On June 25th at a ceremony in the EUSP’s Conference Hall, William Rosenberg was awarded an honorary doctorate. Rosenberg is a professor at the University of Michigan and a member of the EUSP Department of History’s International Advisory Board. After the official ceremony, Rosenberg gave a semi-formal speech about his own path as a historian, the first years of the European University, and about how shortages, violence, and loss have continued to define the history of Russia after the revolution of 1917.
Rosenberg’s interest in Russian culture began, as often happens, upon reading 19th century Russian literature. In the late 1950s, moreover, when he was in college, it was impossible not to be interested in the Soviet Union. The launch of Sputnik in 1957 was a sensation, as was Khrushchev and his “thaw” policy. At this time, America was going through a difficult period of social unrest and the struggle for desegregation. Events in the city of Little Rock (1957), where federal troops were called in for two months to protect the safety of black students, and the “Bloody Sunday” civil rights marches in the city of Selma, Alabama (1965) brought into question the traditional image of America. For Rosenberg, who completed his master’s at Harvard in 1961, his interest in Russia and the political instability of his own society developed into one scholarly interest: studying the revolution of 1917.
At Harvard at that time, the approach to studying Soviet history (and history in general) was rather conservative. History was studied as a series of acts done by great people, especially politicians. Great people make great history!—is how Rosenberg describes Harvard’s historical narrative. At the same time, Soviet historians were also regarded as falsifiers. In 1964 Richard Pipes founded the magazine “Criticism: A Review of Recent Soviet Books on Russian History,” which was created for close analysis and deconstruction of Soviet texts. “Criticism” lasted until 1984. A contemporary journal with the same name retains symbolic ties to Pipes’ project, although it differs significantly. In distinction from Harvard, Stanford and Berkeley proved more sensitive to reality. The 1960s in the United States were a time of social protest against the Great American Narrative. Protests and brutally suppressed riots, demands for social change, speaking out against racism and the war in Vietnam—all of this gave rise to a new understanding of the distribution of power in society and mechanisms of social transformation. Rosenberg marked an important turning point as the appearance in 1964 of Leopold Haimson’s article on the problem of social stability in pre-revolutionary Russia. History ceased to be a matter exclusively for politicians; other, more complex categories appeared within it. For Rosenberg, with this retrospective view of the development of historical approaches during his own formation as a historian, there was an important, close relationship between scientific theory and political context.
Context was (and remains) important for the establishment and development of the European University. In the early 1990s it was incredibly difficult for such a project to receive support within the instability of post-perestroika Russia. Rosenberg spoke of how organizers were refused by one fund after another until they ultimately failed to obtain the minimum funding required for establishing open graduate courses. In Rosenberg’s opinion, the Department of History was faced with the biggest challenges. How to teach history in the “new” Russia? How to introduce new approaches? And which ones? These difficulties were primarily due to the fact that in Soviet historical tradition interpretation was more important than empirical fact or archival data. In modern Western tradition, this was long ago not the case. Moreover, the difficulties were associated with the very nature of Soviet archives, which were created in order to tell the great Soviet history rather than the history of social movements or “historical losers.”
With regard to the study of the Russian revolution, Rosenberg stressed that although political figures deserve researchers’ attention, there is a series of other important factors. The development of social movements, cultural particularities, emotions, subjectivity, and power distribution—this is the context in which historical figures act and to a large extent determine. We must not forget the importance of the combination of circumstances and randomness that transforms historical possibility into inevitability. Rosenberg pointed to three issues that, in his opinion, made the 1917 revolution inevitable. These were constant shortages, the totality of violence in the pre-revolutionary period and the pervasive sense of loss—of loved ones, stability, and of the future. It’s possible, said Rosenberg, that no political actions could have saved such a society. Deficiency, loss and violence remained key characteristics of both the Soviet and post-Soviet period. After 1993, there was not a new narrative in Russia to replace the Soviet one, and the country lived in a constant state of postmodern reality. However, as Rosenberg believes, the current historical project of Putin’s Russia is to unite the present country with its pre-revolutionary past. In this situation, where the state seeks to legitimize itself through historical narrative, independent-minded researchers will face more difficultly than in the 1990s.
Olga Yakushenko
