It is hard for me to provide a dispassionate review of David Engerman's fine new history of Soviet Studies in the United States. When I entered the Ph.D. program in political science at the University of California Berkeley in 1985 as an aspiring young Sovietologist, key figures in this book, such as Richard Pipes, Stephen Cohen, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Jerry Hough, loomed large for my graduate cohort—not only in nationally televised debates about the nature of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms but also on the graduate syllabi that shaped our scholarly training. Given the close attention then paid by the broader public to the dramatic changes taking place in the Soviet Union, we were sure that we, too, would soon be making our mark in a debate that seemed then to have direct implications for the very future of humanity.
As Sovietological debates raged on, however—with less and less apparent relevance to the ongoing process of communism's collapse—the public and political scientists alike began to look upon our previously favored group with increasing skepticism. The death throes and final disintegration of the Soviet system transpired precisely as I completed my dissertation, and I found myself a newly minted specialist in a field that no longer existed and, indeed, was widely ridiculed. Thus, it was with considerable interest, and some nostalgia, that I immersed myself in Engerman's meticulously researched account of just how the strange intellectual project of Sovietology was initially generated after World War II, rose to a central position in American academia, and ultimately imploded along with its subject matter.
To reconstruct and convey the essence of the Soviet Studies field to a wider audience, some two decades after the Soviet collapse, is a daunting task. Engerman succeeds admirably in tackling it, demolishing a number of widely held stereotypes along the way. Was Soviet Studies a product of the Cold War, funded in large part by the U.S. military, intelligence community, and State Department? Indeed it was, Engerman shows—but this very interdependence between academics and policymakers generated an outpouring of interdisciplinary, theoretically innovative, and policy-relevant research. In the immediate aftermath of victory over the Axis powers, few scholars had any moral qualms about accepting money from security agencies within the U.S. government. After all, Engerman usefully reminds us, during the 1940s such towering intellectual figures as Talcott Parsons, Margaret Mead, Barrington Moore, and Herbert Marcuse were all actively involved in research for the U.S. military. They and their close collaborators played important roles in the foundation of the Harvard Russian Research Center, which was explicitly designed to integrate empirical investigation of Soviet society into general social science theory. Meanwhile—again with direct U.S. government funding and encouragement—Columbia University's Russian Institute focused on training graduate students with fluency in Russian and a thorough understanding of the classical Russian culture, thus providing the first generation of leadership for practically every other Slavic department in the United States. Such easy alliances among Cold War military planners, theoretical social scientists, and Slavicists became unimaginable after the bitter scholarly schisms provoked by the Vietnam War, but in the early days of Soviet Studies they were commonplace.
Moreover, the social scientific scholarship produced in the Soviet Studies field in the 1950s and 1960s was of the finest caliber. The Russian Interview Project, funded by the U.S. Air Force to assess the potential for revolutionary opposition to Stalin's regime in the postwar period, utilized surveys of thousands of Soviet refugees in West Germany to demonstrate instead just how deeply rooted Soviet norms of state ownership of industry, guaranteed employment, cheap housing, and low prices for foodstuffs had become—even among a population one might have expected to be especially critical of the Soviet regime. For the Harvard modernization theorists who designed this study, such evidence appeared to show both the long-term staying power of the Soviet variant of “industrial society” and the need to analyze that society in explicit comparative perspective with other modern industrial nations, including the United States.
Not only did the prediction of relative Soviet stability turn out to be much more accurate than the expectations of the air force analysts who hoped that the communist regime would quickly implode after the war, but it also inspired a larger theoretical debate about just how “different paths to modernity” might generate functionally comparable, yet institutionally distinct, regime types. Some scholars, such as Talcott Parsons himself, initially took the stand that a full “convergence” between the “social systems” of the United States and USSR might occur; the majority instead pointed to the continuing hegemony of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and quarreled over whether the post-Stalin Soviet regime should be labeled as a distinct form of socialist “institutional pluralism” (Hough) or as a slowly degenerating posttotalitarianism (Brzezinski). Barrington Moore's direct involvement in this debate at Harvard ultimately led to the publication of his magnum opus Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966), in turn inspiring his student Theda Skocpol's groundbreaking comparative work States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (1979). In a very real sense, then, early research in the field of Soviet Studies was the initial inspiration behind the entire school of thought that now goes by the name of “comparative historical analysis.”
The later decline and fall of Soviet Studies, by contrast, occurred when the boundaries among academic disciplines, theoretical paradigms, and policymaking circles hardened, leading to a series of debilitating scholarly and ideological turf wars among Sovietologists—at precisely the time when Gorbachev's reforms should have provoked a creative rethinking of old axioms on all sides. From the end of the Brezhnev era onward, Engerman shows, leading figures in the Soviet Studies field began to see their work as directly tied to U.S. foreign policy debates. Historian Pipes joined Senator Henry Jackson's circle and then the Reagan administration in endeavoring to show that tsarist and Soviet “patrimonialism” were essentially continuous and inherently expansionist, and that all efforts to deal with the Soviet Union as a “modern” power were therefore naive and dangerous. At the same time, political scientists like Cohen took it upon themselves to mount a media campaign against right-wing opponents of the Soviet system like Pipes, declaring instead that Soviet “reformers” were bound to take power in the Kremlin if the United States would only drop its hostile stance toward the USSR.
