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рецезнию Леннарта Самуэльсона.
A Review in Five Acts: Lennart Samuelson on Istoriya Rossii XX vek
It is not an easy task to comment on this review in Baltic Worlds because its author has some difficulty expressing himself in English and is not always able to state his meaning clearly. If this review is in fact a translation, there is nowhere any mention of this fact. Take the title, for example, “Reflections on the historiography of a reactionary era.” Does he have in mind historians of the Soviet period (the “reactionary era”) generally? Or Soviet historians, those who were engaged in reactionary historiography during this period? And what does “reactionary” mean in this context? The one example the author provides in his review is a reference to reactionary Nazi legends about “Judeo-Bolshevism,” which hardly squares with the title.
Take another example at random-the reviewer writes that most of the “coauthors are, however, neither historians nor experts, as is reflected in both form and content.” This, alas, is not idiomatic English. The form and content of what (of their degrees? reputation? contributions?) or whose form and whose content (the historians’ or experts’? the book as a whole?)? What is more, this statement is not factually accurate, overlooking, at a minimum, Sergei Firsov, Boris Ilizarov, Vladimir Lavrov, Aleksandr Pantsov, Iurii Pivovarov (Academy of Sciences), Vladimir Shestakov, and Natalya Zhukovskaya, all of whom are full-fledged doktora istoricheskix nauk, to say nothing of the impressive roster of well-known experts in other fields among the authors.
It is a bit ironic for such an awkward writer to find apparent fault with the volumes under review as written in “popular-science style.”
I.
Associate Professor Samuelson’s review is organized in five haphazard sections: The first section presents an overview of historiography during the late Soviet period and more recently, throwing out, as our reviewer would say, a “plethora” of names. He includes the sensationalist Simon Montefiore and the strident and tendentious Anne Applebaum, bemoaning that they have not made “the same impression in Russia as in Western Europe and the U.S.” Among Russian writers of history whose views “are more or less scientifically established,” presumably unlike Professor Zubov and his co-authors, Samuelson identifies the pop-author Edvard Radzinsky and refers to recent biographies of prominent historical figures like “the Mad Monk, Rasputin” (capitalization in original). Aside from such praise for works presenting “the country’s history ... in customary scientific fashion,” there is no reference in this first section to the volumes being reviewed.
II.
In the second section, Samuelson for some reason delves into the history of the original project in which Solzhenitsyn was involved for the purpose of producing a history textbook consistent with his views. He then points out that such a textbook must take into account that in the final year of school “only” 50 class hours are devoted to modern Russian history. It is difficult to say what the point here is-that the project was doomed from the start? That it got out of hand, expanding to 1,850 pages, and departing from Solzhenitsyn’s conception of the textbook? Why is this important for our understanding and evaluation of Istoriya Rossii XX vek?
This is followed by a curious intermezzo in which Associate Professor Samuelson takes issue with views he attributes to Professor Zubov with the “support of the vice-director of the Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Russian History, Vladimir Lavrov” based on a letter the latter purportedly wrote “to the Russian government” suggesting that the Lenin mausoleum and the necropolis in Red Square should be removed as an unsuitable legacy of a totalitarian regime that for decades oppressed its own people. Characteristically, our “scientific” historian-reviewer does not, despite attaching 24 footnotes to his review, see any need to cite any source for this letter (though he does cite a news report on Radio Free Europe about an upcoming trial probing the last Tsar’s murder in which Professor Lavrov is nowhere mentioned), nor any need to quote the text he is taking issue with. Rather comically, Samuelson suggests in his rebuttal that neither Zubov nor Lavrov have taken into consideration the “sensitive issues concerning descendents’ burial rights to the remains” of those buried behind the mausoleum under the Kremlin wall. What is the relation of all this to Istoriya Rossii XX vek? According to the reviewer, it sheds light on “a strong anticommunist reaction to the former[ly] predominant ideology” presented in these volumes.
Finally, the reviewer concludes this second section by furnishing a prolonged synopsis of the contents of the two volumes, identifying the sections, chapters, and sub-chapters, the subjects covered, the pages where they appear, and the number of sub-chapters. For the common reader, this could have been one of the more objective and informative parts of this review. Yet, unaccountably, even this bare outline in the review is erroneous, as a simple comparison with the published table of contents will confirm (e.g., the first section has four not three chapters found on pp. 62-392, not 62-369; the third section has 55, not 35 sub-chapters).
III.
In the third section, Samuelson actually begins to discuss the history book he is reviewing, though-remarkably for an author who is conspicuously concerned about “the scientific fashion” (meaning, presumably, academic rigor)-still with few citations to the text and no quotations from it in support of the views attributed to its authors. Here he accuses these authors and Professor Zubov in the first instance of factual errors, misrepresentation of “numerical” material, and use of “downright” falsified documents. I am not competent to pass judgment on these charges, which will need to await the reply of the authors, but the reviewer’s criticism of the volumes’ “overflowing with biographies, excerpts from memoirs, diaries, and other private testimonies” because “strange as it may seem, Zubov ignores in its entirety the social history research conducted with an emphasis on everyday life ... consolidated after 1992" is itself odd. The practice of quoting from first-hand, eyewitness accounts will probably strike most educated readers as more valuable and (pardon me) more engrossing than their subsequent consolidation in social history research.
