As a footnote to last month’s discussion on access, I wanted to put in a plug for our annual Summer Laboratory on Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia.

Obviously, nothing is as cheap or convenient as reading on your own computer screen; at the other extreme, nothing says “I’m a Russian historian” like a photograph in front of the Kremlin. Yet in the end, I suppose, most scholars still want something in between. And nothing can really get a project moving—or get it finally done—as well as some concentrated time in a great research library: a place with big broad tables and collections to match, where you can find 25 rare items, spread them out on a surface all open at once, and begin to make (or finally tie up) a whole series of connections. If the library is filled with other scholars and specialists—people you’d like to meet and discuss ideas with—so much the better.

For forty years, the University of Illinois has provided such a space through its Summer Lab. Every year, dozens of scholars from around the world come to town, for days or weeks, to use our world-famous collections and to consult with the bibliographers of our Slavic Reference Service. We build special programs around the SRL, as well, including (this year) both a specialized workshop on Scholarly and Literary Translation and the 2013 Ralph and Ruth Fisher Forum, “Early Russian Itineraries: Movement and the Space of the Russian Empire.” For a nominal registration fee, Laboratory Participants receive full library privileges, can attend all of the workshop’s programming, and have access to inexpensive university accomodations for their stay. (We also have some limited grant money to support both travel and housing.)

My own field is early imperial Russian history, and to be honest, I can’t imagine a better place to conduct fundamental research using printed or microfilmed materials. In addition to the library’s millions of individual monographs (including hundreds of thousands of titles in the languages of the Former Soviet Union and Eastern bloc), we have a number of unique and uniquely convenient resources. We have 454 microfilm reels of finding aids to Soviet Communist Party materials from GARF, RtsKhIDNI, and TsKhSD. We hold the only copy of the famous Turkestanskii Sbornik (594 tomes of materials on Central Asia) available outside Uzbekistan. We provide in-house access to the Russian State Library’s Electronic Dissertations Database, with full text versions of over 25,000 history dissertations; and we have perhaps the most complete collection of Russian Imperial newspapers (gubernskie vedomosti) in North America. And that thumbnail description just scratches the surface: write the SRS to see what we have for you!

So if you need to get away to get your project going come to Illinois for the Lab this year. It’s a fun, social and scholarly time, part of a grand Midwest tradition of public librarianship that has helped provide working researchers with the tools they need for decades.

This fascinating documentary tells the improbable tale of a beauty pageant set in a modern-day Russian prison, one of 35 women’s prisons across the Russian Federation. The story of this documentary is simple enough. A group of young women in a Siberian prison – all of whom have come of age in post-Soviet Russia – stage a beauty pageant.

These women grew up during the privatization and collapse of the Russian economy in the 1990s. Unlike their parents, the last generation of Soviets, they had no clear career path, and even if they did they would have trouble finding a job. They grew up poor and hungry, witnessing a corrupt few get unbelievably wealthy while their own family’s standard of living collapsed.  “I can’t say that freedom is any different from prison,” says an inmate who had been freed from prison. A former participant in the prison’s annual spring beauty pageant, she was now free and unemployed in a Siberian village, living with her desperately poor father, who weeps as he remembers the good life during Soviet times. Little wonder, then, that these women – part of an unprecedented wave of crime among women in post-Soviet Russia — turned to a life of violent crime, alcohol, and drugs.

The subjects of this film are the untold story about the victory of crony capitalism in Russia. It is a world in which the old communist ideals have collapsed, replaced by a society in which the poor and unlucky – many of them young women — have no protection and virtually no way to get out of poverty.  The path from communism to post-Soviet Russia, at least in this documentary, leads to drug abuse, alcoholism, prostitution, and prison. Still, if the Siberian prison is a rough place, it seems no less humane than the world outside its walls. And to their credit, the prison administrators seem to care about rehabilitating the inmates for non-prison life.

The premise of the inmates’ rehabilitation seems to be that making them adhere to familiar ideals of feminine domesticity will turn them into upstanding, law-abiding citizens capable of adjusting to the demands of modern Russian society. The rehabilitation program involves discipline (play by the rules and you’ll get time off), sewing (stitching army uniforms for the all-male Russian army), and a beauty pageant. “I think this will help them in their future lives,” said a prison official, a woman, regarding the rehabilitative potential of the beauty pageant.

The standards for feminine beauty, as in the United States, come straight out of the lotion, shampoo, eyeliner, and lipstick commercials that dominate Russian television. The prison rehabilitation seems to be doing the work of Russian advertisers; it teaches Russian women to feel good about themselves when they look good. It tells them that beauty is skin deep. Judging by the documentary, many women accept this proposition.  One contestant, who was cynical and forlorn at the beginning of the documentary, says by the end that she gained a sense of confidence from participating in the pageant that she lacked previously. Making her own costume, applying cosmetics, learning how to strut and preen before an audience, made her feel like a whole Russian woman. Of course, since the parole board sees participation in the pageant as grounds for early release, the contestants have a reason to invest themselves in the process. The system encourages them to trivialize their own sense of beauty.

The pageant is put on exclusively for the female inmates and mostly female administrators – with the exception of two male prison guards, one of whom carries a permanent grin on his face throughout the show. Unstated, yet clear from many shots in the documentary, is an undercurrent of lesbian relationships. The inmate who had earlier been freed from the prison returns at the end of the documentary as a special guest singer for the pageant. She is all gussied up – high heels, black stockings, and hot pants. She speaks to the camera about her intense relationship with an inmate left behind the bars who is also participating in the pageant. They hold hands and appear to embrace as lovers, as other inmates appear to do throughout the documentary. It is perhaps ironic that one of the participants in the pageant may be hoping to get early release – so she can continue her relationship with a former female inmate outside the confines of the prison.  Though none of the prison officials say so, it seems clear that one of the reasons for the pageant is to combat the supposedly “abnormal” physical and emotional bonds between women that invariably result from the all-female environment of the prison. In the context of the prison, however, it is the heterosexual relationship that is “unnatural.” The beauty pageant provides a rite of passage out of the women’s prison, preparing the inmates for reentry into the heterosexual world. Once in that world, the prison officials hope, the women will turn away from the emotional and physical comforts of a homosexual relationship and away from the supposedly more male crimes that landed them in jail – armed assault, armed robbery, drug trafficking. Instead, they will find a decent, law-abiding, money-making man and cook and clean. They will look like the women in the TV ads. Rather than staging robberies and injecting heroin, they will take a powder and do their nails.

