Gerstein’s Law of History

One of Haverford’s first tenure-track female professors believes that the interpretation of any event—historical, cultural or personal—can be summed up thusly: ‘It all depends on how you look at it.’

Students who have enjoyed Professor of History Linda Gerstein’s eloquent perspective on the history, culture and architecture of Russia these past three decades owe a debt of thanks to one of her college boyfriends.

In her sophomore year at Harvard (Radcliffe), her then-boyfriend convinced her to take a course in Russian literature with him. On the first day of lecture, Gerstein fell in love—not with the boyfriend, but with the subject matter. The professor, Michael Karpovich, was the premier expert in Russian history at Harvard: “He was a living artifact of Russian culture in the 19th century,” says Gerstein. He was also a model for the title character of Nabokov’s novel Pnin. His enthusiasm captivated Gerstein: “It was the humanity, his broad Russian soul, educated, Europeanized, but deeply rooted in Russia itself,” she says. Gerstein was also fascinated by the course’s exploration of Russian literature as a vehicle for political conversation in a society ruled by censorship and strict government control over public discourse. “Literature,” she says, “was a way in which Russians could covertly talk about politics. I discovered later that this held true for contemporary Soviet Russian audiences as well.”

Gerstein switched her major from American to Russian History and Literature and was then faced with the unenviable task of having to learn a new language at age 19. Karpovich took her under his wing, inviting her to tea with him and his wife, who taught Gerstein Russian folk songs. She received her bachelor’s degree in 1959 in history and literature and went on to earn a master’s in Russian studies in 1961 and a Ph.D. in history in 1966, both from Harvard as well. She wrote her dissertation on Nikolai Strakhov, a Russian literary critic and activist who was a major intellectual and moral resource for both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy—no small feat, given that the two authors were polar opposites and bitter rivals. “He was a Russian nationalist, but highly Westernized, and an early feminist in his way,” says Gerstein. “He was also a biologist by training, and was involved in controversies surrounding Darwinism.” Gerstein’s thesis was published as a book by Harvard in 1971.

While she was pursuing her doctorate in the mid-60s, Haverford had a search for a Russian historian to join its faculty, and Gerstein’s Harvard professors recommended her for the job; “The benefits of an old boys’ network,” she laughs. She was hired by the College in 1965 and arrived on campus as only the second full-time female faculty member, and, she admits, she was somewhat oblivious to the complexities of an all-male institution’s culture. “I had been an undergraduate at Radcliffe, which, like Harvard, had been both co-ed and not co-ed,” she says. “I lived in a co-educational world at Harvard, and as a graduate student I was teaching both men and women. So I was completely naïve about ‘the woman question’ in 1960s America.”

Fortunately, Gerstein found a built-in ally at Haverford in Fay Ajzenberg-Selove, the first tenure-track female professor at the College. She had been teaching in the physics department since the beginning of the decade, and she and her husband, a physicist at the University of Pennsylvania, befriended Gerstein and her husband George Gerstein, a biophysicist also at Penn. “They were very welcoming to us; they lived near us and occasionally invited us to dinner,” she says. “I very much admired Fay, liked her a lot.” Soon after Gerstein’s arrival, Ajzenberg-Selove left on sabbatical (leaving Gerstein as the only full-time female faculty member on campus), and would leave the College in 1969 (she later wrote A Matter of Choices: Memoirs of a Female Physicist and received an honorary degree from Haverford in 1994). “I was, of course, devastated when Fay left,” says Gerstein.

But she had another female support system in place, thanks to the close relationship and cooperation between Haverford and Bryn Mawr; it was an environment not unlike the one Gerstein had experienced at Harvard/Radcliffe, a campus straddling the line between co-ed and single-sex. Haverford’s History department was closely tied with Bryn Mawr, and the Russian department was actually bi-college; hence, Gerstein found some of her closest friends in those early years, such as Barbara Lane, Mary Dunn and Judith Shapiro, among Bryn Mawr’s faculty. She also had many Bryn Mawrters as students in her classes, and was the Haverford chair of an early version of the Bi-College Cooperation Committee.
“Being close to Bryn Mawr saved my sanity by creating a feminist consciousness in me,” she says. “Because I lived in a bi-college world, I became more reflective about the oddness of being in the all-male environment of Haverford in the 1960s. Despite the fact that I had been at Harvard/Radcliffe for 10 years, I’d never really thought about the politics of gender; I grew up, in this respect, at Haverford/Bryn Mawr.”

