Russian historical scholarship in 21st century

Andrei Sakharov, chairman of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Corresponding Member of the RAS
 
In the 1990s, after the events of 1991, there took place not only a so-called socio-political revenge in the country, but also, to a certain extent, scientific revenge. It was a time when there appeared a lot of works, and I cannot say they were professional, they were semi-professional, it was journalism by so-called people of intellect working in the media, who tried to cross out and overturn everything that had been created in the field of historical science in the Soviet era, with all its attributes, all the ideas, with all the personalities, etc.
 
Maybe you do not agree with me, but I think this is quite possible to be called a scientific revenge of revolutionary times, which, however, to my surprise and joy, almost didn't affect historical science. The historical remained, I would say, beyond revenge. And I remember the years when historians, including the researchers of our institute, were criticized by many: why are you sitting, why are you silent, why are not you speaking? Why are you not condemning? Why are you not reconsidering, why aren’t you doing this, why aren’t you doing that? But the point is, it's very difficult to involve scholars in political polemics of this sort, because a scholar works in the library, the archive, at a desk, and trusts, above all, not a political maxim but the facts, the source. And, I think, the 1990s  was a period of an accumulation of forces, of refocusing, rethinking, new approaches, a time when researchers and historians very cautiously came to judgement and very gradually re-evaluated the past Soviet era. And in the end, I think, in the 90s and the beginning of the 21st century, there it was a re-evaluation, but very cautious one, very neat, on the basis of a huge number of published sources on the basis of a very careful, very calm, thoughtful approach to the various eras, periods, people, etc.

 
I think that anyone who says today that, strictly speaking, nothing, nothing will happen, I think that this is not entirely correct. Take, for example, the methodology. What is the methodology we had before the events of 1989-1991? We had a clearly defined methodology, you all know this, and we all practiced this methodology, Marxist-Leninist, class-based. Socio-economic targets were the most important; political, and class aspects came to the fore. In the 1990s and at the beginning of the 21st century these aspects almost retreated into the past and became a relic of historical scholarship. Of course, not for everybody, not everywhere, not for all periods, yet these Marxist-Leninist tenets, especially in their Stalinist version, in the short form, have become relics and retreated into the background. It was the most important, the most important methodological achievement of 90s and the beginning of the 21st century.

 
The problem of civilization came to the fore. Now many people talk about a combination of factors of civilization and formation criteria in the understanding of history. Probably, at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century, these criteria occupied their place in our scientific work. Now everyone speaks about civilization issues, which are the criteria for the understanding of society in antiquity, in the Middle Ages and in modern and contemporary times. But I want to say that, although they do speak, they have a very vague idea about what civilization criteria are and how they are to be applied to the understanding of history. In the 1990s, in a series of publications, journalistic articles, discussion papers and some controversial texts, all this has been determined, expressed, written in the pages of our periodicals. Then it was suggested that civilization criteria are much broader, more important, deeper, and bigger than the formational aspects: these are territorial issues and ethnic issues, the mentality of a people, cultural relations and everyday interactions in society. It really becomes possible to evaluate an epoch from the standpoint of major, large-scale shifts in public consciousness, etc. An article was published recently in "Questions of History”, which sums up this thinking and these disputes: what is an epoch, what is civilization, how to apply these criteria to our time? To the foreground come issues related to technology and technological factors: the industrial revolutions of the end of the 17th century and of the end of the 19th century, then the computer revolution of the 20th century; these fundamental technological changes affect all sectors of society. We cannot write the history of Russia without recourse to regional history. We can no longer write the history of our country without involving a multi-volume history of Yakutia, the histories of Mordovia, Udmurtia, Dagestan. All this was set up in the 1990s. And in many ways, these works, based on local materials and local sources, dictate not only an understanding of regional history, but also of all-Russian history.

