Authors

Kai Johann Willms¹;  ¹ University of Basel, Switzerland

Discussion

The beginnings of the Cold War posed a challenge to political decision makers in the United States: Until World War II Eastern Europe had been a marginal field of research in American academia. In order to overcome this lack of expertise, new institutes and research centers for East European and Soviet Studies were established and generously funded. Since there were not enough domestic experts to meet the demand for knowledge about Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, émigré scholars from the region constituted a vital human resource.

One national group of scholars that gained particular prominence in Cold War Soviet Studies was the Polish émigré community. A significant number of Polish-born experts on Russian and Soviet affairs had a long-lasting influence on the development of their respective fields: To name but a few, Czesław Miłosz introduced a generation of American students to the works of Dostoevsky; Adam Ulam received acclaim as a biographer of Stalin and as an astute analyst of U.S.-Soviet relations; Zbigniew Brzeziński became one of the leading ‘Sovietologists’ of his time and entered the halls of power when serving as Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor. This strong presence of exiled Polish academics in American Soviet Studies has recently led to a discussion to what extent Western researchers had become used to viewing the Soviet Union ‘through Polish eyes’ – especially against the background that already before World War II, there had been a long tradition of Polish writing about Russian history, culture and politics. Did the émigré scholars introduce elements of this intellectual tradition into the Western academic discourse?

The historian Andrzej Nowak has argued that one should not overestimate the inner cohesion of the “Polish connection” in American ‘Sovietology’: Many of the influential émigré scholars had come from Jewish families and had not identified with a tradition of writing about Russia and the Soviet Union that was rooted in Polish nationalism. In my paper, I will differentiate this argument by focusing on two highly influential Polish-Jewish émigré historians who became leading figures of opposing ‘schools’ of Western Soviet Studies: Richard Pipes and Moshe Lewin. Drawing on published and unpublished materials, in particular ego documents, I will demonstrate how these two scholars positioned themselves vis-à-vis the Polish ‘Sovietological’ tradition and how they reflected on the significance of their biographical experiences as well as their cultural self-identification for their scholarly work. I will thus try to contribute to a discussion on the role of ‘positionality’ in East European Studies.