Abstract
Reviewed by: Clayton Black, Washington College, Maryland, USA
As Susan Grant notes in this stimulating collection of essays, ‘The “across 1917” trajectory [in Russian history] is by now a familiar one’ (171). Indeed, despite the flurry of attention to the centennial of the revolution in 2017, historians have long sought to counter schools of thought that portray 1917 in Russia as a fundamental break with the tsarist past and the Bolshevik experience as sui generis. Historiography of recent decades has seen scholars grapple with questions of ‘roads to modernity’ and broadly comparative approaches to the Stalinist transformations of state and society. Andy Willimott and Matthias Neumann introduce this volume with a densely woven retrospective of these trends and the intellectual threads that have helped draw them together. What is new here is that, although Willimott and Neumann do not prescribe a single approach to ‘crossing the divide’, the articles they have assembled offer concrete, monographic examples of people and institutions and how they navigated the before and after of 1917.
In the lead article, J. Arch Getty uses the cases of Lenin’s entombment and clientelism through the Stalin years and post-Soviet era to expose the persistence of deep cultural structures, even when such structures may have outlived any functional purpose or advantage. Although he makes an appeal for a ‘conceptual apparatus... that reflects the interaction of event, agency, and cultural structure’, and although he argues that the Bolshevik leadership initially made no deliberate choice to perpetuate ‘Muscovite folkways’, Getty nevertheless describes the return to clan patrimonialism as ‘inescapable’ (44), and the turn to transcendence and the mystification of Lenin’s body an outcome of the unconscious influence of identifying the state ‘as body’ on the decision to embalm the dead leader (35).
Examples of continuity beyond the structures of political power also appear with greater salience in these essays than instances of dramatic change. The result is an important balancing of our understanding of 1917 that recognizes the impossibility of thoroughgoing transformation of an entire society in the course of a year or even several years. Through the prisms of youth movements, circuses, nurses, non-Russian women of the Volga-Ural region, historians, the legal system, Ukrainian teachers, and expressions of humour, the authors explore the interactions of the new with the old and make clear that substantial elements of the latter not only persisted but, in fact, fundamentally shaped the regime as it developed after the October revolution.
Readers will find in this collection a useful addition to the landmark volume edited by Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow and James L. West, Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (1991), which brought to light the growth of professional identities and obshchestvennost’ (a complex term that, Neumann points out, ‘carries with it connotation of public sphere, civil society, educated public, and social and political associational engagement’ (93)) in the last decades of the tsarist state. Here we see a socially and politically engaged population that, even if it did not share the values of the Bolshevik government, carried on with work, as often as not out of a sense of professional duty, and facilitated the transition to a new order, ensuring continuities with its predecessor in the process. On the level of individual subjectivities, Jonathan Waterlow challenges recent arguments about Soviet citizens learning to ‘speak Bolshevik’ or deliberately ‘write themselves into’ the Bolshevik narrative, offering instead a more nuanced idea of the ‘crosshatching’ of pre- and post-revolutionary attitudes towards the state.
In his concluding essay, Peter Waldron offers a sweeping survey of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century efforts in the Russian state to make the transition to modernity, and argues, contra Tibor Szamuely and Richard Pipes, that oppressive absolutism was not an inevitable legacy of Russian tradition. There was far more interest in and sympathy for political, social and economic modernization in the tsarist government than historians have credited it with, and, in fact, Soviet leaders continued much of what had been started by their pre-revolutionary predecessors. Time and again their efforts ran up against an economy that remained ‘unproductive and uncompetitive’ (252).
Although the case for continuity between the aims of Sergei Witte and Joseph Stalin sounds much like the argument that Theodore H. Von Laue made over fifty years ago (Why Lenin? Why Stalin? A Reappraisal of the Russian Revolution, 1900–1930, 1964), it is curious that I find no mention of that work in this volume. Nevertheless, students of the revolutionary era will surely want to add this collection to their reading lists. Neumann and Willimott have assembled a first-rate body of research to inspire reconsideration of Russia’s path to modernity in the decades surrounding 1917.