Soviet Studies Research Articles

T. H. Rigby Remembered

T. H. (Harry) Rigby (1925-2011) was the Sovietologist that everybody liked, regardless of political, national, of any other kind of dividing lines. It was easy to see why: he was such a benign person, friendly and unassuming, with a sly sense of humor, nonpolemical but willing to argue, generous in sharing his remarkable knowledge of Soviet politics. Everybody knew him, too, despite the fact that for most of his career he was based in Canberra, far away from the main centers of Soviet studies. An Australian with a gift for languages and a love of empirical research, he was a political scientist in the British tradition rather than the American. The words he wrote of his mentor, Leonard Schapiro, could equally be applied to himself he remarks how English Schapiro was (despite not being English by birth), with his suspicion of vague abstractions,... distrust of panaceas,... respect for hard facts, common sense and practical judgement and tooted attachment to tolerance, fairness and diversity. (1) Rigby's scholarly work was so universally approved that one might have expected it to be bland and middle-of-the-road, but not at all: in his own quiet and reasonable way, he was a trailblazer. Harry Rigby was born in Coburg, a working-class suburb of Melbourne, and educated in state schools, where his bent was toward languages. He worked briefly as a clerk in the Australian Taxation Department before being called up into the Australian Army. Serving in New Guinea and Morotai, he was a base wallah, assigned to clerical rather than combat duty, but consoled himself with the thought that it would probably be more interesting than the Taxation Department. Sympathetic to socialism and the Soviet Union on the basis of Soviet wartime achievements and his reading of Hewlett Johnson's The Socialist Sixth of the World, Rigby was one of many young Australian soldiers who briefly joined the Australian Communist Party before deciding its dogmatic tone was uncongenial and dropping out. (2) The low-key approach was typical of Harry--no breast-beating about Gods That Failed; no cutting-off of communist friends like the Australian political scientist and Soviet expert Lloyd Churchward; just a prudent silence about one aspect of his biography for the duration of the Cold War. Typical also (of Harry, not the Cold War) was the fact that it never caused him any real trouble. British Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency seemed not to care; Australia's Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) cared only marginally, and the Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB) was perhaps not even informed about it by the Australian Communist Parry, which after Harry's letter of resignation to the Coburg branch in 1947 seems to have forgotten all about him. A beneficiary of the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme (the Australian equivalent of the GI Bill), Rigby went to the University of Melbourne after the war, studying Russian with Nina Christesen and Politics with W. Macmahon Ball. As a political science student, he found both Marx and Max Weber appealing, although the Weberian influence was probably the deeper. (3) Equally important as an event of the postwar years was Harry's marriage in 1947 to Norma, a Coburg schoolmate who shared not only Harry's background but also his unusual ability to appreciate and adapt to all sorts of strange milieux, from Oxford to Moscow; for the next 64 years, they were to be inseparable. Their son Richard was born in 1948. In Harry's time--and in mine, too, a couple of decades later--what you did after taking a good Melbourne degree was to go overseas, preferably to Oxford or Cambridge. Harry went to London, a more sensible choice, and immediately met everyone in the then very small world of Soviet studies, which accommodated both the academic and intelligence communities of specialists. George Bolsover, director of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, was a man with a foot in both camps; in my time, 20 years later, he seemed like a sworn enemy of all types of intellectual activity, but Harry's memoir shows him in a slightly different light. …

Изучение привилегированных социальных групп древних кочевников Центральной Азии в контексте развития отечественной номадологии в 1960-е — начале 1990-х гг.

Изучение привилегированных социальных групп древних кочевников Центральной Азии в контексте развития отечественной номадологии в 1960-е — начале 1990-х гг.

MGIMO(U) School of Post Soviet Studies

The article evaluates the history and current work of Center for Post-Soviet Studies - one of analytical subdivisions of MGIMO (U) Institute of International Research.

