How the West wrote the Soviet history from Cambridge history of Russia, volume 3

Introduction

RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

The history of Russia in the twentieth century (and particularly the Soviet period) has undergone several important historiographical shifts in emphasis, style, methodology and interpretation. From a story largely centred on the state, its leaders and the intellectual elite, Russian history became a tale of social structures, class formation and struggles and fascination with revolution and radical social transformation. Political and intellectual history was followed by the wave of social history, and a whole generation of scholars spent their productive years investigating workers, peasants, bureaucrats, industry and agriculture. From the revolution attention moved to the 1920s, on to the Stalinist 1930s, and at the turn of the new century has crossed the barrier of the Second World War (largely neglecting the war itself) into the late Stalin period (1945-53) and beyond. In the last decade and a half the 'cultural' or 'linguistic turn' in historical studies belatedly influenced a new concentration on cultural topics among Russianists - celebrations and rituals, representations and myths, as well as memory and subjectivity. One revisionism followed another, often with unpleasant displays of hostility between schools and generations. The totalitarian model, undermined by social historians in the 1970s, proved to have several more lives to live and reappeared in a 'neo-totalitarian' version that owed much of its vision to a darker reading of the effects of the Enlightenment and modernity.

The historiography of the USSR was divided by the Cold War chasm between East and West and by political passions in the West that kept Left and Right in rival camps. On the methodological front deductions from abstract models, perhaps necessitated by the difficulty of doing archival work in the Soviet Union, gave way by the 1960s to work in Soviet libraries and archives. The access to primary sources expanded exponentially with the collapse of the USSR, and the end of the Cold War allowed scholars in Russia and the West to work more closely together than in the past, even though polemics about the Soviet experience continued to disturb the academy While the end of the great divide between Soviet East and capitalist West portended the possibility of a neutral, balanced history of Russia in the twentieth century, old disputes proved to be tenacious.

Still, Russian historiography has benefited enormously from the newly available source base that made possible readings that earlier could only be imagined. One can even say that the dynamic political conflicts among scholars in the past have actually enriched the field in the variety of approaches taken by historians. At the moment there are people practising political, economic, social and cultural history and dealing with topics that earlier had been on the margins - sexuality, violence, the inner workings of the top Soviet leadership, non-Russian peoples and the textures of everyday life in the USSR.

It is easy enough to begin with the observation that Russia, while part of Europe (at least in the opinion of some), has had distinguishing features and experiences that made its evolution from autocratic monarchy to democracy far more difficult, far more protracted, than it was for a few privileged West­ern countries. Not only was tsarist Russia a relatively poor and over-extended member of the great states of the continent, but the new Soviet state was born in the midst of the most ferocious and wasteful war that humankind had fought up to that time. A new level of acceptable violence marked Europe in the years of the First World War. Having seized power in the capital city, the new socialist rulers of Russia fought fiercely for over three years to win a civil war against monarchist generals, increasingly conservative liberal politi­cians, peasant armies, foreign interventionists, nationalists and more moder­ate socialist parties. By the end of the war the new state had acquired habits and practices of authoritarian rule. The revolutionary utopia of emancipation, equality and popular power competed with a counter-utopia of efficiency, pro­duction and social control from above. The Soviets eliminated rival political parties, clamped down on factions within their own party and pretentiously identified their dictatorship as a new form of democracy, superior to the West­ern variety. The Communists progressively narrowed the scope of those who could participate in real politics until, first, there was only one faction in the party making decisions and eventually only one man - Joseph Stalin.

Once Stalin had achieved pre-eminence by the end of the 1920s, he launched a second 'revolution', this one from above, initiated by the party/state itself. The ruling apparatus of Stalin loyalists nationalised totally what was left of the autonomous economy and expanded police terror to unprecedented dimen­sions. The new Stalinist system that metastasised out of Leninism resurrected the leather-jacket Bolshevism of the civil war and violently imposed col- lectivised agriculture on the peasant majority, pell-mell industrialisation on workers and a cultural straitjacket on the intelligentsia. Far more repressive than Lenin had been, Stalinist state domination of every aspect of social life transformed the Soviet continent from a backward peasant country into a poorly industrialised and urban one. The Stalinist years were marked by deep contradictions: visible progress in industry accompanied by devastation and stagnation in agriculture; a police regime that saw enemies everywhere at a time when millions energetically and enthusiastically worked to build their idea of socialism; cultural revival and massive expansion of literacy and educa­tion coinciding with a cloud of censorship that darkened the field of expression; and the adoption of the 'most democratic constitution in the world' while real freedoms and political participation evaporated into memories.

However brutal and costly the excesses of Stalinism, however tragic and heroic the Soviet struggle against Fascism during the Second World War, and however devastated by the practice of mass terror, Soviet society slowly evolved into a modern, articulated urban society with many features shared with other developed countries. After Stalin's death in 1953, many in the West recognised that the USSR had become a somewhat more benign society and tolerable enemy than had been proposed by the Cold Warriors. The 1960s and 1970s were a particularly fruitful moment for Western scholarship on the Soviet Union, as the possibility to visit the country and work in archives allowed a more empirical investigation of earlier mysteries. With the development in the late 1960s of social history, historians in the West began exploring the origins of the Soviet regime, most particularly in the revolutionary year 1917, and they radically revised the view of the October Revolution as a Bolshevik conspiracy with little popular support. Other 'revisionists' went onto challenge the degree ofstate control over society during the Stalin years and emphasised the procedures by which workers and others maintained small degrees of autonomy from the all-pervasive state. Gradually the totalitarian model that dominated in the 1940s and 1950s lost its potency and was largely rejected by the generation of social historians.

From its origins Soviet studies was closely involved with real-world politics, and during the years of detente the Soviet Union was seen through the prism of the 'developmental' or 'modernisation' model. Implicit in this interpretation was a sense that the social evolution of the Soviet system could eventually lead to a more open, even pluralistic regime. The potential for democratic evolution of the system seemed to be confirmed by the efforts of Gorbachev in the late 1980s to restrain the power of the Communist Party, awaken public opinion and political participation through glasnost', and allow greater freedom to the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet borderlands. Yet with the failure of the

Gorbachev revolution this reading of Soviet history was bitterly attacked by the more conservative who harked back to more fatalistic interpretations - that the USSR was condemned by Russian political culture or its utopian drive for an anti-capitalist alternative to a dismal collapse.

This volume of the Cambridge History of Russia deals with the twentieth century in the Russian world chronologically and thematically in order to provide readers with clear narratives as well as a variety of interpretations so that they may sort through the various controversies of the Soviet past. The volume is not simply a history of the ethnically Russian part of the country but rather of the two great multinational states - tsarist and Soviet - as well as the post-Soviet republics. Although inevitably the bulk of the narrative will deal with Russians, the conviction of the editor is that the history of Russia would be incomplete without the accompanying and contributing histories of the non-Russian peoples of the empire. Among the unifying themes of the volume are: the tensions between nations and empire in the evolution of the Russian and Soviet states; the oscillation between reform and revolution, usually from above but at times from below as well; state building and state collapse; and modernisation and modernity For the historians and political scientists who have contributed to this work, understanding the present and future of Russia, the Soviet Union and the non-Russian peoples can only come by exploring the experiences through which they have become what they are.

