Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

________

I first encountered Dave Joravsky in graduate school, when I read his Soviet Marxism and Natural Science, 1917–1932.¹ The overarching subject was the shift of the official version of Soviet science from a rather mundane positivist-materialist reductionism in the 1920s (largely ignored by practicing scientists) to an imposed "dialectical materialism" that took hold in the early 1930s and provided ideological cover for (the most famous example) Lysenko's Lamarckian view that traits acquired during an organism's lifetime—that is, not determined by genes—could be inherited by its offspring.

Almost everything in the book was new to me. What most startled me, however, was Dave's demolition of the belief, to which almost all scholars of the Soviet Union at the time subscribed, that Lenin, in a 1905 article on "Party Organization and Party Literature" had provided the authoritative basis for Soviet leaders' insistence that literature—belles lettres—should be written from a Bolshevik point of view. That was, in fact, the position that Stalin took in the 1930s. As Dave pointed out, Lenin had asserted only that political and social analysis published in the Bolshevik newspaper should reflect the party's ("party" not yet capitalized) positions; competing socialisms were either irrelevant or unwelcome. That might seem to be no more than a puzzling aside in a book on Soviet science, but in fact it was a refreshing reminder that Soviet scholarship of that time, and even later, [End Page 451] offered a very unreliable history of early Bolshevism, as it did of Soviet science. Yet Western historians decided to turn the Soviet false credit into a false charge (which they nevertheless seemed to think was true). Dave reminded them that they should look at the original documents. Not really a necessary reminder, you might think, but Cold War–era historians made that mistake over and over again. Even as recently as 15 years ago I had to recommend that a publisher not accept a book proposal on the history of Soviet art whose reasonably well-known would-be author claimed the same Lenin article to be the foundation stone of Soviet art.

Dave wrote two other remarkable books on Soviet science, The Lysenko Affair and Russian Psychology: A Critical History.² Here, however, I want to introduce you instead to his last, as yet unpublished but completed book: Great Nations of the West.³ Joravsky used literature (the works of Émile Zola, Lev Tolstoi, Marcel Proust, Robert Musil, and many other greats) as his sources for this meditation on nationalism, antisemitism, and attitudes toward war in 19th- and 20th-century Europe. How did these writers frame the nation? How did they justify nationalism? Did they see war as useful, necessary, inevitable, central to national identity? Dave was the opposite of a nationalist and appalled by the justifications great writers offered for war, but his purpose was not to denounce them, because that would have been too easy. Of course, he did not hide what he thought. He really did want to understand their points of view. The book sits at the boundary of history and literary studies: Dave assumed that literature maps and perhaps shapes intellectual trends. The book reflects his astonishing breadth and depth of knowledge, and his writing is compelling.

Dave was a generous colleague, with a habit of asking fundamental questions. When I talked with him about my own work, he routinely honed in on what he took to be the essential questions: What was my basic assumption? Was I writing from a political or moral point of view (he employed other dichotomies as well), and why? Sometimes I found that style of interrogation of my work useful, sometimes—temporarily, at least—annoying, particularly when I didn't have ready answers to his questions. But the questions were useful even when I tried to ignore them. When the department dealt with hiring decisions, Dave tended to pose questions just [End Page 452] like that. Indeed—Dave himself confessed to this—when he hadn't managed to read a candidate's work, he would listen to what others had to say, and when he had a good sense of what a book was about, he would ask a question about the essence of the book's approach to the question under study or its underlying premise. That provoked some of us—or at least sometimes me—to reassess our own opinions. At times, he seemed overly blunt, or stubborn, but that was because he treated everyone as an intellectual equal.

By contrast, when he was chair in the 1980s, he had to deal with a group of history students who wanted to protect the freedom of speech of a tenured member of the faculty in our School of Engineering who was a Holocaust denier. David listened to them respectfully, and then suggested—very tactfully—that while that engineer certainly had a right to say what he wished, denying the Holocaust was no more rational than denying electrons, and we, as a history department, had no reason to provide a forum that might seem to legitimize such a perverted view. My memory of that encounter is somewhat vague, but my recollection is that the students departed, if not completely satisfied, then at least no longer feeling that we had willfully suppressed free speech. Dave showed his respect for fellow faculty by needling us, as it sometimes seemed, but never needled students.

________

I did not know Dave Joravsky all that well, and what I knew—as a young Australian postdoc newly arrived from the UK, unfamiliar with American society and its mores—I initially found hard to interpret. I was unsure how to place him, or he me. Moreover, my main contacts with him were in the first decade of my life in the United States, the 1970s, and that is half a century ago. So, for all my admiration of his work, I thought it might be difficult to write about him. But it turned out otherwise. As soon as I opened his Lysenko Affair and started reading the preface, Dave rose up before me in all his memorable idiosyncrasy. "Mean motives will probably be ascribed to me" is his first sentence. Who ever started a scholarly book like that? He meant that he might be taken to be gloating, in an American triumphalist way, about Soviet stupidities. It is true that he despised those [End Page 453] stupidities, but he was an equal-opportunity despiser. There were plenty of stupidities to be found closer to home.

