Unrequited Love: Michel Vovelle’s Relations with Soviet and Post-Soviet Historians

Abstract

The author of this article analyses the history of the complex and contradictory relations of Michel Vovelle (1933–2018), an outstanding French researcher of the Revolution of the eighteenth century, with Russian historians in the Soviet and post-Soviet times. It is noted that, unlike most French left-wing historians from A. Sobul’s entourage, cooperation with whom was a priority for Soviet researchers, Vovelle invariably maintained a certain distance in relation to the latter: he did not publish his works in the USSR and did not go there for regular Russian-French colloquiums. The situation changed only when Vovelle, after Sobul’s death, became head of the scholarly programme of the Bicentennial of the French Revolution. In this capacity, he made his first visit to the USSR in 1982. However, despite the warmest reception given to him by Soviet historians, he, as his memoirs demonstrate, still tried to keep a certain distance in his relations with them and was not much interested in the real situation in Soviet historical science, limiting himself to reproducing stereotypes common in the foreign press. Even less did Vovelle like his arrival in the USSR in the year of the Bicentennial of the French Revolution, when at a large conference in Moscow held at the height of Perestroika, the ideas of left-wing French historians were sharply criticised not only by their Soviet colleagues but also by the general public. The negative impressions left from that visit to Moscow were apparently so strong that in subsequent years, Vovelle refrained from any active cooperation with historians of post-Soviet Russia. And only a meeting with many of them at the colloquium in Visile (2006) showed Vovelle that, despite ideological and methodological differences with him, his Russian colleagues were infinitely far from the militant anti-communism that dominated in Eastern Europe and that they were open to fruitful cooperation with left-wing historians of France. He was finally convinced of this by a visit to Moscow in the same year, which, unfortunately, turned out to be the last for him.