Reading Russia and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century: how the 'West' wrote its history of the USSR

RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

From its very beginnings the historiography of Russia in the twentieth century has been much more than an object of coolly detached scholarly contempla­tion. Many observers saw the USSR as the major enemy of Western civilisa­tion, the principal threat to the stability of nations and empires, a scourge that sought to undermine the fundamental values of decent human societies. For others the Soviet Union promised an alternative to the degradations of capi­talism and the fraudulent claims of bourgeois democracy, represented the bul­wark of Enlightenment values against the menace of Fascism, and preserved the last best hope of colonised peoples. In the Western academy the Soviet Union was most often imagined to be an aberration in the normal course of modern history, an unfortunate detour from the rise of liberalism that bred its own evil opposite, travelling its very own Sonderweg that led eventually (or inevitably) to collapse and ruin. The very endeavour of writing a balanced narrative required a commitment to standards of scholarship suspect to those either militantly opposed to or supportive of the Soviet enterprise. At times, as in the years just after the revolution or during the Cold War, scholarship too often served masters other than itself. While much worthy analysis came

My gratitude is extended to Robert V Daniels, Georgi Derluguian, David C. Engerman, Peter Holquist, Valerie Kivelson, Terry Martin, Norman Naimark, Lewis Siegelbaum, Josephine Woll and members of the Russian Studies Workshop at the University of Chicago for critical readings of earlier versions of this chapter. This essay discusses primarily the attitudes and understandings of Western observers, more precisely the scholarship and ideational framings of professional historians and social scientists, about the Soviet Union as a state, a society and a political project. More attention is paid to Anglo-American work, and particularly to American views, since arguably they set the tone and parameters ofthe field through much of the century This account should be supplemented by reviews of other language literatures, e.g. Laurent Jalabert, Le Grand Debat-.les universitaires frangais - historiens etgeographes -etlespays communists de 1945 a 1991 (Toulouse: Groupe de Recherche en Histoire Immediate, Maison de la Recherche, Universite de Toulouse Le Mirail, 2001).

from people deeply committed to or critical of the Soviet project, a studied neutrality was difficult (though possible) in an environment in which one's work was always subject to political judgement.

With the opening of the Soviet Union and its archives to researchers from abroad, beginning in the Gorbachev years, professional historians and social scientists produced empirically grounded and theoretically informed works that avoided the worst polemical excesses of earlier years. Yet, even those who claimed to be unaffected by the battles of former generations were themselves the product of what went before. The educator still had to be educated. While the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union permitted a greater degree of detachment than had been possible before, the Soviet story - itself so important an ingredient in the self-construction of the modern 'West' - remains one of deep contestation.

The prehistory of Soviet history

At the beginning of [the twentieth century]', wrote Christopher Lasch in his study of American liberals and the Russian Revolution,

people in the West took it as a matter of course that they lived in a civilization surpassing any which history had been able to record. They assumed that their own particular customs, institutions and ideas had universal validity; that having showered their blessings upon the countries of western Europe and North America, those institutions were destined to be carried to the furthest reaches of the earth, and bring light to those living in darkness.[1]

Those sentences retain their relevance at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Western, particularly American, attitudes and understandings of Russia and the Soviet Union unfolded in the last hundred years within a broad discourse of optimism about human progress that relied on the comfort­ing thought that capitalist democracy represented the best possible solution to human society, if not the 'end of history'. Within that universe of ideas Russians were constructed as people fundamentally different from Westerners, with deep, largely immutable national characteristics. Ideas of a 'Russian soul' or an essentially spiritual or collectivist nature guided the interpreta­tions and policy prescriptions of foreign observers. This tradition dated back to the very first travellers to Muscovy. In his Notes Upon Russia (1517-1549)

Sigismund von Herberstein wrote, 'The people enjoy slavery more than free­dom', observations echoed by Adam Olearius in the seventeenth century, who saw Russians as 'comfortable in slavery' who require 'cudgels and whips' to be forced to work. Montesquieu and others believed that national character was determined by climate and geography, and the harsh environment in which Russians lived had produced a barbarous and uncivilised people, ungovernable, lacking discipline, lazy, superstitious, subject to despotism, yet collective, pas­sionate, poetical and musical. The adjectives differed from writer to writer, yet they clustered around the instinctual and emotional pole of human behaviour rather than the cognitive and rational. Race and blood, more than culture and choice, decided what Russians were able to do. In order to make them civilised and modern, it was often asserted, force and rule from above was unavoid­able. Ironically, the spokesmen of civilisation justified the use of violence and terror on the backward and passive people of Russia as the necessary means to modernity.

The most influential works on Russia in the early twentieth century were the great classics of nineteenth-century travellers and scholars, like the Marquis de Custine, Baron August von Haxthausen, Donald Mackenzie Wallace, Alfred Rambaud, Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu and George Kennan, the best-selling author of Siberia and the Exile System.[2] France offered the most professional academic study of Russia, and the influential Leroy-Beaulieu's eloquent descriptions of the patience, submissiveness, lack of individuality and fatalism of the Russians contributed to the ubiquitous sense of a Slavic character that contrasted with the Gallic, Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic. Ameri­can writers, such as Kennan and Eugene Schuyler, subscribed equally to such ideas of nationality, but rather than climate or geography as causative, they emphasised the role of institutions, such as tsarism, in generating a national character that in some ways was mutable.[3] Kennan first went to Russia in 1865, became an amateur ethnographer, and grew to admire the courageous revolutionaries ('educated, reasonable self-controlled gentlemen, not different in any essential respect from one's self) that he encountered in Siberian exile.[4]For his sympathies the tsarist government banned him from Russia, placing him in a long line of interpreters whose exposures of Russian life and politics would be so punished.

Russia as an autocracy remained the political 'other' of Western democracy and republicanism, and it was with great joy and relief that liberals, includ­ing President Woodrow Wilson, greeted the February Revolution of 1917 as 'the impossible dream' realised. Now the new Russian government could be enlisted in the Great War to make 'the world safe for democracy'.[5] But the Bol­shevik seizure of power in Petrograd turned the liberal world upside down. For Wilson's secretary of state, Robert Lansing, Bolshevism was 'the worst form of anarchism', 'the madness of famished men'.[6] In the years immediately fol­lowing the October Revolution the first accounts of the new regime reaching the West were by journalists and diplomats. The radical freelance journalist John Reed, his wife and fellow radical Louise Bryant, Bessie Beatty of the San Francisco Bulletin, the British journalist Arthur Ransome and Congregational minister Albert Rhys Williams all witnessed events in 1917 and conveyed the immediacy and excitement of the revolutionary days to an eager public back home.[7] After several trips to Russia, the progressive writer Lincoln Steffens told his friends, 'I have seen the future and it works.' Enthusiasm for the revolution propelled liberals and socialists further to the Left, and small Communist par­ties emerged from the radical wing of Social Democracy. From the Right came sensationalist accounts of atrocities, debauchery and tyranny, leavened with the repeated assurance that the days of the Bolsheviks were numbered. L'Echo de Paris and the London Morning Post, as well as papers throughout Western Europe and the United States, wrote that the Bolsheviks were 'servants of Germany' or 'Russian Jews of German extraction'.[8] The New York Times so frequently predicted the fall of the Communists that two young journalists, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, exposed their misreadings in a long piece in The New Republic.[9]