Joravsky was primarily an intellectual historian, but the struggle between the geneticists and Lysenko that was the subject of his greatest book, The Lysenko Affair, was not, in his analysis, a conflict of ideas at all but rather a conflict between scientists with ideas and politicians without them. Rather than a crude version of a Marxist "dream of human perfectibility," the impetus behind Lysenkoism was "a self-deceiving arrogance among political bosses, a conviction that they knew better than scientists how to increase farm yields."⁴

This could have been written as a simple victim/victimizer story, but that was not exactly the story Joravsky wanted to tell. "Of course my chief sympathies have been with the scientists who suffered persecution because their analysis of the real world subverted the dream of a great leap forward. But the instinctive contempt that their persecutors arouse in me is diluted by the realization that most of the persecutors were ignorant brutes; they only dimly understood the world they were trying to beat into modernity." His personal reaction to the "enthusiasm for a willful leap out of agricultural backwardness" that partly impelled these ignoramuses was "embarrassed sympathy."⁵ In this connection, he quoted Brecht (an unusual choice for a US Sovietologist, still more in German), but he could have taken some lines from a poet closer home, the American Robert Lowell:

Pity the monsters!Pity the monsters!Perhaps, one always took the wrong side—Ah, to have known, to have lovedToo many Davids and Judiths!⁶

Joravsky's ambivalence about the "little Stalin" monsters who did their bullying at a lower level did not extend to the big monster himself, Iosif Stalin. But in his preface to the English-language edition of Roy Medvedev's Let History Judge, a work he highly esteemed, there is a degree of unease about Medvedev's unqualified denunciation of Stalin's "criminal character," which, in Medvedev's analysis, constituted "the main cause of Stalinism." As a David against Soviet political Goliaths, Medvedev is Joravsky's man—but with qualifications. He warns readers that the "unfamiliar conceptual [End Page 454] framework and somewhat annoying word use" derived from a Soviet Marxist-Leninist background may interfere with their appreciation of Medvedev's "penetrating analysis of Stalinism." For Joravsky himself, what was particularly difficult to swallow was Medvedev's Soviet concept of "mistakes," which carried the "dubious assumption that there is always a 'correct line' in politics." "Of course some readers will cavil at the one-sided vehemence" of Medvedev's argument, and perhaps Joravsky cavils too, in a way. To be sure, "olympian detachment comes easily to outsiders." At the same time, "If it is used without Olympian arrogance, it can assist the discussion Medvedev is trying to start."⁷

Joravsky found Medvedev's analysis particularly illuminating when it came to Stalinist mentality—that is, the mentality of its executants—rather than the man himself. Medvedev "has produced the first reliable study of one of the most disturbing puzzles in social psychology": namely, why the "upper strata of Soviet society," "party members at various levels, managers and specialists, writers and scholars" submitted to or even cooperated in "their country's descent into utter lawlessness," despite the fact that "they were the chief victims after the peasants."⁸ But Stalinism remained a "disturbing puzzle" to Joravsky, defying "even the semblance of logic. I find myself staring, in the last analysis, at the wild irrationality that confronts the historian of collectivization and of mass terror. I can see how the Stalinist mentality worked, but I cannot find a rational explanation for it."⁹

That last sentence—Joravsky's voice at its most recognizable—comes from the article he wrote for the conference on "Cultural Revolution in Russia" that I organized at Columbia University in, I think, 1973. It was perhaps a bit surprising that Joravsky agreed to take part in this conference, as he did not really sympathize with its revisionist agenda. The Cultural Revolution of the late 1920s–early 1930s was a five-year episode (known to contemporaries by that name) that involved unrelenting communist bullying of the "bourgeois" intelligentsia and strident attacks on religion with an extensive proletarian affirmative action program.¹⁰ Up to that time, the Western scholarly view of such bullying was that it was an obedient response to "signals from above" from the political leaders, but what I found, [End Page 455] in addition to the signals, was a good deal of militant enthusiasm and initiative "from below," notably from the Komsomol and various outsider groups in the cultural world. This interested me because I was looking for a point of entry into social history, then a nonexistent field of Soviet studies. It did not particularly interest Joravsky, because to him the key issues about the Soviet Union continued to lie in its intellectual history.¹¹

