Later today we will be discussing your recent book, Russia In Flames.
So, can you just begin by telling our viewers a little bit about the book, about its arguments
and about what you wanted to do by writing it?
Well, the book has an interesting origin, which was that I hadn't planned to write this
book.
It was an assignment.
I had a relationship with an interesting editor at Oxford University Press, and it was about
2011, something like that, and he said, "you know, the anniversary of 1917 is coming up,
you've been in the field of Russian history for your whole career, had you ever thought
of writing a history of 1917?" And I said, you know, I've always written books on very
idiosyncratic, odd, subjects that interested me, but I've never taken on a sort of - well,
it's not true.
My first book was on a revolution, the revolution of 1905, but 1917 is the big event in modern
Russian history, and I had never gotten that near it.
So I thought, and he said he had a series called Pivotal Moments in World History, and
of course, this is obviously one, and I thought, what an interesting idea.
I'll do it.
So, typically I wrote a book that I wanted to write, and it was published, which it was,
and that was well and good, and this time, it was a book, a sort of set piece.
So I started writing it, and I discovered that, of course, hundreds of books have been
written on this subject.
The difference is that since 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, archives were opened,
historians in Russia, in the successor states, started to go and discover new material to
write, publish, to think in new ways about the old subjects, so that the whole framework
of 1917 which was somewhat off putting before, very ideological, very pro and contra, had
shifted.
And what I discovered in writing was that that was very exciting.
So almost as exciting as the challenge of putting everything together was this new view,
this opportunity to think again about a subject that had been thought about many, many times.
A sort of de-ideological perspective on it.
And so that became very exciting.
And the other thing that happened was that in the field of Russian history overall a
lot more attention had been paid to the scope of empire.
We all know it was an empire before 1917, and of course the word was there, but the
idea of how the dynamic of imperial rule was essential to the nature of pre-1917 imperial
Russia, and of course this was somewhat stimulated also by the fall of communism when the thing,
the Soviet Union broke apart in national terms.
So almost without planning it, without a program in mind, I found myself thinking in order
to tell this story in the year 2017, you have to really take on the big picture.
That was a fatal decision.
It meant that the story was enormous, and very complicated.
But also, very fascinating.
So this is how the nature, the origin and the nature of the project evolved.
Right.
It is a huge story, and it's a huge book to match the huge story.
So can you talk to us a little bit about the process of researching and writing this?
How did, where did you begin, how did you begin?
And then how did it unfold from there?
Well, the other thing that, and the name of this editor by the way is Timothy Bent at
Oxford University Press in New York, and he said, this book is gonna be a book for the
general educated reader.
So it's not just a book for the field, for your colleagues, it can't be just engaging
in methodological arguments and so on.
It has to inform this general reader.
It had to have a story, it had to have a narrative.
And so, aside from the imperial idea, it also had to tell the political story.
Now I was known in the field for cultural history, and other kinds of approaches.
So I started with the story.
What happened?
Of course I had already been working a lot on the history of the first world war, which
also had a centenary in 2014, and I thought to myself, having written on 1905, that there
was a time period that had to be covered as well as a geographical period.
So 1905 as background, the first revolution, World War I as the, really the instigation
of the collapse of the old regime, and the dynamics of that leading into the year 1917,
the revolution itself in that sense, the political events, and then the civil war, which lasted
until 1921.
You could argue you should take the story further, bit I thought that was a nice beginning
and an end.
So I had to say to myself, what does this reader need to know?
So a historian might say: too much attention to Lenin.
But, excuse me, you can't tell the story of 1917 without a lot of attention to Lenin.
You might not conclude that he was the reason for everything, but he had to be there.
You had to introduce him in a way that wasn't condescending to this educated reader, but
that provided enough information.
And in my mind, a book, even if it's in narrative form, has to have an argument.
So the challenge was to embed the argument, whatever it turned out to be, in the story
itself.
And that was my aspiration.
I don't know whether I succeeded, but that was how the project unfolded.
So this project took you away both from the previous themes you had worked on, and as
you said from maybe the previous audiences you had written for.
It's a book for the public as well as for an academic audience.
Did that change your writing process at all, the way you went about it technically or imaginatively?
Yes.
So my first book was on the revolution of 1905, and that was a social history.
So it was very much an analysis of social movements.
And there's some of that in this book, actually, as well.
And my other work was more or less essayistic or analytic also, but in terms of late nineteenth
century culture, or I wrote on religion, on the history of law and medicine, so they were
problem oriented, most of them.
And this one, but then I had to pay a lot of attention to how to construct a narrative.