The Western reaction to the Bolsheviks approached panic. Officials and advisers to the Wilson administration spoke of Russia as drunk, the country as mad, taken over by a mob, the people victims of an 'outburst of elemen­tal forces', 'sheep without a shepherd', a terrible fate for a country in which 'there were simply too few brains per square mile'.[10] Slightly more generously, American ambassador David Francis told the State Department that the Bolsheviks might be just what Russia needed: strong men for a people that do not value human life and 'will obey strength . . . and nothing else'.[11] To allay fears of domestic revolution the American government deported over two hundred political radicals in December 1919 to the land of the Soviets on the Buford, an old ship dubbed 'the Red Ark'. The virus of Bolshevism seemed pervasive, and powerful voices raised fears of international subversion. The arsenal of the Right included the familiar weapon of anti-Semitism. In early 1920 Winston Churchill told demonstrators that the Bolsheviks 'believe in the international Soviet of the Russian and Polish Jews'.[12] Baron N. Wrangel opened his account of the Bolshevik revolution with the words 'The sons of Israel had carried out their mission; and Germany's agents, having become the representatives of Russia, signed peace with their patron at Brest-Litovsk'.[13]

Western reading publics, hungry for news and analyses of the enigmatic social experiment underway in Soviet Russia, turnedto journalists and scholars for information. The philosopher Bertrand Russell, who had accompanied a delegation ofthe British Labour Party to Russia in 1919, rejected Bolshevism for two reasons: 'the price mankind must pay to achieve communism by Bolshevik methods is too terrible; and secondly, . . . even after paying the price I do not believe the result would be what the Bolsheviks profess to desire.'[14] Other radical dissenters included the anarchist Emma Goldman, who spent nearly two years in Bolshevik Russia only to break decisively with the Soviets after the repression of the Kronstadt mutiny in March 1921.[15]

The historian Bernard Pares had begun visiting Russia regularly from 1898 and reported on the beginnings of parliamentarianism in Russia after 1905. As British military observer to the Russian army he remained in the country from the outbreak of the First World War until the early days of the Soviet government. After service as British commissioner to Admiral Kolchak's anti- Bolshevik White government, Pares taught Russian history at the University of London, where he founded The Slavonic Review in 1922 and directed the new School of Slavonic Studies. A friend of the liberal leader Pavel Miliukov and supporter of constitutional monarchy in Russia, by the 1930s Pares had become more sympathetic to the Soviets and an advocate of Anglo-Russian rap­prochement. Like most of his contemporaries, Pares believed that climate and environment shaped the Russians. 'The happy instinctive character of clever children,' he wrote, 'so open, so kindly and so attractive, still remains; but the interludes of depression or idleness are longer than is normal.'[16] In part because of his reliance on the concept of 'national character', widely accepted among scholars, journalists and diplomats, Pares's influence remained strong, partic­ularly during the years of the Anglo-American-Soviet alliance. But with the coming of the Cold War, he, like others 'soft on communism', was denounced as an apologist for Stalin.[17]

In the United States the most important of the few scholars studying Russia were Archibald Cary Coolidge at Harvard and Samuel Northrup Harper of the University of Chicago. For Coolidge, the variety of 'head types' found among Slavs was evidence that they were a mixture of many different races, and while autocracy might be repugnant to the Anglo-Saxon', it appeared to be appropriate for Russians.[18] After working with Herbert Hoover's American Relief Administration (ARA) during the famine of 1921-2, he concluded that the famine was largely the result of the peasants' passivity, lethargy and orien­tal fatalism, not to mention the 'stupidity, ignorance, inefficiency and above all meddlesomeness' of Russians more generally.[19] The principal mentor of Amer­ican experts on the Soviet Union in the inter-war period, Coolidge trained the first generation of professional scholars and diplomats. One of his students, Frank Golder, also worked for Hoover's ARA and was an early advocate of Russia's reconstruction, a prerequisite, he felt, for ridding the country of the 'Bolos'. Golder went on to work at the Hoover Institution of War, Peace and Revolution at Stanford University, collecting important collections of docu­ments that make up the major archive for Soviet history in the West.[20]

Samuel Harper, the son of William Rainey Harper, the president of the University of Chicago, shared the dominant notions of Russian national char­acter, which for him included deep emotions, irregular work habits, apathy, lethargy, pessimism and lack of 'backbone'.[21] Harper was a witness to Bloody Sunday in 1905 and, like his friend Pares, a fervent defender of Russian liber­als who eventually succumbed to the romance of communism. Russians may have been governed more by emotion and passion than reason, he argued, but they possessed an instinct for democracy. In 1926 he accepted an assignment from his colleague, chairman of the political science department at Chicago, Charles E. Merriam, arguably the most influential figure in American political science between the wars, to study methods of indoctrinating children with the love of the state. Russia, along with Fascist Italy, was to be the principal laboratory for this research. Merriam was fascinated with the successes of civic education in Mussolini's Italy, while other political scientists saw virtues in Hitler's Germany.[22] For Merriam creating patriotic loyalty to the state was a technical problem, not a matter of culture, and the Soviet Union, which had rejected nationalism and the traditional ties to old Russia, was a 'striking experiment' to create 'de novo a type of political loyalty to, and interest in a new order of things'.[23] In The Making of Citizens (1931), he concluded that the revolution had employed the emotions generated by festivals, the Red Flag, the Internationale and mass meetings and demonstrations effectively to establish 'a form of democratic nationalism'.[24]

To study what they called 'civic education', something akin to what later would be known as 'nation-building', Harper and Merriam travelled to Russia together in 1926. Guided by Maurice Hindus, an influential journalist sym­pathetic to the Soviet experiment, Harper visited villages where he became enthusiastic aboutthe Bolshevik educational programme. Impressed by Soviet efforts to modernise the peasantry, he supported their industrialisation drive.[25]This led eventually to estrangement from the State Department specialists on Russia with whom Harper had worked for over a decade. In the mid-i93os he wrote positively about constitutional developments in the USSR, and his 1937 book, The Government of the Soviet Union, made the case for democratic, participatory institutions in the Soviet system. He rationalised the Moscow trials and never publicly criticised Stalin. When Harper defended the Nazi- Soviet Pact of 1939 as a shrewd manoeuvre, students abandoned his classes and faculty colleagues shunned him. Only after the Soviets became allies of the United States in 1941 did he enjoy a few twilight years of public recognition, even appearing with Charlie Chaplin and Carl Sandburg at a mass 'Salute to our Russian Ally'.[26]

Seeing the future work

Through the inter-war years the Soviet Union offered many intellectuals a vision of a preferred future outside and beyond capitalism, but contained within the hope and faith in the USSR and communism were the seeds of disil­lusionment and despair. Writers made ritualistic visits to Moscow and formed friendships with other political pilgrims. In November 1927 novelist Theodore Dreiser accepted an invitation to tour the USSR, and his secretary remem­bered an evening at the Grand Hotel with Dorothy Thomas, Sinclair Lewis, Scott Nearing and Louis Fischer, followed by a visit to New York Times corre­spondent Walter Duranty.[27] By the early 1930s, many 'Russianists' had moved decisively to the Left. The sociologist Jerome Davis, who taught at Dartmouth and Yale, advocated recognition of the USSR and was ultimately fired from Yale for condemning capitalism.[28] Paul Douglas, a distinguished University of Chicago labour economist, enthusiastically but mistakenly predicted that Soviet trade unions would soon overtake the Communist Party as the most powerful institution in the country.[29] Robert Kerner, a Russian historian at the University of Missouri, gave up what he had called 'racial metaphysics' (he said he had studied the Slavs as the 'largest white group in the world') to investigate environmental and historical factors, work that culminated in his The Urge to the Sea (1942). The epitome of professional Russian history in the inter-war period, Geroid Tanquary Robinson of Columbia University, was attracted to radical thought early in his life and dedicated his scholarship to a re-evaluation of the much-maligned Russian peasantry. His magnum opus, Rural Russia under the Old Regime (1932), the first substantial historical work by an American scholar that was based on extensive work in the Soviet archives, challenged the prevalent notion of peasant lethargy and passivity. Influenced by the 'New Historians' who turned to the study of everyday life and borrowed insights from the other social sciences, he worked to distinguish professional historical writing, which looked to the past to explain the present (or other pasts), from journalism or punditry, which used the past and present to project into and predict the future.

