Michael David-Fox - Crossing Borders

On Ongoing Debates in Russian and Soviet History

The specter of modernity continues to haunt much Western scholarship on Russian and Soviet history. In grappling with the issue, post-Soviet historiography has continued to invent new twists and variations on the thorny problems of old. In the past, the polarizations in the field may have been described somewhat differently: between industrial society and backwardness, between universalism and particularism, between Russia as European and Russia as unique. While this chapter analyzes a specific dispute over modernity and the concept of neo-traditionalism that first animated the field in the 2000s, it also looks backward to these broader antecedents that its participants did not discuss and forward to the debates continuing reverberations in the field.

In an edited volume on the new developments in the study of Stalinism, Sheila Fitzpatrick placed disagreements between a modernity group and its critics at the center of the new historiography. In the work of the current generation, Fitzpatrick wrote, two distinct approaches can be discerned.... The modernity group... suggests that the stereotype of modernity based exclusively on Western experience (parliamentary democracy, market economy) is inadequate and points to the Soviet example as an important alternative form. She described this groups case for an alternative Soviet modernity as resting on the presence of statist phenomena such as planning, early social welfare measures, scientism, surveillance, and the disciplines of self and collective. The critics, adherents of the concept of neo-traditionalism, did not necessarily deny that the Soviet Union in its way was modern, but their interest, however, is drawn more particularly to the archaizing phenomena that were also a part of Stalinism: petitioning, patron-client networks, the ubiquity of other kinds of personalistic ties like blat, ascribed status categories, court politics in the Kremlin, the mystification of power and its projection through display, and so on.

The emergence of two polarized positions, each grouped around its own concept, would be easily recognized by a historian of science or sociologist of knowledge as a common phenomenon in the evolution of scholarship. But these mundane features of the dispute should not obscure that it built on a foundational axis of modern Russian studiesone that the late Leopold Haimson, drawing on the Annales school, used to scrawl his famous iron cross on the blackboard on the first day of class, introducing generations of graduate students to the vertical line between universalism and particularism that divided the field of political and social conceptions. Because the post-Soviet skirmish engaged this core issue, it has retained significance even after many of its participants have moved on to new phases of debate. The issue of how to approach the problem of Soviet modernity continues to engage fundamental conceptual issues at stake in understanding Russias historical trajectory, the Soviet order, and Stalinism.

If this chapter has an underlying message, it is a plea to those who continue to find the modernity and neo-traditionalist paradigms convincing to interrogate their central concepts with depth and rigor. The aims of this discussion are (1) to analyze the post-Soviet conceptual split in the historiography, focusing mainly on works that explicitly advance notions of modernity and neo-traditionalism; (2) to locate differences between the tendencies and their implications, especially in their different understandings of the modern and their differing comparative lens; and (3) to suggest how the concept of multiple modernities, which was not explicitly embraced by the first post-Soviet proponents of Russian/Soviet modernity, at once resolves and complicates dilemmas already implicitly raised by the modernity paradigm. Along the way, I point out the continuing reverberations of the split in the 2010s, as numerous scholars take Soviet modernity as a given while others privilege traditional features of the Soviet order.