Andrej L. Jurganov: Russkoe nacional’noe gosudarstvo. Žiznennyj mir istorikov ėpochi stalinizma. [Der russische Nationalstaat. Die Lebenswelt der Historiker im Stalinismus]. Moskva: Izdatel’skij centr RGGU, 2011. 766 S. ISBN: 978-5-7281-1123-8

Andrej L. Jurganov: Russkoe nacional’noe gosudarstvo. Žiznennyj mir istorikov ėpochi stalinizma. [Der russische Nationalstaat. Die Lebenswelt der Historiker im Stalinismus]. Moskva: Izdatel’skij centr RGGU, 2011. 766 S. ISBN: 978-5-7281-1123-8.

In “The Russian National State: The Existential World of Historians During the Stalin Epoch”, A. L. Iurganov reconstructs the way in which early Soviet historians came to endorse the term “Russian National State” (russkoe natsional’noe gosudarstvo) in their work on the USSR’s pre-revolutionary history. More than a Begriffsgeschichte, this study focuses on both the intellectual creativity of Soviet historians and the vagueness with which the party framed their ideological relationship with the past. According to Iurganov, this ideological indeterminacy (ideologicheskaia neopredelennost’) was intentionally designed by Stalin to guarantee him the upper hand in his relationship with both historians and the historical record itself.

Iurganov’s treatment of the changing semantics of the term “Russian National State” is meticulous. Charting an array of changes reflected in monographs, textbooks and journal articles published between the 1920s and early 1950s, Iurganov flanks this analysis with a keen investigation of relevant archival sources. This latter work is not only fascinating, but frequently allows Iurganov to identify the agency behind key semantic shifts. Sometimes he traces innovations to the historians themselves; at other times, the shifts turn out to stem from the historians’ interactions with their colleagues, critics, editors, new publications and party handlers. This is Stalin-era intellectual history at its best.

Iurganov’s discussion of the surprising diversity of the discipline during the 1930s and 1940s is similarly dynamic. Criticizing previous scholarship that has posited a simplistic dichotomy between historians and the party, Iurganov argues that such a distinction is artificial and obscures the former group’s eager engagement with the latter’s priorities. What is more, Iurganov finds that historians engaged in remarkably wide-ranging interactions with one another, the historiography and party authorities as they attempted to trace the evolution of Russian state sovereignty. Ultimately, Iurganov finds that there was never any consistent official line or advice on this important subject; instead, Soviet historians zig-zagged abruptly from position to position over the course of this period.

Most controversial in this study is Iurganov’s conclusion that this chaotic state of affairs was intentionally designed by Stalin to create a sense of indeterminacy within the historical discipline. Recent scholarship by specialists such as A.M. Dubrovskii (Istorik i vlast’. Briansk 2003) and the author of the present review contends that such turbulence within the existential world of Stalin-era historians stemmed from the party authorities’ incomplete ideological control over the discipline. According to this line of reasoning, although Stalin and members of his entourage such as A. A. Zhdanov, A. I. Stetskii, G. F. Aleksandrov and A. S. Shcherbakov frequently intervened within the discipline in order to promote their ideological, mobilizational and educational priorities, they also frequently failed to follow through with their initiatives, both because they were preoccupied with more prosaic tasks and because they lacked formal training in the field. As a result, even the most trusted of the court historians struggled to convert the party bosses’ simplistic platitudes and sloganeering into more sophisticated and exacting scholarship. And this inability on the part of the party authorities to fully control the field explains many of this period’s misunderstandings about official intentions, from the 1944 historians’ conference to S. M. Eisenstein’s cinematic debacle “Ivan the Terrible”.

Iurganov, however, argues that the atmosphere of intellectual and interpretive uncertainly that reigned during this period was something that Stalin deliberately cultivated. It was, according to Iurganov, a fantastic game of cat-and-mouse designed to monopolize disciplinary authority within the field. An imaginative interpretation, it owes something to early work on totalitarian theory by people like Hannah Arendt. But like its forerunners, it is also very difficult to demonstrate empirically: in contrast to Iurganov’s resourceful archival work on the historians themselves, here he appears unable to identify documents that actually depict careful command and control on the part of Stalin, much less the intentional creation of an atmosphere designed to foster intellectual dependency. Hard pressed to produce even circumstantial evidence (much less a ‘smoking gun’) from the former party and state archives, Iurganov relies heavily on deductive reasoning and rhetorical turns of phrase to characterize Stalin’s role vis-à-vis the past.

In the process of advancing this notion of intentional ideological indeterminacy, Iurganov contradicts aspects of his larger work. Having highlighted the dynamism of intellectual life during the Stalin period, Iurganov undercuts the rigor and independence of people like A. M. Pankratova and A. E. Efimov by trapping them within a deliberately irrational, chaotic system. And having criticized colleagues for positing a dichotomy between historians and the party, Iurganov reifies this binary by depicting the historians as little more than playthings in Stalin’s hands. This framing of the historians’ existential world is tendentious and mars an otherwise fascinating intellectual history of the period.

David Brandenberger, Richmond, VA