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Culture, Culture Everywhere: Interpretations of Modern Russia, across the 1991 Divide

The turn towards cultural analysis among historians in Europe and the United States emerged in the 1970s, when the new social-science-oriented history began to lose ground to methods drawn from anthropological, linguistic, and literary theory. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the discrediting of Marxist-style historical materialism reinforced this trend. The vector of explanation has been inverted (or, Marx would say, returned to where he found it). Historians are likely now to view culture not as a reflection of underlying social structures and power relations but as the origin of political styles and even as the guiding force of national destinies. As a system of values, signs, and conventions, culture provides the circuit board for personal as well as collective experience and the software for individual as well as national self-expression. Cultural formations are both stable and changing: they persist over time but can also signal moments of rupture. Culture seems therefore to offer a strategic point of entry for historical research.1 But there are dangers in taking this route. If we regard the structuring relationships of culture as fundamental, we may reduce our capacity to identify or understand historical change.2 The cultural turn also runs the risk of circularity. Seeing “culture” everywhere, we cannot decide where it begins and ends and therefore what distinguishes it from what it is not. Is the cultural approach a flight from the tough questions of institutions and power? Are terms such as “representation” and “discourse” evasive maneuvers that substitute metaphor for the analysis of “real forces”? Or is the cultural approach a bold attempt to identify power relations where they have been ignored – in forms of knowledge and expertise, symbols and images, which organize the process of civic life and even the texture of personal experience? Do the culturalists renounce the