| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods and Theory

Cathy A. Frierson and Samuel H. Baron, editors. Adventures in Russian Historical Research: Reminiscences of American Scholars From the Cold War to the Present. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe. 2003. Pp. xxii, 272. Cloth $64.95, paper $24.95.
The twenty essays in this volume, arranged chronologically by year of first exposure to research and life in the former Soviet Union (1958–2002), consist of succinct autobiographical accounts in which academic, political, social, cultural and personal observations are mingled in a variegated mix. Editors Cathy A. Frierson and Samuel H. Baron sought to include a representative sample of scholars and succeeded in part. Commendably, forty percent of the contributors are women. Understandably, in terms of graduate training, scholars from Harvard, Columbia, and Berkeley are prominent (Princeton less so). But the Big Ten midwestern state universities, several of which also play a major role in training Russianists and producing scholarship, have only one representative in this book.	1
To the extent they are revealed, the political views held by the contributors are centrist liberal, mostly skeptical of Cold War triumphalism, aware of the "realms of autonomy" existing within the "massive structures of Soviet life," and conscious that "many of the pompous generalizations concocted ... by Sovietologists" had little actuality (p. 86). As Priscilla Roosevelt sardonically notes, the Cold War assertion that "homo Sovieticus" was virtually an alien life form took years to set aside, but until it was jettisoned, it impeded both research and the understanding of Russians (p. 37). As for fields of historical research and methodological approaches, most of these scholars are decidedly not postmodernist; as Hugh Ragsdale crustily puts it, "genuine historical work is not a house of fashion" (p. 91). Overall, this is also probably a fair description of Russianists as a whole, if only because demographically, the largest cohort of practicing scholars was trained in the 1960s and 1970s, when totalitarian models or the new social history held sway. Yet the reader should be cautioned that in recent years matters have changed: a review of current scholarship will find considerable attention devoted to topics such as empire, identity, masculinities, leisure, and modernity in general. (Of course, a volume such as this, organized to give equal weight to each decade of Russian-American cultural exchanges, will naturally give more weight to the traditional.)	2
As for archives, several scholars (Ragsdale, Bruce Menning, Golfo Alexopoulus, and Timothy Barnes) caution that, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, access to specific repositories remains unpredictable, arbitrary and, after a window of opportunity lasting roughly until 1995, even constricting. Richard Stites laments that in the Russian research community "deep intellectual structures" persist. According to him, even "the mostly generous and hard working library and archival staff desperately need refresher courses in how history is done today" (not according to antiquated cataloguing systems) to be able to respond to requests for materials that cut across disciplinary boundaries. Yet most contributors to this volume write gratefully of help received by remarkably generous, hard-working, and often erudite librarians and archivists. And many (Nancy Kollman, Frierson, Robert Weinberg, Alexopoulus, Nadieszada Kizenko) describe marvelous experiences, treasure troves of exciting, previously untouched sources, and unlimited access to opisi, or archival indexes, previously off limits to Westerners. Those who ventured into Siberia (Alexopoulus and Weinberg) are especially effusive in their descriptions of the reception given them. Moreover, as Kollman and others point out, new access to archives since 1991 has greatly expanded the terrain of "doable topics."	. . .

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