Geoffrey Hosking
Daniel Snowman meets the historian of Russia and its peoples

When I first met Geoffrey Hosking in the 1970s, he was a lecturer in History at the University of Essex but his current enthusiasm was Russian literature. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky? No, he said: recent and present-day Russian literature. Dissident literature, then - all that samizdat stuff? Again, no. He was interested in novelists published in the USSR of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, some of whom, he said, were really rather good. Here, evidently, was a man who sidestepped the stereotypes.

He always had. At Cambridge, Hosking read Modern Languages but his PhD was in Russian history (with a thesis on the Duma of 1907-14). In mid-doctorate, he took a year off to go to St Antony's, Oxford, for a crash course on Western European history, which he didn't feel he knew enough about. Then, with all those years of languages and variegated history under his belt (and a still-to-be completed PhD), he was offered a lectureship in yet another subject: Government. The new University of Essex did not yet have a History or Russian Studies Department so Hosking, now in his mid-twenties, found himself having to teach (and therefore learn about) Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, comparative political cultures, input-output theory and the structures and functions of the state. With so many topics floating seductively past his purview (not to mention a year lecturing on Revolutions to huge assemblages of students in Madison, Wisconsin), a less disciplined person might easily have become lost to serious scholarship. But if others pursued the path to dilettantism, Hosking used his intellectual versatility to help fuel his guiding light, the flame of Russian history.

Russia was still very much the riddle wrapped in an enigma it had been to Churchill. Few Westerners knew much about the country or its history. Those who did tended to be either left-leaning ideologues inclined to justify the Communist experiment or exiles and cold warriors avowedly opposed to it. Both groups were transfixed by the geopolitics of a dangerously bipolar world.

Hosking was neither cold warrior nor fellow traveller. But he wasn't a dry-as-dust academic either. He felt, and feels, that you can only really understand the present if you know what produced it. Back in the bipolar world in which Hosking learned his craft, the USSR was a vast, looming presence. Western academies were full of Kremlinologists, analysts of Soviet leaders and their policies; but the deeper internal history of the country and of its people was scarcely known except in barest outline. Here, surely, was a vital key to understanding the contemporary world. It was a door Hosking was determined to unlock.

The country and its people. These are what Hosking has particularly tried to know. His writings are sprinkled with references to a town here, a village there, a quotation from the letters column of a regional or local newspaper, a joke the workers or peasants would tell each other, a telling anecdote from his own experience. But Hosking is not a collage artist. On the contrary, his finely tuned mind loves nothing more than to alight upon an organising principle, perhaps a Big Hypothesis, that helps explain a mass of otherwise inchoate facts. In a recent article, for example, he interpreted the whole course of Russian history as variations on the theme of Patronage and Clientelism. There were early hints of such an approach in his book about those post-Stalin novelists, Beyond Socialist Realism. Here, he suggested that the publication of Pasternak's Dr Zhivago (in the West) and of Solzhenitsyn's Ivan Denisovich heralded the appearance of a new fiction, less burdened than before by the ideological yoke of Socialist Realism and capable of revealing authentic insights into the nature of life at village and township level.

The book was, in some ways, a residue of Hosking's undergraduate training in languages and literature, underpinned perhaps by his years as a politics lecturer. But Essex by now had a History Department and Hosking was one of its founder members. His thesis on the Duma had been published, but it was high time he produced a 'big' history book.

Hosking took a long time writing his History of the Soviet Union. It was a book he knew he had to get right. In 1984 he had left Essex to succeed Hugh Seton-Watson as Professor of Russian History at London University's School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES). A year later, his History, which takes off where the thesis on the Duma ended, finally appeared. It has been widely used as a standard text on the subject ever since.