I heartily agree with the impetus for Sean’s original post and consider myself a supporter of the ideals of open access. Russian History Blog itself was created in part with hopes of tilting the field ever so slightly in that direction–something I have written about on a few previous occasions. I thought it worthwhile to add a few things to the conversation Sean has provoked. I consider myself far from expert on these subjects, but one simply cannot spend the better part of a decade in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University without imbibing something of the thinking about these subjects that drive the work of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM).

While I am happy to see this discussion within the framework of the field of Russian history, it is important that we recognize that this is a long and ongoing conversation within the digital humanities, and many of the arguments we see here are merely a rehash of those taking place within other forums.

First, a primarily moral argument is made in support of open access, noting among other things the various ways in which the research that appears in journals has been supported by governments, foundations, and universities only to then wall off the results of that research in subscription-based databases. The argument raises important issues like the underlying justification for scholarship and whether reaching an audience beyond the academy (or even perhaps beyond the North American/Western European academy) is a goal worth pursuing.

Then, the complications, primarily economic, are raised, in this case by the journal editors and Josh Sanborn, as they respond that online publication only negligibly reduces the cost of journal publication and thus only through the revenues from subscription services like JSTOR and Project Muse can these journals survive. Further, the open access movement underestimates the costs and the value added that come from the peer review and editing process.

By no means do I doubt either the good will of those in the conversation and or the veracity of the various costs/constraints that they describe. I can barely begin to imagine the amount of work that goes into editing a journal, and I am so thankful for the selfless labors of the many who do so. (I would certainly like to know more, though, about the economics behind the more than 8,000 open access journals that already exist.) However, I would suggest that we also at least look at the very foundation of this conversation–something that has been happening in the digital humanities. That is, the question has been posed in terms of the impact of open access on journals as they are currently published. Sanborn urges us “to make sure that we don’t destroy the funding models of our journals before we have a secure path towards ensuring their viability over the long run.”

I don’t doubt the tremendous value of journals for scholars. I read them regularly, have published in them in the past, and hope to do so in the future. However, I do think we should recognize that our journals as they are currently published do impose certain costs on the academic and intellectual enterprise. These costs are most readily apparent in the limitation of readership, the primary concern of Guillory’s initial post,  but as Michael O’Malley (among others) has argued in a pair of blog posts, peer review itself imposes significant costs on the scholarly enterprise.

However, even if we leave aside the question of whether maintaining the status quo is desirable, doing so may prove impossible. Surely the major changes in the publishing world wrought by the digital revolution and the reduction of public funding for higher education and scholarship will impact our academic journals as well. No doubt, they already are. (Our academic monographs will likely change due to similar processes, but I will leave that aside for the moment given that this conversation has focused mostly on journals.) As my colleague Dan Cohen, Director of RRCHNM, has put it in one of his many writings on the subject:

…it’s a collective failure by historians who believe—contrary to the lessons of our own research—that today will be like yesterday, and tomorrow like today. Article-centric academic journals, a relatively recent development in the history of publishing, apparently have existed, and will exist, forever, in largely the same form and with largely the same business model.

Major change is inevitable, argue Cohen and many others like him who have spent years thinking seriously about the intersections of digital technology and historical/humanities scholarship. If so, shouldn’t scholars try to shape the change rather than merely react to that which is imposed upon us.

RRCHNM has been quite active in doing precisely that–experimenting with new ways of conceptualizing the journal, article, peer review, editing, etc. (Here is just Cohen’s most recent contribution to the ongoing conversation about the viability and usefulness of different forms of post-publication review. Following Cohen’s Twitter feed is a great way to keep up on emerging discussions around this subject. His forthcoming book, The Ivory Tower and the Open Web, to be available open access on the web and in print form from the University of Michigan Press, provides an extended discussion of many of these subjects. It is available online in draft form starting with the introduction here.)

I can’t even begin to rehearse all of the interesting discussions and approaches taken, but I urge you to take a look at their Press Forward project, Digital Humanities Now, the Journal of Digital Humanities, American History Now, etc., to see some of RRCHNM’s most recent models of scholarship in the open access realm.

So, where do we go in the field of Russian history? This is something I have thought a lot about but only taken the most timid of steps with the launch of Russian History Blog. (The blog was never intended, it should be emphasized, as an attempt to replace the journal. Rather the hope was to make something of our scholarship available on the open access web and to encourage some experimentation with different modes of disseminating our research.) Russian History Blog was far from the first attempt at academic blogging in Russian history. In fact, I took some of my initial inspiration from Sean’s Russia Blog where this whole conversation began. I would certainly love to see even more colleagues get involved in blogging whether individually or in group formats like this one. However, these are still but timid steps. I am watching the Press Forward project with interest to see if I think it holds promise for us, but I think we should all keep abreast of the developments in the digital humanities and constantly reassess if and how they will impact our own field.

Guillory entitled his entry “Let’s Start Talking About Open Access.” As Mark Steinberg gently pointed out in the comments, this is in fact a discussion that has been going on for some time. I’ve been thinking about it for several years, for more or less accidental reasons. Ten years ago, I was asked to be a faculty member on our library’s search for a digital resources librarian. Soon afterwards, I was appointed to the faculty library oversight committee, on which I served for two years. I subsequently served on the faculty committee that oversees the entire college budget.  As part of those experiences, I learned how libraries pay for digital resources, the intersection of library budgets with institutional budgets, and the ways that our librarians, at least, think about publication and public access. On our campus, our librarians are vigorous supporters of making scholarship available to as many readers as possible. As a result, our head of libraries has been the most enthusiastic initiator of the discussion regarding open access. A couple of years ago, he led the charge to create an open access policy for Lafayette faculty, and he and I have continued to correspond on access issues, including the disastrous Finch Report.

The Finch Report is a set of recommendations created by a British governmental working group headed by Dame Janet Finch entitled “Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications.”  It recommends that all academic work be made available free to the public on the internet and that the costs associated with the production of such works be borne by their authors. This is a mind-numbingly foolish solution, as many British academics and the AHA have pointed out, but the Finch Report at least clarifies something that, occasionally, airy discussions about open access neglect: nothing is free. Again, this point is well addressed in the comments to Sean’s blog, but it’s worth reiterating. Whenever you hear the word “free” in any discussion on open access, you should substitute the word “subsidized.”  One of the remarkable things about the economics of academic publishing at present is that much of that subsidization takes place invisibly, as many (though not all) academics both write journal articles and referee them without the expectation of piece by piece remuneration. This willingness to work without direct pay creates the possibility for much greater access than the public sphere currently enjoys. And most scholars want to create greater access. In contrast to Sean, I think that most of us and most of our institutions give greater weight to widely distributed journals than they do to those with a smaller reach. It is not my impression that publishing in the American Historical Review, a high subscription journal, is less prestigious than publishing in a smaller venue.

