For those unfamiliar, what is your name and what do you do here at Swarthmore?

My name is Bob Weinberg, and I’m a professor of history. I specialize in Russian History, but I teach classes on European history, various aspects of Russian and Soviet history, Jewish history, and I have been involved with the teaching of our senior research seminar since its inception.

Could you tell us a bit about the senior research seminar?

For every major at the college, students have to do some kind of comprehensive experience at the end. In some departments they write a thesis; in other departments, they do some other kind of project. Some time in the late 90’s, we developed this research seminar where students engage in their own research on a topic of their own choosing, and work with a faculty member to write a 25-30 page paper based on secondary and primary sources. It’s a requirement to complete the major. Sometimes students are able to take advantage of the college’s funding of summer projects; they go somewhere to conduct research.

Is there a really cool project a student has done that you can think of off the top of your head?

Somebody studied the history of the Paris zoo, in the 1870s-80s; then, they went off to graduate school at Johns Hopkins, continued that project, and have a PhD now.

Good for them! Could you tell us a bit about your educational background, and how you ended up here?

Yeah; so, I went to Cornell University. I was in the school of industrial labour relations. It was a state-funded school, so tuition was a lot less than the arts and sciences, and I would say that maybe 95% of the people entered planning to go to law school. A few people may have thought that they would do something with labor activism, labor organizing; I didn’t want to do any of that. But, I took around forty courses over the course of four years, and the only courses that really engaged my intellectual curiosity had to do with Russia. So, I thought I’d go to grad school for Russian history. I had studied Russian in middle and high school. I decided to get a PhD in Russian history–I ended up eventually at Berkeley–and there weren’t many jobs in the late eighties, when I was on the job market. I was fortunate enough to get interviewed by Swarthmore, hired, and I’ve been here since. This was the first time I had any experience with a small liberal arts college, so I really found it all very new and different and challenging.

What’s some research you’ve done? What do you focus on?

I’ve mostly done different research projects on the Jewish experience, in particular sort of on government policies towards Jews in the late Tsarist period and the early Soviet period, as well as anti-Jewish violence and expressions of antisemitism. I’ve studied the 1905 revolution in Odessa with an emphasis on the Jewish working class, I did a project on the establishment of a territory in the Soviet Far East, along the Chinese border, as a special Jewish territorial homeland, sort of the equivalent of Israel, set up in the late 1920s, I studied a court case about a Jewish brick factory manager who was accused of ritual murder, and I wrote a short book on various aspects of the Jewish Question in Russian and Soviet history.

So, on that note, we’re going to the Hobsbawm question; one of his more famous quotes is that “Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers are to heroin addicts; [they] supply the raw materials.” In an era where people view nationalism as a very pertinent question, how do you view the role of the Historian in nations, and what should the role of the socially conscious historian be?

We were talking in my European history class about nationalism, and I would argue that there’s nothing primordial about nationalism, nations, the nation-state–these are all phenomena that emerged in the late 18th, early 19th centuries, and I’ve never felt comfortable, with people feeling that they’re obligated to root for the U.S.A. at the olympics. I mean, I just don’t get it. But I think it’s important to tell people, students in particular, that there’s nothing that is inherent to human society that says that we have to organize ourselves around nations or nation-states, that there are other ways of organizing society and the political system, and it can be a very dangerous force, as we know.

What I also find interesting, is that beginning in the 19th century, with the emergence of political liberalism, and the emergence of nationalism, we tend to associate nationalism with political conservatives. But, it was sort of the child of liberalism–just as individuals have to be liberated from the state, so do nations have to be liberated from multinational empires. So, if you’re going to have a liberal, constitutional state, then national liberation for minorities in these multinational states is an obvious avenue to go down. It’s only in the late 19th, early 20th century that nationalism becomes more associated with political conservatives.

On the topic of conservatism, when I took a class with you, one of the things we talked about was Stalin’s suggested revisions to a bunch of Russian history textbooks. One of the things he wanted were more dates, names, places; I, even as someone who comes from a somewhat conservative part of America, feel like it’s very popular to deemphasize the “great man” theory in favor of a more holistic view of history. What are your thoughts on that?

Well, as I tell students, certainly in history 3 (Surveys of European history), historians sort of write the history of the past, we work with the evidence, we ask the questions, we interpret, analyze, but we need to have basic knowledge. We need to know that the French revolution occurred before the Russian revolution. I don’t get fixated on particular dates, but we need to have some grasp to understand the knowledge of what actually happened, and only then does it become an issue of interpretation.

The individual is important; what individuals, intellectuals, do, can make a big difference. Stalin was reacting to the trend in the 1920s and the 1930s to deemphasize the role of the individual, a very Marxist approach, and he, as you suggested, wanted to reinject the role of the individual, the heroes from the Russian past. Some people may argue that that may have to do with his desire to sort of elevate himself as a great individual, but I think that he was trying to restore a sense of national pride and awareness of Russia’s greatness on the world stage prior to 1917.