'Collectively', writes David C. Engerman, these new professional experts on Russia - Harper, Kerner, Davis, Douglas, Robinson, Vera Micheles Dean and Leo Pasvolsky - 'offered more reasons to support Soviet rule than to chal­lenge it'.[30] They played down ideology as they elevated national, geographic or even racial characteristics. Russia, they believed, had affected communism much more than communism Russia. The small cohort of American diplo­mats (George Kennan, Charles 'Chip' Bohlen, Loy Henderson and the first ambassador to the USSR, William Bullitt) who manned the new US embassy in Moscow after recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933 shared similar atti­tudes. Kennan reported that in order to understand Russia he 'had to weigh the effects of climate on character, the results of century-long conflict with the Asiatic hordes, the influence of medieval Byzantium, the national origins of the people, and the geographic characteristics of the country'.³¹ Influenced by the German sociologist Klaus Mehnert's study of Soviet youth, Kennan noted how young people were carried away by the 'romance of economic devel­opment' to the point that they were relieved 'to a large extent of the curses of egotism, romanticism, daydreaming, introspection, and perplexity which befall the young of bourgeois countries'.[31] To demonstrate the continuity and consistency of Russian character of life, Kennan sent home an 1850 diplomatic dispatch, passing it off as if it were current![32]

In the years of the First Five-Year Plan, Western writing reached a crescendo of praise for the Soviets' energy and sacrifice, their idealism and attendant suffering endured in the drive for modernisation. The post-First World War cultural critique of unbridled capitalism developed by American thinkers like John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen encouraged many intellectuals to consider the lessons that capitalist democracies might learn from the Soviets. Western Leftists and liberals hoped that engineers, planners and technocrats would be inspired by Soviet planning to discipline the anarchy of capitalism. In 'An Appeal to Progressives', contrasting the economic breakdown in the West with the successes of Soviet planned development, the critic Edmund Wilson proclaimed that American radicals and progressives 'must take Communism away from the Communists ... asserting emphatically that their ultimate goal is the ownership of the means of production by the government and an indus­trial rather than a regional representation'.[33] The educator George Counts waxed rhapsodic about the brave experiment in the USSR and its challenge to America, though within a few years he turned into a leading anti-communist. As economist Stuart Chase put it in 1932, 'Why should the Russians have all the fun of remaking the world?'[34] John Dewey expressed the mood of many when he wrote that the Soviet Union was 'the most interesting [experiment] going on upon our globe - though I am quite frank to say that for selfish reasons I prefer seeing it tried out in Russia rather than in my own country'.[35]

Even the evident negative aspects of a huge country in turmoil did not dampen the enthusiasm for Stalin's revolution from above. Popular historian Will Durant travelled to Russia in 1932, witnessed starvation, but was still able to write, 'The challenge of the Five-Year Plan is moral as well as economic. It is a direct challenge to the smugness and complacency which characterize American thinking on our own chaotic system.' Future historians, he pre­dicted, would look upon 'planned social control as the most significant single achievement of our day'.[36] That same year the Black writer Langston Hughes, already interested in socialism, visited the USSR with other writers to produce a documentary. Inspired by what he saw - a land of poverty and hope, struggle but no racism or economic stratification - he wrote a poem, 'One More "S" in the U. S. A.', for his comrades. Decades later the anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy brought him before his committee to discuss publicly his political involvement with Communists.[37]

Journalism occupied the ideological front line. With the introduction of by-lines and a new emphasis on conceptualisation and interpretation instead ofsimple reportage, newspapermen (and they were almost all men) evaluated and made judgements. Reporters became familiar figures in popular culture, and, as celebrities back home, those posted in Russia gradually became iden­tified with one political position or another. Of the handful of American cor­respondents in Moscow, Maurice Hindus stood out as a sympathetic native of the country about which he wrote. Unlike those who relied on Soviet ide­ological pronouncements or a reading of the Marxist classics as a guide to understanding what was going on in Russia, Hindus chose to 'be in the coun­try, wander around, observe and listen, ask questions and digest answers to obtain some comprehension of the sweep and meaning of these events'.[38] He befriended men and women of letters, like John Dewey and George Bernard Shaw (whom he guided through the USSR on a celebrated trip), and once was prevailed upon by F. Scott Fitzgerald's psychiatrist to allay the novelist's fears of a coming communist revolution in America. To his critics, Hindus was naive, apologetic and even duplicitous. One of his fellow correspondents, the disil­lusioned Eugene Lyons, considered Hindus to be one of the most industrious of Stalin's apologists.[39] Whatever his faults or insights, Hindus developed and popularised a particular form of reporting on the Soviet Union - one emu­lated later with enormous success by Alexander Werth, Hedrick Smith, Robert Kaiser, David Shipler, Andrea Lee, Martin Walker, David Remnik and others - that combined personal observations, telling anecdotes and revealing detail to provide a textured picture of the USSR that supplemented and undercut more partisan portraits.

The Christian Science Monitor's William Henry Chamberlin came as a social­ist in 1922 and left as an opponent of Soviet Communism in 1934. In those twelve years he researched and wrote a classic two-volume history of the

Russian Revolution that, along with Trotsky's account, remained for nearly a quarter of a century the principal narrative of 1917 and the civil war.[40] The Nation's Louis Fischer was an early Zionist, who became disillusioned when he served in the Jewish Legion in Palestine and came to Russia in 1922 to find 'a brighter future' in the 'kingdom of the underdog'. His two-volume study of Soviet foreign policy, The Soviets in World Affairs (1930), was a careful rebuttal to the polemics about Soviet international ambitions. Lyons was very friendly to the Soviets when he arrived in Moscow at the end of 1927 and wrote positively about Stalin in a 1931 interview before he turned bitterly against them with his Assignment in Utopia (1937). Duranty, the acknowledged dean of the Moscow press corps, stayed for a decade and a half, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932, refused to recognise the great famine in Ukraine of that year and often justified what he observed with the phrase, 'You can't make an omelet without breaking

eggs'.[41]

Several European journalists were more critical earlier than the Americans: Malcolm Muggeridge of the Manchester Guardian reported on the famine months before his American counterparts; and Paul Scheffer of the Berliner Tageblatt was refused re-entry after he wrote about the violence of mass collec­tivisation. One of the most dramatic defections was by Max Eastman, a Leftist celebrity, formerly the bohemian editor ofthe radical journal Masses, who had enjoyed notoriety as the representative of the Left Opposition in America and promoted Trotsky's line in Since Lenin Died (1925) and Leon Trotsky: Portrait of a Youth (1926). The translator of Trotsky's extraordinary History of the Russian Revolution (1932), he attacked Stalin's cultural policies in Artists in Uniform (1934). By the mid-1930s his doubts about Marxism led him to conclude that Stalinism was the logical outcome of Leninism, a position that Trotsky rejected.[42] In time Eastman became a leading anti-communist, even defending the necessity of 'exposing' Communists during the McCarthy years.[43]

