Monday, June 22, 2026

On Turns, Returns, and the Tension between Political Advocacy and Scholarly Inquiry

I appreciate the opportunity to respond Susan Smith-Peter’s letter concerning what I have called the Karpovich school of Russian imperial studies, which pioneered in North America the historical study of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as multiethnic, multicultural, and multiconfessional states almost half a century before the so-called imperial turn. In the 2022 essay that partly inspired my article, Smith-Peter credits Michael Karpovich for having “transplanted” Vasilii Kliuchevskii’s “idea of Russian history” to the United States and Harvard University in particular. She builds this case in part by pointing to the fact that Karpovich had been “a student of Kliuchevskii’s at Moscow University.” At Harvard, the author implies, students learned from Kliuchevksii via Karpovich that “only the ‘Great Russian’ people had agency, not the Ukrainian people.” The works produced by these students, Smith-Peter claims, “helped to create the field—one in which Ukraine was an object, not a subject.” Thus, the field of Russian history in the US was born with a “Ukrainian blind spot.”

As I explain in the article, there are problems with each of these claims. As Karpovich stated to one of his students, “I cannot say that [Kliuchesvkii] taught me” because “he did not teach his students the methodology of history.” That student was none other than Philip Mosley (1905–72), who as the director of Columbia University’s Russian Institute made important contributions to the development of Ukrainian studies in North America. In fact, Karpovich was highly critical of what he called “the Klyuchevski scheme of Russian history,” whose many “deficiencies,” including neglect of the imperial and colonial dimensions of that history, led Karpovich in 1943 (!) to argue that Kliuchevskii’s scheme “stands in need of a thorough renovation, if not a total replacement.” This is exactly what some of Karpovich’s students—Firuz Kazemzadeh, John S. Reshetar, Jr., Richard Pipes, Marc Raeff, and Donald Treadgold—explicitly set out to do in their doctoral dissertations and subsequent publications. For his part, Reshetar published what Taras Hunczak more than twenty years later called “the first objective study” of the Ukrainian Revolution, which Reshetar instructively subtitled “a study in nationalism,” thereby centering Ukrainian agency. As I write: “Having first acknowledged that the ‘distinctiveness of the Ukrainians is now generally recognized,’ [Reshetar] proceeded to place Ukrainians in the foreground of the study, which opens with passages from Mykola Kostomarov’s The Book of Genesis of the Ukrainian People (1846) and Mykola Mikhnovsky’s Independent Ukraine (1900),” and then “documented and explained the myriad ways that Ukrainians . . . shaped their own history and that of the Soviet Union.” Reshetar’s explicitly decentering approach to the study of Russia’s borderlands and non-Russian peoples was typical of his cohort. Concerning Nicholas Riasanovsky’s place therein, Jonathan Daly, who knows a thing or two about Karpovich’s students’ impact on the field, originally “never considered Riasanovksy one of them,” nor did some of Karpovich’s students have much of a relationship with him or think much of him as a scholar, and Riasanovsky himself, for that matter, “insisted that Karpovich had not inspired his scholarly evolution.” In any case, Riasanovsky left Harvard before Karpovich delivered his pioneering 1947 lecture on major gaps in Russian historiography, and wrote his doctoral dissertation under B. H. Sumner and Isaiah Berlin at Oxford University. Had Riasanovsky spent more time in Karpovich’s orbit, perhaps he would have been more attuned to the imperial and colonial dimensions of Russian history, and less beholden to “the main traditions of prerevolutionary Russian historiography . . . that I managed to adapt . . . to the American and Western scene.” Nowhere do I argue, as Smith-Peter claims, that “Riasanovsky’s textbook is an outlier, not representative of the views of the field.” This misrepresentation of my argument should be retracted.

Nothing can substitute for reading the original essays: Smith-Peter’s concerning the field’s purported “Ukrainian blind spot” (which, oddly, she traces to Harvard, which in 1973 established the first academic Ukrainian research institution in North America) and mine concerning Anglophone historiography of Russian Empire before the imperial turn. Smith-Peter’s (in multiple senses of the word) original intervention concerning the development of the field of Russian history in the US was published in part in reaction to Russia’s “current war against Ukraine,” and elsewhere she has clearly stated her opposition to both “Putin’s Russia” and the genocidal war. Good history is not defined by political neutrality, because historians inevitably bring assumptions, values, and political judgments to their work, whether they acknowledge them or not. Rather, what distinguishes good history from bad is adherence to the conventions of historical scholarship: the critical use of sources, the careful weighing of evidence, engagement with counterevidence, and logically sound argumentation. Historians are well aware that the past can be used to confirm preconceived beliefs and advance political agendas, and they are well positioned to assess the cogency of an author’s arguments in relation to evidence marshaled.

I shall close by addressing Smith-Peter’s claim that “at the center of the cluster is a silence where Ukrainian voices should have been,” and her observation that “no scholars of Ukraine, are given the opportunity to argue the question” (it is unclear whether by this she means to suggest that scholars of Ukraine should have been invited to participate in the thematic cluster). Since I was not involved in selecting the articles for inclusion in the cluster, I can only speculate on the criteria used to guide the selection process. Based on the evidence at hand, however, it is reasonable to imagine that the decision had something to do with the fact that the cluster originates from the international conference “What Is Colonialism?” held in Vienna in June 2024, that it is not focused on Ukraine, and that the journal’s policy clearly stipulates that clusters “generally have no more than four papers.” Elsewhere I have called into question scholars’ spurious calls to “listen in silence and solidarity” to academics hailing from the places and peoples that scholars study (which essay was so censored by the editors and overseers of a publication known, one suspects, to most readers of this response that I pulled it from review and published an uncensored version of it elsewhere). As suggested above, good history is distinguished by how evidence is used and arguments are constructed, not by the political, national, or regional identity of the historian advancing claims about the past.