Max Weber and Russia (Jyväskylä: Aleksanterei Series 2, 2010) by Vesa Oittinen (review)

[MWS 12.2 (2012) 273-274] ISSN 1470-8078 Book Reviews Max Weber and Russia (ed. Vesa Oittinen; Jyväskylä: Aleksanterei Series 2, 2010), 198pp. ISBN 978-952-10-5154-8. €20.00. This volume with its eleven contributions goes back to an international symposium ('Max Weber. Problems of Rationality and Russia') held in May 2007 by the Alek santerei Institute in Helsinki that brought together academics from Russia, Finland and the Netherlands. The eleven contributions, of rather uneven quality, handle the influence of Weber on research into the Soviet Union (Soviet studies), the reception of Weber's work in Russia, Weber's own studies on Russia and early Soviet history, the contribution of Weberian sociology in respect of the analysis of communist and post-communist Russia, the interconnection between Weber's sociology of religion and Orthodoxy, neo-Kan danism in Russia and Germany as well as the implications of the Weberian thesis of bureaucracy and rationalism on the present business culture of Russia. What strikes one first of all is that the authors almost always prefer to cite from mostly apocryphal editions that have been produced by some publisher in whatever version after the original copyright has lapsed. Almost no-one uses the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, which has been appearing since the beginning of the 1980s. Max Weber's writings on Russia are, in general, cited according to the shortened Eng lish edition, which to be sure is based on the Gesamtausgabe with its text-critical approach and commentary; in one case the republication of the original by a Koblenz publisher is full of printer's errors and errors of comprehension. Working with such a text would distress any philologist, but for the social scientist it is apparently a matter of indifference as to which Weber text is cited. The main thing is that Weber is in the title, and so everything will be fine. As with other greats and almost mythical figures of science one can generalize, prove and verify just about everything and nothing. Not only is one free in regard to the textual basis that is cited but also with regard to the date of composition of what ever text an author refers to. The monumental and monomanic 2005 Max Weber biography by Joachim Radkau is repeatedly referred to, where Weber's 'turn to the East' is a sudden and irrational jump into the unknown and is said to signify his 'love-hate relationship to Russia'. These statements have neither sufficient textual basis nor basis in the course of his life. Weber's interest in Russia came out of his acquaintanceship with some younger Russian academics who belonged to the Rus sian reading room in Heidelberg and his interest in questions of constitutional law which, as a jurist with a doctorate and habilitation, was a subject always close to him. The concept of 'love-hate' may be a useful concept for a practising psychotherapist, but academically it is close to nonsense.© Max Weber Studies 2012, Gifton House, 17 Malvern Road, London, E8 3LP. 274 Max Weber Studies Moreover, in none of the eleven contributions is a reference made to the almost complete edition of the private and academic correspondence of Max Weber. This is a shortcoming that remains incomprehensible because if one does pay close atten tion to the Weber correspondence there are several very important observations on his relationship to Russia and also his connections to Russian academics, who include Sergei Bulgakov, Bogdan Kistjakovski and Alexander Kaufman. On can of course, as the authors in this collection do, interpret and analyse Russia/the Soviet Union using Weberian ideas and concepts: with the sociology of domination, the concepts of charisma and bureaucracy and the rationalism thesis, or with 'ideal types' or whatever else is suggested by Weberian sociology. Thus, this is a volume about how and in what ways Weberian ideas can be applied to the analysis of the political, social and economic development of Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries. This is a thoroughly rewarding and meaningful under taking, but this volume, unfortunately, brings forth only little or no new conclusions and knowledge. One of the basic problems becomes clear in the concluding contribution...

Dorena Caroli, Histoire de la protection sociale en Union soviétique (1917‑1939)

Dorena Caroli has written a rich study of Soviet “social protection” in the first two decades of the fledgling Soviet regime. A historical treatment of this long‑neglected subject is particularly timely today, as Russian policy‑makers review the scope of their system of social protection. Imaginatively and thoroughly researched in archival, published and unpublished sources, Caroli’s book will be a “go‑to” resource for historians interested in social policy in inter‑war Russia. The book is o...

