Renegades, Dissidents, Bureaucrats: Topics in Soviet Intellectual History (Winter 2023)
Section outline
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Instructor: Karl Hall
Number of credits: 2
Course level: MA
Time: Thursdays at 15:40
Location: D109
Instructor's office hours: Tuesdays 13:00-15:00; Thursdays 14:00-15:00; and by appointment
Zoom option: If you require Zoom access for visa reasons or other extenuating circumstances, use this link. Please alert the instructor beforehand if you will not attend in person; online access is only for special circumstances.
This course treats debates among and about intellectuals in Soviet history. Our investigation of the relations between scholarly expertise and state authority will be interspersed with conceptual debates from various disciplines. Rather than focus solely on canonical literary and political intellectuals, we will cast our nets more widely, studying the effects of specialization and "disciplinization" on intellectual life, as well as the changing composition of the white-collar class.
When Julian Benda famously invoked La trahison des clercs (1927), he had in mind the French Dreyfusard consensus that intellectuals were capable of forming a class-in-themselves, and amid rampant cultural pessimism he faulted his postwar contemporaries for failing to defend "a corporation whose sole cult is that of justice and of truth." In the newly-formed Soviet Union many Old Regime intellectuals who had survived the disastrous Civil War might have subscribed to Benda's sentiments, referring to the Bolsheviks as "gorillas" and lamenting the new regime's contemptuous attitude toward "pure science." But the Bolsheviks were much more inclined to treat the intelligentsia suspiciously as bound by their (now-abolished) classes of origin, while many intellectuals gradually found new roles for themselves in a transitional white-collar "stratum," and a younger generation of scholars learned how to "re-bind" themselves to the class of the future. Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia thus looms in the background of our discussions of Soviet intellectuals negotiating periods of optimism, crisis, and normalcy under state socialism. (Here "Soviet" is always understood as more than ethnically Russian.) Global configurations of knowledge production shifted dramatically in the course of the twentieth century, so the sociology of Soviet intellectuals must range widely if it is to generate a common framework for disciplines usually assimilated to the "universal" modern experience (the natural sciences), versus disciplines usually understood to be "distorted" or somehow distinctively "Soviet" under state socialism (humanities and social sciences). Recurrent tropes of genius on the one hand or collectivity on the other should thus be interrogated in a variety of academic fields, not least because the Soviet case can in turn shed light on historians' practices of "situatedness" (in Mannheim's sense).NB: there are presently 14 subject options for 12 weeks. We will decide which two topics to exclude based on the consensus of the current cohort.
Grading: General participation: 25%. One formal presentation: 25%. Review essay: 50%.
Review essay length: 8-9 pages, double-spaced. Due on April 12. Topic chosen in consultation with instructor. Pragmatically speaking, the essay should take one of the session topics as a jumping-off point, but it is understood that prior research interests will shape the chosen emphases.
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Please note that this session will be held online (link above).
Presentations: Julia, Berkant
Assigned reading:
Elizabeth Wood, "Paradoxes of gender in Soviet Communist Party women’s sections (the Zhenotdel), 1918–1930," in The Routledge Handbook of Gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia (2021). This section will have a more experimental character and require student collaboration. Although many topics in the seminar lend themselves to gender analysis, this is an intellectual problem at the methodological level, one which I hope will enter into our discussions, but not something that has driven the choice of subject in any given week. This week is no exception, in the sense that we are NOT going to foreground "the woman question" in Soviet political and social history, but rather discuss in a more concrete and biographical way the challenges facing Soviet intellectuals who happened to be female. Students should pair off and work together to identify one female intellectual to present briefly (10 minutes?) in class. But here's the catch: the figure presented must be known primarily for contributions to something other than politics or literature, e.g., no Aleksandra Kollontais, no Anna Akhmatovas. When choosing someone to present, think about concrete pathways (and obstacles) to social and disciplinary advancement in a particular intellectual role, reaching beyond mere appeals to male chauvinism, Soviet bossism, and patriarchal cultures.We will use the brief Wood essay simply to give us a common reference point regarding early Soviet aspirations, but it is not about intellectual history per se. Our aim will be to identify broader challenges to incorporating Soviet women into intellectual history. I will set the scene and then briefly present the case of Maria Petrashen.Further resources:Also not intellectual history, but important for moving the conversation outside of Moscow and Leningrad: Douglas Northrop, "Subaltern voices," Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (2004).