While this project was in the making, the Soviet Union and Soviet communism collapsed, the party and state archives in Russia were opened, and the field of Russian history was transformed. There is no simple correlation, of course, between this transformation and my views of the revolutionary period I studied. Even so, it seems to me that my present, so to speak, has influenced my past in several ways. In part this book has been my attempt to contribute to an understanding of the Soviet 1920s, largely centering on the years of the New Economic Policy (NEP, 1921–28), which stresses that period’s pivotal, transformational, often revolutionary, yet above all contradictory nature. The move away from the hoary dichotomies between an alternative to Stalinism and the straight line to totalitarianism, change from above versus change from below, seem at least partly due to a historical heightening of critical distance — a fading of present-day urgency invested in a NEP model, the Bolshevik Revolution, and communism. Second, the way in which many dimensions of systemic transformation are interconnected, driven home to me through very different kinds of “revolutions” since 1989, seems in retrospect one reason I expanded this book and changed its focus. It was to be about the making of a “socialist intelligentsia” in Soviet Russia. Yet I soon realized that the attempt to mold a new intelligentsia was only one part of a constellation of Bolshevik missions on the “third front” of culture. Finally, and most concretely, the opening of the Communist Party and Soviet state archives made it possible for the first time to write the history of the relatively little known Bolshevik institutions of higher learning dedicated to remaking the life of the mind.
Along the way, I have incurred many debts which it is my pleasure to acknowledge. Like many first monographs, this book began as a dissertation. During my graduate work at Yale in the early 1990s, and in many cases well after I had defended the dissertation, I was aided above all by Ivo Banac, Paul Bushkovitch, Katerina Clark, Mark Steinberg, and Mark von Hagen.
My work has also developed within the orbit of Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, first in a semester as an exchange scholar, later as a frequent pilgrim from the provinces, and finally as a postdoctoral fellow. I have had the opportunity to present my work on the 1920s several times at the institute in recent years. The generation of younger historians I grew up with there has influenced me in ways that would be difficult to unravel.
I was first introduced to Russian studies by an extraordinary group of scholars at Princeton in the mid-1980s, including the late Cyril Black, Stephen F. Cohen, and Robert C. Tucker. Although since then some of my views have diverged from some of theirs, my studies of those years were a formative experience.
At the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies I was able to spend a crucial year of research and writing as a Research Scholar, and I am grateful that since then I have been welcomed back many times.
I am also grateful to several other sources of support, without which this work could not have been written. I received research grants or fellowships from Fulbright-Hays, the American Council of Teachers of Russian, the Spencer Foundation, the Javits fellowship program of the U.S. Department of Education, and on two occasions from the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX). In the final stages, I was a fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences in Uppsala.
I have also been fortunate to have been able to conduct research in some great libraries, including the Russian State (formerly Lenin) Library, INION (which inherited the library of the Communist Academy), the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, and the libraries of Columbia, Harvard, and Yale Universities. I thank the staffs of these institutions, and a great many Russian archivists from each of the archives listed in the bibliography, for their spirit of cooperation.
Other debts have been both scholarly and personal. Susan Gross Solomon has been a source of support, tactful criticism, and inspiration. Nikolai Krementsov and I found out right away that we had much in common, and our exchanges have left their mark on my work. Peter Holquist has been a font of provocative ideas during our ongoing conversation in New York, Moscow, Washington, and points’ beyond. I have greatly valued my close association with György Péteri, and he has pushed me, at times with a well-deserved scholarly shove, into several new areas.
All the aforementioned scholars have critiqued parts or all of this work; for the same generosity in commenting on parts of it in various incarnations I also thank Julie Cassiday, Charles Clark, Katerina Clark, Paul Josephson, Peter Konecny, Woodford McClelland, Daniel Todes, and Vera Tolz. Still, I and I alone bear the responsibility for its deficiencies.
I thank my colleagues at the University of Maryland at College Park, especially George Majeska and James Harris, for their strong encouragement. Also in Washington, Zdeněk Václav David, historian and librarian, has over the years shared his unconventional wisdom and showered me with materials of the most diverse kind.
Sergei Kirillovich Kapterev, self-styled vulgar culturologist, has usually been around when I needed him.
Katja David-Fox, my wife and sharpest scholarly critic, has built a foundation of love and understanding without which the whole enterprise would have been impossible.
PORTIONS of the chapter on the Institute of Red Professors were published as “Political Culture, Purges, and Proletarianization at the Institute of Red Professors, 1921–1929,” Russian Review 52 (January 1993): 20–42. I thank the Ohio State University Press for permission to incorporate them here.
From 1989 until the completion of this book I spent a total of about two years on five research trips to the archives in Russia. By a stroke of fortune I was able to make a bit of history myself, when in the fall of 1990 I became one of the first Western researchers admitted to the former Central Party Archive and, I was told, the second foreigner to work at the former Moscow Party Archive. Since new archival documentation comprises a large part of this study, I have developed a method of citation different from the standard Soviet and Russian practice, which has in general been adopted by Western historians. Rather than citing a document only by collection, list, folder, and page, I have preceded this information with the official title or heading of the document in quotation marks and its date. I believe specialists will gain invaluable information from the full identification of archival material, instead of just facing an “alphabet soup” of abbreviations and numbers. In many cases I (or the archivists themselves) dated the document either from internal evidence or by material in the folder surrounding it. In such cases, and in cases when the day, month, or year are not certain, that is indicated in the citation. Occasionally, when I have cited many documents of the same type, I have for reasons of space omitted the document title. It is my hope that the benefits of this methodology will be quickly apparent, and that it will attract attention to problems of source criticism in a new era in the study of Soviet history.
MICHAEL DAVID-FOX
Washington, D.C.