Moshe Lewin, 1921–2010

Moshe Lewin, 1921–2010 Sir Ian Kershaw (bio) I can't claim to have known Misha very closely. In fact, I did not meet him until 1991, when he was the main organizer of (and inspiration behind) an important conference, held in Philadelphia, comparing the historical development of Russia and Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries. Before then, Misha had been known to me only as the author of a brilliant book on the Soviet Union which I had frequently used with my students, his collection of essays published as The Making of the Soviet System.1 I was delighted, therefore, when I received the invitation to the Philadelphia conference. The conference brought together an array of outstanding specialists on Germany and on Russia/the Soviet Union from across the world, including a number of Russian scholars now able to travel freely and to offer their own accounts of the fall of the Soviet system. The conference went extremely well, producing some fascinating papers and discussion. Misha, its central figure, was in his element. He and I seemed somehow to strike a chord from the outset, and we continued our discussions by correspondence when I returned home to England. The conference had, I think it is fair to say, broken new ground in its wide-ranging comparisons, ranging back to the imperial period in Germany and Russia and ending in the upheavals of 1989–90. It had, in particular, sought to depart from the concept of totalitarianism, which up to then had been practically the only framework of comparative analysis for the two countries. Misha's original idea had been to publish not only the 27 conference papers and 18 prepared commentaries but also transcripts of three days of intense discussion. I told him straightaway that I thought this plan was illusory. Not only was the sheer volume of material daunting from a publishing perspective; in addition, the comparison worked better in some areas than others. I suggested to Misha that we should confine a published version to the area where comparison was likely to be most enlightening: the period of the Stalin and Hitler dictatorships, [End Page 123] and that I would be happy to collaborate with him on producing such a volume from the relevant conference papers. Without hesitation, Misha agreed, and we began a fruitful and intellectually enjoyable period of close collaboration. Quite a number of the papers had been written in English by non-native speakers of English and, as is natural and inevitable, required some editorial attention. What I had not anticipated is that this would apply to the contributions of my coeditor! Misha was, of course, fluent in many languages, and his English was excellent—if inimitable in its style and expression. Reading his earlier published work had given me no inkling that his written English needed a strong editorial hand to polish the style. I was left with the tricky job of recouching and touching up Misha's English without, of course, altering the content. It was a sensitive task, though Misha never bristled at my suggested amendments to his wording. My changes were accepted by Misha with patience and good humor. What had seemed to me an awkward assignment turned out to be relatively straightforward. What emerged was, I think, a valuable set of essays in a volume which plainly bears the imprint of Misha's views, not just on Stalinism but on the nature of the comparison of the two systems.2 Working with him, while I could not claim it to have been easy, was a pleasurable intellectual experience, from which I gained a great deal. During the 1990s, I saw Misha almost every year when he came over to England to visit long-standing friends in Birmingham, where he had been based for some years—in the 1970s, I think—at the university's Soviet Studies Centre. Among his close friends in Birmingham were Dorothy Thompson (the widow of E. P. Thompson) and Rodney Hilton, the eminent medievalist (a prominent Marxist historian and one of the founding editorial board of the journal Past and Present), and his wife Jean Birrell (herself a specialist on the rural society of...

