Boris M. Firsov
HISTORY AND SOCIOLOGY: Walls and Bridges
Presentation at a Mini-Conference “History and Social Sciences in Russia”
Budapest, October 10-11, 2002
In Place of a Preface
I would pose a question: “In what relations are sociological and historical cognition as two very
important methods of mastering reality?” Until recently they obeyed one of Lobachevsky’s
geometrical theorems stating that parallel lines do intersect but the point of intersection lies in
infinity. Speaking of Russian sociology, I would say that its historism still leaves much to desire. I
also suspect that experts would not be delighted with sociologism of Russian historical sciences.
The events of last 15 years have opened up possibilities for surmounting one of the serious illnesses
of Russian (and till recently – Soviet) social sciences. Diagnosis of this illness is a loss of memory
or amnesia. It proved to be a result of all kinds of political repressions and ideological pressure
“from above” (coercive amnesia) and also a consequence of the intentional escape from clashes
with the past “from below” (deliberate amnesia).
The viruses of social amnesia were attacking not only science and its representatives but also the
masses of ordinary people of the country. My childhood and youth passed under the power of those
taboos against knowing the pre-Revolutionary past of the nation. For my mates and me life should
have begun with pictures of the dazzling future where the present was only an optimistic prelude to
it and the past was sort of lacking. A writer Boris Vassiliev born in 1924 has reminded lately that
for the first ten years after the Revolution history was practically not taught in schools. However,
even now it resides, by his expression, in the backyard of school programs fueled by myths like
class struggle being the eternal perpetuum mobile of human progress.
During the perestroika period I had to witness attempts to consciously ban any, this time Soviet,
past as not wanted. “We must become a normal country” – this demand seemed quite grounded. But
the rush to “normality” was occurring unsupported by the experience of the preceding historical
periods and epochs. More importantly, only few paid attention how painful was the breaking of the
mental stereotype of a great nation; but they have started to speak about it only now that
transformation fervors have abated. In the result, already in 2-3 years after the resignation of Gaidar
and the beginning of an abrupt braking of the reforms, a majority of nation-wide public opinion
polls respondents (up to 60%) supposed that the Soviet system in itself had not been so bad; the
rulers were unfit, and not all of them [1].
And now what Russian studies showed in the beginning of a new millennium. Approximately 10-15
percent of Russian population orientated themselves to liberal values. The intention to be orientated
to moderate, enlightened and patriotic pragmatism was typical of 40-45 percent of Russians [2].
This pragmatism absorbed both traditional values and western values of a liberal trend. Adherents
of asocial individualism did not exceed 10 —15 percent of total population. To get 100 percent we
will have to add near 30 percent of the population nostalgic for many rules of Soviet life, such as
planned economy, governmental care, and collectivist attitudes. When mixed, this cocktail of values
represented a hybrid mentality lost in labyrinths of the Soviet past. It would be a truism to repeat,
how dangerous the amnesia of the social sciences is. Surmounting it would mean inculcating in
people a skill to commensurate the scales of the country’s history with the history of daily life of its
ordinary people.
1. The First Wall: Culture as A Source of Mass Amnesia [3]
According to encyclopedic definitions, amnesia is a lack of recollections or incomplete memories of
the events and feelings of a certain period. The roots of coercive mass amnesia go back to October
1917 and the implantation by Bolsheviks of artificial (devised) forms of living on the basis of
“upbringing the masses”. In the period of leftist cultural experiments the former patterns of vital
activities were recommended for oblivion. In any case, the possibility to follow its challenges was
excluded. Early Bolshevik values dominated noticeably till the end of the 1920s, having no
officially permitted alternative.
In several moves (no use to list them) all the threads of political management of the country
happened to be in hands of the newly born bureaucracy who had long-term utopian plans. One of
those was to melt over the able population, primarily younger generations, into a human material of
a new type suitable for establishing a socialist economy and a socialist society. In this connection, it
does not seem accidental that before the machinery of forced implantation of communist ideology
took on the features of completeness, the targets of communist forcible experiments were the
principal institutions of socialization, i.e. school, family and church. Their destruction followed by
radical transfiguration was associated with guarantees of the liberation of people from bourgeois
traditions and the culture of the past. They began with school by introducing control over political
reliability of teachers, over methods and contents of teaching. But, as a German historian R. FulopMiller wrote in 1927, after his visit to the country, “The Bolsheviks organized popular education in
such a way that no one could go beyond the limits of officially permitted knowledge and education;
thus, there was no danger for the proletarian state that the citizens would obtain an excessive
volume of knowledge that would turn them into an ‘subversive element’ ” [4].