The great ideological and political struggles that pitted liberals against con­servatives, socialists against communists, the Left and Centre against Fascists intensified with the coming of the Great Depression. Like a litmus test of one's political loyalties, one's attitude towards the Soviet Union separated people who otherwise might have been allies. Communists by the 1930s were unques­tioning supporters of Stalinism and the General Line. Their democratic critics included liberals and Europe's Social Democrats, among whom the exiled Mensheviks used their contacts within the country to contribute knowledge­able analyses in their journals and newspapers, most importantly Sotsialis- ticheskii vestnik (Socialist Herald). To their left were varieties of Trotskyists, most agreeing with Trotsky that the Soviet Union had suffered a Thermido- rian reaction and become a deformed workers' state.⁴⁵ For Trotsky the USSR was ruled, not by a dictatorship of the proletariat, but by 'a hitherto unheard of apparatus of compulsion', an uncontrolled bureaucracy dominating the masses.⁴⁶ Stalin's personal triumph was that of the bureaucracy, which per­fectly reflected his own 'petty bourgeois outlook', and his state had 'acquired a totalitarian-bureaucratic character'.⁴⁷ Impeccably Marxist, Trotsky provided an impressive structuralist alternative to the more common accounts based on national character or rationalisation of the Soviet system as an effective model of statist developmentalism.

In the second half of the 1930s the threat posed by Fascism intensified the personal, political and psychological struggles of the politically minded and politically active. While some embraced Stalinism, even as it devoured mil­lions of its own people, as the best defence against the radical Right, others denounced the great experiment as a grand deception. The show trials of 1936-8 swept away loyal Bolsheviks, many of whom had been close comrades of Lenin, for their alleged links to an 'anti-Soviet Trotskyite' conspiracy. John Dewey, novelist James T. Farrell and other intellectuals formed the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, and the 'Dewey Commission' travelled to Coyoacan, Mexico, to interrogate Trotsky. It concluded that none of the charges levelled against Trotsky and his son was true.⁴⁸ But equally

Introduction' to Max Eastman, Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1955), pp. 7-20.)

45 Leon Trotsky The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going?, trans. Max Eastman (1937; New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972), pp. 19, 47, 61.

46 Ibid., p. 52. 47 Ibid., pp. 93, 97,108.

48 The Case ofLeon Trotsky: Report ofHearings on the Charges Made against Him in the Moscow Trials by the Preliminary Commission of Inquiry (New York: Merit Publishers, 1937); Not Guilty: Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938). See also, Alan Wald, 'Memories of the John Dewey Commission: Forty Years Later', Antioch Review (1977): pp. 438-51.

ronald grigor sunt

eminent intellectuals - among them Dreiser, Fischer, playwright Lillian Hell- man, artist Rockwell Kent, author Nathaniel West and journalist Heywood Broun - denounced the Commission's findings and urged American liberals not to support enemies of the USSR, 'a country recognised as engaged in improving conditions for all its people' that should 'be permitted to decide for itself what measures of protection are necessary against treasonable plots to assassinate and overthrow its leadership and involve it in war with for­eign powers'.[44] Confusion and self-delusion about the USSR affected even the American ambassador to Moscow, the political appointee Joseph E. Davies, who attended the Bukharin trial and later wrote that he was astonished that such crimes could have been committed by Old Bolsheviks.[45]

Despite forced collectivisation, the consequent famine and the Great Purges, many on the Left retained their passion for Soviet socialism until Stalin himself delivered a body blow to their faith with the August 1939 non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. Fellow-travellers found it hard to travel down this road, and Communist parties around the world haemorrhaged members. The New Republic, which had supported the Soviet Union for decades, reversed itself when Stalin attacked Finland. Many who had resisted the concept of 'totalitarianism', which collapsed Stalinism and Nazism into a single analytical category, suddenly saw merit in this formulation. In i940 Edmund Wilson published To the Finland Station, an excursion through the prehistory and history of Marxism in thought and in power.[46] Once a Communist, later an admirer of Trotsky, Wilson questioned the sureties of his earlier faith and ended up with praise for Marxism's moral and social vision while rejecting the authoritarianism and statism of the Soviet model.[47] Arthur Koestler, the son of Hungarian Jews, explored his loss of faith in the Communist movement in his novel Darkness at Noon (i940). Basing his hero on Bukharin, Koestler told the story of an idealistic Soviet leader, Rubashov, who agrees to confess to imaginary crimes as his last contribution to the revolutionary cause. Along with George Orwell's distopian novels, Koestler's exploration into the mind of a Bolshevik would become one of the defining literary portraits in the anti-communist arsenal in the post-war years.

With the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941, attitudes shifted once again, spawning an outpouring of writing on Russia and the Soviet Union.

Some two hundred books were published in the United States in 1943-5 alone. Ambassador Davies's memoir, Mission to Moscow (December 1941), sold 700,000 copies and was memorialised in a splashy Hollywood film that lauded Soviet achievements, 'convicted' those charged at the Moscow trials, justified the Soviet attack on Finland and portrayed Stalin as a benign avuncular patriarch. A grotesque piece ofwarpropaganda,playingfastand loose with historical fact, the film was widely panned in the press, and leading 'progressive' intellectuals, including Dewey, Dwight MacDonald, Wilson, Eastman, Sidney Hook, Farrell and socialist Norman Thomas, signedpublic protests against it. Fouryears after the film's opening in 1943, Warner Brothers reacted to the onset of the Cold War by ordering all release prints destroyed.[48]

One of the most important and influential scholarly works of the period was by the Russian-born emigre sociologist Nicholas S. Timasheff, whose The Great Retreat showed in detail how the Soviet state had abandoned its original revo­lutionary programme and internationalist agenda in the mid-1930s and turned into a traditional Great Power.[49] Instead of the radical levelling of social classes of the early 1930s, Stalinism re-established new hierarchies based on wage differentials, education, party affiliation and loyalty to the state. The Great Retreat represented the triumph of the 'national structure', Russian history and the needs and desires of the people over 'an anonymous body of interna­tional workers'.[50] Rather than betraying the revolution, the Retreat signalled its nationalisation and domestication, the victory of reality and 'objective facts' over utopianism and radical experimentation. The book appeared in 1946 just after the high-point of Soviet-American co-operation, clearly a reflection of the Yalta spirit of the immediate pre-Cold War years. Timasheff predicted that the revolutionary years were over; faith in the Marxist doctrine had faded and a future development towards democracy was possible. Here he echoed his collaborator, fellow Russian-born sociologist Pitirim Sorokin of Harvard, who in his Russia and the United States (1944) proposed that Russia and the United

States were meant to be allies, not enemies, and that the two societies were indeed converging along the lines of all other highly industrialised societies. This 'convergence thesis' would eventually become standard in the moderni­sation literature of the 1950s, and both in its introduction and its elaboration it was part of a general political recommendation for understanding, tolerance, patience and entente between the Soviet Union and the Western powers.

The Cold War and professional sovietology

In late 1945 American public opinion was generally positive about the Soviet Union. A Fortune poll in September showed that only a quarter of the popula­tion believed that the USSR would attempt to spread communism into Eastern Europe. By July 1946 more than half of those polled felt that Moscow aimed to dominate as much of the world as possible.[51] Within government and in the public sphere opposing formulations of the Soviet Union contended with one another. Vice-President and later Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace used Russian character to explain why a 'get tough with Russia' policy would only result in tougher Russians. Others like Walter Lippmann warned that not recognising Soviet interests in Eastern Europe would lead to a 'cold war'. But far more influential, and eventually hegemonic, were the views of a number of State Department specialists, most importantly George Kennan, who did not trust the Soviet leadership.