The Cold War within the Cold War

The Cold War within the Cold War Lynne Viola (bio) David Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts. ix + 459 pp. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. ISBN-13 978-0195324860. $34.95. Know Your Enemy was all the talk of the 2009 American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) convention. In scenes worthy of Vanity Fair, groups of graduate students and junior scholars huddled around single copies of the book, scanning indexes for names and reading aloud passages about their favorite and less-than-favorite senior colleagues. At the same time, a few more seasoned scholars could be glimpsed sitting quietly in dark corners imbibing the book, alternating facial expressions between the academic smirk and carefully concealed looks of injured vanity. I only received a copy of the book some time after the convention, but if I had purchased the book there, surely I would have carried it into the privacy of my hotel room. Few academic books create the kind of visible stir that Know Your Enemy did at the annual meeting of the AAASS. Although the motivations behind the buzz varied wildly, as one may expect, this is a book worthy of the attention of the field. David C. Engerman should be applauded for stepping voluntarily into the minefield that was Soviet studies. A historian of the United States well known to Russianists, Engerman has produced a fascinating narrative history of the creation and development of Soviet (interchangeably used in his account with Russian) studies. My first paragraph aside, this is not a gossipy or even a chatty book but a balanced and scholarly study of the evolution of our field against the backdrop of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. [End Page 682] Engerman begins his study roughly where he left off in his excellent and very well-received Modernization from the Other Shore.1 That book detailed the fascination that Russia, and later the Soviet Union, held for U.S. intellectuals from the late 19th century to the eve of World War II as they alternated between particularist (Russia as sui generis) and “universalist” (Western, sometimes American) understandings of the Russian path of development. Know Your Enemy continues the story of these alternating views of Russia but focuses more on the development of Soviet studies in the United States during the Cold War and the field’s dual aspirations “to serve both Mars and Minerva” (1), both the state and the world of scholarship, as well as the tensions between area studies and the separate disciplines. Engerman concludes his book with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the accompanying decline in area studies approaches to Russia and the Soviet Union. The marriage of Mars and Minerva in the figurative hall of Soviet studies took place in a world very different from today. World War II had featured the mobilization of intellectuals and academics (on all sides of the conflagration) into the service of the state (and military) as the world faced total war. Moving freely between academia, on the one hand, and government and military service, on the other, academics dedicated themselves to the national cause. Mars and Minerva merged during the war and went on to animate, influence, and ultimately stunt the development of area studies in the United States. This wartime pattern continued into the postwar period as hot war became cold and the Soviet Union replaced Nazi Germany as the national foe. Engerman writes that “Russian studies, the first such area program, was a wartime innovation in teaching and research that set the pattern for postwar universities” (3). Soviet studies were thus born in war and enmity and led by a generation of scholars who saw themselves engaged in a (very American) moral crusade against communism and the Soviet Union. Although there was “no single Cold War party line” (5), nonpartisanship or attempts at “objectivity” would have been viewed as defeatist if not something worse in the first two decades after the war. The founding centers of Soviet studies in the United States were the Russian Research Center at Harvard and the Russian Institute at Columbia...

Song of the Year and Soviet Mass Culture in the 1970s

is a country / where the people choose their kings. --Poet and lyricist Sergei Ostrovoi on Song-72, 1 January 1973 We have long drawn conclusions about late Soviet society based on its televised ceremonies. Images of the parades on Red Square and the interminable applause of Brezhnev-era party congresses, broadcast by national evening news services across Western Europe and the United States during the Cold War, have played a central role in the Western scholarly and political imagination. Anthropologists have used them to construct typologies of modern ceremony that distinguish between the closed, hegemonic rituals of totalitarian states and the disputatious contests of democratic ones. (1) Within Soviet studies, they have served as key evidence for Mikhail Gorbachev's characterization of the 1970s as an era of stagnation, exemplifying the way that late Soviet public or official culture had aged along with the state's leadership, becoming hopelessly rigid, hierarchical, and formalized, preparing the way for the collapse of Soviet ideology in 1991. (2) But Soviet Central Television had another set of televised ceremonies that were at least equally important: the high-profile and high-stakes musical variety programs that accompanied all major Soviet state holidays. (3) These shows were part of a group of new television holiday traditions invented during the Brezhnev era, many of which are still a prominent part of current Russian television's holiday programming. Among the most important of these new television holiday rituals were those linked to the New Year, the Soviet holiday most clearly associated with domestic spaces and relationships, and least clearly with 1917 or 1945. (4) The fact that Boris Yeltsin chose, in 1999, to announce his resignation and introduce his little-known successor, Vladimir Putin, during the New Year's Eve presidential address to the people, a tradition launched by Leonid Brezhnev in 1970, is but one indication of the continued importance of these television rituals in post-Soviet Russian political and cultural life. (5) This article considers one of these new, Brezhnev-era New Year's traditions, a national song contest--part Eurovision, part Grammy awards-called Song, of the Year (Pesnia goda, 1971-present) that was broadcast every year on the evening of New Year's Day. Song of the Year, I argue, offers us a much more dynamic view of Brezhnev-era culture than that suggested by the label stagnation: it reveals how the state-controlled mass media could become a site of significant cultural innovation and experimentation aimed at finding new of engaging and unifying the Soviet populace during the Cold War. Rather than exclusively offering a display of state power, Song of the Year sought to delight viewers by providing popular entertainments and creating a good mood for the holidays) Far from being closed and formalized, it emphasized audience participation, created suspense, and changed dramatically from year to year. Song of the Year also unsettles our usual narratives about the evolution of Soviet culture after Stalin. (7) First, it highlights the continuities in Soviet cultural policy from Khrushchev to the Brezhnev era. Television was central to several aspects of Nikita Khrushchev's thaw, particularly the renewed emphasis on leisure, the Cold War redefinition of competition with the West in terms of ways of life defined morally and materially, and the ambitions of Soviet journalists to lead the revitalization of the socialist project. (8) All these dimensions of the television thaw continued to shape Central Television's content in the 1970s. Indeed, the problems of leisure, of cultural competition with the West, and of identifying new to engage the population only gained importance under detente and developed socialism. (9) The response to these continued pressures during the 1970s was a group of television ceremonies that experimented constantly with new to stimulate viewer participation and to direct and satisfy audience demand, foregrounding the conflicts and negotiations that had long characterized Soviet popular culture. …

