Stephen F. Cohen (1938–2020)

Notes on Contributors

This review examines the book Cultural History of Russia published in 2020 by the publishing house of Charles University, Prague. This inquiry into the main areas of interest in both past and contemporary history of Russia has long been expected not only by students, specialists in Russian studies and in cultural studies, but also by a broad audience of those is interested in Russian cultural history. The authors seek to arrange the book according to the conceptual model; this innovative approach aims at underlining such cultural concepts that are basic and constitutive of the modern Russian culture. For these ends, facts, achievements and problems of the Russian cultural history are interpreted. The authors introduce students and readers to modern Russia, endowed with centurieslong heritage, multinationalism, large territory, but also with cultural contradictions and clashes. The book resolves a hard issue of presenting the real amalgam of views of the Russians on such disputes, and pays special attention to the Russian mass media and Runet. Therefore, suggests the book, modern Russians are in search of cultural identity, which is proved by heated discussions. The nine chapters help readers to get rid of the usual stereotypes in the image of Russians, invites the public to reflect on the achievements and contradictions of the cultural history of Russia. Discussion questions and tasks are what helps students that would read the book engage with the Russian realities and with each other. What is also beneficial for the use of this book in classes is that it is written according to the standards allowing a non-native speaker who has an A2-B1 level of Russian to understand all the information efficiently. To adapt the book to the needs and mental realities of European students, it is published in both print and digital format — the latter includes extra video and audio tapes. In the context of integrating the students with the material the authors should also be given the credit. They entangle the history and culture of medieval, modern and 21th century Russia with European history and the global cultural space. Overall, the book serves as an example in both fields: the cultural research and the textbook initiating and enhancing lingual and cultural understanding of Russian realities. The publication will remain a landmark among the educational achievements not only of the Charles University, but also of the community of European scholars specializing in Russian studies.

SUMMARY: Mark von Hagen’s article offers an interpretation of the changes that occurred in the study of Russian and Soviet history, and suggests the concept of “Eurasia” as an anti-paradigm facilitating the description of the region that combines the legacies of multinational empires and of Soviet-style socialism. At the same time, “Eurasia” is an anti -paradigm because it points to a variety of ways to revise many assumptions about Russian, Soviet, and Eurasian histories. For von Hagen, three separate processes heralded the arrival of new historiographical approaches. First, there is the increasingly prominence of works interpreting the history of Russia and the USSR not as that of a national state, but rather stressing its multinational and imperial character. Second, historians are constantly paying a greater attention to borderlands in the context of the prevailing view of boundaries as porous and fluctuating. Third, diasporas – including émigrés and exiles – have been “rediscovered” and their works are now returning to their countries of origin. Von Hagen also analyzes what he considers as “two paradigms” of the historical perception of Russia and the USSR. The first, “Russia as Orient”, attempted to present the Russian-Soviet historical experience as essentially rooted in centuries long Oriental and despotic traditions of Russia. Using Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, von Hagen argues that this perception of Russia as Orient helped sustain a Western “occidental” identity. It often walked hand in hand with a belief in the unique experience of Russian history, a belief that von Hagen terms “neo-Slavophile”. The second paradigm is that equates the Soviet Union with modernization. According to von Hagen, this paradigm was partly rooted in the liberal tradition of the Russian “state school” of historiography, which saw the privileged role of the state led by an enlightened bureaucracy as the driving force of Russia’s path to modernization. Opposed to attempts to “essentialize” Russian history within the “Russia as Orient” paradigm, the modernization paradigm attempted to “normalize” the Soviet experience. Assumptions of the inevitable ethnic and national homogenization of the Soviet Union became prevalent in the modernization paradigm. Von Hagen then explores the legacy of Eurasianist thinkers, a group of Russian émigrés who offered their vision of Eurasia as a space of interaction between the Russians and the Turkic and Finnish peoples. Their vision of Eurasia also implied a positive evaluation of the Mongol presence in Russian history and a critical approach to Eurocentric assumptions. Von Hagen asserts that, in his view, the new Eurasian anti-paradigm avoids problematic apects of the Eurasianist legacy, such as the political views of the Eurasianist thinkers and their geopolitical views. The new Eurasian anti-paradigm retains their critique of “essentializing” approaches to such concepts as Europe and Asia in order to offer an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the complex pasts of Central and Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. For von Hagen, the Eurasian anti-paradigm has been profoundly impacted by the current “decentralization” of historical narratives, which is the result of interaction between historians and linguists, anthropologists, sociologists, etc. Eurasia allows one to part with the dominance of national narratives while accepting the importance of modern nationalism in historical processes. According to von Hagen, Eurasia does not coincide with the former Russian Empire or the former Soviet Union or with any other particular state. Its chronological boundaries are also not rigidly determined. In the age of globalization, von Hagen argues, it is important to remember that the great continental empires constituted an important element of global history. In the last part of his article, von Hagen surveys literature that he believes attests to the emergence of the Eurasian anti-paradigm in Russian-Soviet history. According to the author, the Eurasian anti-paradigm does not preclude any specific approaches to the past; even less is it meant as a judgment about the likelihood of one or another country of joining the European Union, NATO, or for that matter any of the Asian organizations. It is meant as a concept that opens up new horizons in the study of history and signifies a return of the Eurasian space into global history after almost a century of isolation.