There is a view that the main thing of the 1990s is sources, and that is all, everything else is nonsense. Indeed, a lot of sources were published. I believe that the publication of these sources by various centers, universities, Rosarkhiv, the Foundation "Democracy" and the archives of the Federal Security Service, was quite a huge breakthrough phenomenon in our field, and I would even say in world scholarship. Publication of the sources and creation of new works based on them led to the fact that Russian scholarship has not only become world scholarship in the fullest sense of the word, not only did it become on a par with world scholarship, it has surpassed it. Because it was close to the sources, these Russian sources, in many respects it surpassed the global approach to our history. It was recognized by many historians who came here and with surprise looked through the huge volumes of publications, which really shocked them as scholars. I remember Hosking, an English academician, Szvák, a Hungarian, I remember the French who asked, "How did you manage to do this over the past few years?" And Russia was able to do this in recent years. And I think that Rosarkhiv, and the archives of the Federal Security Service, with which we cooperate and work together a lot, have been very successful in this respect and really made breakthroughs. But I want to speak about the ten-volume "Lubyanka", about the project "Power and Society: the Russian Provinces", ten beautiful volumes published in Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk; I can speak about the Foundation “Democracy." Many will frown and smile, but I look at these twenty volumes by Foundation "Democracy": a great number of sources are often poorly treated, poorly commented, but they are published, they do exist, they can be used. I remember, when Yakovlev reported about these volumes at the presidium of the RAS, the debate was very tough, he was accused of poor quality of processing, publishing and commenting on these sources. He admitted this, he said: "I wanted to do it quickly; after all, I wanted to publish while there was a possibility." There was such possibility. Another question is whether there is now a possibility. This is a philosophical question. But the Foundation "Democracy" managed to do it.The proceedings of the Gulag, published in many areas and regions, are now on the shelves; there are works related to the declassification of the archives of the Central Committee of the Politburo; materials on the Civil War and General Kolchak were published; Danilov’s "The Tragedy of a Soviet Village" and "The Village Through the Eyes of the Soviet Cheka, United State Political Administration (OGPU), NKVD"; this was all published in the 1990s and at the beginning of the 21st century. There were also "Letters to the Authorities" and "Winter War" -  a completely new analysis of the Soviet-Finnish war, an outstanding volume that aroused a huge surge of interest in the problem of Russia and Finland. All these are sources, which are part of our historical front, our historical breakthrough and innovation.

 
The second item of our current agenda is the program related to the union of peoples. I think this is closely associated with these common innovative approaches to our history, which I mentioned earlier, though not completely and fragmentary, but mentioned many things nevertheless. And this is a common people’s line through the years 1612, 1812, and 1942, this line is now coming to the fore in our innovative approach. I think that all these dates, the Time of Troubles and 1812 and the dates related to the Great Patriotic War, certainly make up the overall fabric of our innovative modern historiography.

Valery Avidzba, director of the Abkhazi Institute for Humanitarian Studies named after Professor D. Gulia

 
June the 22nd, 1941. Undoubtedly, this date was and remains one of the most sorrowful days of mankind. Although World War II originated from an earlier date, September 1, 1939, it was June 22, 1941 that the most destructive war in history started, given the number of victims, and the countries and peoples involved in it, a war that is justly called the Great Patriotic War.

 
The Great Patriotic War was the most important and crucial part of the Second World War, because it not only defended the independence of the Soviet Union, but also made a decisive contribution to the liberation of the peoples of Europe from fascism. According to official figures, 72 states and over 80% of the world's population took part in this biggest war in history, and military operations covered the territory of 70 states.
 
It seemed that the lessons of this war would be stable, but the reality is that there are many people wanting to rewrite history, to shift its focus and, most importantly, to denigrate the victors, that is, the people and the country thanks to whom fascism was defeated. This is nothing more than a short-sighted washing one's hands of the past. Hence the struggle for monuments, the demonstrations of former Nazis in the guise of national and state revival and revision of history, observed in some of the new countries of the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and the West.
 
Such an attitude towards our own history and history in general can have very bad consequences:  the victory over fascism, writes Professor Mitiaeva, "was won at a terrible price: the country lost 8.5 million soldiers and commanders, 19.5 million civilians; 25% of the inhabitants of the occupied areas died, that is, every fourth person. Out of the 5.5 million driven to Germany, 3.4 million died. Our soldiers were dying in a foreign land for saving the world from fascism. The countries where they were dying were not able to free themselves from Nazi occupation. The price of the liberating mission in World War II was about 1.5 million dead and 3 million wounded Soviet soldiers" (end quote). Without exception, all the peoples of the Soviet Union contributed to the victory in this holy war, and suffered heavy losses. Therefore, it is necessary to preserve the memory of our fathers, grandfathers and great grandfathers, and not to question their achievement. In plain language, a disrespectful attitude to the merits and memory of our ancestors is nothing but treason.

 
Abkhazia also contributed to the victory in World War II. It was attended by more than 55 thousand people of different nationalities. 17 thousand people were killed, including about six thousand ethnic Abkhazians.
 
Now about what the state of historical scholarship in Abkhazia today. Talking about it, we cannot avoid saying that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Abkhazia experienced the hardships of war, which resulted, in addition to the destroyed infrastructure, in the deliberate destruction of  centers of research and culture. So, on October 22, 1992, the Abkhazian State Archives and Abkhazian Institute of Language, Literature and History named after Gulia were burned. It is clear that these losses hampered research greatly. With appreciation and gratitude, I want to note that many scholars, research institutions and universities responded to our misfortune, they sent us books free of charge and assisted in the identification of valuable materials on the history and culture of Abkhazia.
 
Valery Soldatenko, director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, Doctor of History, member of the National Academy of Ukraine
 
In search for a new national history there occurs the rejection of the concept of the Great Patriotic War, as if it were one of the largest communist myths, and its replacement by the concept of World War II. Moreover, this concept is built in such a way that the Ukrainian people, Ukraine became a victim. They were not as much participants in the war, as they became, from both sides, the battleground on which the battle unfolded, and it is unclear from which side they could expect the worse scenario of events.
 
