Sovietology at the End of History: Academics Respond to the Soviet Collapse

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Much was said in the 1990s about the response of Soviet scholars of all disciplines at the time of collapse of the Soviet bloc from 1989 to 1991. There seemed to be at first both a reckoning of a whole area of studies that failed to foresee it, and a search for individuals who just might have foreseen it. Mostly, there was an exultant triumphalism that had the effect of immediately erasing many earlier topics of passionate discussion, as well as much reinvention in the profession as the object of its study disappeared, seemingly, from reality. This panel revisits this watershed moment in the profession from several perspectives: participant, literary, historiographical. With more than 30 years of perspective, the panel will revisit the ironies, erasures, and reinventions, both narrative and personal, that followed one of the most peculiar developments anywhere in academe.

Sub Unit

• History: Since 1990

Chair

• Andrew Sloin, Baruch College / CUNY Graduate Center

Papers

• Innocence and Triumph at the End of the Yellow Brick Road: John Lewis Gaddis in the Land of Oz - Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, U of Hong Kong (China)

• What the Soviets Call the Anti-Soviet Professor: Comrade - Jonathan W. Daly, U of Illinois at Chicago

• A Historian’s Participant Observation of the End of the Cold War in US Sovietology - Sheila Fitzpatrick, Australian Catholic U (Australia)

Discussant

• Mark Edele, U of Melbourne (Australia)