The Soviet Past in the Post-Socialist Present by Melanie Ilic Dalia Leinarte

Author:Melanie Ilic, Dalia Leinarte [Melanie Ilic, Dalia Leinarte]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367263836
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

Latvia: Two Styles of ‘Doing History’

The complicated state of historical research in Latvia is a good illustration of some of these stresses and strains of the post-communist historical professions. Taking a slightly wider view, it becomes clear that here a profound interest in the past has emerged in social science disciplines, generating an inclusive scholarly literature that reflects society-wide retrospection. These inquiries, on-going since the renewal of Latvian independence in 1991, tend to reflect two kinds of historical imagination: one, typical of most credentialed historians, customarily thinks in terms of chronological sequences and linear time and is oriented primarily toward documentary archival evidence; the other combines documentary, belletrist and orally gathered evidence, and uses analytical methods that downplay linearity, employ multiple shifting time frames, and is concerned more with representations of the past than with the precise location of events in space and time. In this chapter, these are referred to as ‘styles’ of doing history.4 Both subscribe to the notion that the past in Latvia needs to be rewritten and reconceptualised after a half-century of dominance by Marxist-Leninist ideology, but their practitioners exhibit different approaches to how this should be done. The term styles (rather than schools, for example) is most appropriate for describing the two, because many historians and social scientists in Latvia have published works in which elements of both styles are present. There is no need, in other words, to imagine a Latvian Methodenstreit, in part because the total number of working historians and social scientists in Latvia is not large enough to be allocated to warring sides and in part because practitioners have not shown much interest in publishing polemical exchanges.

At the same time, a review of the Latvian-language history writing of the past two decades shows that some historians are much more comfortable with traditional methods of ‘doing history’, leaving the question of its contemporary relevance to others, while some are more attuned to analytical methodologies and interdisciplinary viewpoints and are greatly concerned with how the past enters into the thinking of present-day Latvian populations. For the former, the present and the past are distinct time-defined and different phases of the longer flow of Latvian history. For the latter, the past is very much entangled with the present, and ‘history as it really was’—at least recent history—is difficult to reach because the analytical concepts for doing so embody unconscious, half-conscious, or fully conscious preoccupations of the present time.

One unforeseen problem has rendered the general situation even more complicated. When Latvian historians and social scientists began the long and difficult task of seeking to ‘Westernize’ their professional work, they encountered the fact that by the 1990s historical and social science research in the ‘West’ had itself become methodologically highly differentiated, generating many equally inviting modes of approach to evidence and different senses of what constitutes usable evidence.5 No single ‘Western’ methodology presented itself as a substitute for the Soviet mono-ideology dominant in Latvia until 1991. Some researchers in ‘the west’ appeared to have become quite

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