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A Single Research Community: Not Yet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

David L. Ransel
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Abstract

A forum on Boris Mironov's Russian and English editions of The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917 (2000) offers the comments of four scholars on different aspects of Mironov's work. David L. Ransel introduces the forum with a consideration of whether Russian and western historical scholarship has been or should be converging, and he reviews the Russian-language response to Mironov's book. William G. Wagner discusses Mironov's key conclusions: that the imperial period was marked by the development of a more individualistic personality, the democratic nuclear family, civil society, and a state order based on the rule of law. He questions, however, the validity of the modernization paradigm as an adequate tool for analyzing these developments. Willard Sunderland comments on the use of the concept of empire in Mironov's book, calling attention to the assertion that imperial Russia was a “normal” European state and that it was not a “true colonial state.” The focus of the book, he argues, remains Russian society within the space of the empire, not the society of the empire as a whole. Steven L. Hoch considers Mironov's chapter on demographic processes, criticizing the use of demographic theory and its application to problems such as fertility and mortality. He also argues that Mironov accepts too uncritically the utility of the statistical data at hand. Boris Mironov responds to Wagnar, Sunderland, and Hoch in turn.

Type
Forum
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 60 , Issue 3 , Fall 2001 , pp. 550 - 557
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2001

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References

Thanks go to Laura Engelstein, Daniel Field, Nina Perlina, and Willard Sunderland for sharing their thoughts and offering their advice during the preparation of this article. Sunderland shrewdly questioned my premise, asking why I thought achieving a single scholarly community was desirable; because Russian and western scholars have different constituencies and diverse tasks, we should also expect to produce distinctive types of work—a good point.

1. Boris N. Mironov, Sotsial´naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii (XVIII-nachaloXXv.): Genezislichnosti, demokraticheskoi sem´i, grazhdanskogo obshchestva i pravovogo gosudarstva, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1999). An English translation is available, although it differs in certain respects from the Russian edition. Contrary to what the publication data might suggest, the English text is actually translated from a draft prepared several years before the final manuscript for the Russian edition was submitted. The Russian edition is therefore the product of additional research and argument. The English edition also lacks illustrations, the bibliography, and some tabular material included in the Russian version. Nevertheless, the editor and translators of the English version are to be congratulated for the high quality of the translations and the effective integration of translations of individual chapters made by a dozen different people. Boris Mironov, N., with Eklof, Ben, The Social History of ImperialRussia, 1700-1917, 2 vols. (Boulder, Colo., 2000)Google Scholar.

2. A few examples: Mironov, B. N., Istorik i sotsiologiia (Leningrad, 1984)Google Scholar; Mironov, Russkii gorod v 1740-1860e gody (Leningrad, 1990); Mironov, , Istoriia v tsifrakh: Matematikav istoricheskikh issledovaniiakh (Leningrad, 1991)Google Scholar.

3. These first studies were of a “soft” variety, resting as they did on occasional household lists rather than on a continuous series of vital events. See, for example, Czap, Peter Jr.,, “Marriage and the Peasant Joint Family in the Era of Serfdom,” in Ransel, David L., ed., The Family in Imperial Russia: New Lines of Historical Research (Urbana, 1978), 103–23Google Scholar; Czap, “The Perennial Multiple Family Household: Mishino, Russia, 1782-1858, “Journal of FamilyHistory 7, no. 1 (Spring 1982); Rodney Dean Bohac, “Family, Property, and Socioeconomic Mobility: Russian Peasants on Manuilovskoe Estate, 1810-1861” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1982); Hoch, Steven L., Serfdom and Social Control in Russia: Petrovskoe, aVillage in Tambov (Chicago, 1986)Google Scholar.

4. One of the first of these works applied quantitative methods to the study of serfdom: Ivan D. Koval´chenko, Russkoe krepostnoe krest´ianstvo vpervoipolovine XIX v. (Moscow, 1967). A compendium of types of quantitative research being done in the late 1970s can be found in Koval´chenko, Ivan D., ed., Massovye istochniki po sotsial´no-ekonomicheskoi istoriiRossii perioda kapitalizma (Moscow, 1979)Google Scholar. Demographic history began to appear in this period as well. A few examples: Vishnevskii, A. G., ed., Brachnost´, rozhdaemost´, smertnost´v Rossii i SSSR (Moscow, 1977)Google Scholar; Kh. Palli, Estestvennoe dvizhenie sel´skogo naseleniia Estonii1650-1799, 3 vols. (Tallin, 1980); Kolesnikov, A. D., ed., Problemy istoricheskoi demografiiSSSR (Tomsk, 1980)Google Scholar.

5. An exception occurred in 1976 when I was able to include a Russian folklorist in a conference project on “Mother and Child in Russia.” The Soviet censors removed the most interesting part of her essay, but she and I were able to restore it and slip it past the censor when translating the piece into English for publication. See Antonina Martynova, “Life of the Pre-Revolutionary Village as Reflected in Popular Lullabies,” in Ransel, ed., TheFamily in Imperial Russia, 171-85.

6. To take just one example, the coverage, such as it was, of everyday life in historical time had been left entirely to ethnographers, whose works included: Krupianskaia, V Iu. and Polishchuk, N. S., Kul´tura i byt rabochikh gornozavodskogo urala (konets XlX-nachaloXX v.) (Moscow, 1971)Google Scholar; V A. Aleksandrov, Sel´skaia obshchina v Rossii (XVII-nachab XIX v.) (Moscow, 1976); Anokhina, Liudmila A. and Shmeleva, M. N., Byt gorodskogo naseleniia sredneipolosyRSFSR v proshlom i nastoiashchem (Moscow, 1977)Google Scholar; Mikhail G. Rabinovich, Ocherkietnografii russkogo feodal´nogo goroda (Moscow, 1978). The first work by a historian on this topic appeared at the very end of the 1970s, Iurii I. Kir'ianov, Zhiznennyi uroven´ rabochikhRossii (konets XlX-nachalo XX v.) (Moscow, 1979).

