Americans Experience Russia

Encountering the Enigma, 1917 to the Present

Choi Chatterjee, Beth Holmgren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415893411
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136177224
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

Americans Experience Russia analyzes how American scholars, journalists, and artists envisioned, experienced, and interpreted Russia/the Soviet Union over the last century. While many histories of diplomatic, economic, and intellectual connections between the United States and the Soviet Union can be found, none has yet examined how Americans' encounters with Russian/Soviet society shaped their representations of a Russian/Soviet 'other' and its relationship with an American 'west.'

The essays in this volume critically engage with postcolonial theories which posit that a self-valorizing, unmediated west dictated the colonial encounter, repressing native voices that must be recovered. Unlike western imperialists and their colonial subjects, Americans and Russians long co-existed in a tense parity, regarding each other as other-than-European equals, sometime cultural role models, temporary allies, and political antagonists. In examining the fiction, film, journalism, treatises, and histories Americans produced out of their 'Russian experience,' the contributors to this volume closely analyze these texts, locate them in their sociopolitical context, and gauge how their producers' profession, politics, gender, class, and interaction with native Russian interpreters conditioned their authored responses to Russian/Soviet reality. The volume also explores the blurred boundaries between national identities and representations of self/other after the Soviet Union's fall.

1

Studying Our Nearest Oriental Neighbor

American Scholars and Late Imperial Russia

David C. Engerman

American ideas about Russia in the late nineteenth century exhibited all of the contradictions of the Victorian culture from which they emerged, while at the same time revealing some of the significant (and growing) differences between American and continental European thought. American writers— and especially the scholars discussed in this essay—carried Victorianism's sense of optimism, faith in individual improvement, and belief that character was defined by the ability to overcome nature and natural urges. While holding on to notions of cultural hierarchy rooted in personal virtue, American Victorians adhered to the principle that individual people and perhaps even entire peoples could improve. At the same time, though, American scholars in the Victorian era adopted concepts and language from continental European (and especially French) writers that envisioned unchanging and essential national characters. American scholars’ discussions of late nineteenth-century Russia, therefore, reveal what a leading historian called “one of the most tragic contradictions within American Victorian culture”: the tension between the prospect of change and the rigidity of hierarchies or, perhaps, between the plasticity of individual nature and the permanence of national character.¹

American scholars built their visions of Russia from imported material. The French accounts of Russia that were so influential to Victorian Americans were part of a centuries-old particularist tradition that saw Russians as inherently different from Europeans. Yet, in America, this view was not as popular as was the list of character traits themselves. While stable European views of national character contrasted with mercurial American ones, they also established the intellectual boundaries within which most Western discussions of Russian character took place.

By the revolutionary era of the late eighteenth century, the terms for understanding Russia were well established: Russians were “a people born to slavery,” with little prospect of anything else. As Tsar Nicholas I ascended to the throne, in 1825, the basic terms for understanding Russia— uncivilized, backward, despotic, and Asiatic, yet spiritual and collective—had clearly recognizable precursors dating back three hundred years. Expanding commercial, political, and cultural ties between Russia and the rest of Europe and, increasingly, the United States created new demand for outsiders to explain Russia. The new generation of Russia observers in Europe undertook their studies using conceptual categories passed down through the centuries.

Among the most elegant of these new accounts came from a French nobleman, the Marquis Astolphe de Custine, who traveled through Russia in 1839. Like his contemporary and fellow countryman Alexis de Tocqueville, Custine aimed for political theory more than travelogue. He wanted to visit the gendarme of Europe, as Russia was then known, in search of arguments against representative government. He returned a liberal constitutionalist— with an intense distaste for Russian institutions and Russian people, concluding that Russia's despotism was well deserved: “Other nations have tolerated oppression; the Russian nation has loved it; she still loves it.” Russians were not made by despotism; they made it. And that despotism revolted him sufficiently to upend his political beliefs. While unremittingly negative about his experience in Russia—upon crossing the border en route back to France, he proclaimed, “I am free!”—Custine nevertheless described Russians using both negative and positive glosses on the same image. Russians were “superstitious” and “lazy” but, at the same time, “poetical” and “musical.” ² Russian character, in short, expressed itself both in its reprehensible political system and in its exotic arts.

