When it came time to make the decisive choice of what career to select—in my case between theater and the academy—the decision to go to graduate school in history was deeply shaped by the need to know more about the Soviet Union. Socialism remained in my young adulthood a utopia that first-hand knowledge of the actualities of the Soviet system did not tarnish. For me, as for many who drifted from Old to New Left, the USSR was no longer the model of socialism but a distorted or degenerate failure to realize the emancipatory promise of Marxism. Still, when I finally arrived in the Soviet Union in 1964, I experienced no disillusionment, only a concrete confirmation that socialism lay in the future. I was traveling with my father’s brother from relatives in Tashkent to others in Leningrad on the day that Nikita Khrushchev fell from power. Our plane was pulled down in Cheliabinsk, where we waited for hours until released to go on to Leningrad. There was no news about Khrushchev’s removal on radio or television, my thoughts were that if only I were in New York I could find out what was happening.
The people I met in the Soviet Union the next year, when I was an exchange student with Moscow and Erevan State universities, seemed to live a more authentic life than my compatriots back home: struggling, to be sure, with the material poverty of the early Brezhnev years, but at the same time maneuvering through the restrictions on public life and preserving a rich interior, private life marked by a deep humanism, a sense of social justice, and faith in a better future. That mid-1960s moment, living with students at the university dormitories, was my first and most durable experience of a non-capitalist world, a place free of commercialism and concern for money, marked by a rough equality. My enthusiasm for the Soviet experience was not shared by most of my fellow American exchange students who complained incessantly about the petty discomforts—no toilet paper, for example—that plagued our daily lives. Upset when I discovered I was being followed by plainclothes police, I confided in one of my fellow students, only to find out soon afterwards that he had betrayed my confidence and reported me to the American Embassy. When I applied to stay a second year on the exchange, the Soviets agreed but the Americans refused.
I reveled in the warmth of close Russian and Armenian friends, who helped in dozens of different ways to ease the material and bureaucratic difficulties of Soviet life. These friendships were deep, reinforcing, and have been maintained until the present. The mid-1960s were still a time when many intellectuals and most ordinary people supported the gradual reforms evident since the death of Stalin, maintained their belief in progress toward socialism, and remained both curious toward and suspicious of the West. Much of that immediate post-Khrushchevian affection for the system on the part of those I knew would soon disappear. Inequities and corruption grew in the next decades, along with social pessimism and inertia. Still, my own take was that the USSR was fundamentally a healthy society, that was struggling to overcome the legacy of Stalinism, but required radical reform to open its constricted public sphere. In my first published article (in a New Left journal published by Oberlin College students), I wrote about the need for a “bourgeois democratic revolution” in the USSR, more openness and protections for those in the embryonic civil society struggling to emerge. Paradoxically, the greatest sense of distance I felt in the Soviet Union was in Armenia itself, where I was received as a long-lost relative but was immediately aware of how different I was from the “we” that insisted I was one of them.
At Oberlin College in the late 1960s and through the 1970s, I was the young firebrand professor, the “Red-in-Residence” on that isolated Ohio campus, a self-proclaimed “Marxist” (who was just beginning to struggle through Capital, the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, and the Grundrisse). The Marxism of that time was that of the young Marx along with the socialist humanism of Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, György Lukács, and Leszek Kolakowski, providing a compelling theoretical tradition that informed my work on Soviet history. Intellectually, the most innovative writing was by the new social historians, particularly British Marxist labor historians, and again I found a standpoint outside the society in which I lived from which to observe, analyze, and advocate. Teaching and scholarship, even in northeastern Ohio, was, I believed, a kind of political activity that required the most meticulous scholarly engagement: faithful attention to the evidence, as neutral and objective as possible a construction of narrative and analysis, and awareness that one came to the work with values of one’s own. “Truth was revolutionary” (in Régis Debray’s phrase), and honest scholarship on the USSR was essential for the activist Left, which all too often was overly apologetic or content to be just plain ignorant. We were confident that the student anti-war agitation and the civil rights movement were merely the first steps toward a more radical restructuring of American society. These were infectious thoughts, and I was an active participant, even from the precarious perch of an untenured assistant professor. The History Department slapped my wrists firmly when they refused to put me up for tenure, but in the best traditions of that liberal college the faculty pressured reconsideration.
Without much self-reflection, I wrote about class and nationality, which now seems to have come out of my own life experience as a leftist Armenian in America. After more than a decade as a Soviet historian at Oberlin, I moved to the University of Michigan, where I was appointed to a chair in modern Armenian history. I became a “professional Armenian,” that is, I taught Armenian history largely to Armenian students, lectured to the Armenian community, and tried to elevate a rather parochial sub-field to the standards of the discipline. My interests in Transcaucasia and nationality problems in the Soviet Union continued to be marginal among mainline Russianists, until the explosion of national resistance in 1988. Suddenly, I was given my “fifteen minutes of fame,” as I glided from radio to television to appearances in Washington as the “expert on the Caucasus.”
The promise presented by the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev was extraordinarily consequential for those of us in Soviet Studies who had argued against the demonization of the Soviet Union and for a more “détentist” approach in foreign policy. At that effervescent moment of the late 1980s, “actually-existing socialism” seemed about to become modern and humane, against the pessimistic predictions of most of the Sovietological community, which was convinced either of the permanence of the Stalinist infrastructure or the inevitability of collapse. Gorbachev’s failure, in part because of the emergence of separatist nationalisms, had a catastrophic effect on the identities that I had formed over much of my life. The Soviet Union disappeared; Armenia became independent; socialism was (at least temporarily) thrown on the trash heap of history. When someone innocently congratulated me that now I had a country, I told him coldly, rashly, no, I have lost my country. I remember with sadness my father’s query to me shortly before his death, would socialism come back again? I told him, not in the short run, though as long as capitalism existed there would be some kind of socialist opposition.
But just as the reality of the Soviet Union did not diminish the ideal of a more egalitarian, socially just, and participatory social order beyond “actually-existing democracy,” so its disappearance did not scour the political landscape of alternatives or bring history to an end. America had not changed as we had wanted in the 1960s, and the post-Soviet Union metamorphosed into something more like what we hoped to avoid. But the optimism and security of family and children, of satisfying work, prevented political despair. Indeed, my marriage to Armena Marderosian (an Armenian to be sure!) kept me afloat, even when tragedy—the death of our first child, Grikor—nearly drowned us. For a decade, I shifted identities slightly, from Soviet and Armenian historian to Soviet and post-Soviet political scientist (at the University of Chicago), interested in nations and nationalisms, and then back to history (returning to Michigan). I continue to search for new places from which to observe. I remain a foreigner, an odar, in my native land, but that distance seems to be a propitious place to look beyond the political limits that the present offers us, and explore how I and my colleagues in Soviet history