Focus on Eastern Europe

When Professor Ronald Linden submitted his manuscript "East Euro- pean Studies: Towards a Map of the Field and Its Needs" to this jour- nal, it was forty-four pages long, with a single-spaced, twenty-four- page appendix of references. This was a monograph-length manuscript, much too long for a journal, and, after serving as a discussion paper for a roundtable on "Current Research on Eastern Europe: The State of the Field" at the Thirteenth National Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in September 1981 at Pacific Grove, California, it was in fact subsequently issued in mimeograph form as part of the Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies. ~ But I did send the manuscript to three reviewers with a note that the author had agreed to condense his paper and make it more analytical, highlighting the strengths, weaknesses, and gaps in the field.

One of the reviewers had his doubts about publishing broad-gauged "state of the field" pieces. He wrote:

I bet you that in most cases the readers turn immediately to the footnotes or references to see whether their names have been listed. After that it's anybody's guess: if their names are not included, they

I. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, Russian and East European Studies Program, 1981, No. 101, 68 pp.

STUD|ES [N COMPARATIVE COMMUNISM VOL. XV, NO. 4, W|NT~R 1982, 315-318

316 STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE COMMUNISM

probably will not read the article because they are mad; if their names do appear, then frequently the people are satisfied and also do not read.

The other two reviewers, however, were positive and recommended publication.

Because five years had passed since we had published a survey of textbooks on Communist politics put together by our Associate Editor

2 Rudolf T6krs, which included a survey of the East European scene, my original intention was to publish Linden's shorter, analytical survey of East European studies, accompanied by his valuable reference ap- pendix and a comment by a senior American scholar, along the lines of our textbook survey. After further consideration, however, I invited several European and Asian scholars in the East European field to con- tribute additional commentaries in which they would undertake two tasks:

(1) to comment on the Linden survey from the perspective of the tradition of their national scholarship, highlighting differences in ap- proach, methodology, research focus, and documentary base, and

(2) to provide the readers of this journal with a representative sam- ple of works on Eastern Europe produced in recent years in their re- spective countries.

One of the shortcomings of American scholarship in general, and of Communist studies in particular, is the inadequate awareness of publi- cations in foreign languages. 3 Our writings tend to be quite parochial, and I thought that we would perform a signal service to our readers by bringing to their attention a cross-section of scholarship on Eastern Europe published in Western Europe, Israel, and Japan. Here again I would like to acknowledge gratefully the encouragement of the Volks- wagen Foundation (through their generous three-year grant covering the 1979-1982 period) to develop stronger ties with scholars in Western Europe.

The members of our International Editorial Board strongly supported this international collaborative enterprise, either offering to prepare comments themselves or providing the names of and introductions to prospective contributors. Andrzej Korbonski of UCLA wrote a corn-

2. "The Science of Communist Politics: Political Science Textbooks on the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe," Snuties in Comparative Communism, Vill, 3 (Autumn 1975), pp. 211-332. See especially Barbara Jancar, "Eastern Europe: Toward a New Paradigm?" (pp. 278-300) and Vernon V. Aspaturian's comment (pp. 300-304).

3. Linden in his conclusions, in fact, pointed to the underutilization by the field of foreign- language material, especially German.

FOCUS ON EASTERN EUROPE 317

ment on the survey from the vantage point of his long association with foundations and other sources of support for East European studies. Two other members of the Editorial Board--Pierre Hassner of the Fon- dation Nationale des Sciences Politiques in Paris and Ferdinand Feldbrugge, Director of the Documentation Office for East European Law at the University of Leyden--made valuable contributions, the lat- ter describing studies on Soviet and East European law, which in continental Western Europe are more developed than in the English- speaking world. In addition, Archie Brown of Oxford arranged for Gordon Wightman of the University of Liverpool to prepare a comment from the British perspective, while Gianfranco Pasquino of the Univer- sity of Bologna suggested Renato Mieli, the former editor of the lead- ing Italian journal on Eastern Europe, Est: Rivista trimestrale di studi sui paesi dell'est. Finally, Heinz Timmermann was responsible for the contribution by Arnold Buchholz, his colleague at the Bundesinstitut fiir ostwissenschaftliche und internationale Studien in Cologne. The choice of Dr. Buchholz was most appropriate because, in addition to his duties as the scientific director of the Bundesinstitut, he is the exec- utive director of the secretariat coordinating federally sponsored re- search on Eastern Europe (which in the Federal Republic includes the Soviet Union) and the author of recent works dealing with methodolog- ical and organizational aspects of East European studies.

Israeli and Japanese scholars play an active role in the International Committee for Soviet and East European Studies and its world congres- ses, and special efforts were made to commission comments from the perspectives of scholarship in these two countries, a Through the good offices of Professor Galia Golan of the Soviet and East European Re- search Centre of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, we were fortunate in securing the collaboration of Dr. Michael Shafir of the Russian and East European Centre of Tel Aviv University, who has provided a lively contribution, with informative bibliographical citations on Israeli work in the East European field. We also approached Professor Takayuki Ito, Director of the Slavic Research Center at Hokkaido Uni- versity. Although he was unfortunately unable to meet our deadline, we hope to publish his view of Japanese perspectives on East European studies in a forthcoming issue.

4. Both countries also possess unique personnel and documentation resources: in Israel the thousands of recent immigrants from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; in Japan the de- tainees and prisoners of war who spent years in Siberia after World War II. (A research pro- ject on Soviet indoctrination of the Japanese is underway at the University of Southern California, with eventual publication in the School of International Relations, Far Eastern and Russian Research Series.)

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This symposium ends with a rejoinder-addendum by Ronald Linden covering some of the more significant work on Eastern Europe produced since the completion of his original manuscript.

As I mentioned in my recent report on editing Studies, ~ symposia such as this, involving scholars of different disciplines in several coun- tries, are extremely time-consuming and editorially labor-intensive (not to mention the costs of translation and of overseas telephone calls). Yet I believe they are very worthwhile, for they enrich the field and make our journal truly international and interdisciplinary.

This issue also contains Walter Connor's review article on dissent in Eastern Europe, a continuation of our symposium on "Dissent and Political Change" begun in the Summer/Autumn 1979 issue, Vol. XII, Nos. 2 & 3. (Review articles on dissent in the Soviet Union and China will appear in our next issue.) This volume is rounded out by our an- nual publication of abstracts of recent doctoral dissertations in compara- tive Communism, a triennial list of other dissertations of interest, as well as a combined five-year index to Vols. XI through XV (1978- 1982) of this journal. (The index to the first ten volumes appeared in our Winter 1977 issue, Vol. X, No. 4.)

I would like to end these introductory remarks by extending an invi- tation to all our readers to comment on this symposium or, indeed, on any aspect of East European studies.

P. B .

5. "Comparative Research on Communism: Some Observations on Editing Studies in Com- parative Communism, 1970-1980," Studies in Comparative Communism, XIV, 2 & 3 (Sum- met/Autumn 1981), p. 269.