The Blackwell History of Russia aims to present a wide readership with a fresh synthesis in which new approaches to Russian history stimulated by research in recently opened archives are integrated with fundamental information familiar to earlier generations. Whatever the period under review, new discoveries have thrown into question some persistent assumptions about the nature of Russian government and society. Censorship and surveillance remain important subjects for investigation. However, now that social activity in Russia is no longer instinctively conceived in terms of resistance to a repressive, centralized state, there is room not only to investigate the more normal contours of everyday life, but also to consider its kaleidoscopic variety in the thousands of provincial villages and towns that make up the multinational polity. Religion, gender, and culture (in its widest sense) are all more prominent in the writings of contemporary scholars than they were in the work of previous generations. Historians once preoccupied with pig-i ron production are now more inclined to focus on pilgrimages, icon veneration, and incest. No longer so overwhelmingly materialist in their approach, they are more likely to take “the linguistic turn”; the changing meanings of imagery, ritual, and ceremonial are all being reinterpreted.
The challenge is to take account of “extra” dimensions of the subject such as these (the list could easily be extended), and, where appropriate, to allow them to reshape our understanding, without risking a descent into modishness and without neglecting fundamental questions of political economy. One way of squaring the circle is to adopt an unconventional chronological framework in which familiar subjects can be explored in less familiar contexts. Each of the three volumes in the series therefore crosses a significant caesura in Russian history. The first, examined by Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter in Russia’s Age of Serfdom, 1649-1861, is the physical and cultural move from Moscow to St Petersburg at
The beginning of the eighteenth century; the last, explored by Stephen Lovell in The Shadow of War: Russia and the USSR, 1941 to the present, is the collapse of the USSR in 1991. In this middle volume, Ted Weeks ranges “across the revolutionary divide” of the year 1917.
For much of the twentieth century, 1917 seemed to mark the most significant of historical ruptures and there are naturally good reasons for continuing to regard the revolutionary cataclysm as a fracture between radically different worlds. Autocracy and Marxism-Leninism were ideological poles apart; so were the aims of their respective proponents. Indeed, it is hard to exaggerate the ambition of the Bolsheviks who came to power in October to transform the world in which they lived. They attempted not only to supplant the monarchy and to extend the dictatorship of the proletariat far beyond Russia’s borders, but also to forge a new civilization, ultimately to be peopled by a different sort of human being: New Soviet Man and New Soviet Woman.
For all these reasons, it is no surprise that the Soviet and tsarist periods should have tended until recently to attract historians of different backgrounds, different temperaments, and different preoccupations. While some were fascinated by the decline of an increasingly inflexible tsarist regime, whose attempts to strengthen the Romanov dynasty paradoxically served only to make its own government more brittle, others were drawn to explain why a Bolshevik vision apparently so suffused with optimism should have corrupted within less than a generation into the horrors of the Stalinist Terror. Even basic logistics militated against scholarly efforts to “cross the revolutionary divide,” for while the Soviet government stored its principal papers in Moscow, the richest archival collections relating to the late-imperial period remained in Leningrad.
Nearly 20 years after the collapse of the USSR, however, 1917 no longer seems quite such a total rupture. After all, as governors of a sprawling multiethnic state, the Bolsheviks faced many of the same geopolitical challenges as their tsarist predecessors. How were they to balance the security of multinational Rossiia against ethnic and cultural Rus’? Some of the most fertile research of the last generation has been devoted to precisely this question and to related dilemmas of imperial expansion. Himself an acclaimed authority on the history of the Polish-Lithuanian borderlands both before and after 1917, Weeks draws on this literature to offer a brilliant analysis of the nationalities question in one of the most striking chapters of his new book. Continuities are no less striking when one turns to the economy. The last three tsars and the early Soviet leaders were all struggling to manage the politics of industrialization in an overwhelmingly agrarian empire. All of them ran up against the risk-averse peasantry’s stubborn attachment to the small-scale communal organization that had helped them to survive for centuries. Peasant obstinacy was to prove just as exasperating to Stalin at the end of the 1920s as it had to Stolypin between 1906 and 1911. Their solutions, of course, were radically different. Whereas Stolypin hoped to foster a new generation of prosperous (and politically loyal) farmers by encouraging the wealthiest peasants (“kulaks”), Stalin set out to annihilate them. Nevertheless, it would be misleading to suppose that the Bolsheviks had a monopoly on state violence. In many ways, the key turning point was not 1917, but, rather, World War I, described with characteristic prescience by Norman Stone in 1975 as “a first experiment in Stalinist tactics for modernization.” More recently, Peter Holquist has traced the development of a wartime consensus in favor of planning that stretched across the political spectrum, including among liberals in government who regarded themselves as a supra-class elite with the best interests of the state at heart. And just as liberal planners’ commitment to forcible state intervention in the food supply chain during World War I marked the first stage in a continuum of state violence that stretched beyond 1917, so Daniel Beer has demonstrated the ways in which psychiatrists and other liberal intellectuals anticipated some of the controlling instincts of the Soviet regime by seeking to combat a perceived threat of moral degeneration well before 1917.
Not that violence and surveillance were the only tools at the state’s disposal. Russia has always derived much of its stability and flexibility from time-honored ways of doing things. The sorts of informal patronage network that had overlain the tsarist bureaucracy for centuries at both central and local levels soon wove their way into a powerful Soviet nomenklatura. Nor should we confine our interest in continuity to matters of geopolitics and the state. Most aspects of the distinctive form of Soviet consumer society that emerged in the aftermath of the Russian Civil War - tourism, the cinema and so on - had their origins in the commercial explosion of late-imperial Russia. Many of the reformist impulses in Russian Orthodoxy that emerged in the first decade of the twentieth century found expression only after the October Revolution, when the nascent Soviet regime tried to exploit them as a way of splitting the church. There is no need to stress the virtues of writing cultural history “across the revolutionary divide”: it is the only way to write about Russian modernism, itself part of a European cultural movement with deep roots before World War I.
In other words, while no one would sensibly seek to minimize the impact of the October Revolution, the lived experience of Stalin’s generation only partly confirms the impression of 1917 as a fundamental caesura. Drawing on recent writings which have enriched our understanding of the 1920s and 1930s as never before, Ted Weeks explores a vital period in Russian history, culminating in the “Great Patriotic War” that served as the ultimate test of the nascent Soviet regime.
Simon M. Dixon School of Slavonic and East European Studies University College London
World History
