In his retrospective essay written in 1989, Boris Gasparov—Lotman’s colleague at Tartu University in 1967-80—states that “Tartu intellectuals were searching for the means of separating themselves from the [social] context, of finding and demarcating a free, detached spiritual space—because the whole ‘inhabited’ space of culture was contaminated—to build on it their own separate world” (B.Gasparov 1994a, 282). Here, using the language of his circle, Gasparov outlines the major shift in the strategies of social behavior and identity construction among academic intellectuals associated with structuralism and semiotics. This shift, which was taking place in the second half of the 1960s, and some of its intellectual consequences are topics of this chapter.
As I demonstrated in the previous chapter, Soviet structuralists’ dominant strategy in the 1950s and early 1960s was to make use of their social status, high patronage and connections, the liberalism of the Khrushchev’s Thaw and the rhetoric of scientism to gain the highest possible control over academic institutions and the terms of the interaction between science and politics. The failure to establish an alternative center of academic authority and influence in the form of the Institute (or Institutes) of Cybernetics and Semiotics resulted in major frustration of these aspirations. By 1964, structuralism-oriented linguists, folklorists and literary scholars found themselves faced with a very narrow spectrum of choices. They could allow their work to be defined by their opponents in purely technical terms; they could escape into highly specialized—“specialized enough to be unintelligible,” in Vladimir Toporov’s words—“niches” within the academic field, or to become intellectual and possibly political dissidents.1
Yet, another option presented itself in 1963 when Moscow structuralists encountered the Tartu group headed by Yuri Lotman. This encounter made possible the emergence of the Tartu-Moscow—or, Moscow-Tartu, depending on where from you are looking—School proper. In this chapter, I consider this School as a new type of the academic public, the institution of what I call “parallel science.” By exploring in details the historical transformation of the Tartu network over time and in relation to the wider social context, I attempt to understand the meanings in which this social space was indeed “parallel” to, as well as “separated” and “independent” from, Soviet society.
In effort to address this concern, the chapter considers three major periods in the history of the Tartu School: the period of the summer schools (1964-1974), the epoch of Lotman-dominated Tartu School (1975-1985) and the perestroika period. I show that each of these periods is characterized by a number of distinctive social strategies. For instance, during the summer schools, Tartu scholars tried to achieve a high degree of public invisibility and “enclosure” within the narrow circle of friends and colleagues. Later, they took a more public and expansive stance, which ultimately brought them during the Gorbachev’s
1 Toporov to Lotman, March 17, 1964 (LC, F135, s.1442).
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perestroika into the midst of highly politicized debates. Along with these changes, this chapter explores a number of common and persistent themes, which were characteristic for parallel science. For instance, I analyze how in the history of the Tartu School universalistic values of professionalism and moral life were intertwined with exclusionary techniques of differentiating “us” from “them,” and how the moral community of academic professionals was conceived in opposition to the world of ideologists, careerists and “uncultured” lower class promotes. The central section of the chapter is an exposition of the Tartu School’s dominant discourse of archaism. Here, I demonstrate how some of the major dimensions of the Tartu intellectual paradigm reflected and refracted the School’s location and role within the realm of parallel science. I conclude the chapter by outlining the implications of this my studies for the broader history and sociology of Soviet (parallel) science and the public sphere under Soviet socialism.
Networks, Institutions and Parallel Science
The concept of “parallel science” is one of the central in this book. Therefore, we cannot proceed without properly introducing it. Preliminarily defined, parallel science is a historically-specific form that some of the personal networks of academics took in the 1960s-80s in Soviet Russia. Unlike institutions and personalities, networks only recently became the focus of attention of the students of Russian and Soviet science (see Adams 2000;
Kojevnikov 2004). Following Mark Adams’ definition, “network” is here understood as
“voluntaristic, private, and fluid set of interlinking personal relations and associations based on ties of trust, family, friendship, ‘old school ties,’ shared concerns, common fascinations, and so forth” (2000, 11-12). Unlike formal institutions and other “structures,” networks are loose, flexible, hard to trace and control. Although private and voluntaristic, they are often stronger and more durable then any formal structure. The role of networks in the history of science is hard to summarize in one formula. It is hard to imagine scientific and intellectual development without informal contacts and ties among scientists and between them and the broader public. At the same time, the legitimacy of academic disciplines and institutions often requires hiding or even suppressing the networking behind them (Adams 2000, 13).
