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Negating the Negation: Russia, Not-Russia, and The West

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Alexander J. Motyl*
Affiliation:
Columbia University

Extract

There is a savage irony at the core of Sovietology. Whereas the study of Soviet history and politics should have concerned itself with everything Soviet, it traditionally focused almost exclusively only on what was Russian. By ignoring the non-Russians as something not Russian and, thus, by implication, inconsequential, “Sovietology in one country” contradicted its own premises and, thereby, turned in upon, indeed even negated, itself. By setting the center over the periphery, by detaching the center from the periphery that defined the center as a center, Sovietology in effect emptied the center of its “centrality.” In so doing, Sovietology transformed itself into an inauthentic form of Russian studies—inauthentic in the sense of ostensibly being concerned with the Soviet Union, while, in reality, actually pursuing the study of something with which Sovietology was ostensibly unconcerned.

Type
II The USSR and Beyond
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 Association for the Study of Nationalities of Eastern Europe and ex-USSR 

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References

Note

1. See Alexander J. Motyl, ‘“Sovietology in One Country’ or Comparative Nationality Studies?” Slavic Review, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Spring 1989), pp. 8388.Google Scholar

2. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).Google Scholar

3. For a discussion of the origins of Sovietology, see Walter Laqueur, The Fate of the Revolution. (New York: Collier Books, 1987). See also Alexander Dallin, “Bias and Blunders in American Studies on the USSR,” Slavic Review, vol. 32, no. 3 (September 1973), pp. 560–576; Stephen F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 337.Google Scholar

4. On Gorbachev's views on the nationality question, see Alexander J. Motyl, “The Sobering of Gorbachev: Nationality, Restructuring, and the West,” in Seweryn Bialer, ed., Politics, Society, and Nationality inside Gorbachev's Russia. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989), pp. 149173.Google Scholar

5. For a discussion of these views, see: Paul A. Roth, Meaning and Method in the Social Sciences. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); Michael T. Gibbons, “Political Science, Disciplinary History, and Theoretical Pluralism: A Response to Almond and Eckstein,” PS: Political Science & Politics, Vol. 23, No. 1 (March 1990), pp. 44–46; Pauline Marie Rosenau, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

6. Regarding deconstruction, see: Christopher Norris, The Deconstructive Turn. (London: Routledge, 1989); Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); Mark C. Taylor, ed., Deconstruction in Context. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Rosenau, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences.Google Scholar

7. For a detailed discussion of Engels’ views, see Charles C. Herod, The Nation in the History of Marxian Thought. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976).Google Scholar

8. Typical of this genre is Yevhen Sheremet, Ukrainians by Profession. (Kiev: Ukraina Society, 1981)Google Scholar

9. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. (New York: Grove Press, 1968); Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967).Google Scholar