Hiding in Plain Sight: Russia in World History

Abstract

Hiding in Plain SightRussia in World History Brigid O'Keeffe (bio) Eugene M. Avrutin, Racism in Modern Russia: From the Romanovs to Putin. 140 pp. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. ISBN-13 978-1350097285. $17.95. Choi Chatterjee, Russia in World History: A Transnational Approach. 226 pp. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. ISBN-13 978-1350026414. $29.95. V. I. Zhuravleva, Obshchee proshloe russkikh i amerikantsev: Kurs lektsii (The Common Past of Russians and Americans: A Lecture Course). 618 pp. Moscow: RGGU, 2021. ISBN-13 978-5728129790. How exceptional are imperial Russia and the Soviet Union when it comes to some of modern world history's defining phenomena, not least race and racism; empire, imperialism, and colonialism? Can the methodologies of transnational, transimperial, and comparative history help us to better appreciate the many and complex worlds that imperial Russian and Soviet histories inhabit and share with other polities? How and why might we—or, how and why must we—better integrate imperial Russian and Soviet history into world history? None of these questions are new in our field. Nor are the controversies that they have periodically inspired. Historians and anthropologists have long debated these very questions with a rightful sense of urgency. The stakes have never been small, and in our current moment the debates can feel weightier than ever. In the aftermath of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, some scholars are perhaps now arriving at these [End Page 921] concerns only belatedly, with contrition—and others, grudgingly, with hesitation and eyes lowered in wariness. Yet three fascinating books recently published by Choi Chatterjee, Eugene Avrutin, and Victoria Zhuravleva suggest that scholars of imperial Russian and Soviet history would do well to open their eyes more widely to what often has been hiding in plain sight. In particular, their books should prompt the field to pursue these questions about Russia's place in world history still more energetically and searchingly—in our writing and research, but also and especially in our teaching and public outreach. Each presents a plea not only for a better understanding of imperial Russia and the Soviet Union's place in world history but also for the historian's role in imagining possibilities for a more humane global future. Bridging Worlds Choi Chatterjee's new book seeks to show how the Russian and Soviet empires were not the outliers that many often assume them to have been. It is a stale yet persistent conceit in Slavic studies, she insists, that poses Russia as exceptional—exceptionally deficient, backward, illiberal, authoritarian, unique—and thereby both awkwardly situated outside the conventional paradigms of world history and ill suited for productive comparisons. Chatterjee demands a nuanced integration of Russia into world history. She hinges this demand to her book's fundamental comparison of the British, Russian, and Soviet empires. Methodologically, Chatterjee's comparative history of empires blends a distinctive mélange of transnational, intellectual, biographical, and autoethnographic approaches. Looking in unexpected places and amplifying neglected voices, she charts ideas, networks, people, patterns, and experiences that traveled across and beyond the British, Russian, and Soviet empires. Chatterjee's unapologetic aim is to push historians both within and without Slavic studies to bridge their own conceptual worlds and to broaden their frameworks. She demands that we expand both the very notion of world history and our consideration of whose voices matter in its retelling. The result is a book that is quite unlike either the standard historical monograph or the conventional essayistic tome written by an academic but intended for the often invoked but rarely reached "general audience." Across the space of seven compact chapters, Chatterjee takes us on a tour of British colonial plantations and Soviet collective farms; of tropical island prisons and Siberian sites of exile; of people's democracies and British mandate territories. Readers visit the Comintern no less than the ivory [End Page 922] towers of Cambridge and Moscow. Her panoramic portrait reveals how the Russian, Soviet, and British empires produced a world that has pulsed, variously and often simultaneously, with imperial nationalism, antinationalism, hopeful internationalism, anarchism, terrorism, anticolonial resistance, religious nationalism, (un)popular dissidence, universal humanism, imperial nostalgia, and (post)colonial...