Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

The "human sciences," which encompass the social sciences and humanities, are a category that allows for consideration of disciplines frequently separated in today's scholarly landscape. Historically, they very much belong together; the human sciences can be defined at their origins as the "science whose subject is 'man.'" In this sense, their roots can be located in early modern Europe, where after 1600 there emerged a "substantial and profound literature on the subject 'man,' a subject that was later studied in ways driven primarily by a secular rather than a theological interest."¹ But in Western and Central Europe, the great period of ferment and disciplinary formation—what Reinhard Koselleck called the Sattelzeit, or period of makeover and accelerated change—came in the decades on either side of 1800. In European history, then, the "epistemic shifts" of the period 1750–1850 constituted a "great intellectual transformation" that marked the transition from general frameworks such as natural law and moral philosophy to modern disciplines like economics and anthropology.² Yet Russia's own Sattelzeit, of course, came significantly later, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: it was made possible by the rapid growth of the academic intelligentsia and intensive European exchange ushered in by the Great Reforms. Indeed, this is one reason the chronological emphasis of the current special issue of Kritika lies precisely here.

To say that the history of the human sciences in Russia is intimately connected with the classic question of Russia's relationship with Europe is only to gesture at the most general parameters of the issue. As in so many other areas, [End Page 1] everything depends on how we decide to grapple with the old problem of "Russia and the West" in our approach to this history. As the human sciences flourished in late imperial Russia in the wake of Europe's earlier period of intensive transformation—or, to put it another way, as Russia internationalized in the age of nationalism—it was in this realm, as in others, demonstrably part of Europe yet also visibly separated from it. In the human sciences, as with the earlier emergence of a Westernized Russian high culture, a phase of imitative assimilation was followed by a period of intricate interaction with Europe at the time when Russia's contribution to world scholarship became rich and original and was then followed by another great parting of ways during the Soviet period (yet, it is crucial to note, within a continuing, if frequently subtle and greatly fluctuating experience of international interaction). This is a picture hauntingly familiar from other parts of the historical canvas. Russia's perennial game of transformation and belated yet intensive catch-up has provoked some of the most challenging and thought-provoking historical conceptions in the field—such as Alexander Gerschenkron's "advantages of backwardness," Marc Raeff's "well-ordered police state," Alfred Rieber's "sedimentary society," Martin Malia's "East–West cultural gradient," and Laura Engelstein's "combined underdevelopment."³

The conceptual dividends reaped from this complicated historical pattern, however, have been decisively more modest in the history of the human sciences. Most frequently, in general histories of the human sciences, Russia (albeit not always a handful of Russian scholarly pioneers) is simply ignored and omitted.⁴ Within the field, the international dimensions of the history of the human sciences in Russia have too often been treated as a one-way street: Western influence on Russia. For example, Alexander Vucinich's classic, pioneering Social Thought in Tsarist Russia began with a discussion of West European influence on Russian sociological thought during the Great Reforms and after, focusing especially on translations of influential works. [End Page 2] But the focus of the study itself was squarely on distinguishing a distinct and internal Russian pattern—how ideology, morality, and revolutionary politics, all preoccupations of the Russian intelligentsia, were intertwined with the rise of sociological thought.⁵ The concern with Russian difference is legitimate and valuable; it is, in fact, a major facet of the contributions to this number of Kritika. But a different light is shed when international interactions are placed at the center of attention. In recent years within the Russian field, significant and revealing works have appeared that have made great strides in interrogating the role of experts, social knowledge, and their relationship with the state.⁶ But explorations of individual disciplines are far ahead of more synthetic examinations of the human sciences.

The special issue of Kritika you have before you is thus triply revisionist. First, it aims to look at the "sciences of man" in Russia across the boundaries of single disciplines, although by necessity its treatment is highly selective. Second, it moves toward a transnational framework for looking at the Russian–European relationship in the human sciences. Third, because the history of the human sciences is placed into the context of new ways of approaching the old problem of "Russia and the West," the investigation complicates and transcends the traditional notion of Western influence.

