Marxism and Medieval Studies: Marxist Historiography in East Central Europe

For more than four decades, Marxism was the ruling ideology of the communist states of Eastern Europe. Marxist ideology was rooted in conceptions of history, so communist governments interested themselves in the writing—and the rewriting—of history. This book investigates what kinds of historical research developed under the auspices of state-promoted Marxism, and even more the scholars themselves who had to navigate that academic milieu.The book consists of an introduction and a conclusion by the volume's editors, and seventeen chapters exploring particular areas, or methodologies of history writing, or specific figures. The contributors focus largely on Poland and Czechoslovakia, with two chapters on Hungary and one on Romania. One chapter concerns the maverick Soviet cultural historian Dmitrii Likhachev, and a few other Soviet scholars make cameo appearances in some chapters as imported influencers on budding East European Marxist historians. An occasional Yugoslav or East German scholar enters into discussion, too, but no Albanians or Bulgarians. Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia are also omitted, apparently because they were then subsumed under the Soviet Union.The conclusion (chapter 19) provides a succinct overview of the authors’ findings: A rigidly Stalinist vulgarized Marxist orthodoxy barely got established in the chaotic postwar conditions before Stalin's death and with it the overturning of that approach to writing history. In the 1950s–1960s, some East European scholars thinly veiled their continued adherence to prior non-Marxist history writing behind allusions to Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin. Other scholars engaged creatively with Marxist conceptions and methodologies, including those from the Soviet Union, the French Annales school, and British medievalists, to advance research on social and economic topics. In the 1970s-1980s, political repression resulted in historians’ quiet dissociation from Marxist-Leninist approaches. With the collapse of communism, Marxism ceased to provide any inspiration for historical writing.While the conclusion's overview might satisfy the informational needs of some readers, they would do well to delve into the chapters themselves. There they find vivid portraits of scholars who began their careers in the pre-World War II period, and who found ways to continue their scholarship in the much-different postwar communist academic world. Scholars who had credentials both as Marxists and as anti-fascists were few, and so the new governments had little choice but to accept academics of dubious ideological loyalty. Personal connections mattered, and personality also; thus, a non-Marxist scholar, Aleksander Gieysztor, could flourish in Poland, taking leadership roles and producing excellent historical research. Normal scholarly debates about interpretation of the past, when tinged with allegations of deviation from Marxism, could have serious ramifications. The losers in these debates sometimes lost their positions and opportunities to publish and had to settle for less prestigious jobs or accept retirement. But contrary to the image in the West, they rarely experienced arrest. The authors of the chapters do not disguise their favoritism towards certain scholars whose intersection with Marxism was thoughtful and creative, or their disapproval of the academic opportunists who criticized them.The amount of room for debate among scholars who claimed a “Marxist” label might surprise readers accustomed to hearing about ideological straightjackets under communism. The classic Marx/Engels model concerned only Western and Central Europe, not Eastern Europe, so there was space for historians and archeologists to develop different schema for how their particular country's trajectory fit into the Marxist framework. When did each country become “feudal?” Scholars offered a number of different answers, depending upon which characteristics of feudalism were deemed most significant and how the sparse documentary and archeological evidence was interpreted. What to make of the evidence of continuity in peasant payments in kind alongside of the development of a cash economy? How and where was class struggle between producers and exploiters manifested, and did Eastern Europe experience the “crisis of feudalism” of the fourteenth century that marked the transition towards capitalism? Even within the confines of the official Marxist theory, scholars found room—sometimes ample, sometimes constrained—for alternative interpretations.The chapters also explore how national imperatives concerning the past coming from the government fitted awkwardly with Marxist approaches to history, which were supposed to espouse internationalism. Several chapters describe how Polish medievalists tried to fulfill the government's goal of establishing a longstanding Polish-Slavic identity for Silesia—territory newly annexed to the Polish state after World War II. Slovak scholars felt the need to deny the impact of Hungarians on the development of the medieval Slovaks; Hungarian scholars had to deny the impact of the Slavs on medieval Hungary. Czech and Slovak scholars alternately cast the short-lived Great Moravian state as the forerunner of a unified Czechoslovak state or as the predecessor of either an autonomous Slovak state or a Czech vanguard of progress.Several chapters specifically focus on the discipline of archeology. Jiří Macháček's chapter 15 explains succinctly how and why Marxism has influenced the discipline of archeology as a whole; its emphasis on material culture and stages of development fit quite well with archeological approaches to the past. Macháček surveyed specifically Czech archeologists’ perspectives, while Iurie Stamati (chapter 18) studied Romanian archeologists. Piotr Wecowski's chapter 8 elucidates how the Polish government's willingness to sponsor archeological research resulted in the creation of a haven for productive, non-ideological intellectual exchange among scholars of early Polish history. Many of the archeologists were women, the focus of Florin Curta's examination of female scholars with trans-national connections (chapter 16).It is a truism that the individual chapters of a collected volume are uneven in quality, and this book is no exception. While the scholarship found in each chapter is impeccable, the chapters vary quite a bit in accessibility to readers who are not equally immersed in the historiographies of these countries. Certain chapters are praiseworthy for their appropriateness for non-specialist readers: Attila Pók's chapter 4 on Hungarian medievalists; Piotr Wecowski's chapter 8 on Polish medievalists; and Adam Hudek's chapter 14 on the historiography of Great Moravia. Throughout the book, each chapter features both full footnoting and a bibliography of works cited—a citation form that is reduplicative, to be sure, but immensely helpful to scholarly readers.While Marxism as a theory undergirding historical research has gone out of style—and rightly so—the scholarship East European scholars produced under its aegis ought not to be discarded, or their personal experiences within the communist system be forgotten. This volume helps to preserve this scholarly legacy.