Still, all of this intellectual work is subsidized. The research for the articles is often underwritten by institutions of various sorts. Further, universities and colleges expect professors to be a part of a professional dialogue, and many of them include authoring journal articles and refereeing them as labor that falls under our job descriptions. Some, like my own institution, consider this work carefully when deciding upon merit raises. Others do not. But this doesn’t mean there is no subsidy, just that there is a massive free rider problem at play in any college or university faculty. Thought of more broadly (but not of course literally), we might say that society pays for part of the production of scholarly articles through block grants to professor salary pools rather than piece by piece. Part of it is also paid for by independent scholars and professors who lack institutional support and/or living working wages for the work they do and essentially subsidize the enterprise through their own uncompensated time.

But not all of this labor remains uncommodified. Carolyn Pouncy’s work as the Managing Editor at Kritika is wage labor, as she pointed out in her response to Sean’s blog, and cash from somewhere must be budgeted and dedicated to her position. At present, it is paid for in part by the institution that hosts Kritika, and in part by the libraries that support Project Muse, a service like JSTOR that serves as on online platform for the distribution of digitized articles from a wide clientele of scholarly journals. This limits full digital access to those libraries that subscribe to Project Muse, but it does no one any good to call it a “concentration camp of ideas,” as Sean does. For a concentration camp, Kritika (and by extension Project Muse) is quite happy to let ideas escape into the open web, as I know through personal experience. As part of a move towards a new policy on campus, Lafayette librarians reached out to journals that have published the work of Lafayette faculty with requests to allow those works to be stored in Lafayette’s open digital repository. One of my essays appeared in Kritika a few years back, and Kritika quickly responded to our request with permission to store the final pre-publication draft on the site, minus the typesetting and other professional accoutrements of the finished project in Kritika but with the final pagination in place. Scholars around the world can now read it and cite it even if they do not enjoy a subscription to Kritika or Project Muse. I hope, though, that if you have access to Project Muse, you get the essay from there. Kritika needs to survive.

Gaining rights to make one’s own work open access can be complicated after the fact, and I was lucky to have dedicated librarians willing to shepherd this process through. Usually it is better to negotiate with publishers at the time of signing the contract. The principle is simple. In the best-case scenario, you retain copyright to your work, but grant a license to the journal. Alternatively, they are granted copyright, but you are granted a license to distribute your work in specific ways. This sounds daunting, but it hasn’t yet been for me. I strongly recommend using the resources on the SPARC website and the handy “addendum” form at scholars.sciencecommons.org These are legal forms you can fill out very quickly and attach to your contract when returning it to the journal. I use them for articles and book reviews, and I have not had any problems. Some presses accept the addendum as is.  Others ask me to modify it to conform to their practices. Many big presses now have standard policies in place to allow authors to post some version of their work on their own websites or in digital repositories. Sometimes authors are required to wait a year before posting, sometimes they can do so after the piece has been published. These restrictions seem, to me at least, to be reasonable. My work is not particularly time sensitive, and if it takes a certain delay before opening access in order to ensure that academic journals continue to exist, that seems to be a good tradeoff.

The problem, as Sean suggests, is that a constellation of scholar websites and digital repositories is not optimal for research.  Indeed, any of my students would say the same thing. No matter how many times you show them how to use Historical Abstracts (another database that is not free), or, God forbid, the paper journal copies in the library, they are drawn back into the gravitational pull of JSTOR. Nor is it just students. I am always relieved when I find an article I need and see that the full text is available through our library databases. This is another way of saying that JSTOR (and Project Muse) perform a valuable function, one that costs money and, yes, must be subsidized in some way. Again, this subsidy is paid at present mostly by college and university libraries, which are required to limit the usage of those resources to their own patrons. We see a pattern emerging – the subsidies for scholarship are mostly hidden from view in the depths of university and college library budgets and in the salaries of university and college professors. This creates the illusion that the production of scholarship is free and that only pernicious rent-seekers are preventing intellectual fruits from being more widely shared.

This system is reaching a breaking point, not so much from pressure from open-access advocates as from two other big forces.  The first is that everything I have talked about above relates to humanities and social science journals.  These journals are chump change in library budgets. The enormously expensive journals are in the natural sciences and engineering, which not only charge tens, sometimes hundreds of times more in subscription fees than humanities journals do. For instance, Kritika charges a library $95 to subscribe for a year. The Journal of Comparative Neurology charges $35,489. Science and technical journals frequently levy “page charges” as well. These are the charges assessed to authors for the production of each page in the journal their article occupies. At Lafayette, the college pays these fees as a matter of course out of our common research budget (which, by the way, reduces the amount of money available for humanists and social scientists to conduct their research).  These journals, many of them published by for-profit behemoths like Elsevier, thus literally get it coming and going. It is nice work if you can get it. These science publishers are killing the goose that has been laying them these golden eggs, though, as their charges have been rising well above the rate of inflation and above the ever slowing rate at which tuition can be raised. These are the pernicious rent-seekers, not Slavica or Cambridge University Press.

This brings us to the second big force, which is the crisis of funding faced by institutions of higher education since the financial crisis. The short answer as to who has been subsidizing scholarly journal publishing is: taxpayers and donors. State governments have been slashing support for public universities, so too have federal and national governments elsewhere in the world. Even relatively wealthy private colleges like my own saw such a hit in their endowments and annual giving that budgets have shrunk significantly. Put more simply, due to the actions of science publishers and collapsing library budgets, the current silent subsidy model for journals in the humanities and social sciences is under threat as well.

I don’t know how to solve these problems, but I worry that endorsing wiki-anarchism in the name of open access could fatally undermine the precarious institution of the academic journal. I’m actually rather heartened by the way that folks have been feeling and fumbling their way towards a new model. Journals have gotten more receptive to the idea that authors should have rights to their articles and that those rights can include open access. Colleges and universities have begun creating digital repositories and encouraging their faculty members to participate. Scholars are increasingly turning to immediately open access venues like this Russian History Blog in order to publish certain sorts of ideas. Archives and libraries are digitizing valuable and rare resources for the general public. Our big challenge is to maintain and extend these moves and to keep scholarly journals alive in an age of austerity. As historians, Russian or not, I think our best strategy is to remain aware of these trends, to assert authorial rights to establish open access where we can, to support the small bore moves toward open access whenever possible, and to make sure that we don’t destroy the funding models of our journals before we have a secure path towards ensuring their viability over the long run. Above all, we must continually remind anyone who asks that being a professor encompasses more than teaching and that the scholarly labors we perform are essential for our country and for our common civilization.