Now, the trick with this book is, until the end of 1917, it's more or less one narrative
thread, because you have a government, you have a state in turmoil, in trouble, but still
there's a center.
After the Bolshevik coup in October 1917, there's more than one center.
You have many narratives.
And the trick, which I'm not certain at all that I solved the challenge, is to at the
same time show the different strands that emerge, the nationalist breakaway movements,
the regional stories, the story of Siberia, of the simultaneous and intersecting conflicts
of the civil war, have them be comprehensible on their own terms, and somehow manage to
show how they intersect without driving the reader crazy.
Also, it had to be vivid.
It had to have personality, had to have some sense of the texture.
So, some, a few readers have already complained: why are there so many people in this book?
I tried to make the stories of people not merely decorative, but actually exemplary,
so a certain type of person, or a certain type of background.
And sometimes, for example, in discussing the peasant movements there was one very outstanding
leader who, and by telling his story, you can really sort of bring it to life.
So I tried to be coherent as a narrative, to be enticing, so to speak, in terms of characters,
personalities, and events.
These are very, a lot of very dramatic events.
So that was a different kind of challenge, yes, definitely.
This is a broader question, maybe about the writing process, perhaps aimed at our graduate
student audience who sometimes wonder: where to begin writing? How to write, how do historians
write?
So can you walk us through what an average day looks like, in writing Russian In Flames?
How do you deal with writer's block, the frustrations that come with dealing with such a big topic?
Well, one thing I would, yes, one thing I want to say about this book which is also
different from what I have done before is, this book is built 95% on secondary literature,
or documentary material that was prepared by other people.
There's very little, there's some primary research in the sense that I myself went to
the archives and looked at the material, let's say, on the pogroms of 1920 at YIVO, which
I did.
But mostly, at that level of a narrative, you can't afford to go in yourself at every
moment, even if you wanted to.
And also, since 1991, all this new material is there.
So my research process did not include in this case sitting in an archive and taking
notes and assimilating and organizing it.
It involved finding among secondary works ones that had the kind of information and
the interesting sort of inspiring arguments that got me thinking about how to think about
something.
So if you read the book, you'll notice that many chapters say "this chapter owes a lot
to so and so" because I really wanted to give credit.
Sometimes I felt I gotta be sure that I'm really using it in my own way, but there's
a lot of work that went into this book not done by me.
Process?
Get up in the morning, get to the computer, and sit there.
And Regenstein Library was absolutely key, this is a fabulous library.
I have the experience of the library at Yale which is wonderful, but Regenstein is absolutely
superb in our field.
Modern European history, this whole, the latest thing, rare publications that you wouldn't
imagine being on the shelf, and then an enormous resource was the HathiTrust, I don't know
how to pronounce it, where digitized material.
So, to a greater extent than any other book, I could sit in my room.
And the question was, again, it's the same process.
Reading, assimilating, choosing what's important, and rewriting it about a hundred times.
I think it's a really valuable point as access in Russia can become more difficult and restrictive
for some topics, to make the point that you can do all of this without working extensively
in archive.
Can you say a little bit more about other places that you've done research in Russian
history? Are there other archival repositories or other libraries that are particularly near
and dear to your heart, other than Regenstein?
Well, I would say that the library most dear or dearest to my heart other than Regenstein
is the Slavonic Library in Helsinki, where I have spent many, many, many months over
many, many years, actually I think I first went there in 1971, and it is a fabulous library
in the whole environment and the personnel are wonderful.
I did some of the work on the war there, and many illustrations come from Helsinki, they
have a fabulous collection of World War I postcards, some of which are used as illustrations
in the book.
And YIVO was also very interesting for the purposes of civil war and the telling the
Jewish story and the pogrom story and partly the Ukrainian story.
And another challenge of this book actually is that, linguistic.
So when you get into empire, Russian, German, and French were the three basic working languages
of the field, and over the past decade I've acquired Polish, so Polish OK, Ukraine, oh
dear, Ukraine is a big part of the story, and I can fake it to a certain extent, but
actually...
However, it was very interesting that some of the new writing on Ukraine, some of it's
in English, some Ukrainian historians have written in Russian in order to speak across
the divide still, so I was able to some extent to access that, and to a very interesting
dialogue with some of the Ukrainian scholars in North America.
But when it comes to, you know, the Caucasus or Finland or the Baltic states, you have
to recognize your own limitations.
Yeah, it's a daunting problem.
Another really unusual and I think remarkable thing about the book is the number of memoirs
that you yourself worked through, of the very vivid memoirs we have of this period, and
you've done a lot to assimilate them.
I guess that makes me wonder about the relationship between your voice and the voice of your authors.
