Suny’s first book, The Baku Commune (1972), launched him on two subjects that were to be central to his writing: the revolution and what we would now call its multicultural character (focusing on the non-Slavic nationalities). From an Armenian family with roots in the Russian and Ottoman empires, Suny has written extensively on the Caucasus. As an early advocate of social history, he was active in the great Cold-War-inflected dispute of the 1960s and 1970s about whether the victorious Bolsheviks had popular support, giving them legitimacy as rulers, or merely took power by a coup, making their rule illegitimate. Richard Pipes, the hard-line anti-communist Harvard professor who was adviser on Soviet affairs to President Reagan in the early 1980s, took the latter view, Suny the former. The present volume contains two essays on this topic, one from the 1980s and the other a decade later, together with a new essay on the currently fashionable topic of violence and terror in the post-revolutionary civil war.

Suny was part of a cohort of young historians in the United States and Britain, some of them Marxists, who were challenging the dominant ‘top down’ interpretations of Soviet history and trying to look from the ‘bottom up’ one. In the interests of full disclosure: I was one of the same cohort, though not in the Marxist wing, which led me into scholarly clashes not just with Pipes but also with Suny, subsequently a friend and sometime colleague at the University of Chicago. We saw our critics as ‘Cold Warriors’, unable to analyse the Soviet Union accurately or objectively because of political prejudice, while they accused us of being ‘pro-Soviet’ and ‘soft on Communism’.

The great early influences on Suny as a historian were the British Marxist E.P. Thompson, with his emphasis on shared experience as the basis of class consciousness, and the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, with his sense of man as ‘an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun’, those webs being what we call ‘culture’. Suny assessed the retrospective significance of the ‘cultural turn’ in an article originally published in the American Historical Review in 2002, reprinted here in revised form. Historiography – looking at the trends in the ideas and methods historians bring to their research and the themes they choose to pursue – has always been Suny’s forte: he even managed to introduce it, despite his publisher’s qualms, in his very useful textbook overview of Soviet history, The Soviet Experiment (1998), and it is also the genre of his present book. But his perspective is not a narrow disciplinary one: concurrently with his Armenian studies and history positions at the University of Michigan, he managed to spend a decade working as a political scientist in Chicago, along with his friend and intellectual mentor William Sewell.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, bringing independence to the non-Russian republics such as Ukraine and pushing the question of Soviet nationalities into the political limelight, Suny found himself in great demand as an expert adviser and public intellectual. Among the offshoots of that new role were his efforts to bring Armenian and Turkish scholars together to talk about the Armenian genocide – something that only a person of Suny’s genial personality and fair-mindedness could have brought off. More recently, he has written a history of the Armenian genocide, ‘They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else’ (2015). An unexpected result of the break up of the Soviet Union was the sudden consensus among historians that it had indeed been an ‘empire’, a term previously used mainly on the political right and avoided by the left. Suny accepted this shift, albeit wryly noting its partisan overtones, and discusses it in one of the most interesting chapters of the book, ‘The Empire Strikes Out: Imperial Russia, “National” Identity, and Theories of Empire’, written in the mid-1990s.

The countries we study often become second homelands, especially when, like Suny, you first go there as a young and impressionable exchange student. He arrived in the Soviet Union in 1964, when the hopes of the Thaw period that real socialism could be built now that the evils of Stalinism had been acknowledged were still tangible. The Brezhnev decades eroded those hopes through inertia and mild (by comparison with the past) repression, but then hopes of reform were rekindled with Gorbachev: as Suny writes, ‘at the effervescent moment of the late 1980s, “actually existing socialism” seemed about to become modern and humane.’ But Gorbachev, unlike the Chinese reformers, decided to start with political reform and leave the economy for later, which turned out to be a disastrous choice. The collapse of the Soviet Union made its constituent republics, including Armenia, independent – but Suny’s Armenian identity was never of the nationalist kind. ‘When someone innocently congratulated me that now I had a country, I told him coldly, rashly, no, I have lost my country’ – that is, the place where, as a long-delayed consequence of the Russian Revolution, a humane socialism might have emerged.

Suny, an optimist by nature, does not accept that socialism was discredited by the Soviet experiment. The socialist goal of empowerment and social justice remains something to fight for, in his view, and capitalism and the assumption that ‘individual greed will magically produce the greatest good for the greatest number’ something to be opposed. Suny also offers no apology for the work of the pioneering cohort of Western social historians of the Soviet Union, seen as gullible and open to Soviet manipulation by critics like Richard Pipes and Anne Applebaum. He stoutly defends their ‘exemplary contributions to our knowledge of a world that was difficult to penetrate and whose authorities obstructed both domestic and foreign critical investigations of its history’, while admitting the inevitable tension ‘between the historian’s noble ideal of objectivity and the partisan political arena in which that history has been written’.