Slavonic and East European Review, 96, 1, 2018 The Poetics and Politics of Modern Russian Biography POLLY JONES Like many genres, biography came belatedly to Russia. As with other such late arrivals, biography underwent intensive growth in quantity, sophistication, cultural significance and popularity from the era of Nicholas I onwards. It stands today as a dominant force in post-Soviet publishing. Yet studies of Russian biography’s poetics and its role as a literary and cultural institution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries remain thin on the ground, a fact often lamented, yet not fully addressed, in the scattered writings on the subject.1 The present volume examines Polly Jones is Associate Professor of Russian and Schrecker-Barbour Fellow at University College, Oxford. 1 Book-length studies of Russian biography are almost non-existent, with the exception of G. O. Vinokur, Biografiia i kul´tura, Moscow, 1927; Dmitrii Zhukov, Biografiia biografii: razmyshleniia o zhanre, Moscow, 1980; D. Kalugin, Proza zhizni. Russkie biografii XVIII–XIX veka, St Petersburg, 2015, and the series published by Memorial, Pravo na imia. Biografii XX veka. Important Russian articles on the form include Boris Tomashevsky, ‘Literature and Biography’, in Krystyna Pomorska and Ladislav Matejka (eds), Readings in Russian Poetics, Cambridge, MA, 1971, pp. 47–55; Iurii Lotman, ‘Literaturnaia biografiia v istoriko-kul´turnom kontekste (k tipologicheskomu sootnosheniiu teksta i lichnosti avtora)’, in O russkoi literature. Stat´i i issledovaniia: Istoriia russkoi prozy, teoriia literatury, St Petersburg, 1997, pp. 804–17; B. V. Dubin, ‘Biografiia, reputatsiia, anketa. O formakh interpretatsii opyta v pis´mennoi kulture’, in Slovo, pis´mo, literatura, Moscow, 2001, pp. 98–119. The ‘Lives of Remarkable People’ series has attracted the most analysis, though more historical than textual. Several texts are analysed in Zhukov, Biografiia biografii; see also G. E. Pomerantseva, Biografiia v potoke vremeni: ZhZL, zamysly i voploshcheniia serii, Moscow, 1987; Ludmilla A. Trigos and Carol R. Ueland, ‘Literary Biographies in the Lives of Remarkable People Series (Zhizn´ zamechatel´nykh liudei)’, Slavic & East European Journal, 60, 2016, 2, pp. 207–20; Inna Bulkina, ‘The Lives of Remarkable People: Between Plutarch and Triapichkin’, Russian Studies in Literature, 49, 2013, 2, pp. 87–95. Several excellent studies of Russian concepts of the self shed light on biography but are not intended as direct studies of the genre: Jochen Hellbeck and Klaus Heller, Autobiographical Practices in Russia = Autobiographische Praktiken in Russland, Göttingen, 2004; Lidiia Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose, trans. Judson Rosengrant, Princeton, NJ, 1991; Laura Engelstein and Stephanie Sandler, Self and Story in Russian History, Ithaca, NY, 2000. POLLY JONES 2 modern Russian biography as a literary form, a publishing phenomenon and a cultural force that reveals and contests hegemonic ideas of the role of the individual in society, and of the make-up of the human personality itself. The History of Russian Biography The history of biography is long, with textual narratives of human lives dating back at least to Ancient Greece, if not the Pharaonic era. But it is also relatively short, with recognition (even naming) and theorization of the genre hesitant and partial in many cultures.2 Biography’s very hybridity or ‘impurity’ — its fusions of art and science, history and literature — long left it excluded from generic taxonomies, or consigned to the unprestigious periphery of the various professions with which it intersected, primarily history and literature.3 Its galloping mass appeal and its tendencies to either burnish or demolish reputations (the former still much more common) tended to make critics suspicious, or even disdainful, about the idea of subjecting the genre to serious analysis. Biography for much of its 2 Biography as a term appeared in English in the seventeenth century; in Russia, the term took until the nineteenth century to be established. On the disjuncture between practice and theorization of the genre, see Daniel Madelénat, La biographie, Paris, 1984 (whose detailed genre study is intended to address the ‘lack of an -ology’ of the genre, as he terms it). On the neglect of biography in criticism, especially before the 1950s, see also David Novarr, The Lines of Life: Theories of Biography, 1880–1970, West Lafayette, IN, 1986. On the neglect of its poetics, see Ira Bruce Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact...