Those universities are right to give long, hard thought to the potential that MOOCs have for promoting learning, not only for the largely well-to-do students of selective colleges and universities in the U. S., but for also for students with less means around the world. Still, for folks in my position and for the students who benefit from my work, it’s hard to see the growth of MOOCs as anything but a disaster. In the first place, I have difficulty imagining a real market competition between online courses. No matter how many “likes” or five star online reviews a course on Imperial Russia from a professor at Ruritania College might get, that professor (or college) will have a hard time competing with MIT or Stanford. It also, I think, carries special risk for American scholars of Russia. MOOCs draw strength from their economies of scale. Russian historians, on the other hand, do best when they focus on the quality of their courses rather than the quantity of the students who take them. I am an optimistic promoter of Russian Studies, but courses on the American Civil War will continue to outdraw courses on the Russian Civil War. There is sure to be space on these platforms for a variety of courses, but the eventual economic logic of MOOCs relies on the “massive” part as much as the “open” part. Enrollments will be carefully watched.

Still, I think that MOOCs could have a useful place somewhere in the new global information system. As my participation in this blog attests, I’m not opposed to digital platforms for scholarship and teaching, and I personally like video learning too. Right now, in fact, in anticipation of a semester in London, my whole family is watching Michael Wood’s cheerful and enthusiastic Story of England. I find myself able to (mostly) turn down my critical engines and get back in touch with the aesthetic pleasures of discovering an unknown past. Who knows, my kids might even dig an archaelogical pit in the backyard when the ground here in Pennsylvania unfreezes. If Stanford and MIT want to make it part of their evangelical mission to support faculty members who wish to produce up-to-date, high quality knowledge transfer sessions for free distribution around the world on the Internet, then God-speed.

But as you might expect, and as an article in today’s New York Times confirms, the ambitions of many MOOC developers are more extensive than that. Some are already taking the “open” out of the equation. The provost of Duke, for one, argues that “we don’t want to make the mistake the newspaper industry did, of giving our product away free online for too long.” Some profit streams may come from credentialing activities such as providing certificates of completion for a fee. Some profits are envisioned as coming from existing colleges and universities who want to outsource their teaching for a licensing fee. Daphne Koller, the co-founder of Coursera, says that she thinks that “this model will spread, helping academic institutions offer their students a better education at a lower price.” Let’s leave to the side for the moment the long-term implications of this model if Ms. Koller is correct – a new educational world in which Ruritania College lays off its Russian historian and invites interested students to take a history course instead from Coursera – and focus on the question of a “better education.”

The basic problem here is the implicit assumption that education consists wholly of information transfer and, in some cases, a process of verifying that some amount of that information has been successfully downloaded from the professor on the screen to the brain of the student. Again, there is nothing wrong with this process of knowledge acquisition.  There is also nothing particularly novel about it. In essence, it is much the same process that takes place when I read a book or when I watch Michael Wood on TV. It is autodidactic – I have an informational resource available to me, and I make use of it to the best of my ability and interest. We all learn a great deal autodidactically, and it’s an important part of a “traditional” college education as well. Whether I assign readings or “flip” a classroom to have them watch pre-recorded videos of lectures on their computers, I am asking them to work autodidactically. I get the strong impression that many of the early enthusiasts and promoters of MOOCs are so autodidactic that they are somewhat befuddled by the notion that there might be other ways of learning.

But of course, there are. Human beings do a lot of their learning within the context of important social networks. In fact, the more important the learning is, the more likely we are to learn them within a particular social relationship. Morals, manners, traditions, and jokes are taught through parent-child, sibling, or friendship relationships (though of course there are autodidactic supplements – a Miss Manners column for instance – that may augment this teaching).  Churches, synagogues, and mosques provide communities through which religious knowledge and beliefs are learned. In college, social peers within the class also provide a mechanism for this social didacticism, through class discussion, through study groups, through their words of praise (or not) for their professors.

Finally, there is mentorship. This too has deep roots in familial and religious institutions, and it plays a key role in a high-functioning professor-student relationship as well. This relationship is a two-way street. It is a social relationship. I may be influenced by E. P. Thompson or Michel Foucault or Joan Scott when I read and like their books, but I am not mentored by them. I watched my academic mentors closely when I studied with them, but it was just as important that I knew they were watching back, that they knew me, my strengths, my weaknesses, my potential. That knowledge was crucial to my own transformation. Again, this is a principle that can be more widely applied. My daughter takes piano classes from a real live woman rather than just by reading piano books. I subscribe to Golf Digest, but really I learn most from my local golf pro, who I find myself wanting to impress with my game, just as I did my earlier teachers. Indeed, one of the things that surprised me as a younger teacher was that students were mostly motivated not by grades but by their desire to do well in my eyes and in the eyes of their peers. I do not know if there is something almost pheromonal about learning, if people learn better when in the actual physical presence of peers and mentors, but I would not be surprised if that were the case.

The genius of MOOC entrepreneurs is to capitalize on this fatal, and widespread, misconception about education. Most people think that education is about informational content, when in fact the core of education, at all levels, is about learning within social contexts. Successful institutions –whether educational, familial, or religious – combine autodidactic learning with social learning and inspired and inspiring mentorship. Education done right is an intensely labor-intensive process. It is not massive, and it is not online. As a result, there are unavoidable expenses, which means that it is also not open unless heavily subsidized by outside parties. By stripping away the social aspect of learning, MOOC entrepreneurs strip away some of the costs. They strip away more when they don’t have to supply dorms and cafeterias and vice-deans and football teams.  In doing so, they seduce us into thinking that a “better education” can be had cheaply – for the amount of money we pay those very same entrepreneurs to supply branded platforms of content distribution. This is an intoxicating thought at a moment when the costs of higher education are under deserved scrutiny. College expenses have to be controlled, but not at the cost of eliminating the core of the educational process.  If MOOCs do come to dominate higher education, as these entrepreneurs hope, we Russian historians are likely to be among the first casualties. But our students will be right on our heels.

