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Bolkhovitinov, N. N.
1993.
Western and Russian Historiography.
p.
179.
Article contents
How I Became a Historian
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Extract
One rainy day in the autumn of 1978, when I returned to Moscow from my leave, the Institute's executive secretary for international ties called me to her office and handed me a letter with the invitation for me to write an autobiographical article for the silver jubilee issue of the Journal of American Studies and to tell how I came to be a historian and a specialist on the United States.
At first the invitation puzzled me. To be honest, I have never written anything personal and, certainly, nothing autobiographical (except for the formal “autobiography” required in the USSR for official documents). Secondly, my official status and my place in the academic hierarchy could hardly justify my taking up the genre of autobiography. True, addressing their letters to the Institute, foreign correspondents often called me “professor” and even “academician,” but I naturally saw diis just as a polite form of address or as ignorance of our scientific hierarchy. The fact of the matter is that I have never been a professor (there is no such official post at the research institutes in the Soviet Union). As far as the title of “academician” is concerned, the difference between a senior research member of an academic institute and an actual member of the USSr Academy of Sciences (Academician) is the same as between the English “Dear Sir” and the French “Sire.”
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References
Nikolai Nikolaevich Bolkhovitinov (born Moscow 1930), Doctor of Historical Sciences, is a senior research member of the Institute of History (since 1968, Institute of General History) of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He has acted as lecturer and consultant on early American History at Moscow State University (1967–74), Simferopol State University (1974–79), and Portland State University (1976). He is a member of the editorial boards of New and Contemporary History and American Annual. His publications include The Monroe Doctrine (1959); The Beginnings of Russian-American Relations, 1775–1815 (1966, rev. edn. Harvard Univ. Press, 1975); Russian-American Relations, 1815–1832 (1975); Russia and the US War for Independence (1976; translated by Jay Smith and published by the Diplomatic Press under the title Russia and the American Revolution), and more than a hundred articles and reviews in scholarly journals. He is one of the compilers and editors of The Foreign Policy of Russia in the Nineteenth Century (10 vols., 1960–76). A new book, The USA: Problems of History and Contemporary Historiography will appear shortly.
1 In an extended and revised form this section formed the basis of my first research article: see Bolkhovitinov, N. N., “On the Threat of Intervention by the Holy Alliance in Latin America (Background of the Monroe Distrine),” Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, 3 (1957), 46–66Google Scholar. Twenty years later this far from recent work was translated into English and published in Bartley, R. H., ed., Soviet Historians on Latin America: Recent Scholarly Contributions (Madison and London: Univ. Wisconsin Press, 1978), pp. 132–57Google Scholar.
2 See Bolkhovitinov, N. N., The Beginnings of Russian-American Relations, 1775–1815 (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975), pp. vii–viiiCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 For a more detailed account of the state and tasks of American Studies in the Soviet Union see Bolkhovitinov, N. N., “The Study of the United States History in the Soviet Union” American Historical Review, 74 (1969), 1221–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “On the Present State of American Studies in the Soviet Union,” American Studies: An International Newsletter, 11 (Autumn, 1972)Google Scholar, reprinted in American Studies Abroad, ed. Walker, R. H. (Westport, Conn., 1975), pp. 101–108Google Scholar; “The Status and Tasks of Studying the History of the United States in the Soviet Union” Soviet Studies in History, 14 (1978), 3–34Google Scholar; Sevostianov, G. N., “On the Study of U.S. History in the USSR,” Soviet Studies in History, 14 (1975), 4–68Google Scholar. For a bibliography of Soviet works on the history of the USA see Okinshevich, Leo, US History and Historiography in Post-War Soviet Writings, 1945–1970 (Santa Barbara, 1976)Google Scholar.
4 It is not all that easy to observe these elementary principles. Re-reading this contribution, I realise that I have not avoided some idealisation that is so typical of the biographical genre. There are unavoidably some gaps in this brief exposition which, I hope, will be filled in the course of time.
5 de Saint-Exupéry, A., Pilote de Guerre (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1942), p. 221Google Scholar.
6 Efimov, A. V., K istorii kapitalizma v SShA (On the History of Capitalism in the USA), Moscow, 1934Google Scholar.
7 Sivachev, N. V. and Savel'eva, I. M., “American Labor in Recent Soviet Historiography,” Labor History, 18 (1977), 407–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Poletica, Petr I., Sketch of the Internal Conditions of the United States (Baltimore, 1826)Google Scholar.
9 Sven'in, P. P., Picturesque United States of America (New York, 1930)Google Scholar.
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