Coming to Terms with the Past... and with One's Older Colleagues

Abstract

The sentence that surprised me most in Sheila Fitzpatrick's essay was her statement that once she had sought to write history objectively and dispassionately. For a moment I thought that such an endeavor had gone out of fashion with Leopold Ranke, but then I remembered the strength of the positivist orientation in Western social science in recent decades. Since I myself believe that the closest we can come to objectivity in the study of human relations is to become fully aware of our own subjectivities and to state them clearly, I am pleased to note that Fitzpatrick has shed this illusion. Historiography confronts the past and seeks to come to terms with it. It may do so by celebrating the past or repudiating it; it may see it as a tragedy, comedy, heroic tale or farce. Each of these attitudes or moods reflects a stand that the historian is taking about present-day society and politics, an endorsement of some group or party and an attempt to discredit another. As Pokrovskii put it, all history-writing is a projection of present-day politics into the past. That is one reason why the same events are re-examined anew by each successive cohort and why it is the bloody, shameful, unsavory episodes that exert particular fascination; in American historiography that would be the history of slavery, our relations with Native Americans and with Central America, and labor history, to name but a few. Historians continually re-write history. That rewriting involves, among other things, working with new approaches, new models and concepts, and rejecting the very terms used by those historians that are being repudiated. This rejection is necessary because methodological devices, from vocabulary to broad conceptions of what is and what is not important, pre-order reality, shape perceptions, highlight some facts or relations, and obscure others. For the past thirty years or more, students of Soviet history and politics have doubted, challenged and assaulted the ogre of the totalitarianism concept. The ogre has been killed many times, but its ghost still spooks many mindsamong scholars, political leaders and people's representatives, among journalists as well as the general public-and the contest continues to rage. The beast seems to be dying only very slowly. The totalitarian model has its roots in myth as well as reality, as Fitzpatrick clearly recognizes. Myth may be too strong a word; pre-conception may be more apposite. I would list several such preconceptions, among them traditional Western views of Russia, her government and its relations to the narod;