In 1946 Kennan sent his famous 'Long Telegram' from Moscow, reiterating that Russian behaviour was best explained by national characteristics. The inherent, intractable, immutable characteristics of the Russians as 'Asiatics' required the use of countervailing force to contain the Soviets' aggressive tendencies. When he published his views in Foreign Affairs, famously signing the article 'X', Kennan abruptly shifted his position from considering Marxism largely irrelevant to emphasising the importance of Marxist doctrine. 'The political personality of Soviet power as we know it today', he wrote, 'is the product of ideology and circumstances: ideology inherited by the present Soviet leaders from the movement in which they had their political origin, and circumstances of the power which they now have exercised for nearly three decades in Russia.'[52] Soviet ideology included the idea of the innate antagonism between capitalism and socialism and the infallibility of the Kremlin as the sole repository of truth. Though his explanation had changed from national character to ideology, Kennan's prescription for US foreign policy remained the same: the USSR was a rival, not a partner, and the United States had no other course but containment of Russian expansive tendencies.[53]

Under the imperatives of the American government's apprehension about Soviet expansionism, a profession of'sovietologists' began to form, primarily in the United States. In 1946 the first American centre of Russian studies, the Russian Institute, was founded at Columbia University, soon to be followed by the Russian Research Center at Harvard (1948). The first 'area studies' centres in the United States became prototypes for a new direction in social science research, bringing together various disciplines to look intensively at a partic­ular society and culture. A generation of scholars, many of whom had had wartime experience in the military or intelligence work, worked closely with governmental agencies and on official projects sponsored by the CIA or the military. Most importantly the air force funded the Harvard Interview Project, questioning thousands of Soviet emigres and producing valuable information on daily life and thought in the USSR, as well as guides for target selection and psychological warfare. In 1950 the Institute for the Study of the USSR was founded in Munich. Secretly funded by the CIA until it was closed in 1971, the Institute produced numerous volumes and journals by emigre writers that confirmed the worst expectations of Western readers. More interesting to scholars was the American government-sponsored journal Problems of Com­munism, edited from 1952 to 1970 by a sceptical scion of the Polish Jewish Bund, Abraham Brumberg, which managed to condemn the Soviet Union as a totalitarian tyranny while avoiding the worst excesses of anti-communist hysteria.

American scholars, particularly political scientists and sociologists, were caught in a schizophrenic tension between their disciplinary identity as detached scientists and their political commitment to (and often financial dependency on) the American state. Challenged by McCarthyism, historians and political scientists sought shelter behind their claims to objectivity, even as they joined in the general anti-communist patriotism of the day. Across the social sciences 'Marxwas replaced by Freud; the word "capitalism" dropped out of social theory; and class became stratification'.[54] A group of social scientists at the University ofChicago deliberately chose the term 'behavioural sciences' to describe their endeavour, trying to appear neutral and not scare off con­gressional funders who 'might confound social science with socialism'.[55] The benefits of working in tandem with the interests of the state were enormous; the dangers of non-conformity were omnipresent. Two of the founders of Columbia's Russian Institute, Soviet legal expert John N. Hazard and Soviet literature specialist Ernest J. Simmons, were named by Senator McCarthy in 1953 as members of the 'Communist conspiracy'.[56] The intellectual historian H. Stuart Hughes was dismissed as associate director of Harvard's Russian Research Center when a trustee ofthe Carnegie Corporation, a major funder of the Center, complained that Hughes supported the i948 Henry Wallace presidential campaign.[57] In Britain the most prominent historian of Russia, E. H. Carr, reported in i950 that 'It had become very difficult . . . to speak dispassionately about Russia except in a "very woolly Christian kind of way" without endangering, if not your bread and butter, then your legitimate hopes of advancement', and the Marxist historian Eric J. Hobsbawm affirmed that 'there is no question that the principle of freedom of expression did not apply to communist and Marxist views, at least in the official media'.[58]

The totalitarian model

With the collapse of the Grand Alliance, the more sympathetic renderings of Stalin's USSR popular during the war gave way to the powerful image of 'Red Fascism' that melded the practices of Nazi Germany with the Soviet Union. In order to conceptualise these terror-based one-party ideological regimes, political scientists elaborated the concept of 'totalitarianism'. Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski formulated the classic definition of totalitarianism with its six systemic characteristics: a ruling ideology, a single party typically led by one man, a terroristic police, a communications monopoly, a weapons monopoly and a centrally directed economy.[59] Such states, with their mass manipulation, suppression of voluntary associations, violence and expansion­ism, were contrasted with liberal democratic, pluralistic societies. Because such systems were able to suppress effectively internal dissension, many the­orists concluded, they would never change unless overthrown from outside.

The T-model dominated scholarship, particularly in political science, through the 1950s well into the 1960s, a time when the academy was intimately involved in the global struggle that pitted the West against the Soviet Union, its 'satellite' states and anti-colonial nationalism. The model of a gargantuan prison state, 'a huge reformatory in which the primary difference between the forced labour camps and the rest of the Soviet Union is that inside the camps the regimen is much more brutal and humiliating', was compelling both because high Stalinism matched much of the image of a degenerated autocracy and because Soviet restrictions and censorship eliminated most other sources, like travellers, journalists and scholars with in-country experience.⁶⁵ The image of an imperialist totalitarianism, spreading its red grip over the globe, was at one and the same time the product of Western anxieties and the producer of inflated fears. George Orwell, already well known for his satire on Soviet politics, Animal Farm (1945), produced the most effective literary vision of total­itarianism in his popular novel Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). Its hero, Winston Smith, tries futilely to revolt against the totally administered society presided over by Big Brother, but by novel's end he has been ground into submission and spouts the doublespeak slogans of the regime. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt, a refugee from Nazism, provided the most sophisticated and subtle interpretation of The Origins ofTotalitarianism which she connected to anti-Semitism, nationalism, imperialism and the replacement of class politics by mass politics.⁶⁶

Scholars explained the origins and spread of totalitarianism in various ways. Arendt linked totalitarianism with the coming of mass democracy; Waldemar Gurian saw the source in the utopian ambitions of Leftist politicians; Stefan Possony tied it to the personality of Lenin, Robert C. Tucker to the person­ality of Stalin; and Nathan Leites employed psychoanalytic concepts to write about the psychopathology of the Bolshevik elite, distinguished primarily by paranoia. The anthropologists Geoffrey Gorer and Margaret Mead reverted to

Praeger, 1966), p. 22. See also Carl J. Friedrich (ed.), Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954; New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964).

65 Merle Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 482.

66 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951). For a history ofthe concept oftotalitarianism, see Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

the ever-handy notion of national character, in this case patterns of inbred sub- missiveness to authority caused by the peasant practice of swaddling Russian infants.[60] Russians were not quite like other human beings. 'They endure physical suffering with great stoicism and are indifferent about the physical sufferings of others . . . [Therefore] No techniques are yet available for eradi­cating the all-pervasive suspicion which Great Russians, leaders and led alike, feel towards the rest of the world. This suspicion springs from unconscious and therefore irrational sources and will not be calmed, more than momentarily, by rational actions.'[61] The positive vision of 'civic education' put forth in the 1920s gave way to the image of'brain-washing'. In 1949 George Counts, who eighteen years earlier had written The Soviet Challenge to America (1931), now co-authored with Nucia Lodge The Country of the Blind: The Soviet System of Mind Control (1949).