Joravsky was quite welcoming when I dropped into American Soviet studies out of the blue in the early 1970s, and generally supported me in my search for a job in the United States in those days of extreme job scarcity. (To be sure, there were limits to his welcome: when a rare Russian history job came up at Northwestern, Joravsky's university, and I asked him if I should apply, he looked at me with horror and said, "But I couldn't have you in my own department!") However, he probably had reservations about the intellectual company I kept. My Cultural Revolution conference could not have happened at Columbia without the support of Loren Graham, a tenured professor there. Joravsky, though I didn't realize it at the time, had a prickly attitude to Loren (who, like Joravsky, was a historian of Soviet science with a Columbia PhD) and in general may have felt a bit defensive about younger scholars like Loren and me who (unlike Joravsky's cohort) had had the opportunity of a research year in the Soviet Union on the recently established American and British exchanges. Joravsky also had intellectual reservations about "revisionism," then only emerging as a phenomenon in Soviet studies and associated primarily with a dislike of totalitarian theory (too "top down") and with Stephen Cohen's argument about an essential discontinuity between "original Bolshevism" and Stalinism.¹² As it happened, I did not agree with Cohen on discontinuity, but it is clear, rereading Joravsky's text, that he assumed I did.¹³

Joravsky's unhappiness was evident in discussions at the conference and, only slightly modified, in the published version of his conference paper, "The Construction of the Stalinist Psyche." For one thing, he was not interested in the Cultural Revolution as a discrete episode but rather as a long-term process—an "explosion of angry contempt for the intelligentsia," yes, but also and probably more importantly part of "an excruciatingly protracted process … an endlessly self-perpetuating effort of the single ruling [End Page 456] Party" to enforce unity and shut mouths.¹⁴ Certainly there was a "great break" (his preferred term for what I called "cultural revolution")¹⁵ that re sulted in "the imposition of thought control" and the move from real ideological debate to "an absurd caricature" that was the essence of Stalinism, but Joravsky did not want to let Leninism off the hook, as he thought Steve Cohen and I did.¹⁶

I did not have the sense that Joravsky enjoyed the exploration of disagreement at the Cultural Revolution conference.¹⁷ His response looked more like irritation. He did enjoy giving a good hard backhander to people he despised: for example, F. G. Kirichenko, characterized as an "arch-Lysenkoite," "fawning gratefully on Khrushchev and Podgorny" at a Central Committee plenum, who earned an ironic tribute from Joravsky as the "first disciple of Lysenko I ever met," whose "passionate apologia helped decide me to undertake this study."¹⁸ But as far as I was concerned, Joravsky was not a mean critic. The revisionist approach probably continued to irk him, but his disagreements with it were individual, never part of a collective working-over.

Joravsky was always his own man, and perhaps something of a loner as a result. Judging by the acknowledgments in his books, he did not have much of a sense of community with other Americans in his field, though he dutifully thanks some of his teachers. But there were intellectual contacts that Joravsky did value highly, notably those he had with Soviet scientists about Lysenko in 1962 and 1965. It was a pleasant surprise to him [End Page 457] to find that it was possible to have real dialogue with Soviet citizens and to find them disagreeing with each other, as well as with him, but on the basis of data and without rancor.¹⁹ He names them, gratefully, as "friendly Soviet scholars,"²⁰ the list including Lysenko's theorist I. I. Prezent and Zhores Medvedev, the future dissident and brother of Roy, whose Let History Judge Joravsky was to introduce to a Western public. There seems to have been a real doubt in Joravsky's mind as to whether an outsider could understand and objectively analyze Soviet debates, so that there was an element of humility here, as well as interest in observing some of his subjects performing in real time. Another eyewitness participant in Soviet debates, the left-wing American geneticist Herman Muller, won an affectionate and sympathetic acknowledgment: "I wish H. J. Muller were still here, so he could judge whether I have made good use of his fascinating reminiscences, and the one item of his Soviet correspondence that accidentally survived the McCarthy years. (He burned the rest when threatened by investigation.)"²¹

It would be remiss not to end an appreciation of David Joravsky without pointing out what an outstanding work of historical research his Lysenko Affair was and remains. These were the days when Western access to Soviet archives was just beginning and was largely confined to the younger generation of International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) exchange scholars. Joravsky addressed the question of whether one can write Soviet history without archival access and answered it affirmatively, even with regard to the most secretive of all periods of Soviet history, the Stalin era—and rightly so, on the basis of his own work. "High politics is hidden, but the public record contains much evidence of changing policies and of the realities they have been designed to master and shape," he wrote. This makes it possible to "draw inferences about the changing patterns of thought and behavior," including collectively within the political leadership, despite their efforts to conceal individual differences.²² These, no doubt, would become known only if and when "the state begins to wither away" (this I take to be Joravskian irony: he surely did not expect it to happen) and the archives became open.²³ Well, the Soviet state withered away, but Joravsky's Lysenko Affair is still there as an important text, even now that it is possible to answer some of those high political questions from the [End Page 458] archives. Moreover, we may now be entering a period where archives are once again inaccessible to Western scholars, meaning that the skills David Joravsky honed so well in the bad old days are once again at a premium. [End Page 459]