Postkolonialismi pealetung post -sovetoloogias: kas paradigmamuutuse künnisel? The Rise of Post-Colonialism in Post-Soviet Studies: Witnessing the Paradigm Change

This article analyses the current state of research in studies of Soviet colonialism and considers inner tensions within this emerging field. By now, dozens of monographs and hundreds of articles touch upon the various aspects of Soviet postcolonialism, yet the field is fragmented and full of inner contradictions and unanswered questions: What is the relationship of research in Soviet colonialism to postcolonial studies in general? What is its relationship to traditional Sovietology? Areas of tension are found through historical and geographical perspectives, in the Russian neglect of its own Soviet imperialism, and in the long-distance scholarship dominant in the area. This paper argues that what we are witnessing now is the pains of a paradigm change, further aggravated by special complexities within the field. The article offers a historical overview of the development of studies of Soviet colonialism and shows that a decisive turn took place in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In 1990s, postcolonial perspectives were more widely employed in analyses of Tsarist-era Russian history. In the 2000s, several important monographs about the Soviet Union were published, yet, interestingly, their main focus was the inter-war period, before the Baltic states were annexed to the Soviet Union. Thus, for research into Baltic Soviet history, these collections and monographs can only provide background information. As for the post-WWII era, most important work from the perspective of Baltic studies – that is, general arguments about the developments in Soviet Union – remain on the level of single articles, the best known of these being David Chioni Moore’s „Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique“ (2001). The article makes a distinction between the general term „empire-studies“ and the more restricted notion of „studies of colonialism“; it further distuinguishes post colonial studies as a sub-category of studies of colonialism. Empire-studies approaches the Soviet Union as a multinational empire, but not necessarily a colonial one. Studies of colonialism argue that Soviet Union was indeed a colonial enterprise where subordinated nations and ethnicities were exploited in the interests of the central power. Postcolonial Soviet studies would apply a postcolonial critique to the research of the area: this would involve a bricolage analysis of power-relations, mechanisms of desire, the hybridity of the colonial subject, and its traumatic identity; it would shift the focus of research from the politico-historical features to socio-cultural features of the period. Though the notions „colonial“ and „postcolonial“ are widely in use in contemporary Soviet studies, the postcolonial turn is far from complete.

The Price of Success: Economic Sovietology, Development, and the Costs of Interdisciplinarity

In the 1940s and 1950s, as Soviet studies became a vibrant academic enterprise with significant links to the policy world, economic Sovietology occupied a special place. Those same years saw, also, the first major wave of decolonization and with it the rise of development economics. While many economists straddled both worlds, Harvard economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron occupied pride of place by virtue of his ideas, his reputation, and his students. Born in Odessa but with his economic education in Vienna, Gerschenkron brought to both enterprises a capacious and wide-ranging intellect and a determination to relate the economic history of his motherland to the contemporary problems of developing nations. His most famous essay, “Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective,” was an important attempt to draw lessons from the Russian economic experience and apply them to the industrializing world. He and his students had great intellectual success in plotting the connections between the second world's past and the third world's future, but with that success, ironically, came isolation from their colleagues both in economics departments and Soviet studies centers.