Yet once the circulation of knowledge is taken out of the more limited literature on the human sciences in Russia and placed in the context of nauka, or knowledge across all disciplines, the theoretical and historiographical picture changes dramatically. Susan Gross Solomon demonstrates with great precision in her introductory article how a broad interest in the ways ideas cross borders has emerged more or less simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic, in both Anglophone and French literature grounded in the history of science and technology, and that this literature itself has been inspired by successive attempts to transcend national frameworks in other areas in recent decades. Solomon's discussion affords great insight into the specific origins of the concept of the circulation of knowledge, or circulation du savoir. Given what Solomon analyzes so trenchantly as "the Paris discussion" (15–20), it is understandable that no fewer than four of the seven articles in this volume were translated from the French. However, it is clearly the case that all these articles were inspired less by a methodological definition of circulation in the specific sense its originators developed than by a broader engagement with the cross-cultural and transnational dimensions to Russian history. [End Page 3]

In the words of one of those originators, Yves Cohen, whose work on circulation in Soviet technology and economics will also shortly appear in the pages of Kritika, "two major traits distinguish the circulation approach from the transfer approach: on the one hand, the accent put on the transformations that the entities in circulation undergo in the process of displacement and, on the other hand, the attention drawn to the effects of the rebound on the point of departure."⁷ There are examples of the first part of this formulation (transformation) in the articles that follow, but few of the second (effects of rebound). All the same, the articles here each develop their own framework for exploring how disciplinary knowledge crosses borders. As Solomon discusses, the investigation in this special issue is only a beginning of a new methodological direction, and it remains to be seen how the further exploration of the circulation of knowledge and the "Russian locale" will unfold. Alain Blum's "reaction" piece at the end, which examines the implications of the articles taken together, points to another noteworthy feature: many of these investigations are into the "sciences of empire" such as ethnography, linguistics, and Orientology—that is, those disciplines with connections to the multinational and imperial nature of the Russian state. The human sciences at the center of attention are those connected to the "imperial turn" in Russian studies.⁸ Forty years ago, one might speculate, a similar project might have found a greater number of scholars preoccupied with investigations of the Marxist social sciences.

In both cases, however, one key finding would be equally applicable. In the pages that follow, the traditional tendency to look at Western influence on Russia is turned on its head. As interactions across borders are explored in depth, not only Russian domestications of international trends but European borrowings from Russia emerge. In his treatment of the difficulties encountered by successive economic schools in fixing a dividing line between free and forced labor, Alessandro Stanzianzi argues that the Panopticon made famous by Michel Foucault and explained as a response to social deviance and prisons was born rather out of "a particular image of Russian serfdom" and "the experiences of the Bentham brothers in that country [Russia]" (29). Vera Tolz's exploration of the international ambitions and national particularities of Russian Orientology, which was furthered by major figures operating on both sides of 1917 such as academicians Sergei Ol´denburg and Nikolai Marr, establishes an equally remarkable claim: Edward Said's Orientalism was indebted not merely to Foucault's discourse analysis, which is conventionally noted, but—via Arab Marxist commentators of the 1960s—to Russian Orientology's critique of the "West." [End Page 4]

Yet delineating examples of influence is, in fact, not central here. In these articles questions of influence tend to have been placed within contexts that are at once broader and less straightforwardly unilinear: international networks and the adaptation of scholarly constructs across borders. To explore the intricacies of these issues, many of this project's contributors wisely chose to highlight biographical studies of exemplary figures or, as Alain Blum puts it, "the carriers of the circulation of knowledge, concepts, and methods" (231). Most notable in this regard is Nathaniel Knight's full-length portrait of the ethnographer Nikolai Kharuzin. The ethnographer's embrace of anthropological evolutionism was so complete that at the end of the piece the author puts it in the context of the Russian intelligentsia's quest for a total system of knowledge—yet Kharuzin had no use for the biological and racial determinism at the core of the evolutionary anthropology of his French mentors. There are other examples of how the biographical approach simultaneously opens up and grounds the transnational. Juliette Cadiot paints portraits of key figures in order to establish overlapping networks of scholars in her study of the interactions between linguistics and the politics of language reform. Her Warsaw-born linguist Jan Baudoin de Courtenay, professor in Kazan, Dorpat, and Cracow, was the product of five other universities and taught in two empires. The international networks of such historians as N. I. Kareev, not only in the historical profession but in sociology, are important for Wladimir Berelowitch, whose examination of the rise of the Russian historical discipline in the late 19th century explodes the hoary dichotomy between the Moscow and Petersburg schools as "largely mythical" (116 n. 7).