Gerstein is quick to praise her male colleagues as gracious and friendly: “They were used to intellectual women. They were married to them, they taught them in class.” The few problems she encountered at Haverford in the early years came from a handful of students, not professors. During her third year of teaching she was visibly pregnant with her second child, and remained in the classroom until her eighth month. “It was hard for some of them to look straight at me in lectures as I got larger and larger,” she recalls. “I was gendered female, and rather assertively so. For adolescent males having sexual identity issues—were they men or boys, homosexual or heterosexual?—this young woman in a dominant position could be difficult for some of them to take. I did have a few students who were unpleasantly aggressive in what in those days we called a ‘macho’ way, trying to bully and resisting the intellectual authority of a female in the classroom.

“That was in the early days,” she smiles, “before I got really tough.”

Despite the occasional incident, she was unwavering in her love for the College: “Whenever someone wanted my husband to take a position somewhere else, I would dig in my heels so we could stay at Haverford.” She immersed herself in administrative life, on one committee after another. When the Haverford community decided overwhelmingly to become fully co-ed in the mid-’70s, Gerstein was faculty representative to the Board of Managers when the Board rejected the proposal. “I was present at that meeting,” she says, “angrily harassing the Board members, shaking my finger at them.”

Yet Gerstein herself was not, at the time, a strong advocate for co-education at Haverford, only because she feared losing the longstanding collaborative relationship with Bryn Mawr. “Although Haverford was a distorted place in its all-male identity, it was also a terrific place for a bi-college identity,” she says. “What really excited me about the bi-college community was the diversity: There was the female school, which was highly academic and had a sense of itself as intellectually hard and tough—and there was the male place, which was Quaker, politically activist, and promoted itself softly in terms of ‘the uses to which knowledge is put.’ The stereotypical self-images were counter-intuitive to society’s idea of what is male and female. This was a very positive, exciting phenomenon for the time, for that era of burgeoning women’s liberation and sensitivity to gender issues.” In the end, she was persuaded by then-president Jack Coleman, numerous faculty members, and the Haverford decision-making process of consensus to see that a co-educational environment would be advantageous rather than detrimental to both schools.

“And I really believe we went co-ed well,” she says. “At the time it happened, my son Mark was applying to college and visiting schools that had recently begun admitting women. Comparing them, he called Haverford a ‘dream place for real co-education.’”

While settling in at Haverford, Gerstein finally got an opportunity to visit the place to which she’d devoted more than 15 years of her academic life. In 1971 she took a sabbatical and traveled with her family to Moscow and Prague (six months spent in each city). The context for the trip was partly a desire to flee American culture: “It was the big bad Vietnam War days, the resistance movement, Haverford’s March on Washington and the teach-in on Cambodia.” However, witnessing the harsh conditions and repressive atmosphere under which Moscow citizens lived gave Gerstein new eyes for what she had left behind. “I would have been quite happy to put all of my fellow radical critics of American culture on a train to Moscow to let them foment revolution there,” she says.

Gerstein believed herself to be knowledgeable about all things Russian when she took her sabbatical, but she was surprised by the strength of the country’s underground dissident world, then little reported by the American press. “I found myself sunk in the middle of it,” she says. “Any foreigner who spoke Russian was a resource to them, a walking encyclopedia about the Western world.”

Her personal involvement in Russia’s political movements helped inspire “Gerstein’s law of history:” It all depends on how you look at it. “I became interested in historiography, historical interpretation, as a function of contemporary intellectual fashion,” she says. “My study of Russian and Communist history and the influence of Marxism taught me to ask questions about why people were saying what they were saying. In the Soviet Union, the political control of historical interpretation was so egregiously vicious and fatal that it taught me to be sensitive to historiography—the politicized ways in which history is written.”

