Comment: Of Archives and Frogs: Iconoclasm in Historical PerspectiveAuthor(s): Jochen HellbeckSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 67, No. 3 (Fall, 2008), pp. 720-723Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27652949 .

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Comment: Of Archives and Frogs: Iconoclasm in Historical Perspective

Jochen Hellbeck

Sheila Fitzpatrick's reflections make for illuminating reading as an auto

biographical text. Two basic forces, she suggests, have shaped her as a

researcher over the years and were present at the inception of a tremen

dously productive scholarly career. These two forces in combination may also better define her research agenda than the much used and abused

term revisionism. One of them is positive; it is her belief in the archive as a repository of historical truth. From this belief flows her conviction

that good historians are empiricists who engage in "lots of hard work on

primary sources." Fitzpatrick herself has played a pivotal role in access

ing ever new source materials and suggesting ways of making them speak; there are few Soviet historians who can match her first-hand archival ex

pertise. The other force is negative and resides in her avowed "iconoclasm about received ideas, skepticism about grand narratives." Although Fitz

patrick writes that this skepticism, along with her preference for empiri cal data, was part of her intellectual personality from very early on, her

scholarly trajectory was profoundly shaped by the debate with adherents

of totalitarian theory, whose embrace of grand narratives at the expense of archival data irritated her.

I admit that I was not fully aware of the animosity of the struggle be tween totalitarianist fathers and revisionist daughters and sons, and I count my blessings that my research has involved politically less mined

territory (some of the old mines are now defused, others have exploded). But reading this essay I was also struck by the effect these battles have had on Fitzpatrick and by how much they still appear to influence her choice of concepts and methods. Here is my question: if, as I believe is true, the ghosts of totalitarianism have been banished, and if overall historians are

moving from politically based to historical examinations of the Soviet

century, does this shift not require a reexamination of the methods that

acquired shape as critical engagements of totalitarian theory? I want to

point out two areas of Fitzpatrick's work?her understanding of subjec tivity and her approach to the archives?that I see as conditioned by the totalitarian debate and that might benefit from a more historical, politi cally less engaged, frame of vision.

When it comes to individuals and their life experience in the Soviet context, Fitzpatrick's work points out the state's limited control over the life of the Soviet population, and it shows Soviet citizens as highly ac

tive, independent social actors. Here she appears to be reacting against the idea of a formidable totalitarian regime that strangles its subjects or

molds them in its own image. Moreover, Fitzpatrick divests most of her actors of ideological concerns, which play a central role in the totalitar ian paradigm. Except for circumscribed groups of "firm believers," such as ardent Komsomolists or

long-standing party members, revolutionary Slavic Review 67, no. 3 (Fall 2008)

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Of Archives and Frogs: Iconoclasm in Historical Perspective 721

ideas and values have little relevance in the lives of most of her Soviet

subjects. In response to the claim that Soviet Russia was an exceptional, qua totalitarian, state, her desire is to de-demonize the Soviet order and stress the presence of what she believes are universal and normal personal attributes?survivalism, self-interest, and material gain.

Her notion of society as animated by self-seeking, scheming individu

als with an enormous capacity to elude the state is encapsulated in the

image of Ostap Bender, Ilf's and Petrov's trickster figure whose adepts in

real life she follows with palpable sympathy. Incidentally, my own earlier

research also centered on a young Soviet con man, the communist impos ter Stepan Podlubnyi, and it is perhaps no accident that Fitzpatrick incor

porated my discussion of his diary into her anthology of recent historical

research on Stalinism. Many aspects of Podlubnyi's life evoke Bender. Al

though he does not parade as Lieutenant Shmit's first son, or his second

one, for that matter, he engages in what we now call identity theft: buying passports and forging documents, masquerading under different names.

Podlubnyi is at home on the black market; he even doctors his mother's

autobiography. When caught by the NKVD, he speaks like Bender, utter

ing the memorable phrase, "The little bird also wants to live."1 He is sent

to prison, labor camps, and penal battalions but reemerges from these

trials, in large measure thanks to his scheming abilities, including his bold

claim to be a medical doctor. He does not make it to Rio de Janeiro, but

neither does Ostap Bender.

Fitzpatrick's focus on Soviet citizens' creative ways of alternatively

conforming to, or eluding, the policies of the communist state raises im

portant questions about the plurality of beliefs, commitments, and self

understandings. Yet her method precludes a close, contextualized read

ing of individuals and their lives. It captures them mostly in isolated acts

of external engagement with the state. We do not get a sufficient sense

of them as interiorized beings who reflect on their roles, and neither is

there a processual, biographical sense of them as individuals with distinct

commitments that develop over time. This, I believe, has less to do with

available data (the presence or absence of diaries and other personal writ

ings) than with the duality between society and state that is central to

Fitzpatrick's engagement of totalitarian theory. The everyday subjects in her recent writings appear as fully constituted agents who comment, as

it were, from an external vantage point on the social and political world

around them.

If we consider Podlubnyi and his diary, such a vantage point is dif

ficult to find. As his journal documents, his behavior as an imposter is

connected to pronounced hopes, ideals, and anxieties. Steeped in the

language of communist class analysis, young Stepan seeks to reform his

problematic peasant and kulak identities; later on, his hopes for inte

gration dim and he apprehends himself "naturalistically," as a "useless"

person, all the while betraying his continued orientation toward socialist

1. Stepan Podlubnii, Tagebuch aus Moskau 1931-1939, ed. Jochen Hellbeck (Munich,

1996), 168.

