From: Chris Doss <nomorebounces@mail.ru>
Subject: Re: Edward Lucas 9259-Johnson's Russia List
Date: Sun, 02 Oct 2005
I am not going to comment on the bulk of Mr. Lucas' missive, excepting this chunk:
"But the more that official Russian history sidles away from the democratic perspective and scholarly approach of the Yeltsin years and back to the fawning, distorted junk of the past, the easier it is to see Vladimir Putin and his "useful idiot" sycophants in the West for what they really are."
I am not quite sure what "official Russian history" is supposed to mean here, seeing as the Kremlin is not given to laying down historical dogma, but Mr. Lucas can rest assured that historical scholarship is alive and well in Russia. Just looking quickly at my desk I see S. Stepanov's "Chyornaya Sotnya" on the Black Hundreds, A.B. Shirokorad's "Rus' i Orda" on the history of the Tatars, I.D. Karpov's "Tragediya Belogo Yuga" on the Whites of the Don, and Roy Medvedev's books on Andropov and Luzhkov. Also on said desk are both volumes of Solzhenitsyn's two-volume "Dvesti Let Vmeste," a work by a Noble Prize winner that incidentally remains, to my knowledge, untranslated and unpublished in the Anglophone world. In my own admittedly personal and unsystematic research on the Cossack Revival Movement, I have come across a wealth of recent material on the Don and Kuban Cossacks. I give especial kudos to the Novyi Biznes publishing house for its publication of a magnificent series of reprints of gorgeous books put out before the Revolution by the Publishing House of the Don Host.
Given the massive amount of historical research and publishing being done in Russia today, I would say that it is hardly surprising that Russian publishing firms are not particularly interested in putting out something by an American. Indeed, it is my impression that few Russians care what people in the Anglosphere think of them or their history. Similarly, I am not really up on the matter, but I would hazard a guess that there are few or zero books written by Russian scholars, painstakingly researched or otherwise, on the Middle Passage or the Opium Wars being published in the United States or England.
Indeed, in a recent conversation with a Russian political scientist, I was told that he had been informed that he could not get published in the United States unless he wrote something that "frightened Americans."