The totalitarian approach turned an apt if not wholly accurate description into a model, complete with predictions of future trajectories. The concept exaggerated similarities and underestimated differences between quite dis­tinct regimes, ignoring the contrast between an egalitarian, internationalist doctrine (Marxism) that the Soviet regime failed to realise and the inegali- tarian, racist and imperialist ideology (Fascism) that the Nazis implemented only too well. Little was said about the different dynamics in a state capi­talist system with private ownership of property (Nazi Germany) and those operating in a completely state-dominated economy with almost no produc­tion for the market (Stalin's USSR), or how an advanced industrial economy geared essentially to war and territorial expansion (Nazi Germany) differed from a programme for modernising a backward, peasant society and trans­forming it into an industrial, urban one (Stalinist Soviet Union). The T-model led many political scientists and historians to deal almost exclusively with the state, the centre and the top of the political pyramid, and make deductions from a supposedly fixed ideology, while largely ignoring social dynamics and the shifts and improvisations that characterised both Soviet and Nazi policies.

Even more pernicious were the predictive parallels: since Nazi Germany had acted in an expansionist, aggressive way, it could be expected that another totalitarian regime would also be aggressive and expansionist. Indeed, during the Cold War Western media and governments fostered the notion that the USSR was poised and ready to invade Western Europe. Any concessions to Soviet Communism were labelled 'appeasement', a direct analogy to Western negotiations with the Nazis in the 1930s.

Ironically, not only changing reality, but the findings of specific studies, belied the model. The most influential text, Merle Fainsod's How Russia is Ruled, the key text in the field for over a decade, appeared within months of Stalin's death and saw little evidence that the Soviet system would change. Yet later when Fainsod used an extraordinary cache of Soviet archives cap­tured by the German invaders to write a ground-breaking study, Smolensk under Soviet Rule (1958), he exposed a level of complexity that made 'general­izing processes' like 'urbanization, industrialization, collectivization, secular­ization, bureaucratization, and totalitarianization . . . seem rather pallid and abstract'.[62] His younger colleague, Barrington Moore, Jr., asked the important question, what was the relationship between Leninist ideology and the actual policies and products of the Soviet regime under Stalin, and concluded that the Bolshevik ideology of ends - greater equality, empowerment of working people, internationalism - had been trumped by the Bolshevik ideology of means - 'the need for authority and discipline'. The 'means have swallowed up and distorted the original ends'. Instead of 'humane anarchism', the very elasticity of communist doctrine allowed for the entry of nationalism, prag­matism and inequalities that ultimately used anti-authoritarian ideas to justify and support an authoritarian regime.[63] In a second book Moore shifted from a language of authority to the then current vocabulary of totalitarianism and elaborated a range of possible scenarios for the USSR, ranging from a rational­ist technocracy to a traditionalist despotism. The Soviet state would continue to require terror, however, if it meant to remain a dynamic regime.[64]

As the Cold War consensus ofthe i950s gave way to a growing discomfort with American policy, especially when containment of the Soviet threat turned into the military intervention in Vietnam, the Soviet Union itselfwas evolving away from Stalinism. Nikita Khrushchev ended the indiscriminate mass terror, loosened the state's hold on the population, and opened small windows to the West. Increasingly, the regime attempted to govern through material satis­faction of popular needs and encouraged popular initiative. The monolithic Stalinist empire in Eastern Europe showed signs of what was called 'polycen- trism', a variety of'roads to socialism', with somewhat increased autonomy, if not real independence, from the Kremlin. And after nearly two decades of T-model dominance, the first serious critiques of totalitarianism appeared, first from political scientists, and later from historians.

In i965 Princeton political scientist and former diplomat Robert C. Tucker attempted to refine the concept of totalitarianism by analysing the personalities of the dictators and concluded that the system of totalitarianism was not the cause of the massive violence of the late 1930s; rather, terror was in large part an expression of the needs of the dictatorial personality of Stalin.[65] In a more radical vein Herbert J. Spiro and Benjamin R. Barber claimed that the concept of totalitarianism was the foundation of 'American Counter-Ideology' in the Cold War years. Totalitarianism theory had played an important role in the reorientation of American foreign policy by helping 'to explain away German and Japanese behavior under the wartime regimes and thereby to justify the radical reversal of alliances after the war'. A purported 'logic of totalitarianism' provided an all-encompassing explanation of Communist behaviour, which led to suspicion ofliberation movements in the Third World, a sense that interna­tional law and organisations were insufficiently strong to thwart totalitarian movements and a justification of'the consequent necessity of considering the use of force - even thermonuclear force - in the settlement of world issues'.[66]Totalitarian theory was a deployed ideological construction of the world that denied its own ideological nature at a time when leading American thinkers proclaimed 'the end of ideology'.[67]

Scholars had to shift their views or jigger with the model. For Merle Fainsod in 1953, terror had been the 'linchpin of modern totalitarianism', but ten years after Stalin's death he revised that sentence to read: 'Every totalitarian regime makes some place for terror in its system of controls.' In 1956 Brzezinski wrote that terror is 'the most universal characteristic of totalitarianism'.[68] But in 1962 he reconsidered: terror is no longer essential; the USSR is now a 'voluntarist totalitarian system' in which 'persuasion, indoctrination, and social control can work more effectively'.[69] Yet in that same year Harvard political scientist Adam B. Ulam insisted that 'the essence of the Soviet political system' is not 'transient aberrations arising out of willful and illegal acts of individuals', but is, rather, 'imposed by the logic of totalitarianism'. Given the immutable laws that follow from that logic, 'in a totalitarian state terror can never be abolished entirely'.[70] When the evidence of the waning of terror appeared to undermine that argument, Ulam spoke of a 'sane pattern of totalitarianism, in contrast to the extreme of Stalin's despotism' and claimed that terror was 'interfering with the objectives of totalitarianism itself.[71] But since Stalinism itself had earlier been seen as the archetype itself of totalitarianism and terror its essence, Ulam inadvertently laid bare the fundamental confusion and contradictions of the concept.

From the mid-1960s a younger generation of historians, many of them excited by the possibilities of a 'social history' that looked beyond the state to examine society, were travelling to the Soviet Union through expanded academic exchange programmes. The luckiest among them were privileged to work in heavily restricted archives, but all of them saw at first hand the intricacies, complexities and contradictions of everyday Soviet life that fitted poorly with the totalitarian image of ubiquitous fear and rigid conformity.

Excited by the idea of a 'history from the bottom up', social historians pointed out that by concentrating on the political elite and the repressive apparatus, the totalitarian approach neglected to note that in the actual experience of these societies the regime was unable to achieve the full expectation of the totalitarian model, that is, the absolute and total control over the whole of society and the atomisation of the population. What was truly totalitarian in Stalinism or Nazism were the intentions and aspirations of rulers like Hitler or Stalin, who may have had ambitions to create a society in which the party and people were one and in which interests of all were harmonised and all dissent destroyed. But the control of so-called totalitarian states was never so total as to turn the people into 'little screws' (Stalin's words) to do the bidding of the state. Despite all the limitations of the model, scholars writing in this tradition illuminated anomalous aspects ofthe Stalinist andpost-Stalinist regimes that contradicted the fundaments oftotalitarianism. At the same time, though less widely regarded, critics of liberalism and market society, from the Marxists of the Frankfurt School to post-modernist cultural theorists, took note of the 'totalitarian' effects of modernity more generally - of technology, industrialism, commercialism and capitalism - which were excluded from the original model.[72]

The modernisation paradigm

The Cold War American academy celebrated the achievements of American society and politics, which had reached an unprecedented level of stability and prosperity. Historians of the 'consensus school' held that Americans were united by their shared fundamental values; political scientists compared the pluralistic, democratic norm of the United States to other societies, usually unfavourably. America was 'the good society itself in operation', 'with the most developed set of political and class relations', 'the image ofthe European future', a model for the rest of the globe.[73] Western social science worked from an assumed Western master narrative brought to bear on non-Western societies: they too were expected to evolve as had Western Europe from theocratic to secular values, from status to contract, from more restricted to freer capitalist economies, from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, in a word, from tradition to modernity.