The society could no longer retain the state of coercive and fragile consensus based on militant
revolutionary asceticism and the devotion to the ideals of the world proletariat. Forced negotiations
with the past began, that is, building of elements of the traditional orientation and cultural life of
pre-Revolutionary educated classes into early Bolshevik values [5]. Among the first ones to be built
in were amalgamated elements of the culture of the former naïve monarchism; the well known
terms «отец и учитель» (father and teacher), «вождь» (leader), «руководитель» (head) and
«хозяин» (master) came into daily use. Then the mythologization and glorification of Lenin
occurred followed by the implantation of values of subordination, power and universal discipline.
They also introduced old symbolics of hierarchy – shoulder straps, uniforms, etc. Another element
was the rehabilitation of the sovereign meaning of notions “motherland”, “great Russia”, of some
historical figures, such as tsars and princes (Peter the Great and Alexander Nevsky, for instance).
Noteworthy is such a method for harmonizing new Soviet values with traditional mentality as an
intensive repeated appeal to folklore. Belletristic literature began to portray more confidently the
positive characters that, in turn, helped develop the people’s culture at symbolic and axiological
levels. Then there began a campaign under the motto “The nation must know its heroes” [6].
Many Russian and western authors tend to ascribe all changes that took place in Soviet reality of the
1930s to Stalin who invariably acts in such cases as an embodiment of political and every mighty.
But it seems that during the period in question a “parallelogram of forces” was active. The initiative
to proclaim tolerance to some of the former norms, a return to elements of the way of life of preRevolutionary educated classes originated largely from certain groups of Soviet elite who were in a
search for a smooth replacement of the totalitarian regime with a more rigid but still authoritarian
model of social governance. This was seriously influenced by the “situation of completing the
revolution, by the quest for a new legitimization of Soviet power, by fatigue of Marxoid schemes,
by a demand of the publicizing of former knowledge adapted to the new generation and by the thirst
of entertainment” [7].
2
The power detected in culture a dosed resource that was accumulated “above” (among the educated
classes) to be conveyed “down” for adaptation by popular masses in need of the enrichment and
development of their cultural experience. In that period cultural differences themselves were
regarded as objectively given, and they needed to be abolished through enlightening the Soviet
people and heightening their cultural level [8]. That is why it took amalgamated cultural patterns
recommended for general dissemination and use. There came a period of “imposing state standards
of cultural knowledge and behavior ‘from above’ ”.
Culture in the amalgamated form remained a means; it bore a functional character and serviced the
burning tasks of socialist construction and pragmatic needs of the then Soviet society, which was
going through a stage of ideological and political development “at the sunset of revolutionary era”
[9].
In post-Stalin period the amalgam of socially approved values was mixed with small doses of
liberal ideas that did not contradict the Soviet concept of peaceful coexistence. This concept did not
provide for a convergence of different social and economic systems. A conversion of values of the
Soviet civilization was excluded, since they a priori had historical advantages over values of the
bourgeois world and, consequently, embodied the future of the state and the society. That period
(and it could be called something like “the interim of traditionalism and liberalism”) began in
Khrushchev era and ended in the mid-80s. By that time a “nonconformist” culture borne by
dissident human rights activists and other participants in human right and cultural Resistance
movement was building up in the depths of the post-Stalin authoritarian society [10]. The moderate
social and cultural layering typical of the 1950s and the “thaw” period took an absolutely different
caliber in the late 80s.
It was only after August of 1991 that Soviet elite, including a considerable part of the academic
elite, would refuse, with an enormous inner resistance, the idea of holding the masses in hands. It
was incredible for its representatives to dream of such a refusal in the 1930s and the post-Stalin
period when they were feeling nearly life-long doubts in the face of an eternal dilemma of the Soviet
epoch – whether or not there should be “an expansion of the possible and a constriction of the
prohibited”. In the result, culture and the social sciences as its organic part gave let the Orwell’s
“ministry of truth” have their hereditary place. As a consequence, till now a majority of Russian
citizens do not have “at hand” the categories suitable for describing and comprehending the society
they live in: social and cultural texts multiplied within the society by the power, mass media, and
means of a scholarly discourse remain for most of non-specialists “semantically devastated”, by
words of a Russian linguist R. Frumkina [11].
