Reading Soldiers' Moods: Russian Military Censorship and the Configuration of Feeling in World War I

William G. Rosenberg is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Michigan, Research Associate in History at Bowdoin College, and Scholar Associate at the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. His interests have focused on late imperial and revolutionary Russia, historical theory, and archives. In 2011 he and Francis X. Blouin published Processing the Past: Contesting Authority in History and the Archives (Oxford University Press), which received the Society of American Archivists' Waldo Gifford Leland Award. Rosenberg has served as vice president of the Research Division of the AHA and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (now the Association for the Study of East European and Eurasian Studies). Although the historical exploration of emotions is an expanding field of research, the analysis of how feelings may affect the course of historical events remains a vexing problem for historians. Important work has helped us understand how emotional experience may be set historically by cultural norms and social contexts, and we have come to appreciate the conceptual value of discerning emotional communities.1 There are also impressive studies on the contextualized social meanings of key emotions such as fear, the ways these meanings affect gender and gender relations, and the kinds of emotional mobilization engaged by mass politics.2 William Reddy and others have taken up the neurological dimensions of emotion as well, including a few scholars in Russia whose work is little-known abroad. Caught up themselves in the post-Soviet turmoil of emotional and social dislocation, they have sought to add “how it really felt” to traditional explorations of “how it really was.”3 Indeed, it is not too much to say that most good historians now accept that some understanding of feeling is key to deciphering how historical experience was lived and remembered.4 Yet the problem of actually accessing emotional states remains, especially at moments of social crisis, when established norms and expressions may be taxed. How can historians be sure that the feelings described in their sources reflect what was actually felt? Sensitive biographers may tease these out in ways that seem wholly convincing, but how does one discern whether or how the expression of emotion itself has filtered an individual's feelings through the social and cultural norms they also engage? For literary scholars, the issue is how literature engages or creates the reader's own feelings.5 For historians, the issue centers on access to the historical actualities of feeling itself through sources in which emotional expression may be mediated by social and cultural values quite different from their own. Is reading emotion in their sources for historians, then, also filtering and configuring feelings, constructing as well as uncovering the evidence? In what ways, in other words, does the problem of accessing emotion for historians lie in the ways it is “read”? There is also a problematic nexus here between the expression of individual emotions and what are often represented as collective feelings: those that are thought reductively to be experienced or expressed as if the collective were an organic emotional whole. Are there circumstances in which individual expressions of emotion might reasonably be read to reflect those of a larger group? Are there differences here between periods of relative social stability and moments of historical crisis? And can the ways in which historians and others configure collective feelings also be as important as the ways in which these feelings appear to be collectively expressed, such as during military parades? Even for historians alert to the problems involved, the relationships in individuals between emotional experience and how it is expressed, remembered, and acted out are problematic. They are even more so for historians when dealing with collectivities, such as soldiers at war. 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