It is in this third section, too, that the reviewer perhaps discloses what sticks in his craw the most. He writes, as usual without citing to or quoting from the text, that: “According to Zubov and his colleagues, a political regime must be judged on the basis of how it makes it possible for individuals to grow spiritually and materially, and whether it enhances the worth of the individual or, conversely, leads to [his] degeneration.” These reveal, according to Samuelson paraphrasing Zubov and his colleagues, whether the society is oriented toward the positive or the negative. Samuelson concludes that this seems “an overly vague goal for anyone wishing to write a “History of 20th Century Russia.” Yet it is precisely the introduction of this ethical dimension that is one of the major contributions of this new History of Russia in the Twentieth Century. At this juncture it is not merely the establishment of the historical facts but the evaluation of these facts of recent history that ultimately concerns the Russian reader coming to terms with his past. It is in this regard, admittedly overflowing the customary bounds of academic historical scholarship, that this new history book enters the debate and proposes its own antidotal reading of Russian history in the preceding suffering century.
IV.
Section IV of the review, besides specifying the allegations of “historical falsifications” that I am not qualified to address, moves more openly to discredit Professor Zubov. Yet here too there are certain obviously confused statements. For example, Samuelson conflates the argument of the Istoriya that, climactic conditions aside, the famine of 1932-33 was a deliberate effort of the soviet regime to bring the peasantry as a class to heel and the argument of Ukrainian nationalists that this famine constituted genocide against Ukrainian peasants specifically.
In response to the view that the new regime welcomed the famine of 1921-22 as making the despised peasants more docile, the reviewer springs to the defense, suggesting that, “the Bolshevik regime did what it could to try and relieve the distress, and accepted foreign aid for those afflicted.” As a matter of fact, the Bolsheviks accepted this aid grudgingly (refusing it, for example, from the Russian Orthodox Church, which they tried to characterize as indifferent to the misery of the starving population in order, according to Lenin, to provide a pretext to liquidate as much of the clergy as possible) and hampered foreign and native non-governmental humanitarian efforts. There is also a serious question about how much of this aid did not actually reach the intended victims. While the soviet government was accepting contributions from relief agencies, it was continuing to sell grain abroad to attract hard currency.
Samuelson takes issue with a number of other “claims,” for example, that “the Great Terror was focused primarily on the various groups of believers in the Soviet Union,” which he attributes to Zubov without, however, providing any citation to where this claim occurs in the Istoriya. Moreover, in an apparent effort to discredit the chief editor as beyond the pale of acceptable academic discourse, he characterizes the account of the children at Fatima in 1917 who reported that they had received revelations concerning the catastrophe shortly to befall Russia, which the Roman Catholic Church after 50 years acknowledged as a miracle, as among “the more peculiar elements in Zubov’s work.” Samuelson then asks sardonically whether this suggests “that higher powers somehow ‘intervened’ in the events in Russia?” Here again the reviewer misreads the text, which does no more than relate this famous phenomenon supposedly foretelling-not “intervening” in-subsequent events.
Along these lines, in describing the butchery of the Tsar, his family, and his immediate entourage, the review addresses the assertion, as usual without quoting or citing the authors, that Germany consented to this decision. Samuelson then writes: “This curious twist of other, usually anti-Semitic, myths surrounding the execution of the Tsar’s family will certainly give rise to doubts on Zubov’s general worldviews (sic).” This curious twist of language hardly qualifies as comprehensible English, but does seem to accuse Professor Zubov of upholding anti-Semitic myths in his world view.
To drive this point home, Samuelson takes up Zubov’s alleged contention that “the purpose of the law [enacted in 1935 to extend the death penalty to children beginning at age 12] was to give the secret police free rein to execute street urchins” (my italics). Remarkably, he cites to the text (p. 928), where only the factually accurate statement that, “the OGPU [secret police] was granted the option to destroy the street urchins physically” is to be found. There is no mention of the “purpose” of this law, which misrepresentation is gratuitously added by the reviewer. In refuting the statement, the reviewer insists that it was “extracted from the most reactionary legends that have circulated about Stalinist terror ever since the Nazis escalated their ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ propaganda in the 1930s.” When I was a student in graduate school, there was an unwritten rule that the first person who accuses his opponent of being a Nazi automatically loses the argument.
V.
After the high drama of the preceding section, this last act seems anticlimactic. It is noteworthy for two intertwined propositions that seem to gravel the reviewer: The legitimacy of the Soviet regime-that, distinguishing Russia and this regime, held its own people in thrall-is doubtful. In light of what we now know, in 2010, it is frankly puzzling that this overarching conclusion about the catastrophic, bloody, tragic, heroic, deformed twentieth century in the U.S.S.R. should be so offensive to a professional economic historian.
Gleb Glinka
Moscow, Russia