To the best of my knowledge, there are only very few studies of this period based entirely on oral history, although most new scholarship on the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras makes at least some use of interview materials, to compensate for gaps in the archive and also to gather the testimony of surviving but rapidly ageing witnesses to an extraordinary (if also surprisingly ‘ordinary’) period of Soviet history. Iurii Aksiutin’s interview-based study of the Khrushchev era presented surveys of popular opinion of almost every event of that decade, but seemed more interested in generating (rather questionable) quantitative data than in exploring the problems of memory and its narrativisation. Other qualitative analysis of interview materials has often investigated the relationship between official myths and individual experiences, of phenomena such as war, mass death and mourning (Cathy Merridale), or large-scale post-Stalinist construction projects such as the Baikal-Amur Mainline (Tania Voronina).  Alexei Yurchak’s interviews with the ‘last Soviet generation’ offer one of the most subtle and suggestive analyses of how Soviet citizens (albeit a younger ‘generation’ than Raleigh’s) negotiated official discourse and rituals in the same period which this book views as the ‘turning point’ in intelligentsia attitudes to the Soviet system (by learning to ‘live Soviet’ in the 1970s, Raleigh argues, they came to question a system that required such complex survival techniques because it had failed to deliver the ‘Soviet dream’).

However, although Merridale acknowledges the phenomenon of ‘confabulation’ between individual memories and state narratives, and so too does Raleigh here, much post-Soviet oral history still seems to be animated by the impulse and the belief that the ‘truth’ of private experience can and must be excavated after decades of silence or falsification by the Soviet authorities (see also the work of Irina Sherbakova and Nanci Adler). I was struck on reading this book, as with other oral history studies, by a disjuncture between an initial acknowledgement of the problems of memory and narrativisation, on the one hand, and the subsequent citation of testimony as not just (or not primarily) narrative shaped by hindsight, but as relatively unproblematic evidence of experience, and especially political attitudes, at the time. The ambitious scale of this project (in terms of time period covered and large number of informants) means that informants’ testimony is rarely cited at greater length than a few lines at a time, and even these short citations are rarely subjected to critical analysis, but rather used to add detail, colour and nuance to the author’s much broader narrative of Soviet history (broadly, of intelligentsia disillusionment with Soviet power). What is promised in the introduction—an exploration of how people narrate and reimagine their memories over time, and under the influence of shifting public narratives—thus recedes into the background during the remainder of the narrative. Perhaps by reading Raleigh’s previous book, The Sputnik Generation, alongside this new and much broader account based on the testimonies in that book as well as dozens of others, we can ourselves conduct the kinds of close analysis of the ‘layers of memory’ (Elizabeth Jelin), which this study, perhaps inevitably, does not.

This is how I use them and this is why they appeal to me, especially because, in the Soviet Union, ideology replaced memory.  As Russian historian Darya Khubova put it:  “It is sometimes said, and is almost true, that ‘for us the documents are subjective, and the only things which might be objective are the memories.’”   The highly intelligent and well-educated people I interviewed structured their responses with a high degree of integrative complexity (here I drew on a scale used in the medical profession, particularly in gerontology, which increasingly relies on oral interviews).  To be sure, I confirmed or suspected in my informants’ responses errors, conscious silences, exaggerations, inventions, and the co-opting of others’ stories, and, when I did, I mentioned this.  I wish to stress, however, that memory is an interpretation of life events rather than a chronicle of the past.  In other words, statements can be factually “wrong” (e.g., when someone remembered taking part in a school Beatles-group), but nonetheless psychologically true, because people often act on the basis of how they understand life events rather than on the events themselves.

To repeat:  I consciously privileged the oral interviews and have no regrets about doing so.  I also drew on decades of reading in the secondary literature, but I did not assign myself the task of “confirming” facts as the baby boomers’ remembered them.  When all is said and done, I would emphasize that oral history is not that different from other kinds of history I have written:  as a historian, I composite.  I create a coherent narrative out of fragments.  In this case, I constructed my own narrative out of the oral evidence (and not only), one that is more instructive than any single reality can be.  I used the narratives to create a story that no lone individual could tell and to embed it in larger historical narratives of Cold War, de-Stalinization, “overtaking” America, opening up to the outside world, economic stagnation, dissent, emigration, the transition to a market economy, the transformation of class, ethnic, and gender relations, and globalization, among others.

Interestingly, one reviewer recently wrote that she regretted that she didn’t hear more of my voice in the book.   I found that remark surprising.  After all, I selected the baby boomers’ words to convey my viewpoint.   Borrowing a phrase from historian Kenneth Kann, I see my book as a collection of voices in my own “choral arrangement.”

I agree that, had I interviewed only members of the working class in Moscow and Saratov, I would have uncovered a different range of experiences, attitudes, and memories. Yet, at the same time, I would caution against reifying class. In other words, whether an informant belongs to the working class or intelligentsia would certainly suggest a probable range of opinions and outlooks, but it would not determine them. What would, in my view, is one’s experiences living Soviet and seeking the Soviet dream, especially at a time when class boundaries became blurred and the population became more urban and better educated.

Although many of the baby boomers kept diaries for brief periods in their youth, none admitted to keeping a diary throughout his/her life. None wrote memoirs, but several published belletristic writings that I examined. I’ll say more about this in a separate posting where I’ll comment on my practice of oral history.

Miriam also had a query about memory. By its very nature, memory, like the writing of history, is revisionist so, had I conducted the interviews earlier than I had (I carried them out between 2002 and 2008), some things about which I wrote would have looked different. I actually asked my baby boomers this very question. As most of them noted, they most likely would not have agreed to share their life stories with me during the Soviet period or else would have done so cautiously. Olga Kamayurova put it like this: “I’m not sure, but, you know, there was fear in our family, probably a leftover of Stalin’s personality cult, and I probably would have been somewhat afraid. I’m generally afraid. . . . And perhaps this fear would have partially scared me. There would have been some things that I probably would have been apprehensive about saying.” All in all, as a result of perestroika, people began talking more openly about their lives, and I saw a real benefit in listening in.

The oral history movement, in its origins, was about capturing the voices of those usually excluded from the historical record: women and the working-class in particular. For the British case, for example, we might think of Elizabeth Robert’s classic A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Working Class Women 1890-1940 (1984) which examined the working and domestic lives of women in three northern cities. Don’s book is also about capturing the voices of those who might not otherwise contribute to the historical record. It’s true that there is a wealth of autobiographical literature from the last Soviet generation, but I am not sure that many of those he interviewed would have taken the time to record their stories without an interested historian and tape-recorder to hand. (Don, I am curious to know if any of your interviewees have, either before or since, written memoirs of any kind?) As Catriona noted, one of the real strengths of Soviet Baby Boomers is that it gives such a vivid picture of life in one of the Soviet Union’s closed cities; the comparative element also helps by extenuating what is “local” and what is part of a more general “Soviet” experience. And in tracking down as many members of the 1967 class in both his chosen schools, Don includes the accounts of women and men evenhandedly (and he is certainly alert to the way gender shaped their experiences). For me, though, the class question is one that warrants attention, not just in terms of this blog conversation but also in the growing literature on the post-Stalin generation more broadly.

