Five Questions for Joshua Sanborn

Note:  This is the first post in what will become an ongoing “Five Questions with” series where students enrolled in the Fall Havighurst Colloquium on Russia in war and revolution pose questions to the guest speakers who speak to the class.  Today’s five questions were posed to Dr. Joshua Sanborn, Professor and Chair of the History Department at Lafayette College.

By Brett Coleman, Riley Kane, and Max Jelen.

Question One: What sparked your interest in Russian Studies? Due to the importance this seminar places on World War I and the Revolution, what interests you most about this point in history?

Joshua Sanborn:  I got interested in Russian Studies because I grew up at the end of the Cold War. My formative political (and educational) years were entirely dominated by the Gorbachev era. Gorbachev became General Secretary when I was a sophomore in high school, and the 1991 coup happened as I was driving to my very first job after graduating from college. That’s why I took Russian in college and eventually became a Russian history major (and then later went on to graduate school). The period interests me for many reasons. In the first place, it was terribly dramatic and is intrinsically interesting for that reason. Professionally, it was exciting because when I started working on World War I topics, there were remarkably few works on the period and few scholars writing in the field. That’s all changed now, but it was really fun to find out new things, to be the first to open particular archival folders, and so forth.

Question Two:  Your book, Imperial Apocalypse, seems focused on the war as an agent of imperial fragmentation, but are there any other major themes that you hope people will take away from this work that might not be as apparent?

Sanborn:  Yes, there are lots of other themes I want readers to take away, both big and small, so it’s a little hard to choose. But I suppose we can cluster some of them around the idea that the level of social trauma experienced by citizens in the Russian Empire was higher than has generally been understood. Violence, deprivation, and disease were all really significant, and that trauma had lasting consequences.

Question Three:  How have your studies and research on the topic of World War I, in the Russian context, informed your present day outlook on the topic? Have you found yourself changing your mind about certain aspects of the topic?

Sanborn:  Absolutely, my research has completely informed my views on the war. The biggest change was the growing awareness of how central the years 1914-16 were for the revolutionary period. It’s embarrassing to remember that when I wrote my dissertation proposal (originally on military conscription from 1874-1941) I didn’t include the war as a significant moment at all. I eventually shortened the time frame of my dissertation and first book precisely because the Great War was so important and there were so many archival files to work on. I’ve also substantially changed my view of the nature and dynamics of nationalism in Ukraine in 1917.

Question Four:   In your work as a historian, what has been the most shocking or surprising revelation that you’ve encountered?

Sanborn:  I guess I’d turn this question around. There were a lot of expectations when the Russian archives opened that there would be explosive revelations – “smoking guns” on various topics. I suppose there were a couple of these, but by far the most important outcome of the archival opening was that it allowed for historians to patiently reconstruct entire periods on new terms. This has allowed us to change the framework of old debates, in my view for the better, rather than finding one piece of evidence or another to solve an old debate.

Question Five:  If you had space for an extra chapter in your book, what would that chapter deal with and how would you incorporate it into the larger narrative you weave throughout the book?

Sanborn:  There are two candidates for this chapter, both of which reviewers (both for the press and in printed reviews) have lamented the absence of, quite fairly. One would be a more extensive chapter on the theories of decolonization and a more explicitly comparative treatment of the Eastern European case with later episodes of decolonization in Asia and Africa. The second would actually entail at least two more chapters on the Civil War between 1918-1921, describing the ways that the Bolsheviks rebuilt the empire and built their state in a “postcolonial” fashion. There would be little trouble incorporating these into the book, but I felt that the theoretical chapter would get the book off on the wrong foot. As for the Civil War, it would have required several more years of research, and I did want this book to be a part of the centennial conversation.

Brett Coleman, Riley Kane, and Max Jelen are all senior history majors at Miami.