By the time Gorbachev came to power in 1985, the battle lines in Sovietology were so firmly entrenched that not even the most revolutionary changes in Soviet policy since Stalin's day could induce either side to rethink its basic axioms. Pipes and his circle insisted until nearly the end of the Gorbachev era that the new general secretary was simply an old-style communist tyrant, even if he was dressed in appealing new “modern” clothing. Cohen and likeminded Sovietologists, in contrast, became unabashed supporters of Gorbachev and his reforms, insisting that those who questioned perestroika were aiding and abetting both Soviet and American “hard-liners.” For a young political scientist like me, trying to navigate this polarized environment could be tricky. One senior scholar, upon reading my dissertation chapter reinterpreting Gorbachev's perestroika campaign as a hopelessly naive form of “Leninist romanticism” that was bound to run aground against the quotidian realities of political and social life, warned me sternly that publishing such work might undermine what Gorbachev was trying to accomplish. Another told me rather more bluntly that if I continued to argue that Gorbachev was in some sense a “Leninist,” I would end up working as a taxi driver. (For the published version of my article, see “Gorbachev: The Last True Leninist Believer?” in The Crisis of Leninism and the Decline of the Left, ed. Daniel Chirot, 1991, pp. 33–59.)
The one flaw in Engerman's story is that he neglects entirely a group of scholars who did manage to develop a deeper theoretical perspective on the revolutionary transformation of the Soviet bloc, and whose work thus stands the test of time far better than most later-stage Sovietological research: namely, scholars of “comparative communism” whose work explicitly included East-Central Europe and East Asia, as well as the Soviet Union itself. On the one hand, given the already ambitious scope of his research, it is understandable that Engerman confines his analysis primarily to the field of “Soviet Studies” proper—and in particular, to the research on the Russian core of the USSR that was characteristic of most Sovietologists. On the other hand, this narrowing of focus leads him to overstate the isolation of the field.
The problem emerges first in Engerman's account of the origins of Soviet Studies, which at times appears to suggest that Harvard and Columbia alone accounted for all serious research in the United States, and that this work tended to ignore the non-Russian peoples of the former Soviet Union altogether. Yet it was precisely in the newly formed area studies centers of the Midwest and Western United States—at Indiana University, the University of Wisconsin, and here at the University of Washington, to name a few of the key sites—that Russian Studies was explicitly conceptualized and institutionalized as one part of the larger study of Europe, East Asia, and/or Central Asia. Later, the leading U.S. area studies centers hired a brilliant new generation of specialists on East Europe—Ivan Berend, Daniel Chirot, Ken Jowitt, Andrew Janos, Joseph Rothschild, Ivan Szelenyi, and so on—whose theoretical works remains central to contemporary political science and sociology. Some of the best work in the Soviet Studies in the 1980s combined the insights of institutionalists studying the USSR with work on comparative political economy inspired by the history of East-Central Europe to produce remarkably prescient analyses of the patterns of decay of the Leninist “empire”—for instance, Valerie Bunce's brilliant work on how East European Soviet satellites had become a liability for the Soviet empire (see, for example, “The Empire Strikes Back: The Evolution of the Eastern Bloc from a Soviet Asset to a Soviet Liability,” International Organization 39 [Winter 1985]: 1–46). Yet none of these scholars merit so much as a mention in Engerman's book.
True, this explicitly comparative work was not at the core of “Sovietology” as practiced in the 1980s. But it was available and widely taught at leading universities specializing in the study of communist regimes, even if its practitioners were somewhat less likely to show up on ABC News. For many of us still teaching and working in the field of Eurasian Studies today, the mentorship of scholars of comparative communism acted as a crucial bridge between the inspiring comparative-historical work of the 1960s and cutting-edge debates about regimes, states, and societies in contemporary social science. Indeed, at its best, the larger field of comparative communism maintained the synthesis of policy relevance, theoretical acuity, and respect for cultural analysis that, as Engerman shows, characterized Soviet Studies in its glorious early years.
It is not Engerman's task to chart the further development of post-Soviet area studies after the collapse of 1991. He is a historian, after all, not a political scientist, and 1991 provides a natural break point for the story he wishes to tell. He simply notes that in the years since the Soviet collapse, Russian Studies has successfully reconnected with the mainstream of political science—symbolized by the American Political Science Association's amply justified decision to give the 2003 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award to Mark Beissinger for his pathbreaking book Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (2002). This was the first time this prestigious award was ever granted to a political scientist working primarily on Russia.
Still, Engerman's lack of attention to influential works of comparative communism during the Soviet period, combined with his rather terse concluding summary of post-Soviet intellectual history, may leave readers with the mistaken impression that the current field of postcommunist studies has had to be constructed entirely from scratch—as if there really were nothing learned, in the end, from the scholarly study of Leninism before the 1990s. On the contrary, political scientists working on the post-Soviet cases have used their in-depth knowledge of Leninist institutions to develop important general theories to explain how and to what extent institutional legacies inherited from the past can shape later efforts to reshape current political rules and incentives. This exciting literature embraces new works by the leading senior area specialists who have long specialized in the Soviet bloc (including not only Bunce and Beissinger but many other outstanding senior scholars), by the generation of specialists trained in the 1980s as Sovietology was imploding, and by literally dozens of outstanding younger political scientists working on postcommunist topics who received their doctorates after the Soviet collapse. All of these scholars are intimately familiar with the history of Soviet institutions and with the classic works of “Sovietology”; none of them is particularly interested in rehashing Soviet-era debates between liberals and conservatives.
Still, despite these minor criticisms, Engerman's book is clearly the best that has yet appeared on its subject. Indeed, with its scrupulous documentation, lucid exposition, and deep insight, Know Your Enemy is likely to become the standard reference work for scholars interested in the history of mainstream Sovietology.