NS a charter member of AATSEEL, and as a Slavist whose participation in the field dates from the thirties, it is indeed gratifying to observe the growth of Slavic-East European studies and teaching in this country. Not only those of you whose appearance in our ranks is quite recent, but all of us irrespective of whether our primary or secondary interest lies in Slavic, owe much to those pioneers and trail-blazers of the '20's and '30's. An immese debt of gratitude is due such figures as George R. Noyes, Samuel Cross, Alexander Kaun, Oleg Maslenikov, Alfred Senn and Arthur P. Coleman, plus a handful of other distinguished scholars, who unsung and unheralded, labored to secure a place under the sun for SlavicEast European studies. They gave unsparingly of their energies and efforts at a time when there was little glory and even less recognition in the SlavicEast European field. It has been a decade since Russian, due to reasons requiring no elaboration here, found its way into the curricula of numerous North American colleges and universities. It is interesting to compare its growth with another newcomer, Portuguese. Whereas Portuguese claims about 1000 students and is having considerable difficulty in maintaining itself, Russian according to President Coleman's Report on the Status of Russian and Other Slavic and East European Languages,' in 1948 boasted approximately 5000 students regularly enrolled in college classes (with an extimated 30,000 more in extension courses, adult education centers, etc.). While Portuguese, partly due to a declining emphasis on Latin American relations, threatens to fall sharply, Russian studies, owing in large measure to international developments, bids fair to expand. And indeed as a regular perusal of the New York Times Education Page will reveal, new courses in Russian language, literature, and civilization continue to make their appearance. New centers of Russian, Slavic, and East European studies have blossomed forth

Soviet Railways to Russian Railways. By J. N. Westwood. Studies in Russian and East European History and Society. New York: Palgrave, in association with the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham, 2002. ix, 254 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Tables. $72.00, hard bound. - Volume 62 Issue 2

Plans for Stalin's War Machine: Tukhachevskii and Military-Economic Planning, 1925–1941. By Lennart Samuelson. Foreword, Vitalii Shlykov. Studies in Russian and East European History and Society. New York: St. Martin's Press, in association with the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham, 2000. xvi, 267 pp. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Glossary. Index. Photograph. Tables. $65.00, hard bound. - Volume 60 Issue 1

Report: Hungarian Studies Association Annual Report

In 2021 and 2022, review articles on the latest international historiography on the history of Russia in the 16th-18th centuries were published in the Hungarian online scientific journal on historical Russian studies RussianStudiesHu. The journal issues also introduce readers to new research by Russian historians, but in this article I will primarily focus on the current state of Russian studies about the 16th-18th centuries in Central, Eastern and Western Europe and the United States. In review articles on the history of Russia from 1462-1689, historians from Hungary, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the United States, as well as French-speaking scholars, call this period of Russian history the "late medieval", "pre-modern" or "early modern" era. Some researchers argue that until the mid-17th century, Muscovy had little in common with European states. And based on review articles of international historiography, it can be established that the central figures of the historiography of the 18th century in almost every country are Peter I and Catherine II, and there is still no consensus regarding the periodization of Russian history in the 18th century.

Two RECENT ARTICLES have skewered the present writer for denying much African influence on Afro-American folktales and for distinguishing folklorists from anthropologists, especially in the African situation. 1971 William D. Piersen published An African Background for American Negro Folktales? citing me seventy-five times in eleven pages, and in 1973 William Bascom published and the Africanist, an inversion of my own title Africa and the Folklorist, in which he named me, with some dissatisfaction, twenty-three times in less than seven pages.1 Bascom is angry, Piersen cautious. Bill Piersen has been writing his doctoral dissertation on Afro-American culture in colonial New England under my direction in the history department at Indiana University (he took his master's degree there in folklore); he is to be congratulated on attacking his mentor before completing his degree. Bill Bascom has been a friend since 1952, when I spent six months at Northwestern University with Melville Herskovits and Bascom in the department of anthropology on a postdoctoral fellowship in interdisciplinary studies. Our relationship hit its first snag when I delivered a report to the 1970 meeting of the American Folklore Society in Los Angeles on my visit the preceding March to Africa, his domain and folklore fiefdom. My off-the-cuff, impressionistic remarks provoked him to write me a scorching letter comparing them to one of the travel postcards wired to the San Francisco Chronicle by their peripatetic columnist Stan Delaplane. As a matter of public record, my response to the negative vibrations this innocent travelogue induced in hard-core Africanists can be found in the Folklore Forum, 1970. There I asked, Where did I err? and noted Alan Dundes' response, In going to Africa. Couldn't you have gone somewhere else? No one would take offense at Asia.2 I give these personal details to acquaint the reader with the biases of the disputants. For myself I am, of course, entirely free from bias, the objective scholar with a computer for a heart, weighing impartially the evidence for African versus European and New World origins of American Negro folk-