And this kind of national history leads to the removal of those issues, which in Russia look more or less stable, for example, the guerrilla movement. Some try to interpret a resistance movement differently, say, the role of the organization of Ukrainian nationalists, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the issue of collaboration in general, relating to the Ukrainians. Sometimes even at a serious level, at the level of academic institutions, they go so far that during the discussions even the Germans begin to be surprised. They have learned that somebody helped them, that there are forces which they clearly represent as those who have to share responsibility for what ultimately happened. Another formulation of the question, say, about something we have not had at all before, confuses the view of these events.

 

Vasily Khristoforov, head of the Center for publishing documents on the history of 20th century Russia at the Russian History Institute of the RAS, Doctor in Legal Studies.


The main direction that allows us to talk about an innovative breakthrough in historical scholarship is, I believe, the wide international co-operation with historians from many countries. It is no secret that the same historical event can be treated quite differently, from a completely different perspectives, by historians inside Russia, and even more so by foreign historians. And this, in my view, is the task of historians: conducting joint research with a broad range of representative documents, searching for objective truth.

I'll give a few examples. It is no secret that Russia and Poland quite differently interpret the events of the Soviet-Polish war of 1920, the events of September 1939, the Warsaw uprising; the Katyn events are still sometimes treated differently. So, thanks to our cooperation with our Polish colleagues, we were able to publish three volumes of documents: "The Polish underground in Western Ukraine - Western Belarus in 1939", "Deportation of the Polish Population from the Territory of Western Ukraine - Western Belarus in 1940" and "Warsaw Uprising". These three seem to be topics about which it is impossible to reach an agreement. We did not seek  agreement. We worked together, published a collection of documents with a good academic commentary, with a good introduction, where we found common points of view.
 
Or take such a difficult subject for Finnish and Russian historians as the Winter War of 1939 - 1940, already mentioned in the speech of Andrei Nikolaevich. As for the beginning of the war, the causes of the Winter War, there are also a lot of different opinions, a lot of variants in interpretation from Russian and Finnish historians. Together with the Finnish historians we published a collection of documents, which is presented on the screen, on the Winter War: research papers and comments. It includes both scholarly articles and unique documents from the central archive of the Federal Security Service (FSB), as well as from the Finnish archives.
 
By collaborating with historians from Germany, we also publish various documents separately as well as together. I would like to name a few collections. First of all, this is "Generals and Officers of the Wehrmacht Speak": the interrogation reports of the generals and officers of the Wehrmacht, who after the war were in the NKVD prison at Lubyanka Square. During their interrogation, they were asked various questions, including those interesting for historians: how Germany was preparing for war, how the Wehrmacht was preparing for war. A unique, from our point of view, collection of documents, which has received a positive assessment abroad, is "The Secret Diplomacy of the Third Reich." It so happened that Russia and Germany worked on similar topics almost at the same time. We have prepared a collection of documents based on the interrogation records and handwritten testimony of diplomats of the Third Reich, who worked in different countries before the war, participated in the war with the Soviet Union, and after the war they were in the Lubyanka prison. At the same time a study of German documents on a similar topic was carried out in Germany, and thus two editions, related to the diplomacy of the Third Reich were publishedt, one in Russia, the other in Germany.

I cannot neglect another country, my favorite, Afghanistan. Opening the archives of the CPSU Central Committee and the FSB archives allowed us to look at the history of  Soviet-Afghan relations, not only at the beginning of the 20th century, but also at the Soviet presence in Afghanistan in the late 70s - 80s. This allowed us to publish a series of articles and documents related to the Soviet presence in Afghanistan.

What do we see, and what conclusion can we make by examining the Soviet presence in Afghanistan and the presence of U.S. troops, the NATO forces, there now? History has taught the Americans nothing. They take the same path, repeating our mistakes and, roughly speaking, step on the same rake. They brought troops just like the Soviet Union, occupied a number of major cities, carrying out operations on the territory of Afghanistan, freeing up some areas from the Taliban, from the opposing side. After some time the troops leave, and these areas again come under the control of the Taliban, just as was the case during the Soviet presence.

The Americans are trying to create a strong Afghan army, as they say, to form a political elite, to create law-enforcement bodies and security so that they can hold their own government - Karzai or the one who will be his successor after the elections, because Karzai's second term is ending. We'll see how much they succeed. But in any case, the residence time of NATO and U.S. forces is already significantly higher than that of the stay of Soviet troops; the number of NATO troops is almost twice the number of Soviet troops in Afghanistan, but the situation today is much more complex than the situation in the late 80s, when Soviet troops were in Afghanistan or even when the Soviet troops left Afghanistan. Even in Kabul, the Soviet representatives - not only in Kabul but also in the neighborhood – moved without any protection. And now, even in Kabul, Russian officials present there cannot move without protection, because the situation is so complicated and dangerous.