This was and remains a source of mild surprise for, as Hosking is the first to admit, it was in some ways an unusual book. For a start, it concentrated on domestic history, scarcely touching on the USSR's relationship with its neighbours. While recounting the main political and economic outlines of his story - the 1917 Revolution, Stalin's Terror, Khrushchev's secret speech and so on - he said little about the Battle of Stalingrad or the Cuba crisis. Leaders loomed large, but so did the led. In addition to weaving the big picture, Hosking enriched his tapestry with a rich skein of illuminating local detail. Thus, when describing the wholesale transplantation of the kulaks, he was able to call upon his wide knowledge of literary sources to help convey the brutality of the process. Having himself travelled in various parts of the USSR, Hosking also devoted substantial space to the non-Russian nationalities. And, almost uniquely among historians of the Soviet state at that time, he dug deep to mine an ore that most pointedly ignored: religion - a view of Russia that was to be triumphantly vindicated a few years later when a widespread resurgence of religious observance accompanied the demise of the Soviet Union.

By the time Hosking delivered his inaugural lecture at SSEES in 1987, the USSR, having recently survived a series of weak and inefficient presidents, had an intelligent, energetic man of vision at the helm. Mikhail Gorbachev, Hosking argued, had to lead a modern, well- educated, largely urbanised society governed via an old-fashioned, totalitarian yet ineffective political system. Hosking saw him trying to bring the two into phase by introducing greater openness in public discourse and restructuring the forms of government. In the West, Gorbachev gained respect for these policies of 'Glasnost' and 'Perestroika'. To many Russians, however, the reforms meant you weren't allowed to drink and that you lost the back-of-the-shop arrangement whereby, for a few roubles, you could obtain the little luxuries of life. Political restructuring did not deliver 'sausage'. Furthermore, the introduction of 'Glasnost' ensured that these gripes were widely aired. Freedom of speech was used not to praise the government that had instigated it but to abuse it for imposing economic stringencies. In some of the non-Russian areas, such as the Baltic states and Ukraine, people began to demand a degree of autonomy. Gorbachev's liberal reforms had loosened the ties that bound his nation together. The USSR was evidently embarking upon a series of seismic changes that were daily placing its previous history in a shifting perspective.

It was against this background that Hosking was invited to present the BBC's 1988 Reith Lectures. His brief was to try to explain the dramatic changes occurring in the Soviet Union by presenting them in historical context. He found it an exacting commission. It was not easy to compose scripts that would take the prescribed twenty-eight minutes and forty seconds to read - especially as they had to be recorded six weeks before transmission at a period when events in the USSR were moving with great rapidity. When Hosking began work on the first talk he wondered whether, by the last, he would be predicting the fall of the Soviet Union. The lectures were an elegant tour de force, tough arguments nicely salted and peppered with deft literary references and revealing personal anecdotes. The series began with a quote from the Pravda letters page signed by, in effect, 'Disgusted, Sverdlovsk'. All the Hosking hallmark subjects were there. One lecture was devoted to the many nationalities within the USSR and their uneasy and unstable coexistence with that over-powerful first among supposed equals, the Russians. In another, he told how, one day in Tbilisi, he had watched workmen refurbishing a magnificent church that had lain almost untended and unattended for seventy years, and he went on to talk about the Orthodox and other Christian cults, Islamic Central Asia and the Jews of Russia. Throughout, it was a fluid, pluralist Russia that he portrayed, one emerging from a long history of imposed rigidity and embarking on an uncharted path whose destination nobody could predict with certainty.

Hosking remains a great admirer of Gorbachev (and enjoyed a long meeting and conversation with him a year or so ago). Yet he senses that Gorbachev had very little understanding of the way the Soviet economic system worked and how, if you gave encouragement to the private sector, it would suck goods out of the public sector and create shortages. Nor did he appreciate the depth of national feelings outside the heartland of Russia itself. To the very end, he remained a firm believer in the Communist Party and the unity of the USSR. A giant on the world stage, Gorbachev - like many of his predecessors - was never able to enter the minds of the people he was called upon to govern.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Hosking decided to turn his attention to earlier times. It was a bold step. It was also characteristic. After all, he says, how better to understand our own era than to study what preceded and created it? Thus, at fifty, Hosking embarked upon what was to prove his most influential work to date. Its title, Russia: People and Empire 1552-1917, if not lapel-grabbing, precisely encapsulates what amounted to a major reinterpretation of Russian history, a Big Hypothesis, one that has since become widely accepted.