The other well-known Western account of Russia from mid-century, by a German nobleman, focused less on governance and culture and more on economic issues. Yet, this report, like Custine's, charted Russia's differences from Europe. Baron August von Haxthausen devoted much of his travelogue on Russia to rural life and rural institutions, especially the mir, or peasant commune. The most distinctive aspect of Russian agriculture in the nineteenth century, the peasant commune was a common focus for students of Russia. To the growing Slavophile movement, which celebrated Russia's uniqueness and its distance from European social structures, the commune represented Russia's special contribution to world civilization. The mir operated through collective enterprise, rather than through competition. It revealed the intimate connection between the peasants and the land. And it was free of the individualism, secularism, and anonymity of the increasingly urban life in Western Europe.

Haxthausen's view of the mir shared much with that of his Slavophile interlocutors. Like the Slavophiles, the German traveler recognized and even celebrated the web of mutual obligations that defined communal life. He shared with the Slavophiles the claim that the mir expressed “the fundamental character of the Slavonic race.” The mir represented everything that was unique about the Slavic peasantry, most notably communal instincts and an intimate connection with the land. But Haxthausen was no shill for the Slavophiles. He proclaimed the commune an economic failure; it did “not possess the condition for making progress in agriculture.” The mir, furthermore, revealed some of the most problematic aspects of Russian character, traits such as laziness and conservatism.³ That book canonized the communal principle as a central element not just in Russian life but also in the Russian character.

Karl Marx read his countryman's analysis of the peasant commune with great interest and even greater disdain. Writing to Friedrich Engels in 1858, Marx mocked Haxthausen's gullibility in accepting the scripted communalism promoted by Russian authorities. Behind the Potemkin communes, Marx suggested, sat decrepit structures eaten away by capitalism's advance. He insisted that capitalist development would inevitably lead to socialism. According to his theory, the peasant commune's sole contribution to progress was to disappear under the pressure of rural capitalism. All nations would proceed along the same trajectory. Capitalism would render meaningless distinctions between nations and peoples, leaving only two classes facing off against each other: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The idea that a nation could find a detour on this path of history was anathema to Marx. Only Asia, which stood outside historical progress, could avoid the inexorable movement toward socialism. Thus, Haxthausen's claim that the Russian mir might be the kernel of Russian socialism—that is, it might help Russia bypass capitalism—challenged not just Marx's understanding of Russia but his understanding of history itself.

Marx reconsidered this view of Russia later in his career. After the dramatic collapse of the Paris Commune, in 1871, made European revolution seem less likely, Marx turned eastward, where his works were widely read and hotly contested. Both he and Engels learned Russian and immersed themselves in economic reports and political polemics about the Russian countryside. Even these diehard universalists came to the tentative and ill-expressed conclusion that Herzen's paeans to the Russian commune might have been right after all. In letters, prefaces, and ephemera—but never in a sustained work—Marx claimed that the mir might in fact be the seed of a socialist order in Russia, “the finest chance ever offered by history to a nation … [to avoid] all the fatal vicissitudes of the capitalist regime.” Marx's thought evolved from universalism in mid-century to particularism in his later years.⁴ Yet, Marx's new views on Russia were not widely known outside a small circle of revolutionaries.