2. The Second Wall: Amnesia “From Below” as a Consequence of the Submission
to the Rules of the Game
Sociologists (and I start with them) created means for “the power-friendly opposition”. For
example, a great importance was attached to the language of truth that leaned upon the role of
subtext. “The tendency to reappraise values claimed a skill not to speak till for the time being and
not to write extra out of anxiety of possible job mishaps but, primarily, of the impossibility to
oppose a lie within the existing language of social sciences. What was written and what the author
meant differed considerably” [12].
Let me retell recollections of Professor Igor Kon [13]. In almost every one of us there lived a fear
instilled in childhood. And even when none of the family was repressed, the frightening campaigns
against the “killer doctors”, “Weismanians-Morganians”, “bastard cosmopolitans” or political trials
3
like the so called “Leningrad Case” were leaving indelible traces in souls. For “when others are
being beaten before your eyes, what you feel is that you yourself are unprotected, the fear that it can
happen to you” [14]. The second mechanism is the doublethink described by George Orwell when a
human can have two opposite but equally sincere opinions about one and the same problem. He,
who lived entirely in the world of official slogans and formulas, was doomed to a conflict with the
system. Sooner or later he should have bump into the fact that real life was not at all running by the
laws of social equality, and only few took them seriously. And those who understood that these
principles are false were doomed to silence or to conscious hypocrisy. “For long you keep on living
by the formula “write two, count three in your head” and eventually you forget what’s “in your
head” and fail to answer a direct question not out of fear but out of ignorance” [15].
The duality of the situation of scholars I am talking about goes back to even more general rules of
Soviet social life, i.e. the relations between professional elites and the power. More precisely the
problem of ambivalence of intellectuals’ social roles was formulated by the late Russian historian
M. Gefter. He noted sagaciously that intellectuals were and are the resource of the persecuted and
the resource of persecutors [16]. Although in daily consciousness the same attitudes were sooner
expressed in terms of the protection from the power or, contrary, the protection of the power.
Based on that I suggested several models of professional behavior and political positions typical of
Soviet sociologists in the late 60s – early 70s [17], [18].
One of those can be defined as individual existence in the niche of professional activity. A certain
stock of vital optimism gave grounds not to suffer in the conditions of the Soviet regime. Being
non-party and/or being parted from the sphere of immediate party interests made a positive
resource. More frequently, this was connected with the possibility to indulge in “pure” science.
Here people felt themselves relatively free. Another variant of “permitted freedom” was teaching at
a higher education institution (political freedom was lacking but there was freedom to dispose of
one’s time).
Political indifference and the inclination to it developed with years were a means to avoid the
sinking into reality and to pass over the tabooed sides of the past, while doing research or teaching.
The easiest way to do that was “to know nothing, to hear nothing and to say nothing”. People
having such attitudes were one-hundred-percent products of the Soviet system. But their life passed
without traumas and breaks in a detached professional world view. The flight from reality saved: it
made the ground for “non-tragic variant of fatalism”.
The name of yet another model is collective immune protection from the power on the basis of
“game to the rules”. In this case there is no open protest or a struggle but there is a hidden
resistance to attempts to make science and professional activities ideological. Behavior within a
closed circle of professionals did not agree with the official behavior outside. This did not come
easy and required a certain talent to mimicry, to fluctuations together with the party line. But the
win is obvious: the professional environment is retained. In such conditions professional activity
proper was grounded on the safety rules. One of them consisted in a search of neutral and socially
approved (frequently time-serving) topics. While an historian was looking for a research topic that
would not attract an increased public or official interest, a sociologist was occupied with criticizing
bourgeois science, since without criticism it was hard to communicate to the reader a certain
amount of positive knowledge. Yet another rule was that no one should cross the “red signal flags”
of censure and ideological taboos. “Collectivism-conformism and early ideological indoctrination
depraved us since childhood; official norm and style of behavior were perceived as something
natural, the only possible; intellectual doubts and moral reflection came, if at all, after a long time…
All those became truly free who broke entirely, even if inwardly, with the system, starting to live by
another system of values… But the likes were few” [19].
