Skip to content

Ethnic Cleansing and Revisionist Russian and Soviet History

Summer 2019
DOI: 10.1007/s12129-019-09791-8

Jon K. Chang is an American historian and the author of Burnt by the Sun: The Koreans of the Russian Far East (University of Hawaii Press, 2016); jonntexas@gmail.com.


It should be made clear which of the scholars cited by name in the exchange write social history. Getty, Rittersporn, Manning, Solomon, Viola, and Fitzpatrick do not write social history as that term is understood and applied by historians of Western Europe and America.

—William Chase, The Russian Review, (Oct.1987)

Yet although they [Holquist, Martin, Weiner and others—namely revisionists] raise the term race, they step around it gingerly and quickly retreat to the safer language of ethnicity and [Soviet] nationality.

—Eric D. Weitz, Slavic Review1

This essay examines why many of the so-called “social historians” of Russian and Soviet studies and in the West did not champion the rights of

Continue Reading

Get access to this article, plus the entire archive, by subscribing.

Subscribe