In his first blog entry, Don argued against the importance of class, but I am not sure I would agree it matters quite as little as he suggests. This is not a criticism of Soviet Baby Boomers: for me, the book offers a wonderful portrait of a particular cohort within a generational group, but I am not sure that it can tell us about the whole generation. For me, they are representative of the “intelligentsia” if we use the term in its broadest definition. They were not all members of the creative or scientific elite; and certainly not all had affinities with the dissident movement. But they were all well-educated and engaged in white-collar rather than manual labor; almost all had higher education. Surely the fact that these were prestigious schools plays a part in the kind of trajectories the pupils’ lives then took and, as a result, the political beliefs and social attitudes they later embraced? Wouldn’t those who had gone to a trade school, or worked in a factory, even within the same city of Saratov and born in the same year, have articulated rather different life-stories and perspectives? My feeling is that there is some way to go in the historical literature on the late Soviet period before we can answer this properly. I would be interested to know whether there are oral histories focusing exclusively on working-class communities underway in Russia. This would make a very useful point of comparison. (I am relatively new to oral history so would appreciate any pointers!)

Whilst I’m posting this blog, I’ll also take the opportunity to probe a couple of other questions. The issue of memory has been raised in passing a couple of times. Don, I know that you were a regular visitor to Saratov for many years before researching and writing the book: How do you think the interviews would have differed had you conducted them ten or fifteen years earlier? Or would the stories have essentially been the same?

And a final question which also comes from discussion with my MA class this year. My students were  surprised that at least some dissidents defended Marxism, rather than leaping to embrace alternative political ideologies. In reading Soviet Baby Boomers, I found myself wondering how far the growing passion for Western products and the escalating frustration with the inadequacies of the Soviet distribution system translated into support for capitalism per se? Did those interviewed think that if they wanted an improved consumerist experience, they needed capitalism to make it possible? My impression is that this leap was not commonly made, but I would be interested to know what Don, and indeed others, think.

Culture of the so-called closed cities was a universal modern phenomenon for major industrial nations, provoked by two military international conflicts – World War I and World War II. Industrial nations tried to protect their military and scientific secrets during the war. As early as 1915 the Great Britain kept in secret a creation of the two townships of Eastriggs and Gretna, where factory Gretna employed 30,000 workers manufacturing cordite for ammunition. The names of these cities did not officially exist because of the secrecy surrounding the operation. During World War II the United States created the first secret “closed” cities for manufacturing atomic weapons – Hanford (Richland), Washington, Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee.[1] The Soviet Union followed the American model.

The United States always played a special role as a model for Soviet modernization. Both Lenin and Stalin used and imitated various forms of industrial experimentation in the US to show a reality of the Soviet modernization.[2] The most famous example of the Soviet imitation of American industrial experience was building of so-called model industrial cities such as Magnitogorsk, when the Soviet administration used a model of Gary, Indiana.[3] During the Cold War, the Soviets followed a pattern of the secret industrial city created by Americans.[4] Both contemporaries and scholars noted that the Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union led to an introduction of a special system of secrecy in the centers of scientific and military production, which became the important components of the military industrial complex in both countries. Location of these centers was kept in secret, they became known as secret closed cities and they were integrated in both military industrial complex and academic-national security complex of both nations.[5]

The first phase of closing of Soviet industrial cities was connected to the beginning of the Cold War during the last years of Stalin’s rule. At the same time this process was following the logic of the major developments in manufacturing the weapons of mass destruction that originated in Soviet labor camps scientific facilities, known as “shabashki.” This phase of closing began in 1945-47, when the first Soviet scientific and industrial centers were built for manufacturing of the main components for atomic bomb and also for chemical and bacteriological weapons. Started as the highest State secret, closed cities were established by Minatom (Ministry of Atomic Energy) and Minoborona (Ministry of Defense) under the leadership of Lavrentii Beria and the KGB. Between 1946 and 1951, Soviet government initiated also various programs of designing of the different means for delivery (and deployment) of weapons of mass destruction. Soviet scientists and engineers became busy with developing of the new models for airplanes, rockets and submarines, which could efficiently and quickly deliver various bombs during the military operations.[6]

Historically, the first Soviet secret cities were the sites for nuclear weapons research and manufacturing, enrichment of plutonium and production of nuclear bombs, and after 1951, of thermonuclear warheads. Such cities included Arzamas-16 (established in 1946, now Sarov), Sverdlovsk-44 (established in 1946, now Uralsk), Cheliabinsk-46/65 (established in 1947, now Ozersk), and Sverdlovsk-47 (established in 1947, now Lesnoy).[7] These secret cities disappeared from the Soviet official maps. Even Soviet citizens were not allowed access to these cities without proper authorization by the KGB. During the same period of time, using again the American model of scientific cities for military research, Stalin tried to create so-called “Science Towns” (Naukogrady) and “Academic Cities” (Akademgorodki) devoted to applied and basic scientific research. All of them received a status of the Soviet “secret” cities. All foreigners (even scientists from the “friendly” countries of “people’s democracy”) were forbidden to enter these “secret” academic communities of Soviet scientists. Majority of these “Academic cities” were established after Stalin’s death (e.g., Novosibirsk Akademgorodok was built in 1957), but the essential ideas and logistics of such Academic cities were developed during the late Stalin’s years.[8]

