Paul Krueger
        Willard Spiegelman
        David Son
        Virginia Dupuy
        Alan Brown
        Wayne Shaw
        Evelyn Parker
        Valerie F. Hunt
        Dan Orlovsky

New Russian History

Russian historian Dan Orlovsky saw his field flourish after the fall of the Soviet empire 15 years ago, when the era of perestroika swung open the doors to archives previously off limits to researchers.

But Orlovsky is now seeing that access shrivel. Russian President Vladimir Putin has tightened his control on power, even more so since the recent escalation of terrorist attacks by separatists from Chechnya.

As a result, the general openness of the Gorbachev and Yeltsin eras is closing. “Access has been cut; information has been blocked,” says Orlovsky, the George Bouhe Research Fellow in Russian Studies in the Clements Department of History.

Obtaining information may be more difficult for some scholars, especially those looking into political or military records, but the shifting winds at the Kremlin hardly will hinder those who study Russian history. In fact, the end of the Cold War indelibly changed the craft of writing the nation’s history.

Before that time, the story of 20th-century Russia focused on Lenin, Stalin, and the concept of totalitarianism. In recent years, however, historians, while not abandoning the tyranny of dictators and their regimes, have uncovered complexities that provide a richer picture of the Soviet people, their culture, their government, and their work environment.

Orlovsky focuses on a group previously unrecognized by historians – white-collar employees and the professional class such as bookkeepers, engineers, journalists, and other educated workers who helped to run the Soviet state. This approach is a departure from the traditional model of government and society dominated by blue-collar workers.

“We were locked into a liberal, progressive, or Marxist interpretation, looking at workers and peasants, soldiers and sailors. We didn’t add this other powerful dimension,” he says.

He has spent 15 years on the subject while editing Beyond Soviet Studies. The time has proven invaluable for Orlovsky, who is writing a book on the white-collar class, because he was able to witness the revolution that dismantled the Soviet empire and replaced it with a democratically elected government in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

“It’s helped a lot to have lived through a revolutionary era and to have witnessed attempts to build some kind of new society,” he says.

Orlovsky, who earned his Ph.D. from Harvard, joined SMU in 1976. He also serves as co-director of SMU-in-Oxford. In addition, each May and June he conducts research in Moscow.

For more information: dorlovsk@smu.edu