The cultural turn, however, comes with its own politics and political costs. The radical doubting of cultures (and national cultures as the moment of congruence of culture and politics) challenges the dominant discourses of politics in the modern world. If cultures can no longer be assumed to be coherent, bounded entities in the real world, then their claims to self-determination, autonomy, and possibly statehood cannot be said to derive unproblematically from the need to represent a particular culture politically. The claims of nationalists that national cultures run back in time to a primordial originating moment and that culture was, is, or should be isomorphic with a territory (the “homeland”) have been subjected to critical, subversive historical analysis. Moreover, the very idea of constructedness of nations, like that of cultures in general, and the central importance of belief, representation, and imagination in making cultures and nations, both challenge the more positivist theories of ethnic conflict and open the possibility for new constructions of national identity that could lead less predictably to conflict or cooperation. Here is an opportunity for a reconceptualization of a problem in political science. Indeed, the historicization and cultural formation of nations and nationalism were most significantly taken up by a political scientist, Benedict Anderson, but one who for all of his influence in broader social science, history, and literary studies remained marginal to the mainstream of political science.78
The deconstructive thrust of the cultural turn, however, need not lead us into a completely indeterminate world without any coherences or temporal solidarities whatsoever. Even as cultural interpretivists disaggregate the assumed wholeness of societies, cultures, and nations, there is an awareness that a certain “thin coherence” (the term is Sewell’s) remains.79 Sherry Ortner suggests where anthropology may be on this point at the present:
People are spinning what Geertz called “webs of meaning” all the time, with whatever cultural resources happen to be at hand. Thus, even if culture(s) were never as whole and consistent and static as anthropologists portrayed them in the past, and even if, as many thinkers now claim, there are fewer and fewer in the way of distinct and recognizable “cultures” in the contemporary world (though I am less sure about that), the fundamental assumption that people are always trying to make sense of their lives, always weaving fabrics of meaning, however fragile and fragmentary, still holds.80
Thin coherence and weaving fabrics of meaning also imply a (not-so-new) political program of deconstruction that holds that the social reality of any society is only one possibility among many. History and anthropology have often promised us an open world, a world (in Sewell’s words) “contingent rather than necessary,” in which
there exist forms of life radically different from ours that are nonetheless fully human … In the pasts they study, historians find worlds, structured differently from ours, worlds where people’s motives, senses of honor, daily tasks, and political calculations are based on unfamiliar assumptions about human society and the cosmic order … History, like anthropology, specializes in the discovery and display of human variety, but in time rather than space.81
The most potent moment for this act of discovery is probably in the study of origins, the very moment in more essentialist theories used to naturalize present phenomena. Pierre Bourdieu suggests that “There is no more potent tool for rupture than the reconstruction of genesis: by bringing back into view the conflicts and confrontations of the early beginnings and therefore all the discarded possibles, it retrieves the possibility that things could have been (and still could be) otherwise. And, through such a practical utopia, it questions the ‘possible’ which, among all others, was actualized.”82 This, of course, was precisely what the projects of Thompson and Geertz were all about—recovery of alternative worlds that held up visions, not of why we had arrived at where we were, but of where we might have gone.
In a way, we have come back from beyond. For the same idea of possible futures other than the present was what compelled people to turn to Marxism. Although a deep pessimism about the possibility of socialism followed in the wake of the collapse of Soviet-style systems and the global hegemony of market capitalism, there has been a revival of the kind of radical historicism that marked the best of the Marxist tradition—the view that all social formations (capitalism included) have their own history and evolution, their birth, maturity, and death, and their replacement by other forms. This revival has taken place not on materialist grounds but in the array of approaches loosely labeled post-structuralist and post-modern. In his conclusion to Beyond the Cultural Turn, one of the most influential voices in that turn, Hayden White, proposes:
A modernist social science must be directed to the study of those aspects of social reality that attest to human beings’ capacities to make and remake that reality, not merely adjust to it. And it seems to me that the significance of the cultural turn in history and the social sciences inheres in its suggestion that in “culture” we can apprehend a niche within social reality from which any given society can be deconstructed and shown to be less an inevitability than only one possibility among a host of others.83
This new historicization of capitalism and the dominant social forms, the attempt to be self-reflexive about the very order in which you live and work, is reminiscent of earlier Marxist attempts to become self-conscious about the bourgeois world. The relativization and historicization of capitalism allow for the retention of hope for development beyond. But any optimism must be tempered by the post-modernist sensitivity to the arbitrariness of any progressive master narratives that give easy confidence in a democratic, egalitarian, socially just future.
From its very beginnings, the historiography of Russia in the twentieth century has been much more than an object of coolly detached scholarly contemplation.1 Many observers saw the USSR as the major enemy of Western civilization, the principal threat to the stability of nations and empires, a scourge that sought to undermine the fundamental values of decent human societies. For others, the Soviet Union promised an alternative to the degradations of capitalism and the fraudulent claims of bourgeois democracy, represented the bulwark of Enlightenment values against the menace of fascism, and preserved the last best hope of colonized peoples. In the Western academy, the Soviet Union was most often imagined to be an aberration in the normal course of modern history, an unfortunate detour from the rise of liberalism that bred its own evil opposite, traveling its very own Sonderweg that led eventually (or inevitably) to collapse and ruin. The very endeavor of writing a balanced narrative required a commitment to standards of scholarship suspect to those either militantly opposed to or supportive of the Soviet enterprise. At times, as in the years just after the revolution or during the Cold War, scholarship too often served other masters than itself. While much worthy analysis came from people deeply committed to or critical of the Soviet project, a studied neutrality was difficult (though possible) in an environment in which one’s work was always subject to political judgment.
With the opening of the Soviet Union and its archives to researchers from abroad, beginning in the Gorbachev years, professional historians and social scientists produced empirically grounded and theoretically informed works that avoided the worst polemical excesses of earlier years. Yet, even those who claimed to be unaffected by the battles of former generations were themselves the product of what went before. The educator still had to be educated. While the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union permitted a greater degree of detachment than had been possible before, the Soviet story—itself so important an ingredient in the self-construction of the modern “West”—remains one of deep contestation.
The Prehistory of Soviet History
“At the beginning of [the twentieth century],” wrote Christopher Lasch in his study of American liberals and the Russian Revolution,
people in the West took it as a matter of course that they lived in a civilization surpassing any which history