Seymour Becker

Abstract

In 2004 Seymour Becker (1934-2020 began his response to the query "Why Russian history?" with the following recollection:Exactly thirty-five years ago I first visited Italy, and Florence, after working for nine months in the archives and libraries of Moscow and Leningrad on the research for my second book. . . . That was when I first asked myself, where did I go wrong? Why Russian history? Why not Italian history? . . . The food, the climate, the joie de vivre, the art and architecture, the landscapein none of these respects can Russia hold a candle to Italy. So what drew me to Russia, and do I really regret it? Of course not! 1In many private conversations over the years, Seymour continued adding colorful details that made the Moscow-Florence (read Russian/Soviet versus European) contrast even more striking. For example, he remembered how in 1967, with other readers at the Lenin library in Moscow, he queued for bluish chicken being sold that day in the library's lobby; or how before leaving on research trips to the USSR, he packed medicines and other deficit goods for people he did not know personally. Unlike many historians of his generation, Seymour was never motivated by the left or right ideological sympathies that were uncritically projected onto the Soviet Union, and he always stood above the Pipesonean/revisionist divide in his field. Rather, from the very beginning of his career as a historian, Seymour understood Russia as a normal participant in the global drama of history, a European empire that simultaneously exhibited various developmental patterns, thus complicating the assumed notions of west and east, Europe and Orient, and empire and nation. This is how he resolved the Moscow-Florence dilemma for himself in scholarship and in university teaching. (After completing his dissertation at Harvard under Richard Pipes in 1963, he taught Russian and world history at Rutgers University until his retirement in 2004.)Becker's dissertation was published in 1968 as Russia's Protectorates in Central Asia: Bukhara and Khiva, 1865-1924 (Harvard University Press, 1968. The book examined "the motives and methods for the extension of Russian control over the Khanates, the post-conquest policies followed by the imperial government toward its two protectorates, the reasons for those policies, difficulties they encountered, and the fate of Bukhara and Khiva at the hands of the revolutionary successors to the tsars" (xii). This was a major step in rediscovering Russia as an empire, a hierarchically organized polity practicing differentiated subjecthood and experimenting with regimes of diversity management-a clear outlier at the time of its publication. 2 The book's