4
The same is written about by A. Kamensky when he turns back to the behavioral practices of
historians in the Soviet epoch [20]. Bringing a subject of research away from official themes
allowed getting around the reefs of timeserving. In reality the historians were divided into two parts
– some admitted only conditionally the Marxist scheme in performing the “ritual”; for others that
scheme made “flesh and blood”. Although, the wall of quotations was no barrier to discerning the
“orthodox scholars and to seeing the people standing closer to “historical truth”. Freedom affected
the community in a peculiar way: someone from the “progressive” turned into a “Slavophil” and
others, on the contrary, became an inveterate conservative. Kamensky adds that “in general the
rejection of the Marxist paradigm, at least at the fist sight, occurred surprisingly fast and smoothly
for a majority of historians… And this is just a confirmation that for the majority it was nothing
more than a formality” [21].
But nevertheless history continues to be an ideological sphere. Not nearly all have renounce the old
world who publicly declare that. “Underground communist party committees also operate today at
history departments of some universities” [22]. Of interest are separate actions of the power. The
Duma deputies are extremely anxious about what textbooks use the children at school. They blame
all that have been done with Soros’ money and even pass resolutions. But these documents pass
over in silence the publication of textbooks approved by the Ministry of Education that are saturated
with, for instance, openly nationalistic contents. Kamensky cites a story of his colleague from an
old Russian town where the Deputy Governor oversees “in person” how “correctly” applicants to a
local teachers’ college interpret the image of Stalin during entrance exams.
3. The First Bridge: Historical Sociology
The editor of an All-Russian “Sociological Studies” Journal Zhan Toschenko had grounds to say
two things, when opening a heading “Historical Sociology” (and that event took place 24 years after
the first issue was released in 1974). Certainly, traditional Russian sociology was in a close relation
with historical knowledge, but “the given branch” has remained non-constituted and
underdeveloped until recently. The problem looks definitely as being old and new. It looks old
because a synthesis of historical and sociological knowledge took place de facto. It looks new
because there are practically no fundamental works and publications in Russian devoted to the
synthesis of these two branches of knowledge [23].
It is customary to call historical sociology a discipline in which sociologists address the past by
using relevant documents and sources with the retention of the qualitative specifics of sociological
knowledge [24]. If leaving beyond the national limits of this discipline, it is not hard to found out
that deep and consistent historism distinguished the works of A. Conte and G. Spencer. The data of
historical science were used in almost all the main works of M. Weber. A noted Russian sociologist
M. Kovalevsky is reported by his colleagues to build sociology “from bottom” by using factual
material discovered by history. But M. Weber, G. Zimmel, E. Durkheim and P. Sorokin themselves
re-channeled sociology to an empirical river-bed, as they studied only the things susceptible to
exact measurements and effected unintentionally the sharp fall in attention the historical material. In
the result, well until the end of the first half of the last century extra-historical, if not anti-historical,
approaches dominated in sociological science [25]. Besides, the historians themselves ignored
sociology in a serious way. Not only in Russia but abroad also their relations were far from being
cloudless.
But already in the middle of the last century the situation became different, the traditional mapping
of the social disciplines field changed, which can be displayed on the historical-and-sociological
works on the problems of the USSR done by western scholars. The works of Sovietologists
5
contained conclusions that lifted the level of general theoretic concepts about sociological problems
of elites, bureaucracy, political systems, revolution, modernization, etc. It went together with the
interaction of different social sciences, for instance, historical sociology gained momentum.
Historians in the West began to master new fields – semiotics, cultural studies, social psychology –
and proceeded to thinking about the role and the place of sciences on society as a whole [26].
Efforts of Russian scholars are directed, first of all, to the interface between history and sociology,
which, by evidence of experts, is flowing into history slowly as it runs into serious problems and
objections on the part of many historiographers. Sociologists also do not hurry into the field of
history, considering their own science more “positive”, precise, experimental” [27].
A prognosis consists in the following. In the West the new century may bring in the
institutionalization of “historical social science”, while in the East (Russia) they will waste their
energy to prove that sociology cannot but be history in its most essential parts, since all social
phenomena have a past that colors not only the present and the future alike [28].
The Western tradition and Western historiography is adopted poignantly. The latter has been long
divided into progressive (democratic) and bourgeois (knowingly unfriendly). Specialists in the
history of foreign countries spoke languages of the countries they studied, but for a historian of
Russia the foreign language efficiency might be considered as something redundant. The dispute
was reduced to citing revelatory articles written for the most part in Russian. Besides, the country’s
history could be regarded as no subject to the mind of foreigners for a deep understanding.