For well over half a century, scholars in multiple fields have been collectively making sense of Russia’s empires and non-Russian peoples in these pages, including in multiple forums dedicated to discussion of things Ukrainian. I trust Slavic Review will continue this venerable and highly productive tradition.

Sean Pollock is Professor of History at Wright State University. His most recent publication is “Extractivist, Exclusionary, and Exploitative? Toward a History of International Scholarly Cooperation in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies before the Annus Horribilis” (https://www.oeaw.ac.at/sice/sice-blog/extractivist-exclusionary-and-exploitative), and others appear in Russian History, The Russian Review, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, and a forthcoming Festschrift honoring Daniel Clarke Waugh.

Citations

1. My article was inspired by Smith-Peter’s December 2022 blog post titled “How the Field Was Colonized: Russian History’s Ukrainian Blind Spot” and other scholars’ post-February-2022 calls to “decolonize” the fields of Russian and Eurasian studies. The essay and my response to it were republished in Susan Smith-Peter and Sean Pollock, “How the Field Was Colonized: Russian History’s Ukrainian Blind Spot,” in “Reinterpreting Russian History after February 24, 2022,” a special issue of Russian History 50 (2023): 145–56, where Smith-Peter was allowed to respond to my comment but I was not invited to respond to hers (ibid., 146n*). The quotations are from Smith-Peter, “How the Field Was Colonized,” 146, 148, 150.
2. Karpovich, as quoted in Philip E. Mosley, “Professor Michael Karpovich,” in Russian Thought and Politics, ed. Hugh McLean, Martin E. Malia, and George Fischer (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), 3. On Philip Mosley and other “Ukrainophiles” at Columbia’s Russian Institute, see Volodymyr V. Kravchenko, Ukrainian Historical Writing in North America during the Cold War: The Struggle for Recognition (Lanham, MD, 2023), 71–74; Philip E. Mosley, “Aspects of Russian Expansion,” The American Slavic and East European Review 7, no. 3 (October 1948): 197; David C. Engerman, “The Cold War’s Organization Man: How Philip Mosely Helped Soviet Studies Moderate American Policy,” Humanities 30, no. 5 (September/October 2009): 22–53; and Alexander Dallin, “Philip E. Mosley, 1905–1972,” The Russian Review 31, no. 2 (April 1972): 209–11.
3. All quotations are from Karpovich’s “Klyuchevski and Recent Trends in Russian Historiography,” as discussed in Sean Pollock, “Anglophone Historiography of Russian Empire before the Imperial Turn,” Slavic Review 84, no. 4 (Winter 2025): 727.
4. Taras Hunczak, “Preface,” in The Ukraine, 1917–1921: A Study in Revolution, ed. Taras Hunczak with the assistance of John T. von der Heide (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), vi; John S. Reshetar, Jr., The Ukrainian Revolution, 1917–1920: A Study in Nationalism (Princeton, 1952).
5. Pollock, “Anglophone Historiography of Russian Empire before the Imperial Turn,” 728.
6. Jonathan Daly, “The Pleiade: Five Scholars Who Founded Russian Historical Studies in America,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 18, no. 4 (September 2017): 786, 819–22.
7. Riasanovsky, as quoted in Yuri Slezkine, “In Memoriam,” University of California, Berkeley, 2011, at https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/inmemoriam/html/nicholasriasanovsky.html (accessed May 31, 2026).
8. For example, Susan Smith-Peter, “Rethinking ‘the Russian Archives,” Ab Imperio 2 (2022): 63–69; idem, “Genocide in Plain Sight,” Medium, April 15, 2022, medium.com/@jkmuf1861/genocide-in-plain-sight-c2c9119ca533.
9. Stephen Kotkin makes a similar point about what constitutes “good history” in his trenchant “The State—Is It Us? Memoirs, Archives, and Kremlinologists,” The Russian Review 61, 1 (2002): 38 n. 13, and personal communication, email message to author, April 8, 2026.
10. “Clusters,” Manuscript Submissions, Slavic Review, aseees.org/slavicreview/manuscript-submissions/ (accessed May 31, 2026).
11. Sean Pollock, “Extractivist, Exclusionary, and Exploitative? Toward a History of International Scholarly Cooperation in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies before the Annus Horribilis,” Study of Islam in Central Asia, Austrian Academy of Sciences, [June 2025], www.oeaw.ac.at/sice/sice-blog/extractivist-exclusionary-and-exploitative (accessed May 31, 2026). See also Catriona Kelly, “‘A Little Help Is Better Than a Lot of Pity,’” Kritika: Exploration of Russian and Eurasian History 25, 1 (2024): 117–30, which argues that while Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine requires clear moral opposition and practical support for Ukrainians, scholars should resist both apologetics for Russian imperialism and the wholesale severing of intellectual ties, because long-term academic dialogue, critical inquiry, and transnational scholarly cooperation remain essential even in times of war.