Soviet Studies, National Security and the Production of “Useful” Knowledge

Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts. By David C. Engerman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 480p. $34.95.Know Your Enemy is a sociology of knowledge of the rise of post–World War II Russian and Soviet Studies, written by intellectual historian David C. Engerman. While it is not a work of political science, it offers an important historical analysis of a foundational episode in the history of the political science discipline. It is an account of the evolution of a specific field—Soviet Studies—but it is more than this, because this particular field was at the heart of the development of post–World War II area studies in general, and the intellectual and political engagements linked to the evolution of area studies were crucial to the development of modern political and social science. This symposium thus brings together scholars of Soviet Studies, contemporary post-Soviet Russian politics, comparative politics and international relations more generally, and the history of the discipline, to reflect on this book. While participants were asked to critically evaluate the book's analysis, they were also asked to comment more generally on the rise (and fall?) of area studies, and the history of political science more broadly. The issues raised by the book relate to the history and evolution of the current discipline, but also bear upon its future. For in response to post–Cold War crises (many connected to the discourse of the “war on terror”), there have been new calls for security-related area research made by such institutions as the Department of Defense (the Minerva Program, administered by the National Science Foundation), the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Department of Education (in connection with Title VI funding of area studies). What does the history of Soviet Studies tell us about these recent developments, and about how individual political scientists and indeed the institutions of professional political science should respond to them?—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

Soviet Studies, National Security and the Production of “Useful” Knowledge

Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts. By David C. Engerman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 480p. $34.95.Know Your Enemy is a sociology of knowledge of the rise of post–World War II Russian and Soviet Studies, written by intellectual historian David C. Engerman. While it is not a work of political science, it offers an important historical analysis of a foundational episode in the history of the political science discipline. It is an account of the evolution of a specific field—Soviet Studies—but it is more than this, because this particular field was at the heart of the development of post–World War II area studies in general, and the intellectual and political engagements linked to the evolution of area studies were crucial to the development of modern political and social science. This symposium thus brings together scholars of Soviet Studies, contemporary post-Soviet Russian politics, comparative politics and international relations more generally, and the history of the discipline, to reflect on this book. While participants were asked to critically evaluate the book's analysis, they were also asked to comment more generally on the rise (and fall?) of area studies, and the history of political science more broadly. The issues raised by the book relate to the history and evolution of the current discipline, but also bear upon its future. For in response to post–Cold War crises (many connected to the discourse of the “war on terror”), there have been new calls for security-related area research made by such institutions as the Department of Defense (the Minerva Program, administered by the National Science Foundation), the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Department of Education (in connection with Title VI funding of area studies). What does the history of Soviet Studies tell us about these recent developments, and about how individual political scientists and indeed the institutions of professional political science should respond to them?—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

Soviet Studies, National Security and the Production of “Useful” Knowledge

Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts. By David C. Engerman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 480p. $34.95.Know Your Enemy is a sociology of knowledge of the rise of post–World War II Russian and Soviet Studies, written by intellectual historian David C. Engerman. While it is not a work of political science, it offers an important historical analysis of a foundational episode in the history of the political science discipline. It is an account of the evolution of a specific field—Soviet Studies—but it is more than this, because this particular field was at the heart of the development of post–World War II area studies in general, and the intellectual and political engagements linked to the evolution of area studies were crucial to the development of modern political and social science. This symposium thus brings together scholars of Soviet Studies, contemporary post-Soviet Russian politics, comparative politics and international relations more generally, and the history of the discipline, to reflect on this book. While participants were asked to critically evaluate the book's analysis, they were also asked to comment more generally on the rise (and fall?) of area studies, and the history of political science more broadly. The issues raised by the book relate to the history and evolution of the current discipline, but also bear upon its future. For in response to post–Cold War crises (many connected to the discourse of the “war on terror”), there have been new calls for security-related area research made by such institutions as the Department of Defense (the Minerva Program, administered by the National Science Foundation), the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Department of Education (in connection with Title VI funding of area studies). What does the history of Soviet Studies tell us about these recent developments, and about how individual political scientists and indeed the institutions of professional political science should respond to them?—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