Virtually, there is no our and their science – there is science and non-science [29]. I join this
conclusion of A. Kamensky.
4. The Second Bridge: Social History and Sociological Research
Already from the definition of social history subject area (genesis of personality, democratic family,
civil society and lawful state) it is become clear what is the relation, or simply dependence, of this
historical sub-discipline on sociology. A key question here is the tonality of explanation of the
Soviet period. B. Mironov suggests coming from the presumption of normality of the Russian
historical process. What follows is his idea of cliotherapy [30], synonym of which is a sober
awareness of advantages and defects of the history of one’s own state and society. (In such a case,
history is called on to inspire people with optimism and give them a spiritual recovery – thus its
tasks were defined by a Moscow historian V. Sorgin). The formation of an understanding of the past
and the myths that form in this process should not unfairly abase the national dignity [31] and
deprive mass consciousness of the means of interpreting the past, as well as the guiding lines to the
future.
But there are several problems here. Problem one is contemporary interpretation of the history of
Soviet society. By habitually using the concept of “totalitarian society”, which was engendered by
the “cold war” conditions and is an invention of western sociology seeking for a method to exactly
portray its principal ideological opponent in the eyes of the world community, one can come to
quite a one-dimensional concept of Soviet system [32]. The latter represents a regime supported
exclusively by violence (terror) and the forced ideological indoctrination. Such a viewpoint
exaggerates the role of the Soviet state and reserves but a little to Soviet society [33]. Society in this
case consists of “small screws” deprived of subjective rights whatsoever. As far as the state is
concerned, it towers over an individual by filling in all the cells of living space, including the
structures of daily life. Turning to earthly realities (I mean an analysis of human actions, concrete
practices under conditions of the USSR) made it possible to supplement the concepts of a tough,
6
governmentally imposed order with a more complex, multidimensional, “diffuse” model. By that
model, inside the Soviet system there worked mechanisms of long and complex coordination of the
interests of the society and the state, those of their mutual adaptation [34]. Such a viewpoint allows
entering into discussion not only the system of party-and-government prohibitions, social taboos of
any kind, technologies of suppression and repression but also methods to skillfully avoid, use and
ignore the taboos and limitations that were opening up before the society’s members various
possibilities of survival. They can be divided into three groups.
(1) In conditions when a social group was unable to openly come out in defense of its members,
more importantly, it failed to get united to assert general interests, the rational strategy of an
individual’s survival and the adaptation to the conditions of Soviet society began to follow a
principle “each one escapes on his own…” [35]. Let me stress here once more that an ordinary
Soviet man had no chances for elementary self-preservation without an obvious and mentally
acceptable bargain with the devil, i.e. with the almighty power. On the other hand, the devil himself
could not exist without making constant bargains with a multitude of ordinary people by denying
their right of a detached (private, family) sphere and the right of self-protection. As the authors of a
research project “The Soviet Man” conducted by the All-Union Public Opinion Research Center” in
1989 wrote: “Mutual lenience” revealing itself in numerous similar cases led to the emergence of
double standards in society, or rather to doublethink. In the result, all the groups of educated elite to
a certain extent “were forced to go trough a ‘bargain with the devil’, striving to preserve
themselves, the opportunity to work and keep the cultural heritage” [36].
(2) Alongside the existence of the doublethink that lived to our times, the understanding of
destructiveness of the doublethink was objectively formed. This fact would inevitably result in an
open functioning in the 1970s of two cultures – permitted and not permitted. In any case, this
bifurcation of culture would mark an open resistance of Man.
(3) A close look in the past allows separate scholars to declare a more radical position, thus refuting
a stereotype point of view that Soviet society was “all-round GULAG” or “utter Stalinism”. In an
interview to “Komsomolskaya Pravda” Newspaper B. Grushin, the author of a book “Four Lives of
Russia in the Mirror of Public Opinion” [37] said: “Having completed the first volume, I am able to
say exactly that our society was heterogeneous. It was inhabited not only by homo soveticus but
also by homo communisticus and homo sapiens. And this radically different from a popular point of
view that all were “soviets”. Not all. When working on the second volume, I can see how one of
these groups, homo communisticus, was gradually disappearing already in the Brezhnev epoch,
because the promised communism plopped down, and everybody was perfectly aware that it would
never exist, in this country in particular. But then there emerged an absolutely obvious conflict
between homo soveticus and homo sapiens. The number of the latter ones was growing and they
had a completely different system of values” [38].
