June 2020
Bert Gordon is professor emeritus of history at Mills College who specializes in modern European history. He was a Fulbright Fellow in Vienna and his Ph.D. thesis received honorable mention for the 1969 Austrian History Award. His most recent book is War Tourism: Second World War France from Defeat and Occupation to the Creation of Heritage (Cornell University Press, 2018).
In your syllabus, you pose the question “Do current embroilments
with Russia represent a return to Cold War days, when the world
seemed on the brink of nuclear destruction?” How would you answer
that?
If I had to say “yes” or “no,” I would say “not quite.” During the
Cold War, it was just the two nuclear superpowers, the US and the
USSR, armed to the teeth. For those of us who lived through it,
there was always the sense that at a moment's notice you might have
a nuclear holocaust. What's interesting about Russia today is that
if you look at their economy and economic power, they're not a major
player at all — not, as it were, super — yet they've invested so
much in armaments and sophisticated missiles they still command
attention. Of course, one of the big differences between the Cold
War days and now is the emergence of China on the world scene. It’s
still unclear how their presence will impact relations among the
three, but it no doubt will. So, do we have Cold War-like tensions?
Absolutely, though I wouldn’t say we’re returning to full nuclear,
Cold War-like hostilities. The atmospherics are different.
Where does Russia fit culturally? Is it more Asian, more Western
European, or something in-between?
Virtually everybody who studies this agrees that while the vast
majority of the landmass of Russia is in Asia, culturally Russia is
definitely part of Europe. However, in many ways, it’s distinctly
different, which creates a tense interplay between the Russians and
the West, including the United States. Under Stalin during the
industrialization, there was this slogan "Catch Up with the West" —
meaning, among other things, “Catch Up with the United States.”
I think that understanding this tussle, as it were, between
emulation and resistance, between the push and pull of Western
influences, should inform how we look at Putin and his government
today. In a lot of ways, what Putin wants to do is emulate some
characteristics of the West, as Stalin did before him, and Peter the
Great did even earlier. But emulation — taking certain things from
the west and not other things — is a delicate balance. What Putin
wants to take from the west is technology, economic development,
that sort of thing. What he doesn’t want to take is what we might
call western liberalism and human rights, what we like to think of
in the Declaration of the Rights of Man from the French Revolution
and the Declaration of Independence from the United States. For
Putin and people who think like Putin, it’s “thank you, but no thank
you.”
Currently, Putin seems to dominate and define how the world sees
Russia. How do you view him?
I see him as extremely careful and not rash. He does what he thinks
he can get away with and, for the most part, has been successful.
Hard to believe, but he’s been in power for 20 years now and has
tried to change the Russian constitution to ensure that he’s in
power for another 15 at least. Remember, he came to power in the
late 1990s when Boris Yeltsin’s health was failing and the Russian
economy was collapsing. When Yeltsin resigned, Putin came in and
stabilized the economy, for better or worse, stopping the free-fall.
In doing so, he opened the door to what we now refer to as the
oligarchs and all that entails.
For people like Putin, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the loss of
the satellite countries, and the uprisings of breakaway ethnic
groups are all a humiliation. Everything done since the fall of the
Berlin Wall has been informed by the drive to hold on to the
influence Russia, through the Soviet Union, once had or, at least,
reclaim some of it.
One of your recommended readings is by Barbara Evans Clements, A
History of Women in Russia: From Earliest Times to the Present.
Why was it important to you to shine a light on women’s voices?
I do it because the stories of women are as much a part of the
fabric of history as are the men’s, yet rarely get the same kind of
acknowledgement. In class, we’ll talk about people like Alexandra
Kollontai who was quite active during the Revolutionary years. She
was a Marxist and theoretician who wrote extensively about how
communism would do away with inequality, do away with marriage, do
away with housework — that women would be fully equal partners
socially, politically, and culturally. It didn’t turn out that way,
but that was the hope.