So how do you balance that notion of looking at the individual versus looking at the idea, the movement, the big…

What made Stalin do what he wanted to do? What prompted his decisions, or Hitler’s decisions? You need to provide the context; his ideas, his behaviors, don’t come out of nowhere. They’re being shaped by previous events, policies, and trends in Russian history. So, they’re circumscribed by a lot of their ideas and behaviors and what came before them and what they participated in. People make decisions. I don’t believe that it ever had to be this way. There may be a lot of factors that lead to it, it’s overdetermined, but individuals making these decisions, never have to make the decisions. They do for a variety of reasons: reasons of state, personal gain, ideologically, and so on. I believe people have a responsibility. The issue is, why are they making the decision?

Look at the dialectic.

Yeah! Look at what makes them tick. And what’s making all the other people around them tick?

So, what would you say is the most surprising thing for people when they first arrive at college to take a history course here?

I actually think that the way we do things isn’t such a shock anymore. About ten years ago, the AP history people were redoing the syllabi for the exams, because they wanted to move away from rote knowledge and have students write essays that were more interpretive and analytical. For some reason, they asked me to participate in the European history revisions. So, those tests, after that, are very different from what they were like twenty years ago, more like what we do.

I do remember, when I applied to grad school, I wasn’t a history major, and I took the GREs, but they also encouraged me to take an achievement test in history, and I had never studied history. And there were several, dozens, of questions, multiple choice, no essay, asking about different popes! Their policies! I didn’t know! I had never studied it! They may have been very important decisions, but that’s what we don’t do anymore. We’re trying to get you to think, and learn what it is to be a historian. It’s like if you were taking a class in chemistry, you would do an experiment and see it through to the end. But, my sense is that students aren’t necessarily surprised by the way we do it. 

So, what do you want students to be able to do after taking a history class?

We read something, and I want them to question what that author was trying to accomplish. Not just to criticize, to trash someone’s opinion, but how does someone use the evidence that they’ve collected? Does their analysis make sense? Are they asking questions that you think are the important ones? Is there another way of looking at that event? I want them to be able to assemble the material to make and follow an argument. And, I hope, in a history course, to be able to write better.

Well, this new semester, you’re going to have students who were born in 2007, which is horrifying, I’m sure.

I stopped thinking about that. I’m fifty years older than my students, more than fifty years. I am aware that my experiences as a teenager are so different from what I think students that I have here have, for a variety of reasons.

Well, this is the common question that everyone asks the historian; what are some really significant events that have happened since 2007?

Well, go back to when you were born.

2005.

You’ve lived in a world where the U.S. has been basically at war for twenty years; we’ve seen a seesaw in political trends, from a country that elects a black man twice to electing someone who is quite the opposite.

Reactionary.

Okay, I try not to inject my political views into the classroom. But we’ve had discussions this week about stripping citizens of birthright citizenship–we talked about that today, because it’s an issue of what makes someone a member of a nation–and the current developments in Europe, it’s all very distressing. But I would encourage students to get their information not just from tweets and facebook. You have to be careful when you read something. Examine its provenance. So I think that’s a big difference.

Difference between our world and the one you grew up in?

Yeah! I mean, I didn’t have Google.

Much to everybody’s chagrin.

Yeah! I couldn’t imagine life without Google. How did I ever find out if that happened? I had to look at a newspaper for movie schedules. I guess I had to go to the library and look at some books. It sounds ridiculous. But, yeah. Technology is certainly very different. And I don’t want to consider AI as an issue. I’m retiring next year.

Two questions: what’s a development in the way that history has been studied over the past, say, twenty years, that you think is very interesting?

I think more people have become more eclectic in their methodologies and the kinds of sources they use, their willingness to step beyond what we might think of as traditional historical methodology.

And, is there a specific subject that you feel has been understudied?

Well, what’s been understudied in the field that I know best is probably being rectified to some extent. It’s an effort to move away studies of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union from Russia. In other words, don’t make Moscow or St. Petersburg the kind of center of classes. And that’s hard to do! There have been efforts to focus on national minorities and write alternative histories of that region without focusing on just the Russian heartland, if you will. It’s very hard to do, and I’m not very successful, because it requires really rethinking how you want to think about the area. It’s eleven time zones, well over a hundred national minorities, from Eastern Europe to Central Asia to the Far East. People of different cultural experiences. I think we’re moving in that direction, more people offering classes on race and nationality.

Do you have a really amusing historical anecdote or event that you like telling people about?

The classic story of how Catherine the Great died is not true, it’s apocryphal; if you’re interested, you’re going to have to do some research on how some people think she died. It’s a great lesson in how to conduct historical research.

Okay, I’ll go to the Wikipedia page after this. Is Wikipedia okay for this, or does the conspiracy run too deep?

Oh, I’m sure. “Personal life, death,” somewhere in there. I won’t give it away.

We’ll leave it for the blog readers. Is there a book that you think everybody should read?

A history book? No. I think everybody should read Crime and Punishment. I am often very unfair to people who say “you have to read this novel that came out,” they say. I ask, how does it compare to Crime and Punishment? 

Pale Fire?

Nope, sorry. I understand, but Crime and Punishment. Last time I read it, it just blew me away. Amazing. And funny!

The author of this blog post still stands by the recommendation of Nabokov’s Pale Fire. You should read it.