Refections on Research: Studying Eastern Europe Since the 1989 Revolution

The Process of Research: Vetting Qualified Sources 

This piece was originally a progress report submitted to the Director of SURF (a Research Fellowship granted through the University of Houston Honors Department).  The goal of this research is to determine from legitimate sources--primary sources and secondary sources, utilizing accurately, primary sources--the current progress of societies and now individual nations in  comparison to their circumstances at the time of the fall of communism.  This reflection piece focuses on the actual process of vetting proper sources in research and is provided as a small peephole into the eventual culmination of the research that will be presented in Fall, 2012 at the University of Houston.


As a disclaimer: the purpose of this reflection is to illustrate proper evaluation and logic in finding good sources of research.  Thus, some facts mentioned here, which are not cited, will have proper citation in the actual research publication forthcoming.

Progress Report: Vetting Proper Sources

As an update on the progress of this research project, I thought it would be pertinent to review the process of vetting sources that I’ve been heavily engaged in for the last few weeks.  This process will continue until I have, hopefully, filled my composition notebook to satisfaction with the material needed for proper presentation of the research.

There is a plethora of publications on the subject of Eastern Europe since the fall of Communism.  I found hundreds online.  I went to the MD Anderson Library to sort through the most plausible sources for the focus of this project. The shelves were lined with commentary, reports, assessments and historical contents from The Fall forward.

After a few hours of sorting through Tables of Contents and Indexes, I narrowed the field to fourteen books that I brought home with me.  One main purpose of the books was to supplement and corroborate the many articles, and other publications written, some by the same leaders who worked for liberty—especially, but not exclusively, for religious liberty—prior to The Fall in 1989. Some of the same sources for Candles behind the Wall have been prolific writers in their own right since.

Some of the fourteen publications have been removed as good sources for this research.  Two circumstances have arisen to disqualify them. Some material, though interesting, well written, and valuable, turns out to be off topic to this research.  One book in this category is East to West Migration, by Helen Kopnina.  This book is part of a larger project that includes many books in the Research in Migration and Ethnic Relations Series, published by Ashgate, Utrecht University, Netherlands.  Upon glancing through the Table of Contents and the Index I thought this book would shed some insight into the struggles and triumphs associated with the reformation of national identities of Germany and the former Communist bloc. It turned out, instead, to be an evaluation of the effects of Russian diaspora—interesting and partly related, but not directly pertinent to this research

The other disqualification is for poor quality work that I believe is an unreliable or incredible source.  That sounds harsh. But not all information is of the same quality; and while a certain amount of information must be included in good, stable research, quantity certainly does not supplant quality.  One such book I disqualified is The Liberal Project and the Transformation of Democracy: The Case of East Central Europe, by Sabrina P. Ramet.   Ramet produces a classic example of the historiographer’s worst nightmare:  She overlays her own perspective to come up with an interpretation of history out of context with its era and other historical sources.  One of Ramet’s problems is that she is an American who produced this book as her Doctoral Dissertation at Texas A&M, remote from the actual scenes and scenarios she judges.   The facts as she bears them are in sharp contrast with a long standing history and sound reasoning found in many other works. 

For instance, Ramet has an entire chapter on the blight of women since the fall in a deterioration of opportunities, respect, and status.  In the chapter entitled, “The Fate of Women in Post 1989 Eastern Europe,” she states authoritatively,

There are confirmed reports of a tangible increase in domestic violence throughout this region in the years after 1989, which one observer attributes to ‘increased alcohol consumption…’ But this approach provides…an incomplete explanation of the rise in domestic violence since the collapse of communism.  A more complete explanation would also mention

·         The delegitimation of communist ideology and, with it, the communist claim that gender equality should enjoy a priority.

·         The increased activity on the part of traditional ecclesiastical institutions such as the Roman Catholic Church in Poland, Croatia, Slovenia, and Slovakia and the Orthodox Church in Russia, Romania, and Serbia, to the extent that they promote a traditional role for women in which women are urged to see themselves essentially as servants to their husbands and children.

·         The influx of neo-Protestant and New Age religions, many of them subscribing to extremely inegalitarian models of gender relations...[Ramet, 92]

Ramet makes several obvious and not so obvious mistakes in her clearly biased—if not inflammatory—assessment.

First, she notes the disdain for communism as a lack of appreciation for communism and then concluding that such an attitude results in crime. She does not substantiate her unrelated claims.  It is true and documented that there are problems with domestic abuse, human trafficking and mafia-like crimes and corruption.  It is also true that religious activity has increased. But to link the two as tandem rather than parallel situations is faulty analysis. The author also fails to recognize documented religious activity for scores of years prior to the fall that, in books such as Candles behind the Wall and others, record the severe sacrifices for liberty leaders of these and other churches have made in hope of eventual freedom to worship as one chooses.

What Ramet sees as a burden, the people of the region see as opportunity. For instance, Ramet does not acknowledge documentation that says women worked under communism, not because of a sense of women’s liberation, but of necessity: The family would not survive without the mother’s additional employment. Thus the mother could not be with her children even if she wanted to.  She also doesn’t mention the reason, as explained in the Communist Manifesto and the words of Marx, why women should be considered equal workers, which has nothing to do with the individual and innate value of a woman. Nor does she acknowledge that we may not be privy to accurate statistics on crime prior to the fall because that information was restricted. There were many such passages as the one cited above in Ramet’s work.  Again, she often makes claims, but then does not follow with substantiation of those.

Suffice to say, the book fails to gain merit as a serious source of evaluation of the circumstances of Eastern Europe.  Unfortunately, there are pockets of information and outside sources she includes that have merit. But because of her poor historiography, they become moot. 

On the other hand, there are authors such as Timothy Garton Ash, author of nine substantive works and countless articles and essays.  His credentials include writing for The Guardian and New York Book Review.  His definition of himself, I think is quasi-historian-reporter of politics.  His definition of the latter term is “the history of the present.”  His works come not only by way of gilded credentials but excellent and thorough research that substantiates his conclusions—when he gives them.  He summed up nicely one of the best credentials of all for a researcher/academic in his latest work, Facts Are Subversive. In the Preface he explains

To be there – in the very place, at the very time, with your notebook open –is an unattainable dream for most historians...Imagine being able to see, hear, touch and smell things as they were in Paris in July 1789. If have an advantage over the regular newspaper correspondents…it is that I may have more time to gather evidence on just one story or question. In Serbia, for example I was able to cross examine numerous witnesses of the fall of Milosevic…During the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, I was a witness to the drama as it unfolded. [Garton Ash, xvii]

 

Nothing replaces a primary source document in value to the researcher. 

I suspect that a good portion—perhaps half the books I’ve chosen will not be appropriate for the project. Nor do I expect the research to be as I expected. Clearly, it has already changed from my initial expectations.   I have no doubt that there will be information I am surprised by, perhaps hoped would be otherwise, but nonetheless use because it is well documented and substantiated, and therefore valuable.  It is more important to be accurate, balanced and well documented in a smaller amount of material than taint the research with bias, confusion and previous poor research.—So, on with the vetting and the progress of the research.

Works Cited

Garton Ash, Timothy, Facts are Subversive. New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2009. Print.

Ramet, Sabrina P., The Liberal Project and the Transformation of Democracy: The Case of East    Central Europe. College Station TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2007. Print.

References

Von der Heydt, Barbara, Candles behind the Wall.  Grand Rapids:  Wm B. Eerdmans, 1993. Print