Interview with Ronald Grigor Suny

Abstract

Interview with Ronald Grigor Suny Ronald Grigor Suny We renew our interview series this fall with Ronald Grigor Suny, who recently retired from the University of Michigan as William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Political Science. As our field faces unprecedented challenges and we seek to decenter and decolonize our work, it seems like an ideal time to hear from Suny. In a career spanning nearly 60 years, he has foregrounded the experiences of non-Russian peoples in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. When Suny entered our field, scholars considered nationalism and nationality frameworks of analysis and non-Russian histories to be inconsequential. Suny's work challenged these dominant paradigms, placing nationality and non-Russians at the center of conversations about identity, class, labor, genocide, Marxism, and emotions. He pushed us to recognize the ways in which the Soviet Union became "the crucible of nations."1 Over his career, Suny has worked across disciplines and fields, published prolifically in academic and public venues, shaped generations of students and scholars, and offered countless lectures and media interviews around the world. Born in 1940, Suny once described the milieu in which he was raised as "Armenian America." His paternal grandparents shared a rich history in the Caucasus (his grandfather is the renowned composer and musicologist Grikor Suni). It is with this side of his family that we can find both the locus of Suny's interest in the Soviet Union and his leftist politics. His father—who as a child experienced the Red Army's invasion of Tiflis, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Georgia—was Suny's first history teacher. Inspired by his father's political orientation, the young Suny gave a school presentation on the Soviet Union's efforts to build socialism, which, at the height of McCarthyism, both horrified his teacher and saw him renamed "Comrade Suny" at school. Suny's maternal grandparents, meanwhile, immigrated to the United States from Turkey; his grandmother left after her sister and others were murdered during the 1890s massacres of Armenians in Diyarbakır, and his grandfather [End Page 693] migrated following the 1909 massacres of Armenians in Adana. Relatives who stayed behind were murdered in the Armenian Genocide. Suny's immense bibliography, including more than twenty books and countless articles, testifies to his boundless intellectual curiosity and innovative ideas. Drawing on Russian, Armenian, Georgian, Turkish, French, and German sources, through his work he has shared untold histories with his readers. His first book, The Baku Commune, 1917–1918, explored the intersection of class, nationality, empire, and Bolshevism in this multinational and dynamic city.2 The fall of this radical Bolshevik experiment foreshadowed the violence that was yet to come. In articles and monographs, including The Making of the Georgian Nation and Looking toward Ararat, Suny explored cultural, social, and political transformations as well as memory politics in the South Caucasus region, drawing out in particular the emergence of nationalism and national consciousness in these spaces.3 In operationalizing nation alongside more traditional categories of Soviet history, Suny has led historians to understand the importance of the USSR. His A State of Nations, co-edited with Terry Martin, solidified nationality as a fundamental building block of imperial and Soviet identities and politics, and The Revenge of the Past showed how nation could end the USSR just as it had sustained it for decades.4 Even when Suny adopted a wide lens—as in The Soviet Experiment and Russia's Empires, co-authored with Valerie Kivelson—he remained focused on drawing out the multinational histories of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union.5 More recently, in Stalin (2020), Suny revisited the dominant themes of his first book—Social Democracy, the revolutionary movement, and the South Caucasus—to explore the story of the Georgian Marxist who went on to rule the Soviet Union for three decades.6 Suny won the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Book Prize in 2022 and Honorable Mention for the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize in 2021 for this book. [End Page 694] Although much of Suny's career has been dedicated to the Russian imperial and Soviet worlds, his oeuvre extends to...