Leopold Haimson: His Historical Vision and Historiographical Legacy

Abstract

515 Ab Imperio, 4/2010 David McDONALD LEOPOLD HAIMSON: HIS HISTORICAL VISION AND HISTORIOGRAPHICAL LEGACY The recent death of Leopold Haimson marks the passing of yet one more member of that founding generation of postwar scholars who established the main currents of NorthAmerican historiography on the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. In recent years, our wing of the profession has lost a series of historians from this cohort trained during the onset of the Cold War. The list of these recent losses includes Richard Stites, Moshe Lewin, Martin Malia, Robert “Bill” Daniels, and Haimson’s one-time friend and longtime colleague, Marc Raeff. If these scholars did not literally found the specialty of Russian history in North America, they certainly stand out as the field’s decisive shapers. Almost all of them were the product of the remarkable mobilization of resources – intellectual, institutional, and, not least financial – that took place at the beginning of the Cold War, as the American government sought to create a cadre of experts who could explain or interpret the country’s new adversary, their former Soviet partner in the GrandAlliance against theAxis. This rapid expansion of a new area of research occurred in tandem with the general growth of higher education in the United States, driven first by the GI Bill and later by the “baby boom.”Almost overnight, there sprang up across the country institutes devoted to the study of the Soviet Union, bringing in 516 David McDonald, Leopold Haimson: His Historical Vision... their train scores of positions in departments of history, political science, anthropology, sociology, economics, language, and literature. By the time of the Twentieth Party Conference in 1956 and the launching of Sputnik the following year, an intellectual infrastructure had come into being, with hubs at Harvard and Columbia, Indiana, and the Pacific Coast, dedicated to research in and the teaching of Soviet, Russian, or Slavic Studies. Haimson played his own part in this process, helping establish a center for Russian research at the University of Chicago.1 If all of these historians, many of whom issued from Mikhail Karpovich’s legendary Harvard seminar, shone as luminaries or lions in their own right, one can fairly argue that Haimson exerted a uniquely significant impact on American debates over the interpretation of late imperial and early Soviet history.2 This influence stemmed in significant measure from the interpretive vision laid out in his first book The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA, 1955), but even more from his subsequent work, most notably a series of seminal articles published in the 1960s,3 as well as later contributions to volumes he edited on themes as diverse as the 1 David C. Engerman. KnowYour Enemy: The Rise and Fall ofAmerica’s Soviet Experts. NewYork, 2009. Of course, as is well known, as the Cold War continued into the troubled 1960s, differences over ideology and orientation surfaced within this part of the academy as it did elsewhere as scholars took sides in a university environment increasingly polarized over questions of domestic policy, the Vietnam conflict, and the U.S. role in international politics. Engerman discusses the effects of these conflicts on the development of a now-maturing “Soviet studies,” and particularly the origins of “revisionism” to whose emergence Haimson’s publications made a contribution (Engerman. Pp. 307-308). 2 On the Karpovich seminar in its Cold War context, seeAlla Zeide. Creating a “Space of Freedom”: Michail Mikhailovich Karpovich and Russian Historiography in America // Ab Imperio. 2007. No. 1. Pp. 241-300. Also, Engerman. Know Your Enemy. Pp. 154158 , who also discusses Isaiah Berlin’s impact at Harvard. On Haimson specifically, see Engerman. Pp. 168-171, 307-308. For Haimson’s own autobiographical and professional life, see two interviews published since 2005: O vremeni i o sebe // Otechestvennaia istoriia. 2005. No. 6. Pp. 185-197; Michael David Fox, Peter Holquist,Alexander Martin. An Interview with Leopold Haimson // Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. 2007. Vol. 8. No. 1. Pp. 1-2. 3 Leopold Haimson. The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-17 // Slavic Review. 1964. Vol. 23. No. 4. Pp. 619-642; 1965. Vol. 24. No. 1. Pp. 1-22...