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Polit.ru / ProScience Theater — February 2016

Oleg Budnitsky on a People’s History of the War

On 15 February, Oleg Budnitsky, Doctor of Historical Sciences and professor specializing in Russian history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, will speak at the Central House of Journalists. His lecture is titled “Is a Scholarly History of the Great Patriotic War Possible?”

Before the event, the historian explained which aspect of the Great Patriotic War interests him as a researcher:

“I study the social history of the war — not the history of military operations, but the history of people at war and during wartime. I study what is called the ‘human dimension of war.’ The essence of my work is that our history of the war has turned into a history of gods and heroes — Stalin, Zhukov and so on — while the people’s history of the war, the way people experienced it in the army and behind the lines, has, one might say, still not been written, although several works on the subject do exist.

“This concerns an enormous mass of people. During the war alone, 29.5 million people were called up into the army and navy; including the prewar armed forces, the total was 34 million. As for the books on the war that I have published, there are several. A number of collections have appeared under my editorship, with my introductions and articles: It Happened. The Germans Came! Ideological Collaborationism in the USSR during the Great Patriotic War; Odessa: Life under Occupation, 1941–1944; The USSR in the Second World War: Occupation. Holocaust. Stalinism; and, most recently, V. N. Gelfand. Diary, 1941–1946, prepared by me and my colleagues. Those are the main books; I also have quite a few articles on this subject in Russian and English.

“In general I work on various subjects, but they are usually connected with pages of wartime history that are insufficiently covered here and were formerly taboo altogether — collaborationism, for example, meaning cooperation with the enemy.

“I am planning other books as well, but I am superstitious in this respect and do not particularly like discussing a book before it has appeared. I am currently writing a book about the Red Army’s advance into Europe in 1944–1945. Again, it is not military history; it is the history of the collision and encounter of two different cultures and, if you like, civilizations.

“Not everyone understands what happened during the war. Eight million Soviet people went abroad for the first time and saw an entirely different world from the one depicted in newspapers and described on the radio. This is an extraordinarily interesting subject, reflected in soldiers’ diaries — which are very rare — letters and other sources. It is fascinating to study how Soviet people perceived Europe.”

Budnitsky’s appearance will take place on 15 February at the Central House of Journalists, 8a Nikitsky Boulevard, near Arbatskaya metro station, beginning at 7:00 p.m. Tickets are available through Timepad, BigBilet and Ponominalu.

Is a Scholarly History of the Great Patriotic War Possible?

More than seventy years have passed since the end of the Great Patriotic War, yet the events of that period continue to interest both the public and historians, and research continues in an effort to learn more about what happened in and to the country during those terrible years.

Oleg Budnitsky believes that the history of the Great Patriotic War remains the most sought-after period in all of Russian history.

“According to opinion polls, most of the country’s population is proud of victory in the Great Patriotic War, while at the same time most are convinced that we do not know the whole truth about the war. What is the ‘truth’ about the war? Do the sources available to us and the historian’s ‘toolkit’ allow us to discover that ‘truth’? Do people really want to know that ‘truth’?” These and other questions concerning the history of the Second World War and the Great Patriotic War will be discussed in Budnitsky’s lecture.

Oleg Vitalyevich Budnitsky is Doctor of Historical Sciences and director of the International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences at the National Research University Higher School of Economics.

ProScience Theater is a science-and-public-affairs stand-up format, or an extended conversation with leading figures in science and the arts in which members of the audience become full participants in the discussion.

The event will take place on 15 February at the Central House of Journalists, 8a Nikitsky Boulevard, beginning at 7:00 p.m.

Oleg Budnitsky Discussed the Study of Second World War History

On 15 February 2016, Doctor of Historical Sciences Oleg Budnitsky appeared on the ProScience Theater stage with a lecture titled “Is a Scholarly History of the Great Patriotic War Possible?”

The interest of the social history of war becomes clear if one considers just one problem: how people who had lived through revolution and collectivization — more often suffering from them than benefiting — were nevertheless prepared in the following decade to fight for their country.

Studying the Great Patriotic War, however, involves particular difficulties. Finding sources for the social history of war is no easy task. Most wartime sources are memoir documents written by educated urban people. Yet before the war the USSR was predominantly a peasant country: two thirds of the population lived in villages and one fifth was illiterate. As a result, only a small proportion of those who experienced the war left accounts of it. Although the Great Patriotic War is often called a people’s war, Budnitsky believes that a people’s history of the war has yet to be written.

Budnitsky also pointed to purely technical difficulties historians face when working with wartime materials. For a long time archives in Russia were administered by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. On the one hand this created an excellent system for cataloguing archival materials; on the other it produced numerous restrictions on access whose continued existence today has no justification. Budnitsky says that in a few months in a foreign archive a historian can study a quantity of documents that would take years to examine in a Russian archive simply because of limits on the number of files that may be issued to a researcher.

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