An Interview with Richard Stites (From the Editors) (Interview‪)‬

"You dirty rat! You dirty rat!" The grinning man doing the James Cagney impersonation is none other than distinguished Georgetown University Professor Richard Stites, legendary in the field for his good humor and joie de vivre. In this issue, Kritika undertakes an interview with Stites, a historian of imperial and Soviet Russia who has done as much as anyone to integrate culture--both high and popular--into the study of Russian history. Indeed, following the publication of his pioneering first monograph, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia, Stites's several books have been devoted explicitly to exploring the role of culture in the historical process, from the intersection of Russia's serf society with the production of the arts in the first half of the 19th century (Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia) to utopian and experimental culture in the first decade of the Russian Revolution (Revolutionary Dreams), to popular culture in Russia across the 20th century (Russian Popular Culture). (1) Stites's numerous edited works also exhibit an abiding commitment to providing readers with scholarship and original source material on culture in both Russian and European history. (2) Even Stites's study of the women's liberation movement, in part devoted to the movement's intellectual and social history, contained an important cultural dimension, for the book entailed, as Stites himself remarked, "more the history of a morality or of an ethos than the history of an idea, in the formal sense employed by intellectual historians." (3) Yet Stites's interests are by no means limited to culture. Perhaps little known is that in the late 1970s he translated and edited in three volumes Pavel Nikolaevich Miliukov's account of the Russian Revolution. (4) Stites also participated with his Georgetown colleagues and the late Lindsey Hughes in producing a new and highly regarded textbook on Russian history (A History of Russia: Peoples, Legends, Events, Forces). (5) On the whole, Stites's scholarship is striking for its chronological scope, as few scholars, in all likelihood, would feel comfortable ranging widely across two centuries so full of upheaval, revolution, and dramatic change. His forthcoming projects extend that scope geographically as well. One, The Four Horsemen, examines liberty and revolution in Russia, Spain, Naples, and Greece during the first decade after the Napoleonic Wars. Returning after that to the 20th century, Stites's next project, "Hitler's International Crusade," investigates European volunteers in the Axis armies fighting the USSR in World War II.