Another old traditional category of the closing a space in the Soviet Union was called a “secret zone.” During Stalin’s time different secret objects and adjacent territories were closed for visiting by Soviet citizens without a special KGB permission. Various labor camps and military bases (including even so-called garnizonnyi gorodok [garrison] for regular “non-secret” divisions of the Soviet Army) belonged to this category as well. They did not exist on the official Soviet maps. Each of these objects (labor camp or military base/garrison) had a special assigned “post box number” without any geographical name. This military practice of keeping secrecy has survived even after Stalin death, and it was used for a cover of various secret objects usually located in the closed cities, or “secret zones.” Through the entire Soviet period, many secret military factories, rocket design offices, sometimes even Academgorodki had no geographical names, only the “post box numbers.” These “secret sites” and “secret cities” were known only by a postal code, identified with a name and a number. Originally, the number following the city was the distance in kilometers the facility was located from the city. In practice, the numbers were in some instances arbitrarily assigned, and changed from time to time, to obscure the actual location of the installation. Thus, the All-Russian Scientific and Research Institute of Experimental Physics (VNIIEF) was initially known as Arzamas-60, a postal code designation to show that it was 60 km from the city of Arzamas. But the “60″ was considered too sensitive, and the number was changed to “16.” In 1947 the entire city of Sarov (Arzamas-16) disappeared from all official Russian maps and statistical documents. The facility has also been known Moscow-300, the town of Kremlev, and Arzamas-75. Zlatoust-20 is probably the same as Zlatoust-36, and Kurchatov-21, Moscow-21, Moscow-400 and Semipalatinsk-121 are almost certainly the same as Semipalatinsk-16.[9] During the 1940s Soviet government created also the so-called secret auxiliary zones (sekretnye vspomogatel’nye zony dobychi syr’ia) for extracting the strategically important natural resources for manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. Usually these zones were connected to uranium mines. Sometimes zones with lignite coal mines were also considered as the closed zones, because of popular notions that lignite coal was an indicator of a close location of uranium and other natural radioactive materials. Such “secret zone” existed near Ukrainian towns Vatutino (Cherkasy region), Aleksandria (Kirovograd region) and Zhioltye Vody (Dnipropetrovsk region).[10]

After World War II the Soviet Union included also some border areas and border cities (the most famous case was a creation of the entire “closed” Kaliningrad Region as a “border zone”) in the “secret zones” category. During the late 1940s and the early 1950s a special system of secrecy was introduced in the cities with the largest military and navy bases in Crimea (a city of Sevastopol, the base of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet) and on Far East (a city of Vladivostok, the base of the Soviet Pacific Fleet). Later on this system of secrecy was spread also on the large industrial cities which became locations of special military production, like a city of Perm, the largest center for Soviet tank production. By 1953, under Stalin, almost forty Soviet industrial cities and towns received a status of secret cities.[11]

The second phase in developing the Soviet system of closed cities began with liberalization and de-Stalinization of the Soviet political regime under Nikita Khrushchev. After 1956, during the Khrushchev’s rule, the Soviet leaders “opened” for the first time the Soviet Union to foreign visitors (including the guests from capitalist countries). The World Youth Festival in Moscow in 1957 was the first attempt for the Soviet officials to organize a public reception of the mass influx of foreigners into the USSR. In 1958 a special youth (Komsomol) travel international agency Sputnik was created to deal with foreign tourists who were invited to visit the USSR. Meanwhile, the Soviet officials encountered a very serious problem: What to do with locations of the secret, strategically important industrial plants and factories, which were part of the Soviet military industrial complex, and which now could be visited by foreigners? The solution was simple: during the 1950s many industrial cities in the USSR were officially closed to foreign visitors to protect secrets and provide security of all strategically important (so-called “regime” – rezhimnyi in Russian) industrial plants. The city of Dnipropetrovsk, traditionally famous as being the center of the Soviet metallurgical industry, became a location of the special military automobile factory in 1945. As early as 1951 this automobile factory (since 1966 known as Yuzhnyi mashino-stroitel’nyi zavod or in abbreviated Russian, simply Yuzhmash) was transformed in a special secret plant for manufacturing of the rocket engines and other equipment for the new Soviet military missiles. Thus, Dnipropetrovsk, the third largest Ukrainian city after Kyiv and Kharkiv with a population of 1,040,000, became an important urban center of military industrial production in eastern Ukraine.  Paradoxically, this city was a popular destination for various metallurgical and machine-building experts from the socialist countries, who had the contacts with local engineers and scientists, especially during the 1950s. As a result of developing of the new rocket-building industry in Dnipropetrovsk and its transformation in a special “regime city,” the KGB decided to close this city to all foreign visitors (including the guests from socialist countries) in 1959.[12]

In general, the “closed” cities (such as Sevastopol, Dnipropetrovsk, Perm, Saratov, Chernobyl, Severodvinsk and many others) received not only some privileges in the socialist system of goods distribution, but also a more severe ideological and cultural control from the political center, which eventually created serious tensions among the local residents who blamed this center for all troubles they experienced. Under Khrushchev and his successor Leonid Brezhnev, more Soviet cities were transformed into the special “regime towns” known later in post-Soviet Russia (since 1993) under the name of zakrytye administrativno-territorial’nye obrazovaniia (ZATO). Almost sixty large and small Soviet cities and towns became officially closed to foreigners (including the citizens of socialist countries) by the end of the 1970s (eleven of them existed in Ukraine, two in Estonia, more than forty – in Russia). Despite the official politics of détente (a relaxation of international tensions between the Soviet bloc and western countries) during the 1970s and the 1980s, the Soviet government still kept the development of its military industrial complex in secret, protecting the cities with military production from foreign guests. Problems of espionage, “deviational” behavior and “ideological pollution” bothered the local ideologists and the police. To some extent, the closed cities played a role of testing ground for various ideological campaigns of the Cold War, which later were used in open Soviet cities as well. For the Soviet politicians the “closed” cities became the “model” Soviet cities, and any of these politicians’ involvement in administration of the closed secret cities was an important justification of their ideological reliability in their successful political career. [13]

The closed cities created their own political lobby (predstavitel’stvo) in the Soviet government. Each “regime” secret city had its representatives in various offices of the central Soviet administration in Moscow. Beginning with the late Stalin era, after the World War II, a growing Soviet nomenklatura was structured, to some extent, according to the role of its elements in the organization of Soviet military industrial complex, which concentrated in the major Soviet closed cities. Even after Stalin, Soviet nomenclatura still reproduced a system of the secret closed society, which had already existed in the Soviet ZATO. The major figures in both Khrushchev and Brezhnev governments were related directly or indirectly to the various scientific and industrial programs of military production in the closed cities.[14] Leonid Brezhnev, who began his political career in Dnipropetrovsk, promoted the political career of his old friends from the closed city. Both contemporaries and scholars who study the “Brezhnev period” call this phenomenon of the rise of a group of politicians from Dnipropetrovsk the “Dnipropetrovsk Mafia” or rule of the “Dnipropetrovsk Family.”[15] Since a rise of Brezhnev to power, ruling elite of Dnipropetrovsk influenced not only regional, but also republican and All-Union politics. Brezhnev’s friends and close colleagues from his post-war years of rule in the region of Dnipropetrovsk went to Moscow and became prominent political figures in the Soviet nomenklatura hierarchy during the 1960s and 1970s. Two main industries of the Soviet military complex – the metallurgical and missile-building industries – had important factories in the region of Dnipropetrovsk. Therefore, the industry of Dnipropetrovsk provided the Brezhnev ruling team with new members from 1964 until 1982. The Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk became the location of the USSR Ministry of Black Metallurgy and of the largest Soviet missile-building factory, which offices were staffed with Brezhnev’s friends. Even after the “downfall of the Brezhnev clan” in Moscow in 1983, when Yurii Andropov began his struggle “with corruption and nepotism” among Soviet nomenclature, members of this clan still played a prominent role in the political life of the Soviet Ukraine. In 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev sent a special committee to check the political situation in Ukraine. This committee represented the department of Ukrainian party organizations at the organizational sector of the CPSU Central Committee. The report of the committee proved that 53% of Ukrainian executive officials came from Dnipropetrovsk.[16]

