerable measure their inner freedom from officially-mandated, widely-accepted ideological guidelines for the Soviet historical profession. Among these scholars were the early Russianists Dmitrii Sergeevich Likhachev, Ruslan Grigor'evich Skrynnikov, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Zimin, and Iakov Solomonovich Lur'e; the Leningrad disciples of Boris Aleksandrovich Romanov – Boris Vasil'evich Anan'ich, Rafael Sholomovich Ganelin, Valentina Grigor'evna Chernukha, Iurii Borisovich Solov'ev, Valentin Semonovich D'iakin and Aleksei Nikolaevich Tsamutali; the Moscow-centered "school" of Petr Andreevich Zaionchkovskii, which numbered 12 doctors of science and 50-odd candidates of sciences, among them the prominent essayist Natan Iakovlevich Eidel'man, as well as the well-known p olitical

historians Valentina Aleksandrovna Tvardovskaia and Larisa Georgievna Zakharova; and the Tartu school of semioticians led by Iurii Mikhailovich Lotman. To this roster one might add the names of two scholars specializing in Soviet history – the prolific student of the 1917 revolutions, Vitalii Ivanovich Startsev, and the analyst of peasant society, Viktor Petrovich Danilov. Nor should one forget the polymath Nikolai Nikolaevich Pokrovskii, who investigated the history of Old Believer communities in imperial and Soviet Russia.

These scholars occupied the highly contested terrain where the informed perspectives of individual researchers sometimes diverged from or clashed  with party imperatives. Under such unpropitious external circumstances, they carried out research in imaginative, occasionally highly idiosyncratic ways, advancing conclusions that modified or even challenged orthodox Soviet interpretations. Yet these scholars were not dissidents in the Western sense: they did not publicly denounce the Soviet system; they did not generally refuse to participate in the routinized life of the Soviet institutions they inhabited; they neither cut off contact with academic bureaucrats nor refused to do tasks assigned by their collectives. On the other hand, these figures cannot be fairly accused of ideological khameleonstvo or fliugerstvo – that is, they neither sought to protect themselves by blending invisibly into the prevailing background nor to advance themselves cynically by altering their views to catch fairer political winds. Indeed, they displayed remarkable consistency in their methods of investigation and probity in reporting their findings.

These scholars seem to have shared a vision of historical objectivity that they constructed, at least in part, from pre-revolutionary scholarly models. The Zaionchkovskii school, for example, owed much to Iurii Vladimirovich Got'e, a conservative-liberal student of Kliuchevskii whose work on self-government and "gentry civilization" mixed social, political, and intellectual history.¹ The Leningrad group was inspired by the pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg school and a host of individual historians from the older generation, especially Aleksandr Evgen'evich Presniakov, Aleksandr Sergeevich Lappo-Danilevskii, Sergei Fedorovich Platonov, and Boris Aleksandrovich Romanov. These influences were acknowledged in Tsamutali's books on Russian historiography and in Anan'ich's personal testimony.² In both Moscow and Leningrad, knowledge of the pre-revolutionary historiographical tradition encouraged individual historians to locate themselves on what Zakharova called the "family tree of scholars" (rodoslovie uchenykh), whose branches reached far into the Russian and West European past.³ Such self-definition bolstered these scholars' self-confidence by helping them to see themselves as outgrowths of a tradition with broader geographical and ideological roots than those acknowledged by the Soviet Weltanschauung.

By studying the Russian past, these scholars also came to define themselves as part of a national historical-linguistic culture more ancient than Soviet culture and having a longer record...