In Western academia, there are a number of procedures of regulating the role of networks. Anti-nepotism rules, blind peer-review, the competitive nature of job appointments and grant applications, —these are all the mechanisms of minimizing the influence of networks. Soviet rulers shared these concerns. Stalinist interrogators were particularly interested in exposing their victim’s networks of acquaintances. Yet, the centralized, hierarchical and rather irrational (in the Weberian sense) character of Soviet institutions, academic institutions in particular, led to bringing the networking and the mutual exchange of favors to the fore as necessary transmission-belts within the existing institutional structure (Ledeneva 1998). Even with respect to the Stalinist period, one can speak about the pronounced dualism between institutions and networks in Soviet academia. Interpersonal networks were relatively independent social milieus and forces, which proved indispensable in decision-making on both administrative and intellectual affairs (Kojevnikov 2004).
Networks bridged between institutional and disciplinary boundaries, levels of the hierarchy, and between academia and authorities. Networking could provide you with a position of esteem and even power within Soviet academia but it could also undermine the significance of the official titles bestowed on you. Institutions and disciplines were, to a large extent, the fields of contestation between competing networks. When a field was occupied by one circle, e.g. the field of biology by Lysenko’s people in the late 1940s, then the members of the defeated networks retreated into neighboring fields, e.g. mathematics and physics in the institutes of the Academy of Sciences, under the protection of more powerful colleagues and
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friends. Under this cover, the counter-networks of geneticists survived the last years of Stalin’s rule and later build the institutional bases for genetic research and for the eventual demise of Lysenko (Adams 2000).
In human sciences, the coming to academic power in Soviet linguistics of Viktor Vinogradov and other anti-Marrists after Stalin’s 1950 anti-Marrism campaign can also be considered as a case of the takeover of the institutions by disciplinary counter-networks. As we have seen earlier, Soviet structuralists also relied on their preexisting networks to establish new personal and intellectual ties with “hard” scientists, sympathetic authorities and Western scholars. In doing so, they joined the forces with other previously suppressed movements—cyberneticians, geneticists, Vygotskian psychologists, critical Marxists—in their struggle for establishing their legitimacy within Soviet science and for reforming the power relations within academic institutions. As we have seen, their partial success was favored by the Cold War competition with the West and the role science was expected to play in it, as well as by the comparatively liberal atmosphere of the Thaw and the overall rapid expansion of Soviet academia.
Yet, last two of these factors lost much of their validity around the mid-1960s.
Khrushchev’s Thaw faltered already in his last years in office and was finally curtailed in the aftermath of the Prague Spring 1968. The institutional expansion of academia was stalled and ultimately stopped by the end of the decade, too (Graham 1998, 82). Most scholars were guaranteed safe academic employment and the opportunity to work within, at least, their narrow professional “niches.” Yet, the establishment of new institutions and challenging existing academic establishments from within formal academia became practically impossible.
In effect, the independent significance of networks has grown immensely. Moreover, their organization and their relationship to the institutions started to change. Although academic networks continued to use formal institutions as fields of their contestations, the energy of many intellectually active scholars was increasingly invested in the work of home seminars, evening seminars, summer schools and other “institutions” of what I have called earlier “parallel science.” Since it appeared to be impossible to satisfy the intellectuals’
demands for academic autonomy and their control over academic professions within established institutions, a substantial segment of Soviet academics opted for alternative forms of self-organization of the academic public. Thus, the emergence of parallel science can be interpreted as a result of the widening of the gap between formal academia and a substantial group of Soviet academics.
Of course, not everything about “parallel science” was entirely unprecedented.
Soviet scientists always gathered in somebody’s apartments or in empty classrooms after work, even though in Stalin’s time this could be dangerous. These were important sites where interpersonal networks were established and maintained. Moreover, these were the sites where alternative hierarchies of worth with respect to persons and ideas were worked out. These were the sites of the so called “Hamburg Test,” or honest, but not blind, continuous mutual peer reviewing aimed at establishing “real reputations,” as differentiated from, or even opposed to, official reputations and ranks.2 Yet, what gave these kinds of Hamburg Test sites their particular character of the institutions of parallel science around the 1960s was the scale at which it became possible to effectively “specialize” in this alternative academia.