7. A few examples: Ul´ianova, Galina N., Blagotvoritel´nost’ moskovskikh predprinimatelei1860-1914 (Moscow, 1999)Google Scholar; Tat´iana P. Morozova and I. V. Potkina, Savva Morozov (Moscow, 1998); Evgenii V Anisimov, Elizaveta Petrovna (Moscow, 1999); Natal´ia L. Pushkareva, Chastnaia zhizn´ russkoi zhenshchiny: Nevesta, zhena, liubovnitsa: X-nachalo XIX v. (Moscow, 1997); Andreev, A. R., Istoriia ordena iezuitov: Iezuty v Rossiiskoi imperii XVI-nachate XIX veka (Moscow, 1998)Google Scholar; Oleg A. Omel´chenko, Zakonnaia monarkhiia Ekateriny II (Moscow, 1993).

8. Current rhetoric, indeed, has us pushing beyond that frontier. See Bonnell, Victoria E. and Hunt, Lynn, Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley, 1999)Google Scholar.

9. A few prominent examples include: Gregory L. Freeze, “The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History,” American Historical Review 91, no. 1 (Spring 1986); Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca, 1992); Wirtschafter, Elise Kimerling, Social Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, 111., 1997)Google Scholar.

10. Odissei has appeared annually since 1989. Each issue focuses on a specific theme; in recent years themes have included cultural history of the social (1997), the individual and society: problems of self-identification (1998), the feast (1999). The volumes of essays mentioned are: Bessmertnyi, Iurii L., ed., Chelovek v krugu sem´i: Ocherki po istorii chastnoizhizni vEvrope do nachala novogo vremeni (Moscow, 1996)Google Scholar; and Bessmertnyi, , ed., Chelovekv mire chuvstv: Ocherki po istorii chastnoi zhizni v Evrope i nekotorykh stranakh Azii do nachalanovogo vremeni (Moscow, 2000)Google Scholar.

11. This is one conclusion of Laura Engelstein's essay “Culture, Culture Everywhere: Interpretations of Modern Russia across the 1991 Divide,” Kritika: Explorations in Russianand Eurasian History 2, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 363-94.

12. The conference papers and discussion appeared in Danilov, Viktor P. and Milov, L. V., eds., Mentalitet i agrarnoe razvitie Rossii (XIX-XX w.) (Moscow, 1996)Google Scholar.

13. See comment by Pavel Zyrianov on individual actors and by others on personal authorship, “Rossiiskii staryi poriadok: Opyt istoricheskogo sinteza,” roundtable organized by Sekirinskii, S. S., Otechestvennaia istoriia, no. 6 (November-December 2000): 43–47 Google Scholar.

14. One Russian commentator criticizes Mironov's conception as being wholly macroscopic and faults it for failing to analyze microhistorical phenomena. This reference to microhistory is, however, the exception that proves the rule, because its author is not using this idea in the way western cultural historians do. Western writers usually use this term to describe a process of selecting a single spot temporally and geographically and boring deeply into the cultural experience, presuppositions, and analytical classifications to reconstruct a picture of the world from this perspective, whereas this Russian critic uses microhistory to refer to the need to test Mironov's hypotheses on the basis of a broad range of local events. See comment by Vladimir Buldakov, “Rossiiskii staryi poriadok,” 46-47.

15. For reasons related to cultural differences between Russia and the west but too complex to enter into here, historians in the west bestow less credit and attention on coauthored or multiauthored volumes than on individually authored works. It would be interesting to have a thorough study of the reasons for this difference.

16. Comments by Gregory Freeze and by Peter Gatrell, “Rossiiskii staryi poriadok,“ 63,64-65.

17. Engelstein, Laura, “Combined Underdevelopment: Discipline and the Law in Imperial and Soviet Russia” and “Replv,” American Historical Review 98, no. 2 (1993): 338–53, 376-81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. Comments by Daniel Field and by Gregory Freeze, “Rossiiskii staryi poriadok,“ 81,82.

19. See Rieber's, Alfred review of Mironov's book appearing in Ob Imperio, 2000, nos. 3-4:433–47Google Scholar. This point was also made in a joint comment by two historians from Saratov, Anatolii Avrus and Iurii Golub, “Rossiiskii staryi poriadok,” 56.

20. Comment by John Bushnell. See also comment by Manfred Hildermeier on the related issue of the complexity of borrowing from the west and how borrowing at one stage sets up dynamics in the receiving country of assimilation and integration that should present problems for Mironov's notions of direct takeovers of foreign models. “Rossiiskii staryi poriadok,” 60, 85-86.

21. Comment by Gregory Freeze, “Rossiiskii staryi poriadok,” 48-49.

22. See especially Rieber, Ob Imperio, 433-37, and Daniel Field, “Rossiiskii staryi poriadok,“ 81.

23. This cathartic purpose is noted in passing, however, by Mikhail Karpachev and Nikolai Bolkhovitinov in “Rossiiskii staryi poriadok,” 51, 53, and by Willard Sunderland in this forum.

24. Mironov, Sotsial´naia istoriia Rossii, 1:16-17.