President Gorbachev has fundamentally changed the Soviet political system. Whether Gorbachev survives another month, year, or decade, the Soviet system will not return to the party-state command economy that preceded his tenure. Although the Soviet changes have not yet resulted in the total repudiation of the communist system, as in Eastern Europe, and a neoconservative retrenchment is possible, those of us who study and teach Soviet politics must respond to these developments with a perestroika of Soviet studies and “new thinking” about the Soviet Union.Concepts and techniques formerly alien to Soviet studies must become integral components of our analysis. Even if we cannot completely discard such concepts as totalitarianism, Marxism-Leninism, and democratic centralism, we must begin to include theories of pluralism, constitutionalism, and federalism. Patently, oldstyle Kremlinology and “black box” analysis must be supplemented if not replaced by public opinion polling, studies of electoral behavior, and legislative roll-call analysis. Rather than thinking and teaching about the USSR in isolation or in the narrow context of comparative communism, we should look at Soviet politics from a broader comparative perspective that draws on theories and examples from Western and Third World systems. Quite simply, the restructuring of how we teach and study Soviet politics must be as fundamental and as sweeping as Gorbachev's perestroika of the Soviet system.

Notes on Contributors

The Journal in 2016.

Paradoxically enough, while India's interest in the USSR has been traditionally keen and deep, Indian achievements in the realm of Russian and Soviet studies have been negligible. This is clearly seen in the almost total absence within India of indigenous Sovietologists, Russian research centres or even attempts to elevate studies on the USSR to the level of an academic discipline. This paradox appears all the more striking if one compares India's performance in this field with those of other countries. Many western countries, of which the United States is a notable example, have greatly augmented facilities for teaching and academic research in Russian and Soviet affairs in the post-war years. At present there exist, within the United States alone, as many as seventy university departments and research centres devoted to the systematic study of Russia before and after the Revolution of 1917. The rapid strides the U.S.A. has made in these studies in the post war years are evidenced by the fact that, compared to the two hundred and fifty doctoral dissertations on Russia and the Soviet Union submitted in the century between 1850 and 1950, one thousand of them have been completed since that date alone.1 In comparison, India is languishing far behind despite her traditional interest in the USSR. How does one explain this curious Indian paradox? No doubt the key is to be found primarily in the country's colonial past and in the attitude of the British Government towards this question.

Human Resource ManagementVolume 4, Issue 4 p. 11-19 Article The uaw and white collar unionization Carl Dean Snyder, Carl Dean Snyder Associate Professor of Economics, in the Department of History and Social Sciences, Eatern Michigan university. Previously, Dr. Snyder lectured at the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations at the University of Michigan. He received a Doctor of Social Science degree at Syracuse University in the fields of economics and sociology. Dr. Snyder?s doctoral dissertation was titled UIndustrial can Lose the Battle for the White Collar Worker: The UAW as a Case in Point. During seven years of industrial experience at Electric Auto- Lite, Dr. Snyder held offices in the local union and the local CIO Council.Search for more papers by this author Carl Dean Snyder, Carl Dean Snyder Associate Professor of Economics, in the Department of History and Social Sciences, Eatern Michigan university. Previously, Dr. Snyder lectured at the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations at the University of Michigan. He received a Doctor of Social Science degree at Syracuse University in the fields of economics and sociology. Dr. Snyder?s doctoral dissertation was titled UIndustrial can Lose the Battle for the White Collar Worker: The UAW as a Case in Point. During seven years of industrial experience at Electric Auto- Lite, Dr. Snyder held offices in the local union and the local CIO Council.Search for more papers by this author First published: Winter 1966 https://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.3930040404 AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume4, Issue4Winter 1966Pages 11-19 RelatedInformation