Facts and Frameworks: The Use of Evidence in Soviet/Russian Journalism and History Writing

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

Soviet ideologists always claimed that Marxism was the only “correct” social theory. This explains why “facts” were seen as the proletariat’s “natural allies.” At the same time, Soviet propaganda and historiography were known for their arbitrary treatment of facts. Facts were considered the ideologists’ easy prey just because they had to comply with Marxism. They simply could not exist outside the interpretative frameworks, which connected them to Soviet/Marxist ideology. This situation was certainly not without parallels in other political traditions. However, Soviet official discourse brought the tension between constructivism and “factualism” to its extreme. This attitude, as many other aspects of Soviet political culture, has been reanimated by official Russian discourse in the 2000s. That is why the Soviet/Russian case provides an excellent opportunity for studying the “rhetoric of facts.” The round table will discuss the cult of facts in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia and the mechanisms of the rhetorical “prefiguring” of their meaning used by Soviet/Russian journalists and historians. We will focus on the “journalism of fact” of the 1920s and 1930s; the reanimation of this tradition on the turn of the 1990s; the rhetoric of “rubrication” of history (or classification of historical facts) in Soviet historiography; and the use of facts in the present-day Russian propaganda. For this discussion, we prefer the round table format because our primary interest lies in the comparison of the cases that will be presented and in the rhetorical mechanisms (“frameworks”) that are common to all of them.

Sub Unit

• History: Russian and Eurasian, since 1924

Organizer

• Dina Khapaeva, Georgia Institute of Technology

Chair

• Irina Prokhorova, New Literary Observer Publishing House

Roundtable Members

• Dina Khapaeva, Georgia Institute of Technology

• Nikolay Koposov, Georgia Institute of Technology

• Timothy Snyder, Yale U

• Juliette Renee Stapanian-Apkarian, Emory U