POSTCOLONIAL ANXIETY IN POLISH NATIONALIST RHETORIC

The field of postcolonial studies in the 1970s as a way to understand the legacy of European empires. While its focus has been primarily on the lingering impact of colonialism in Asia and Africa, the field has generally ignored Poland.1 Janusz Korek reminds us that postcolonial theories emerged in connection with leftist discourses and mainly within Marxist circles at the time of the Cold War.2 Seemingly, this forestalled debate about regions dominated by Soviet imperialism. In addition, the central role of race in postcolonial theory led many to dismiss Central Europe as postcolonial. Another complicating factor, which Korek and others have noted, is the two-sided postcolonial perspective at work in the Polish case: Poland has played both the role of colonized and colonizer. Finally, Korek concludes that the whole field of Slavic and Soviet Studies was deformed by the Cold War, excluding it from broader developments

The Not So Wise Men

A recent book on the development of Soviet studies in America highlights the hazards of mixing politics with scholarship.

Confirmation studies of Soviet research on immunological effects of microwaves: Russian immunology results

This paper presents the results of a replication study performed to investigate earlier Soviet studies conducted between 1974 and 1991 that showed immunological and reproductive effects of long-term low-level exposure of rats to radiofrequency (RF) electromagnetic fields. The early studies were used, in part, for developing exposure standards for the USSR population and thus it was necessary to confirm the Russian findings. In the present study, the conditions of RF exposure were made as similar as possible to those in the earlier experiments: Wistar rats were exposed in the far field to 2450 MHz continuous wave RF fields with an incident power density in the cages of 5 W/m² for 7 h/day, 5 days/week for a total of 30 days, resulting in a whole-body SAR of 0.16 W/kg. Effects of the exposure on immunological parameters in the brain and liver of rats were evaluated using the complement fixation test (CFT), as in the original studies, and an additional test, the more modern ELISA test. Our results, using CFT and ELISA, partly confirmed the findings of the early studies and indicated possible effects from non-thermal RF exposure on autoimmune processes. The RF exposure resulted in minor increases in formation of antibodies in brain tissue extract and the exposure did not appear to be pathological. In addition, a study was conducted to replicate a previous Soviet study on effects from the injection of blood serum from RF-exposed rats on pregnancy and foetal and offspring development of rats, using a similar animal model and protocol. Our results showed the same general trends as the earlier study, suggesting possible adverse effects of the blood serum from exposed rats on pregnancy and foetal development of intact rats, however, application of these results in developing exposure standards is limited.

Nazis and Stalinists: Mutual Interaction or Tandem Development?

