Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union by Michael David-Fox

Abstract

Reviewed by: Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union by Michael David-Fox Balázs Apor (bio) Michael David-Fox. Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union. 296pp. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015. ISBN 9780822963677. Michael David-Fox’s most recent book, Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russian and the Soviet Union, is a collection of essays that revolves around a cluster of interconnected key concepts in Soviet cultural history: modernity, ideology, culture, and transnational entanglements. Although each chapter in the book presents a self-contained narrative, the essays remain closely linked on a conceptual level, and they all circle around the problem of the specificity of the Soviet experience. Was the Soviet project the product of a distinctively Russian historical process, or was it predominantly shaped by broader European developments? The dichotomy of Russian particularism and shared European modernity frames the overall narrative of the book, even if the dilemma is not analyzed in all the chapters in equal detail. The enigma of Soviet modernity is approached from different vantage points and is discussed with the help of a variety of methodologies. Parts 1 and 2 of the book take an abstract, theoretical approach to explore the fundamental concepts of Soviet cultural history (modernity, ideology, intelligentsia, and cultural revolution). The chapters engage with the most pertinent philosophical, historiographical, and sociological debates on the relevant themes while offering a thorough study—relying on the methods of the German Begriffsgeschichte school—of the historical uses of the most important concepts. The last three chapters of the book, on the other hand, are based on empirical (archival) research and follow the patterns of conventional history writing even if they discuss less conventional topics, such as the significance of transnational cultural encounters in the formation of Soviet culture in the interwar period. While the essays in the book are stand-alone inquiries into various aspects of Soviet cultural history, they are connected by a common thread: the notion of Soviet modernity. In the first two chapters David-Fox offers a detailed, sophisticated, and highly original scrutiny of the concept and the scholarly debates it provoked throughout the 20th century. The author argues convincingly that the term is organically tied to age-old discussions about the nature of the Soviet system. Such debates orbit around the question of whether Communism in Russia was the result of a unique, indigenous historical trajectory or whether its evolution was shaped by broader European—and Europeanizing—tendencies. David-Fox provides a critical interpretation of the most significant intellectual—mostly historical—engagements with the notion of Soviet modernity, including the totalitarian-revisionist controversy and the [End Page 153] modernity–neotraditionalism debate of the early 2000s. The author claims that despite the richness and complexity of theoretical contributions to these debates, scholars have generally remained unable to move beyond the conceptual binary of modernity versus traditionalism. The book proposes a way out of this intellectual standstill by advocating the application of Shmuel N. Eisenstadt’s notion of “multiple modernities” to the Soviet case. In line with Eisenstadt’s thesis, David-Fox challenges the universal validity of the “Western model” and argues that modern transformations could also be triggered by indigenous social and political developments. In the Soviet case such developments—for example, the emergence of illiberal regimes with a modernizing agenda—often deviated from Occidental paths to the modern age. Chapter 3 traces the evolution of one specific feature of Russian/Soviet modernity: the merging of etatist convictions with intellectual aspirations to radically reconfigure social structures. As David-Fox demonstrates, the emergence of “intelligentsia-statist modernity” in the Russian/Soviet context testifies to the influence of European values on the mindset of Russian intellectuals as well as to the remarkable persistence of unique, culture-specific characteristic features. The notion of “cultural revolution”—analyzed in detail in chapter 4—further highlights the symbiotic relationship between the intelligentsia’s modernizing agendas and its longing for an interventionist state. In an attempt to explore the multifaceted nature of the notion, David-Fox draws a line of continuity linking early 20th-century Bolshevik ideas of cultural transformation to the Stalinist...