Hosking ignored the minority nationalities this time and concentrated on the Russians. He argued that there have been two Russias. First, there is 'Rus', a word that refers to the people and suggests modesty, homeliness, religion, locality, femininity ('Mother Russia'). Then there is the more grandiose, thrusting, imperial concept suggested by the word 'Rossiia'. It is the conflict between these - the expansive imperium and the more passive ambitions of the Russian people - that forms the central theme of Hosking's interpretation. In a closely argued book of over 500 pages, he showed how the emphasis on 'Empire', so attractive to Russia's leaders from Ivan the Terrible onwards, consistently stifled the more organic aspiration to authentic nationhood for which the 'People' always yearned.

The Hosking Hypothesis, this polarity between the demands of empire and the popular aspiration to nationhood, won its author considerable laurels. But he is building rather than resting on them. He has been awarded a five-year Leverhulme professorship which will eventually issue in a work systematically applying the people-empire dialectic to the period since 1917. The imperial concept, he says, clearly drove the founders of the USSR; the people and territory over which they ruled were not even mentioned in the name they gave the new state, though Hosking senses that Stalin did more to encourage a sense of Russian nationhood than did the old Tsarist empire.

More immediately, Hosking tells me he is correcting the proofs of a discursive volume covering the whole of Russian history, from Rurik and Rus to the Russian Federation of Putin. Here, too, the people-empire hypothesis remains as a building block. But for the first time, Hosking has also written about Russia's relations with its neighbours, of the Mongols, Varangians and Poles, the Swedish, Ottoman and Austrian empires and the twentieth-century challenges from Japan, Germany and China. All this is, so to speak, foreign territory for Hosking. Also, while much of his earlier writing is infused with his knowledge of Russian literature, the new text calls upon music, the visual arts and popular culture as adjuncts to his underlying argument about the suppressed sense of Russian 'nationhood'.

Hosking has given more thought than most to the nature and definition of nationhood, an issue that, until recently, was relatively dormant in sophisticated political circles where the smart talk was of multi-national groupings. In the former Soviet Union, as the minority peoples reassert their separate identities, Hosking feels that the Russians may at last have a chance to achieve genuine national fulfilment. Certainly, this is something to which any Russian leader must be sensitive, he says. Vladimir Putin made his name preserving the integrity of the Russian 'empire'. Once he is properly secure as President, says Hosking, Putin should turn his attention to the national aspirations of the Russian 'people'.

Does Hosking really advocate a resurgence of ethnicity in Russia? Does not assertive cultural nationalism, a blight on the twentieth century, continue to fuel murderous hatreds in the Balkans, the Caucasus and elsewhere? Hosking's response is twofold. First, that a period of national fulfilment is probably a phase Russians need to experience before moving forward; and, second, that the successful achievement of national identity must always be not only ethnic but also civic. Both answers raise further questions, of course; but this wily historiographer and seasoned political scientist is well-equipped to deal with them. 'I do think Russia would be a happier country if it were to become a proper nation-state,' he adds conclusively.

The other day, I bumped into Hosking in the street and he told me he was on his way to the Wigmore Hall. Shostakovich? No. The magnet drawing him was the quartet by Robert Simpson. We waved, and I watched as Geoffrey went on his way, still sidestepping the stereotypes.

Daniel Snowman's most recent book (with Asa Briggs) is about the ends of centuries. He is now writing about the impact of the 'Hitler émigrés' on British cultural history.

© History Today

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