Nazis and Stalinists:Mutual Interaction or Tandem Development? Dietrich Beyrau (bio) Sheila Fitzpatrick and Michael Geyer, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared. 536 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ISBN-13 978-0521897969, $90.00 (cloth); 978-0521723978, $27.99 (paper). After the controversy surrounding Ernst Nolte and the debate on the singularity of the Holocaust that started in the mid-1980s, it has taken German historians and historians of Germany a long time to reconsider a comparison of the National Socialist and Soviet dictatorships. The older debate over the Sonderweg focused exclusively on comparing developments in Germany and Western Europe (plus the United States). The East went, for the most part, unmentioned. If it was at all included in such comparisons, then it appeared only with regard to issues of economic or social history and primarily within the framework of the theory of modernization or the so-called "world system." Such studies mostly described the history of Eastern Europe as one of deficiency or of "semi-colonial" dependency.1 Today these views themselves have become part of history, and Russia is widely accepted as a participant in the process of European modernization.2 Issues of transfer and transnationality have begun to interest historians only in recent years. Particularly [End Page 807] the fourth and last part of this collection of essays investigates the mutual entanglements between Germany and Soviet Russia from 1918 to 1945. This collection presents the reader with a systematic and competent comparison of the two dictatorships. Unlike earlier attempts, it distinguishes itself by offering comparisons in specifically chosen fields that emerge from the collaborative efforts of specialists in German (National Socialist) and Soviet (Stalinist) history. Thus it was possible to avoid the marginalization of one perspective by the other. The systematic comparison showed, according to Michael Geyer, that the specialists in German history were able to profit from the innovative approaches and questions of the specialists in Soviet history. In the past, one used to get the impression that analyses of the Soviet system somehow reproduced something of the backwardness of the analyzed object itself. Yet despite all the catching up that has been done in the research on the Soviet Union, there remains a discrepancy in results, interests, questions, and approaches. Therefore the achievement of these specialists on National Socialist and Soviet history has to be commended all the more. They were able to agree on specific issues and analyze them in four parts: aspects of the governing structure and governance (Yoram Gorlizki and Hans Mommsen, as well as David L. Hoffmann and Annette F. Timm); violence and terror (Christian Gerlach and Nicolas Werth, Jörg Baberowski and Anselm Doering-Manteuffel); socialization (Christopher R. Browning and Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Sheila Fitzpatrick and Alf Lüdtke, and Peter Fritzsche and Jochen Hellbeck); and, last but not least, the German-Soviet war and the confrontation of cultures (Mark Edele and Michael Geyer, Katerina Clark and Karl Schlögel). The result is a one-to-one comparison that promises a number of new insights about parallels and differences, and it can be safely said that this collection fulfills all expectations. As the choice of the title Beyond Totalitarianism shows, we have moved past "totalitarianism" as a leading paradigm in analyzing the two systems, yet we cannot quite free ourselves from its hold. We do not seem capable of dispensing entirely with the old models of types of rule from the political and social sciences. In his introduction, Michael Geyer revisits and discusses these models at length. Present-day studies of Soviet and German society, however, are determined by socio-historical approaches and an interest in cultural history. They also reflect today's mistrust of grand macro-historical and historical-philosophical models. Nevertheless, those models still serve as a point of departure for the investigations at hand, even if it is merely to modify or dismiss them, because like all models, they cannot do justice to the rich shadings [End Page 808] inherent in social reality. This applies to the interaction not only among social groups but also between the leaders and the population, to mention but one binary model, not to forget the motivation and subjective perception...

Condoleezza Rice Challenges NASPA Student Affairs Leaders

Condoleezza Rice Challenges NASPA Student Affairs Leaders

Teaching U.S. History in Russia: Issues, Challenges, and Prospects

Alexander N. Fursenko and Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov, two patriarchs of Russian American studies, died in 2008.1 Their achievements were probably the highest points of Soviet studies of history of the United States, and their deaths have become a watershed in modern Russian scholarship. A new generation of scholars is now taking the lead in studying and teaching U.S. history in Russia. The approaches and favorite topics of this new group of scholars differ from those of the older Americanists, as do their environment and their students. At the start of the new millennium, U.S. history courses in Russian universities are an integral part of the curricula at the B.A., M.A., and Specialist levels.2 The contexts of teaching American history in Russia have changed markedly over the past fifty years. During the Cold War, Soviet universities loaded their curricula with an ideologically defined image of the Soviet Union's “main adversary” in a bipolar standoff. In the 1990s a romanticized image of the United States began to prevail, when the end of the Cold War helped scuttle old priorities linked to the search for social and class conflicts. More recently, the foreign policies of the George W. Bush administration and another American crusade to reform Russia have aroused a new wave of demonization in official and popular discourses. Nevertheless, students' pragmatic interest in the United States as a place of work and travel and as a source of education for those planning international careers has encouraged the introduction of additional courses on American history. Since the end of the Cold War, the students have changed, too. Those who apply to American studies programs and take American history classes differ from their predecessors in many respects. Often, they have personal experience traveling to the United States (for instance, participating in the popular Work and Travel usa program). These students speak fluent English and frequently seek opportunities to participate in exchange programs with American universities or to continue their education there. They choose courses on U.S. history because the United States inspires them with its opportunities; they also readily participate in student panels at academic conferences.3 This new level of student familiarity with America poses a challenge for their professors, who no longer hold a monopoly on knowledge of the United States; a student's personal experience may exceed that of his or her teacher.

Leopold Haimson: His Historical Vision and Historiographical Legacy

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...