She saw her own interpretation of Russian history transform with the times. She had been taught to believe that the country’s actual history stopped in 1917 with the Revolution, and that everything afterwards fell into the category of political science. During her undergraduate days, at the height of the Cold War, many of her professors were extremely critical of and uninterested in the Soviet Union. It wasn’t until she herself set foot in the country that she became more interested in the customs of 20th century Soviet Russia, especially the new underground revolutionary movement. “I admired those contemporary Soviet-era social activists and fighters in the old Russian Revolutionary spirit,” she says. “Their passion, courage and spirit were so like that of 19th-century revolutionaries.” (For a better understanding of these times, Gerstein recommends that everyone see The Coast of Utopia, a trilogy of plays by Tom Stoppard currently
running on Broadway. The “pre-theater reading list,” notes Gerstein, is almost identical to the reading list for her History 244 course, “Russia from 1800-1917,” which she’s teaching this spring.)

Gerstein’s sabbatical also gave rise to a new interest in turn-of-the-20th-century architecture; while in Prague, she shared a house with architects who showed her Czechoslovakia’s aesthetic wonders. When she returned to Russia in June of 1972, she was much more aware of the abundant examples of art nouveau architecture in Moscow as an index of Russian urbanization. “Having been closed out of the literary archives because I was working on a Socialist Revolutionary literary critic—persona non grata with the government—I was switching interests from literature to architecture as a historical and cultural product,” she says. “Architecture is a social condenser—people become socialized in the spaces in which they operate.”

During the ’70s and ’80s, Gerstein continued taking research trips to Russia, looking at architecture and dissident culture; she even led two Haverford/Bryn Mawr alumni tours. However, in 1989 the Soviet Union imploded, and with it the Russian world to which she had become accustomed. “The people I knew were now either dead or living in Israel or New York,” she says. “The society in which I was used to operating had disappeared.” Also, now that Russia had been opened to the West, and vice versa, Gerstein’s skills as a translator and liaison between the two worlds were no longer required.

And back home, Gerstein’s personal life experienced its own earthquake, when, in what she jovially describes as “a fit of middle-aged passion,” she fell in love with, and then married, Professor of Chemistry John Chesick. Suddenly, her priorities changed: “It was clear that I was no longer going back to Russia at that time.” Chesick was reluctant to travel there with her, fearing that he’d be an albatross around her neck as she moved in her Russian language space.
“And I wasn’t going anywhere without him,” she avers.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s Gerstein stayed close to home, “frying other fish” as she puts it, in the History and Russian departments and once again becoming chair of General Programs, which she had created in the ’70s. “General Programs was a way to, in part, think about what students would be doing later in life, reflecting a liberal arts background,” she says. “It was an instrument for bringing things into the curriculum that normal departments couldn’t.” General Programs, she explains, was also the “nursery” for areas of concentration, some of which grew up to become independent majors.

In 2000, Gerstein’s life was again thrown into upheaval when John Chesick became ill with cancer. He died in August of 2001, and Gerstein spent the next couple of years in a stunned state of grief. “My students, and Haverford,” she says, “are what kept me going.”

Last summer, she returned to Russia for the first time in ages, connecting with former students now living there and revisiting her old haunts throughout the country and in Prague, Poland and Ukraine, looking at the small remnants of a dissident movement in a post-Soviet society. “With the new authoritarian crackdowns of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, it’s very much an uphill battle for them,” she says. “There are still dissidents trying to protest, but they are facing widespread popular disinterest. The distractions of global capitalism and political apathy have made it a very lonely world for them.”

She will go back again, continuing her older identity as a Russian historian who knows the dissident movement. “Once I broke the ice, coming out of my self-definition as widow, reclaiming Russia is a finishing process of my grief,” she says. “I’m re-connecting with my younger years, now transformed by those years with John.”