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722 Slavic Review

realistic norms.2 Much later, in the 1980s and 1990s, Podlubnyi claims

for himself the role of a victim of Stalinism. This is another indication of his ongoing urge to understand himself historically and in relation to

the guiding values of his time. His self-reflective stance is partly an effect

of the biographical impetus issued by the communist regime, which kept

sizing Soviet citizens up in terms of their biographical features and their

autobiographical narratives. To locate individuals like Podlubnyi in their

evolving environment of norms, knowledge, and self-constituting prac tices is to historicize the self. Yet this perspective requires an acknowledg

ment of larger systems of meaning that Fitzpatrick distrusts, given their

resemblance to totalitarianism's totalizing claims.

This perspective also affects our understanding of documents and

archives. More than being reflectors of subjective experience, or reposi tories of historical facts, diaries or archival collections play an important role in constituting subjects of experience. They are created in conversa

tion with the constructivist agenda of Soviet power, and in many cases the

intellectual categories of the Soviet state become the organizing catego ries for its archives as well. Consider not only the wager on autobiography, but also the denunciations and interrogations conducted by the Soviet

police state, expressly for the purpose of understanding individuals in bio

graphical terms. By contrast, Fitzpatrick maintains an unabashed positiv ism ("the more [sources] the merrier") which makes sense as a response to totalitarian theory and its relative lack of concern for a documentary record widely held to be ideologically tainted. But her belief in the archive as the ultimate guide to her research offers little room for a critical inter

rogation of how these "data" were produced in the first place. In light of how little significance Fitzpatrick's conception of social his

tory accords to the historicization of the self, and to the role of documents and archives as constitutive of the very phenomena that we study, I re

spectfully disagree with her own sense that the so-called post-revisionists ride on a revisionist agenda that was given up in the 1980s in the face of

overwhelming totalitarian resistance. These are two very different agen das. I also believe that this difference will be even more strongly felt in

future historical studies of modern Russia and the Soviet Union. As the Soviet century recedes further into the past, the possibilities of appre

hending it in strictly historical terms will grow, as will be the felt need to

do so. The fault lines may no longer run between revisionists and totali

tarianists, or between revisionists and post-revisionists, but between more

and less detached historical observers, between those who study the Soviet

past from afar and those who personally experienced Soviet power or live on formerly Soviet soil and therefore have particular moral and political stakes in coming to terms with the Soviet legacy. This is, and will remain, a vital debate.

For all its insights, Fitzpatrick's intellectual autobiography is also note

worthy for its muted personal profile. It offers relatively little by way of

2. Ibid., 272; Tsentr Dokumentatsii "Narodnyi Arkhiv," f. 30, op. 1, ed. 16 (entries for

1/11/1938, 6/21/1938, 12/10/1938).

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Of Archives and Frogs: Iconoclasm in Historical Perspective 723

positive self-identification, the beliefs and ideals that animate her as a

historian. Maybe it is indeed dispassionate archival study that constitutes

her passion. Yet if we believe that all historians project a part of their own

personality into their work, and that all history is, to an extent, autobiog

raphy, I wonder what kind of personality we can extract from the pages of

her work. As I thought about which historical figures she might have felt

particularly akin to, none of her heroes?not Anatolii Lunacharskii, not

the vydvizhentsy, not Ostap Bender?seem to express much about their

author. I was reminded, however, of another figure: a Russian from a

somewhat earlier age, but at the same time a self-proclaimed iconoclast

and forever the epitome of rebellious youth. This is Bazarov, from Ivan

Turgenev's Ottsy i deti (Fathers and sons). "Nature is not a temple but a

workshop, and man is a workman in it," Bazarov famously proclaims, as he

rejects totalizing schemes of the mind in favor of rigorous scientific analy sis.3 The older generation (read: adepts of totalitarianism) charges him

with "nihilism" (read: lack of moral values, failure to condemn the Soviet

regime's immorality). Bazarov weathers their criticism with calm and an

unflinching work ethos. He searches for truth in the anatomy of frogs;

Fitzpatrick sends her students to the archives in search of a truth that is

similarly conceived. The analogy is, of course, not perfect. Bazarov, in a

dated nineteenth-century gesture, preaches to learn from the Teutons;

nowadays many a Teuton becomes an apprentice in Fitzpatrick's Chicago

workshop. Throughout most of the novel, Bazarov is locked in a nihilistic

pose; Fitzpatrick, while affirming a Bazarov-type iconoclasm, in fact pro duces book after book, narrative after narrative. What fundamentally may connect the two, though, is this: in the course of the novel, Bazarov comes

to rethink his dispassionate materialism, while also developing an acute

awareness of his role in history. As a member of a transitional genera

tion, it is his task to tear down stale ways of thinking to prepare for an as

yet unclear future. As her autobiography makes clear, Fitzpatrick likewise

seeks to position her own work and the work of her peers in history. Her

historical perspective on the English-language discipline of Soviet history

over the past thirty years strikes me as a most useful way to get beyond stale

understandings of revisionism as well as its prefixed other, and it bodes

well for the future.

3. I. S. Turgenev, Ottsy i deti, in Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati

vos'mi tomakh (Moscow and Leningrad, 1964), 8:236.

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