Problem two is the quality of sociological information. Did sociologists manage in those years to
break away from the limits of the then dominating ideologized models that presented to the outer
world an embellished façade and passed off this façade as reality? The party-and-state system was
desperately resisting self-knowledge, and the lack of objective data was blocking a realistic policy
[39].
Sociologists managed to find a way out from the cognitive deadlock that was a result of the
obtrusion of the paradigm of ideologized historical materialism. The concept of a three-level
structure of sociological knowledge implied the existence of general sociological theory (historical
materialism), special sociological theories (theories of middle level, according to R. Merton),
empirical basis (empirical studies proper). It was a forced but timely compromise [40]. Its main
7
elaborator V. Kelle wrote not long ago: “I perfectly understood that if theoretical studies would be
done not on the Marxism theoretical basis, they would not be allowed to develop, they would be
strangled… With means available for me I was trying to defend and safeguard the new that
appeared in our scholarly life. In this case, it was empirical sociology, a mere mention of which had
recently been accompanied by epithet “bourgeois”. And it should be admitted that this tactics
worked good: officialdom did accept this point of view” [41]. A way to study “real problems” was
opened up.
Marxism of “branch” sociologies was notably “matched” with structural functionalism of T.
Parsons who is known to have maintained the ideas of stabilization of social life. The pathos of
homeostasis was spiritually close to the concepts of controllability and planability. Illusionary as
they were, they fed the consciousness of the country’s leaders. Another serious breakthrough to the
understanding social reality was based on a wide application of tools and language of systemic
analysis. In the result, things were moving forward, gradually setting sociology free from the “only
true and universal” teaching.
But still there are many lacunas in sociological knowledge. For example, the issues of Soviet public
and political life and the operation of power in the 1950s – 80s remain underdeveloped, while
political sociology itself owes its birth to perestroika and openness, equally as sociology of mass
movements that open ways to the democratization of society. The system of party and censure
taboos told on the study of deviant behavior – crime that used to be considered a remnant of
capitalism until the mid 80s, as well as prostitution, which was regarded as being non-existent. The
concentration on the history of “party state” went to the detriment of the study of the history of the
people and society, since social sciences should have reflected achievements of the country, the
sister Union republics, as well as success in solving the national problem and the victory of the
world socialist system. Ideology narrowed deliberately the circle of problems that in reality make
the common field of history and sociology.
5. The Third Bridge: On Oral History as a Resource of Social Knowledge
Thesis one – general civilian. Oral history with its attention to a man and his personal historical
experience meets perfectly the needs in a dialogue of generations in the beginning of the 21st
century feeling anew the influence of rapid social changes in Russia. That is why the activities of
the Oral History Center at the European University at St Petersburg, encouraging the formation of
historical consciousness, the feeling of social solidarity and personal responsibility, can be of
special importance in the context of the development of a civil society, in which every man is given
an opportunity to be heard.
Thesis two – oral history as a reaction to the crisis of contemporary social knowledge and its
passion for quantitative methods. Today inner trust to quantitative methods is retained but
qualitative methods seem more attractive. Besides, as it has been repeatedly noted in apologias of
qualitative methods, quantitative methods suggest the results of measurements expressed in
artificial (formalized) languages, while qualitative methods give the results of observations recorded
with the help of a natural language. Hence, one part of social researchers trying to attain cogency
rushes into the life worlds of individuals, and the other part will try to do without that, regarding
itself protected by the armor of figures and therefore invulnerable. In the result, there emerges an
opposition of figure (“positive science”) and natural language (actor). It seems that qualitative
methods are closer to the breath of society’s life, to an opportunity to understand its mood, structure
and peculiarities of daily activities of individuals. Historical time that deprived people of the right
of doubt is going away, and the observed devaluation of faultless construction of reality suggested
8
by positivists looks like a regular phenomenon. In this way, with a delay, I personally have
rehabilitated for myself the trust to the understanding social sciences. I am not embarrassed to know
that behind that there is a washing out of the genre of social thinking noted by an American
anthropologist C. Geertz. The scenarios of other social science works, according to his
observations, use the laws of theatrical dramatic art by representing life of society as a drama of
characters and fates in certain social circumstances. I would think these scenarios useful for science
if they bring together a historical (sociological, cultural or anthropological)discourse with the
mentality of wide circles of people.
