NEWS

Expert on Russia finds people friendly, history complex in former Soviet Union

By DAVID WILLIAMSON
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL -- One of the genuine pleasures of Donald Raleigh’s professional life is introducing students and others to a Russia far different than what they expected.

"I had an undergraduate in my office the other day who visited there this year, and he said he was not prepared for how much Russians liked Americans and how much he liked them," said Raleigh, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "He found them much more compatible and like Americans than people in several West European countries.

"When I’ve taken students and adult groups to Russia, which I’ve done since 1979, I’m always impressed that people come back and say ‘Wow! They really like us!’ which they didn’t expect."

Even if he didn’t admit it directly, it would still be obvious from his passport that Raleigh thinks fondly of the Russian people himself. After all, the historian, who is one of the non-native world experts on their nation, has visited the Soviet Union and now Russia 28 times.

For the past 12 years, he traveled there every summer to work on an unprecedented book. That work, "Experiencing Russia’s Civil War," relies on a massive amount of untapped archives from Saratov, a city on the Volga River off-limits to Westerners for decades, and surrounding towns. It offers the first in-depth look at the Civil War’s effects outside Moscow.

Princeton University Press just published the book, which Raleigh believes is the first "total history" of the Russian conflict from a local perspective, one that covers not only politics and society, but also broader cultural codes that determine people’s behavior.

"For instance, I give a lot of attention to language and how the Bolsheviks used language publicly and privately," he said.

Like the violent repression they employed, that sophisticated use of language -- white-washed for public consumption and straight for police and other agencies -- at first served them well enough to help maintain their power, the UNC historian said. Ultimately, however, it betrayed them by undermining Russians’ faith in the "system" and fostering a kind of passive resistance that guaranteed inefficiency and eventual failure.

Underscoring the importance of the Civil War for later Soviet history, Raleigh argues that many of the features associated with the Stalinist 1930s were not only practiced during the Civil War, but also were embedded. That is, he sees few alternatives for a non-Stalinist outcome to the course that Soviet history ultimately took. Bolshevik ideology strongly influenced the Soviet Union’s history after the Russian Civil War, he said, but other key factors that shaped the emerging one-party state included Russian political culture, chance and the wrenching effects of World War I.

"The Civil War was not only a formative experience, but also the defining one for the Soviet political system," Raleigh said.

The author also demonstrates extensive mass opposition to Bolshevik rule by the Civil War’s end. The reason the conflict did not continue, he argues, is that the Bolsheviks introduced concessions. Yet another reason, too often ignored by historians, is the role famine played in keeping the Bolsheviks in power.

"If you’re truly starving, you don’t have a lot of energy to consider any political opposition. Raleigh is deeply involved in his next book project, an oral history of Soviet baby boomers, which will tap his extensive in-country experience."

"I have seen some extraordinary changes in Russia over the years that have amazed me," Raleigh said. "Even under the Soviet system the country was beginning to open up in teaspoon-size doses because it had no choice.

"One of the points I will make in my new book is that the system’s own success at modernizing, at sending the whole country to school and making it a literate, urban society in and of itself destroyed those conditions which made the communist system possible to begin with."

By the time Gorbachev came to power, a one-party state largely closed to the outside world was no longer tenable, he said.

"As the country has opened up over the past decade, the changes have been absolutely phenomenal," Raleigh said. "I take issue with Western media coverage of what’s going on in Russia. The media have exaggerated all the negatives and have been reluctant to consider that a whole new open society is emerging as well. We don’t give Russians credit for realizing they have problems or credit for having the talent to solve them."

Obviously, Russia is still Russia and differs from the United States in various ways, he said, but U.S. reporters and others fail to judge it on its own terms and to see the amazing changes, including for the first time a new democratic order and sounder economics. If a person has money, he or she can buy anything there that can be bought in the United States.

The UNC professor said that with the exception of Chechnya, he has become very optimistic about Russia, its economy and its future. It has evolved into a radically different, freer society, and it’s in the United States and all other countries’ interest to promote stability there.

"Saratov, which was a closed city, is now open, and many of my colleagues at the university there are traveling abroad, and foreigners are visiting now all the time," he said. "They have won all sorts of national and international grants, and they’re all on e-mail."

Like his previous books, Raleigh said "Experiencing Russia’s Civil War," subtitled "Politics, Society and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917-1922," will soon be translated into Russian.

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Note: Raleigh can be reached at (919) 962-8077 or DJR@email.unc.edu.

Contact: David Williamson, (919) 962-8596