The third phase in a history of the Soviet closed cities began under a rule of Mikhail Gorbachev. During perestroika the Soviet leaders “opened” the “closed” cities. But unexpectedly, the local residents experienced more problems after “opening” their society than before. The collapse of imperial structures and economic connections destroyed a traditional and stable society of the closed society. Now a former closed Soviet society experienced the new post-Soviet developments, which led to the new, not ideological, but mainly economic, restrictions. These new restrictions were connected to the new national restructuring and state building in former Soviet republics. All this created various problems, which were reminiscent of the Soviet closeness, restricting economic and political actions of post-Soviet citizens. Now as many years before a population of post-Soviet space asked the same questions again: What is openness and what is closeness of modern society? How the processes of opening and closing a society are influenced by economic possibilities, cultural practices and ideological discourses? Recently, the system of external secrecy was almost eliminated, and locations of the former Soviet closed cities in Russia were mapped. However, the population in these cities is still afraid of being persecuted by FSB (former KGB) and other State security authorities for any indications of public activity or dissidence. Such authorities are still more than powerful in former closed cities. Soviet-time mechanisms to threaten people are still alive in minds of the people who live in these cities. Their fear and isolation from the world society are the reasons why such cities can be easily managed.[17]

After the collapse of communism, the political elites from the former Soviet secret cities still influence post-Soviet politics in former Soviet republics, such as Ukraine. By the middle of 1990s, the role of politicians from the closed city of Dnipropetrovsk in the political life of Ukraine increased. They used the same connections and pattern of political behavior of their predecessors in Brezhnev’s times. In the 1980s, representatives of “Dnipropetrovsk Mafia” made only 53% of ruling Ukrainian elite, by 1996, 80% of all major political leaders of the Ukraine came from Dnipropetrovsk. One Ukrainian president, Leonid Kuchma, two Ukrainian Prime Ministers, Pavlo Lazorenko and Yulia Tymoshenko, represented Dnipropetrovsk Mafia.[18] Even now, in 2012, when so-called Donetsk Mafia replaced Dnipropetrovsk Mafia in the Ukrainian politics and established its control over the political elite in Kyiv, politicians from a former rocket city still play an important role in the struggle for power in post-Soviet Ukraine. Many of Dnipropetrovsk politicians, like Serhiy Tihipko, collaborated or joined Donetsk Mafia. In this way, representatives of the former Soviet closed city still dominate post-Soviet politics.[19]

According to contemporaries, the major result of the closing of the Soviet industrial cities was a growing “envy of Moscow” among residents of the former secret cities and towns and rise of regionalism, which contributed eventually to the regional opposition to political center and produced political base for nationalist politics in non-Russian republics, like Ukraine and Estonia. It is true that quite an opposite movement also took place in the closed cities – sympathy for Moscow, identification of some groups among local population with political and cultural center of the entire Soviet Union. But overall, “envy for Moscow” prevailed among both elite and ordinary residents of the closed cities.

Since the Stalin era, the tensions between provincials and Muscovites created a unique and mass psychological phenomenon of mature socialism in the USSR known as “envy of Moscow.” This phenomenon was a purely Stalin’s legacy, a result of creation of Moscow as a show case of the socialist achievements for the entire Soviet Union. Ten years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in May 2001, Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov, a famous Russian expert in a history of Russia-US relations noted, “According to Stalin, Moscow became a show case of mature socialism, demonstrating to the entire world the achievements and advantages of the Soviet system of closed socialism. All the best of socialism, including its culture, scholarship and science, was concentrated in Moscow. It was simultaneously a show case and epitome of the Soviet closed society.”[20] In September of 1999, Sergei N. Burin, a younger colleague of Bolkhovitinov, noted: “Envy has always been a fundamental element in constructing the Soviet personality since Stalin’s times. Beginning with Yuri Olesha, all Soviet writers noted this. Provincials, who lived in their own closed societies, envied Muscovites because Moscow was a real open city for them, and it had the better living conditions, etc. Muscovites envied provincials, if they made successful careers and traveled abroad. In my opinion, envy killed the Soviet Union, when the local intellectual elites from national republics transformed their envy of Moscow into their new national politics.”[21]

This envy of Moscow produced a new anti-Moscow folklore that initially began among military personnel of the military garrisons in the secret closed cities, and later on spread all over the Soviet Union. As early as the 1950s, provincials began calling Muscovites chmo (acronym from combination of the Russian words chelovek Moskvy i Moskovskoi oblasti – a resident of Moscow and Moscow region). According to the retired Soviet military officers, in the 1950s a sudden influx of the physically weak and effeminate, but smart, young conscripts from Moscow region into the Soviet Army, patrolling the secret nuclear closed cities around Moscow, resulted in their senior officers complaints about unpreparedness of these young soldiers from Moscow for the requirements of military service. Eventually, Soviet military officers from the garrisons in the closed cities used acronym chmo in their documents to mark the names of the conscripts from Moscow and Moscow region. In the 1960s and the 70s this acronym left the closed society of military garrisons from the secret cities, penetrated first the “wide Soviet army circles,” then reached the Soviet civilian population, and became a popular word used to characterize any weak and effeminate male character. As a result, people forgot about the origin of this term, which was directly related to the military personnel of the Soviet closed society.[22] Traditionally, provincial population in the USSR distanced themselves from Muscovites, using various bad words, including chmo. Through the entire Soviet history, provincial intellectual elites tried to join Muscovite elite. If they failed to do so, they eventually also began developing certain anti-Moscow feelings. So-called “envy of Moscow” became a significant element in formation of the regional opposition among local elites to Moscow, especially in non-Russian republics of the Soviet Union. And both national and even Russian-speaking elites from the former closed cities took an active part in their political opposition to Moscow from the late 1980s through the 1990s. In this way, a growing regionalism with a leadership formed basically in the closed Soviet society became a major element of national movements in non-Russian republics of the former USSR.[23]