Thesis three – a possible scenario of oral history research development. It seems promising to
develop a research project built, in any case, on a study of topical Russian (Soviet) theme with the
aim to obtain a significant scholarly result. Interests of the EUSP to the initiative and elaboration of
such a project imply the development of inter-disciplinary approaches, inter-departmental links, a
synthesis of teaching and research activities and the furtherance of the University’s reputation in
Russia and abroad through international cooperation in related fields of social and humanitarian
knowledge.
As an option, it would be useful to bind the project’s topic to social history of Russian (Soviet)
society, which in many senses and aspects remains “incompletely examined”. The deepening of
cognitive process depends on a possibility to bring into use new and infrequently referred to sources
of historically significant data that are late to be rated high among historians. One of these sources
is the citizens of Russia whose personal and collective experience of the life in the USSR and now
in Russia can essentially add to the already known to social scientists.
Specifically noteworthy is the ideas spread among the senior age cohorts, the generations who were
destined to witness and participate in the grandiose historical transformations of the country. Their
natural aging has hindered the collection of true individualized information on how the epoch of the
1930s was perceived. Analogous difficulties would arise in several years at the attempts of new
historical reconstructions of the Great Patriotic War period, etc. The same can be said of the
insufficiently explored 1950s and 1960s in Russian history. In a word, it would be a mistake to
leave the future generations of social scientists alone with the official sources of historical
information and not to provide them with reliable collections of unofficial information. We shall
call it existential, reflecting peculiarities of the existential experience of living in Soviet society.
It is known that after the World War II the so called Harvard Project was carried out, involving indepth interviews with hundreds of displaced persons (former Soviet citizens) with the aim to obtain
true evidence on peculiarities of the respondents’ living in the pre-war Soviet Union [42]. I refrain
from going into detail of that large-scale project. More importantly, its authors reached the
projected goals and succeeded in unveiling many “secrets” of Soviet life. The data collected then
have served for a long time a large number of researchers. In particular, the interviews in the
Harvard Project have recently made the foundation for a book by S. Fitzpatric “Daily Stalinism
[43].
The possibility of a “remake” of the Harvard Project makes the essence of a practical question to
the participants in the mini-conference. It raises no doubt that the project will have the status of
joint venture. The object of the research will be Russian citizens. The subject of the research
(concepts of a certain period or certain aspects of life in the USSR) should be discussed. But
prioritized here could be thoughts and feelings of those who will never again have a chance to be
interviewed due to their age and other peculiarities. In cinematography they frequently use the term
“departing nature” to stress that the state of the object frequently determines the filming time and
can sharply change the plans of a filming crew! This concept is topical for us.
9
In place of a conclusion
Not so long ago the Memorial Society organized a competition among the senior school students of
the country under the motto “Man and History. Russia. 20th Century”. Assessing the results of this
action, the Neprikosnobenniy Zapas (Private Stock) Journal wrote: “The past is contradictory,
because a lot should be known about it to grasp it as it is too diverse. Bad dreams come out from the
horror things about the collectivization, siege, war and repressions, and it is hard to believe, first,
how people managed to always be happy (and truly not all to a man were unhappy!); how is that we
keep on living in such the seemingly calm time (although an old man is not satisfied with it)” [44].
But the discovery would be not in academism but there where through necessary attributes of a
historical writing, be it done by a professional or an ordinary citizen, composing oral history,
emotions of the author will be visible born by the meeting with a different state of mind, with a
different language element (be it a document or an interview), with pictures of daily life and morals
capable to stir imagination [45]. It is these intonations that stimulate the shaping of a society’s
historical consciousness, open up a way to general and special problems of discourse that
accompanies human movement within social and individual time allotted for him. I shall agree that
intonations of this kind have become an accompaniment quite recently.
10
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*
42. Inkeles A and Bauer, R(aymond) A. The Soviet Citizen. Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society. Cambridge, Massachusets: Harvard University Press, 1959.
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*
44.Утехин И. «...держаться корней?» // Неприкосновенный запас, 2000, N6(20).- С.86.
45.Там же. С.87.
Boris Firsov
European University at St Petersburg
Mailing Address: 3 Gagarinskaya Street
St Petersburg 191187, Russia
Tel.: (812) 275-5137
Fax: (812) 275-5139
E-mail: firsov@eu.spb.ru
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