2 Viktor Shklovsky (1929) originally talked about the “Hamburg Test” (gamburgskii schet) in his memorable story about the custom of Hamburg circus wrestlers to test their real strength aside from public matches where outcomes were often predetermined by preliminary agreements between their agents.
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The Brezhnev’s “Little Deal” meant not only the state’s tolerance of petty private enterprise and trade in exchange for at least outward political loyalty (Millar 1985). For academics, it also meant considerable job security, undemanding work hours and considerable tolerance of many alternative but not directly political forms of intellectual self-organization. The researchers at the Academy’s institutes enjoyed especially flexible schedules and few truly enforced job obligations, and thus they could grant informal seminars considerable amounts of their time. University teachers had less time but they were hardly required to do research. So, those among them who chose to do research had an option to focus on the readership and the Hamburg Test-style peership provided by parallel science. In these conditions, informal seminars and summer schools started to play the role of actual academic institutions with their own curricula and schedules of meetings, informal ranks and prestige hierarchies, procedures of recruiting “personnel” and establishing legitimate directions of research, and, finally, with their own distinctive sites of academic communication and even publishing bases. In effect, for a growing number of university students in the 1970s and 1980s, the previously unthinkable choice emerged: to make a career within formal academia or to concentrate on the institutions of parallel science, while resigning yourself to occupying a relatively minor, albeit stable, position in a research institute or a university for decades.3 Participation in informal seminars and circles became more of an aim in itself, rather then an important precondition for “making it” within formal academia.
Overall, if the networks of intellectuals, as described above, permeated Soviet formal institutions, adapted them to their needs and used in their struggles for scarce resources, the networks of parallel science built their own institutions (seminars, summer schools, conferences) outside or at the margins of the framework of formal institutions and official discourses. All kinds of academics, from most established and “official” to most non-conformist and even dissident, had their own networks. In contrast, the networks of parallel science included only those who was seen or wanted to be seen as having an unorthodox agenda of some sort. Some of these members of parallel science were about to become open political dissidents or émigrés. For instance, for Alexander Zholkovsky, the seminar in his apartment in 1976-79 was a transition between being a Soviet scholar to being an émigré.
Yet, for others this was their way of adapting to the Soviet conditions. Informal seminars and salons compensated for the increasingly constraining atmosphere of Soviet institutions, with their pressure to use ideological and clichéd language and with their bureaucratic inflexibility. For some established scholars, parallel science was a place where they could discuss with peers their less publishable ideas. For niche-bound specialists, the institutions of parallel science were ways of building bridges across expert domains. For all of them, this was a public space where they could with some veracity imagine themselves engaged in the pursuit of truth in the midst of the people who share this objective.
At the same time, parallel science was not, as it were, politically dissident. Its dominant ideology was not anti-sovietism or anti-communism but rather “anti-politics”
(Konrad 1984; Szacki 1995). As most reports on the aspirations of the participants of parallel science indicate, they tried to create the public sphere of social interaction that had nothing to do with the socialist state. They did this by indulging in all kinds of activities which were not marked for them as specifically “Soviet”: from studying ancient texts and going into archeological expeditions to simply spending time together interacting (obshchayas’) without using the medium of the Soviet newspeak (or while using it ironically). Anti-politics implied not direct resistance to official discourse but a sustained effort to be outside (vne) of this
3 See Alexander Ospovat. Interview by author. Moscow, September 2001.
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discourse (Yurchak 2006, 126-157). In this outsidedness the members of parallel science saw the only possibility to fully realize their professional vocation.
To what extent they managed to achieve this outsidedness is a disputed matter. For instance, Sergei Oushakine argues that the discourse that I have just briefly described above is characterized by “mimetic resistance”: by turning Soviet official value hierarchies upside down, Soviet dissidents and other non-conformists effectively imitated the structure of the Soviet discourse and thus demonstrated that they shared with the state the same vocabulary of symbolic means and rhetorical devices (2001, 207-8). In other words, both dissidents and official ideologists used the same categories and binary oppositions—Soviet vs. anti-Soviet, socialist vs. Western capitalist, international vs. national, progressive vs. reactionary—but shifted positive evaluation from one end of the binary to another. In short, dissidents were
“anti- but real (nastoiashchii) Leninist[s],” in the words of Alexander Zholkovsky (1998, 167).