Haxthausen's work became required reading for Westerners interested in Russia, especially for those uninterested in revolution. His description of the communal principle appeared frequently in Western European and, eventually, American writings on Russia. Haxthausen's book also influenced the most important English-language work on Russia of the nineteenth century, Donald MacKenzie Wallace's economically titled Russia. Originally published in 1877, Wallace's work directly acknowledged Haxthausen's. Like his German predecessor, Wallace emphasized the economic limitations of communal agriculture. As a practical Englishman, he saw the commune primarily in terms of its social and political functions, rather than its spiritual contributions. Wallace did not ignore Russian character, however. He suggested both positive and negative traits that made Russians unique. They were “singularly free from rancor and the spirit of revenge,” possessing “a patient endurance that would do honor to a martyr,” as well as a “dogged passive resistance.” But he also cited the Russians’ “poor work habits [and] minimal exertions” and their “incorrigible laziness.” Wallace put this last point into geographic perspective; To visitors arriving in Russia from points east, he speculated, Russians would appear energetic enough, while those coming from the west would see them as indolent. The work ethic, it seemed, descended on a gradient from west to east. Wallace laid the blame for Russia's economic woes not on the commune, as Haxthausen had, but on these character traits, and especially on improvidence.⁵

Just after Wallace's Russia came another major European book whose impact on America's Russia experts was even greater: French historian Alfred Rambaud's History of Russia from the Earliest Times to 1877. Ram-baud was far more concerned with historical issues than many previous writers on Russia. But his scholarship also served a contemporary political purpose: to promote an alliance between Russia and France. Rambaud defended his interest in a diplomatic alliance with an ethnographic argument that emphasized the similarities between the French and the Russians. Ram-baud blamed the “Mongol hordes” for imposing despotism, arguing that the Russian state was out of line with the desires of the Russian people. His book is striking for both its historical detail and its relative lack of attention to national character. And, yet, claims about Russia's uniqueness and distance from Europe nevertheless creep into his argument. His description of the peasant commune, for instance, borrows from the Slavophile notion that the mir represented a “primordial” element of Russian society. In this sense, Rambaud's task paralleled Montesquieu's, using geography and climate—the topic of Rambaud's first chapters—to establish Russia's position within Europe.⁶

Rambaud's fellow countryman, Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, used the same approach in his history, The Empire of the Tsars and the Russians (1881), albeit for opposite political goals. Leroy-Beaulieu's principal aim was to explain Russia's vast cultural distance from France in the hope of maintaining significant political distance between the two powers. But he shared with Rambaud a common structure, opening his work with a lengthy discussion of the effects of climate and geography on Russian life. Leroy-Beaulieu provided detailed and damning analyses of national character, harping on Russians’ inconsistent work habits, patience, submission, and lack of individuality. He saved his sharpest words for fatalism, which he deemed the greatest failing in the Russian character. Leroy-Beaulieu found the roots of all these traits in the land: Russians’ resignation and submissiveness, he explained, resulted from their constant struggles against nature. The lack of originality and individual distinctions, similarly, could be traced to the terrain's long stretches of level plains and general lack of geographic features.⁷

Leroy-Beaulieu's argument was not original. His logic and language shared much with Montesquieu and his “empire of climate”—though Leroy-Beaulieu's aim was to separate Russia from France, whereas Montesquieu sought rapprochement. As Leroy-Beaulieu's history became a key reference for European and American Russia experts, his catalog of character traits and his explanation of their causes similarly became common currency for most, if not all, Russia observers.

For some three centuries before Leroy-Beaulieu wrote, in 1877, European writers assessed Russia's political and economic potential in terms of national character. Emphasizing traits like laziness and fatalism, these authors explained Russia's backwardness in terms of its inhabitants’ nature. Rooting Russian character in climate and geography, the European tradition offered few opportunities for improvement. Backwardness was not just a relative condition but an essential and permanent one.

This not...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in Cultural History
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Studying Our Nearest Oriental Neighbor: American Scholars and Late Imperial Russia
• Part I: Inside Stories: Utopia, Bohemia, Crucible
• Part II: Our Popular Russian Romance
• Part III: Conspicuous Consumers: Ambassadors and Donors
• Part IV: Americans in the Russian Mirror
• Part V: Living across Cultures
• Contributors
• Index