Obviously as you read these memoirs you're of course shaped by their views, but you are
of course forming your own views as you read them.
So can you speak a bit about that relationship, and in particular with regard to these first
person sources?
Well, I, of course one is so happy to find a memoir of any given moment, because it does
give you a kind of depth and of perspective and vividness you otherwise don't have.
I was interested in memoirs of political actors, and of course you realize you have sympathy
for some and not for others.
But I was looking for memoirs that illuminated a particular moment.
Some characters I knew already, at least a couple of these characters are carryovers,
characters, actors, historical personages, carryovers from my original work.
V.D.
Nabokov, the father of the novelist, Maxim Vinaver, the prominent Polish, Russian, Jewish
activist of the liberal party.
And back to your point about archives, I just want to say that some of the works I drew
on, I talked a lot about new work, but some of the classics in our field, and you might
want to know really good books on Russian revolution from the pre-1991 days.
For example, William Rosenberg's book on the Liberals.
It is filled with archival material, none of it in Russian, it was published in, I can't
remember, the 1970s or something like that.
And it stands up to this day.
So he went from the Hoover to the Bakhmeteff to Columbia.
There is lots of material in North America and the United States.
In fact some Russian scholars have come to America to mine, publish, edit material, some
of these important Kadet materials that ended up in the United States, and publishing them
in Russian for Russian readers.
So I would say Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's book on the February revolution stands up, it's fantastic
- even though he's changed his mind a little bit, given the more recent publications.
Some of that work was done in the Soviet Union but not in archives.
So yes, archival, I would say I don't want to say that it's a fetish to want archives,
because many of the documents I rely on came from the archives, only I wasn't the one who
found them.
So there is a lot of primary material in this book.
And there's been a huge resurgence of interest, as we would expect, in 2017 about 1917, at
this centenary moment.
And your book has also I think been in dialogue with a number of other books that have come
out at the moment.
So perhaps we can close by reflecting on what you think we've learned new about 1917 in
2017 with this new resurgence of literature, and these new discussions about the revolution.
Well, I would say I have an actual dialogue, conversation, there are a couple of books
that came out almost simultaneously on the revolution itself.
Though I must say in celebration of the centenary of 1917, it's been interpreted broadly as
a year to think about the Soviet Union.
So some of the major publications have not been about the revolution, they've been about
Soviet society and Soviet history, which is perfectly legitimate.
The two books closest to my own, the first one was by Steve Smith, S.A. Smith, also at
Oxford, and he wrote a history from 1905 through 28 I think, and he's a colleague with whom
I've been in dialogue for years and years, and he has a more sympathetic view of the
socialist project than I ended up certainly having after having gone through this material
- he's not uncritical.
He also takes this more economic social history approach to the story.
It's also shorter, I wish mine were shorter.
You know the famous saying, if I had more time I would have written less, that is definitely
true, but we have had very interesting conversations about where to put the emphasis, and how to
evaluate things and how to think about it.
Another book that came out very recently by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, who was the author of the
big book on the February revolution, oh I also want to add Alexander Rabinowitch's books
on Bolshevik politics and 1917 from the political - I don't always agree with his conclusions
but he's a meticulous historian, and those books are incredibly valuable if you want
to know, tell me, what happened on what day, and who was doing what?
He was very careful, and they are still after all these years - he is an archival historian.
So Tsuyoshi Hasegawa just recently published a book on crime in Petrograd during the revolution,
and this is not only interesting in itself, but it's part of a tendency in the current
literature on our side and over there to reject the political story in favor of a view of
chaos and violence.
This is a trend also in thinking about the first world war, this sense that it's a sort
of a kind of anthropological wave of violence that overwhelms, as part of the falling apart
of society which opens the door to, perhaps, authoritarian solutions, and so on.
And Tsuyoshi, who's a very smart historian said we have to spend more time thinking about
not political violence but violence per se.
And my argument with him is I think that it's not, it's very hard some times to see where
politics begins and ends.
And some of this mass violence is chaotic, extremely brutal and violent, and one has
to put that into the story.
It's not some beautiful airbrushed proletariat.
On the other hand, a lot of these mass movements were structured, organized, had purposes,
had a sort of not an ideology, but had more of a coherence and purposefulness than the
notion of mere violence would suggest.
I think partly in Russia and even in the west there's a reaction against the very old Soviet
narrative that it was a nicely organized political movement, of conscious proletarians...
I'm oversimplifying, but basically this was the idea.
So Russian historians and the reaction against that like to say, well, no no no, it was more
a collapse, more a crisis, and I think you have to integrate, you can't give up on the
political story.
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to have this conversation.
Thank you for your questions!
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