Alexei Yurchak agrees that these mimetic patterns were characteristic for much of the dissident thinking and behavior. Yet, most of what he calls “deterritorialized milieus,” of which parallel science is an example, was represented quite differently. He describes how various groups of intellectuals, artists and young people positioned themselves as being
“outside” (vne), being different with respect to any, official or dissident, binary oppositions.
According to Yurchak, this self-positioning involved the “performative reproduction” of existing discursive forms but without paying attention to their literal (connotative) meaning.
This performative shift “enabled new meanings, lifestyles, communities, and pursuits, all within the discursive field of the state but without being fully determined or controlled by it”
(2006, 134). Thus, Yurchak emphasizes the positive and productive, rather then simply negative—restraining and suppressing—aspects of the Soviet discursive universe.
Both of these perspectives correct the limitations of the other and, ultimately, clarify a lot about the relationship between parallel science and formal Soviet academia. In the remainder of this section, I describe the implications of these interpretations for understanding the character of parallel science.
Most importantly, both Oushakine’s and Yurchak’s interpretations imply that the relationship between parallel and formal academia cannot be interpreted as the binary one between two groups or types of individuals with opposite moral characteristics: corruption, inauthenticity and “Sovietness,” on the one hand, and freedom, authenticity and outsidedness, on the other. In fact, despite considerable differentiation between formal and parallel institutional fields, practically all members of parallel science were employees of Soviet academic institutions and some occupied in these institutions the positions of importance.
Nevertheless, the binary opposition just outlined was indeed a powerful trope that permeated the discourses of the historical actors and most Cold War accounts. Yet, in our analysis of Soviet society and culture, this binary opposition should be seen as an object of study rather then taken for granted as a premise of analysis.
Furthermore, Oushakine is probably right when he states that binary tropes permeated both official and unofficial domains of social life. In the unofficial domain, this statement applies not only to steadfast dissidents, as Yurchak argues, but also to those who tried to create with their friends and peers “parallel” forms of public and private life, which would be, hopefully, “invisible” to the authorities. For instance, when these individuals attached high value to presumably apolitical domains and preoccupations which had to do with ancient history, classical literature and art cinema, this could be partially attributed to a kind of mimetic resistance to the official and dissident emphasis on political activism, as well as the official Soviet populism. By positioning themselves and their lifestyle as “non-Soviet,” not even “anti-Soviet,” they continued to employ and reverse the same set of binary oppositions,
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which revolved around the basic distinctions of “us” vs. “them,” and the uncensored vs. the censored (i.e. included in and excluded from collective memory).
As I am about to show by focusing on the case of the Tartu School, mimetic resistance was indeed a significant mechanism of identity-formation in the case of the members of parallel science. Their struggle with official taboos on names and ideas often turned into the creation of new taboos on specific people and ways of expressing yourself (cf.
Etkind 1981). Their struggle with official literary and historical canon led to the creation of the new pantheons or, at least, to the refashioning and reshuffling the official ones. Their rejection of Soviet ritualistic and cultish attitude to science and culture led often to the creation of new rituals and cults. These new rituals were guarded with more passion by the self-elected “moral and intellectual elites” than official rituals by the political elites. The intellectuals’ “purely academic” Hamburg Test in reality often appeared to be a particular form of political correctness, with its own mechanisms of censoring and ostracizing. The shape of their inter-circle consensus on ideas and their substantial disagreements with outsiders are hard to ascertain because of the taboo on “friendly fire” (the critique of one’s
Etkind 1981). Their struggle with official literary and historical canon led to the creation of the new pantheons or, at least, to the refashioning and reshuffling the official ones. Their rejection of Soviet ritualistic and cultish attitude to science and culture led often to the creation of new rituals and cults. These new rituals were guarded with more passion by the self-elected “moral and intellectual elites” than official rituals by the political elites. The intellectuals’ “purely academic” Hamburg Test in reality often appeared to be a particular form of political correctness, with its own mechanisms of censoring and ostracizing. The shape of their inter-circle consensus on ideas and their substantial disagreements with outsiders are hard to ascertain because of the taboo on “friendly fire” (the critique of one’s