The line of scholarly investigation pursued here, the study of mutual interaction across borders in the history of the human sciences, should certainly be applied more in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. The study of Marxist social science and philosophy in this light can yield important new perspectives, especially during the brief heyday of Soviet academic Marxism in the 1920s.⁹ The unique twists and turns of disciplinary construction and destruction in the Soviet period, such as the "second birth" of sociology in the post-Stalin years, might be more fruitfully explicated through deep study of the even more ideologically and culturally fraught relationship with the outside world that emerged in the wake of Stalinist scholarly isolationism and "anti-cosmopolitanism."¹⁰ [End Page 5]

Yet the two articles that we have been able to include on the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, Marlène Laruelle's study of the concept of ethnogenesis in Stalin-era Central Asia and Natalia Avtonomova's exploration of the translation of Western concepts in post-Soviet philosophy, are notable for the different and suggestive dimensions of "circulation" they put forward. Laruelle looks at the origins and lasting importance of ethnogenetic studies (etnogenetika) within the multinational Soviet Union itself, focusing specifically on Central Asia and its republican academies of sciences. She thus examines a "circulation" across the union republics and from the center to the non-Russian regions within the Soviet Union with distinct republican accents and emphases. Yet she also suggests how a direct response to Nazi racial theories of the origins of the Eastern Slavs—a kind of underlying ideological-scholarly competition with fascism—became influential as Soviet theories of ethnogenesis were first formulated. Avtonomova, in turn, places the complexities of language and translation itself at the center of attention as a window into understanding the ways in which Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, and other maîtres-penseurs have been understood in a radically different intellectual and cultural context from the one in which they emerged—the post-Soviet era of translations. In a characteristically original section, Avtonomova compares the reception of French thought in the post-Soviet 1990s, when hundreds of key foreign texts were translated and retranslated, to the institutional conduits and distinctive construction of a unitary "French theory" in the United States.¹¹

This number of Kritika is itself the product of a notable exercise in transnational scholarly cooperation. It is not only a duty but a great pleasure to acknowledge our partnership on this project with Alain Blum and his colleagues at the Centre d'études des mondes russe, caucasien et centre-européen (CERCEC) of the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS). This special issue, which has taken at least four years to produce from inception to publication, could not have proceeded without the extraordinary cooperation and intellectual generosity of Alain, who is a member of the Kritika editorial board, directeur d'études of EHESS, and directeur of CERCEC. He co-organized and graciously hosted the workshop that took place in Paris on the "Circulation du savoir et histoire des sciences humaines en Russie et en URSS" on 26–27 May 2006. In addition, CERCEC financially supported the translations from the French in this issue. The Institut national d'études démographiques (INED), Paris, provided additional support—we thank them both. The important project of translation was greatly furthered [End Page 6] by the dedication of our translators, all talented scholars in their own right: Andrew Drozd, Stephanie Lin, Alison Rowley, Carol Stevens, and Vasilis Vourkoutiotis. It was brought to fruition by the additional work of those authors who wrote in French and Kritika editor Alexander Martin.

The Kritika workshop in Paris, which on the EHESS program fell under the rubric of "Journées d'études internationales," was attended by dozens of colleagues from France, the United States, Russia, and several other countries who took part in a lively and unforgettable intellectual exchange. In contemporary Russian studies, differing academic cultures and linguistic communities erect boundaries that are even today too rarely bridged. The yields that derive from crossing them are potentially great. This special issue can also be seen as an effort to promote the circulation of knowledge within our own field in the present day.