Elaborating ideas from the classical social theorists Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, modernisation theory proposed that societies would progressively assume greater control over nature and human suffering through develop­ments in science, technology, mass education, economic growth and urbani­sation. While Marxism may also be understood as a theory of modernisation, complete with its own theory of history that reached beyond capitalism to socialism, what might be called 'liberal modernisation theory' was elaborated in opposition to Marxism and claimed that the best road to modernity lay through capitalism (though not necessarily through democracy as well), with no necessary transcendence to a post-capitalist socialism.[74] Since the modern was usually construed to be American liberal capitalist democracy, this pow­erful, evolving discourse of development and democracy legitimised a new post-colonial role for the developed world vis-a-vis the underdeveloped. The West would lead the less fortunate into prosperity and modernity, stability and progress, and the South (and later the East) would follow.

Modernisationists were divided between optimists, who held that all peo­ple had the capacity to reach Western norms if they had the will or managed the transition properly, and pessimists, who believed that not all non-Western cultures were able to modernise and reach democracy. For an optimist like Gabriel Almond, one of the most prominent comparative politics scholars of his generation, human history was generally seen to be progressive, leading upward, inevitably, to something that looked like the developed West.[75] Classic works such as Seymour Martin Lipset's Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (i960) and Almond and Sidney Verba's The Civic Culture (1963) considered a democratic political culture with civic values of trust and tolerance, crucial prerequisites for democracy that would somehow have to be instilled in mod­ernising societies. Democracy, development and anti-communism were values which went together. As in the years following the First World War, so during the Cold War, poverty was not only undesirable but a positive danger precisely because it inflamed minds and could potentially lead to communism.

The Soviet Union presented the modernisationists with an anomalous example of a perverse road to modernity that looked very seductive to anti- imperialist revolutionaries. With American scholarship intimately linked to the global struggle against Soviet Communism, the modernisation paradigm both provided an argument for the universal developmental pattern from traditional society to modern, a path that the Third World was fated to follow, and touted the superiority and more complete modernity of capi­talist democracy American-style. A team of researchers and writers at MIT's Center for International Studies (CENIS), worked in the modernisation mode, developing analyses of the deviant Soviet road. CENIS, a conduit between the university community and the national government, had been established with CIA funding and directed by Max Millikan, former assistant director of the intelligence agency. No specialist on the Soviet Union, the MIT economic his­torian Walt Whitman Rostow published The Dynamics of Soviet Society (1952), in which he and his team argued that Soviet politics and society were driven by the 'priority of power'. Where ideology came into conflict with the pursuit of power, ideology lost out.[76] After being turned over to the CIA and the State Department and vetted by Philip Mosely of Columbia's Russian Institute and others before it was declassified and published, Rostow's study was released to the public as a work of independent scholarship.[77]

In his later and much more influential book, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (i960), Rostow proposed that peoples moved from traditional society through the preconditions for take-off, to take-off, on to the drive to maturity and finally to the age of high mass-consumption. He trumpeted that Russia, 'as a great nation, well endowed by nature and history to create a modern economy and a modern society', was in fact developing parallel to the West.[78] But traditional society gave way slowly in Russia, and its take-off came only in the mid-1980s, thirty years after the United States, and its drive to maturity in the First Five-Year Plans. Its growth was remarkable, but there was no need for alarm in the West, for its growth was built on under-consumption. Communism, which for Rostow was 'a disease of the transition', 'is likely to wither in the age of high mass-consumption'.[79]

Most sovietologists shared the general assumptions of modernisation the­ory, and the most fervent adherents of the totalitarian concept made valiant attempts to preserve the T-model in the face of the challenge from the more dynamic modernisation paradigm or to reconcile the two. In a 1961 discussion, Brzezinski distinguished between the 'totalitarian breakthrough' of Stalinism that destroyed the old order and created the framework for the new and the post-terror totalitarianism of the Khrushchev period.[80] The latter looked much more like the corporate system described by John Armstrong in his study of Ukrainian bureaucrats, managed by the 'Red Executives' analysed by David Granick and Joseph Berliner.[81] Brzezinski pointed out that Soviet ideology was no longer about revolution but the link that legitimised the rule of the party by tying it to the project of technical and economic modernisation. Whereas Brzezinski argued that 'indoctrination has replaced terror as the most distinc­tive feature of the system', Alfred G. Meyer went further: 'acceptance and internalization of the central principles of the ideology have replaced both terror and frenetic indoctrination.' In what he called 'spontaneous totalitari­anism', Meyer noted that 'Soviet citizens have become more satisfied, loyal, and co-operative'.[82] The USSR was simply a giant 'company town' in which all of life was organised by the company.

The two models, however, differed fundamentally. The T-model was based on sharp differences between communist and liberal societies, while the mod­ernisation paradigm proposed a universal and shared development. For many writing in the modernisation mode, the Soviet Union appeared as less aber­rant than in the earlier model, a somewhat rougher alternative programme of social and economic development. While some writers expected that the outcome of modernisation would be democratic, more conservative authors were willing to settle for stability and order rather than representation of the popular will. For Samuel P. Huntington, a critic of liberal modernisation the­ory, communists were not only good at overthrowing governments but at making them. 'They may not provide liberty, but they do provide authority; they do create governments that can govern.'[83]

By the i960s it was evident to observers from the Right and Left that the Soviet Union had recovered from the practice of mass terror, was unlikely to return to it, and was slowly evolving into a modern, articulated urban society with many features shared with other developed countries. In the years when modernisation theory, and its kissing cousin, convergence theory, held sway, the overall impression was that the Soviet Union could become a much more benign society and tolerable enemy than had been proposed by the totalitarian theorists.[84] Later conservative critics would read this rejection of exceptionalism as a failure to emphasise adequately the stark differences between the West and the Soviet Bloc and to suggest a 'moral equivalence' between them. Deploying the anodyne language of social science, moderni­sation theory seemed to some to apologise for the worst excesses of Soviet socialism and excuse the violence and forceful use of state power as a nec­essary externality of development. Social disorder, violence, even genocide could be explained as part ofthe modernisation process. If Kemal Atatiirk was acceptable as a moderniser, why not Lenin or Stalin?[85]

Alternatives

Even though government and many scholars were deeply entrenched in an unmodulated condemnation of all Soviet policies and practices from the late i940s through much of the i960s, no single discourse ever dominated Russian/Soviet studies. A number of influential scholars - E. H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher, Theodore von Laue, Alec Nove, Moshe Lewin, Alexander Dallin and Robert C. Tucker - offered alternative pictures of the varieties of Bolshe­vism and possible trajectories. Edward Hallett Carr was a British diplomat, a journalist, a distinguished realist theorist of international relations, an advo­cate of appeasement in the i930s, a philosopher of history and the prolific author of a multi-volume history of the Soviet Union, 1917-29.⁹³ Even in the 1930s when Carr hadbeen sympathetic to the Soviet project, what he called 'the Religion ofthe Kilowatt and the Machine', he was critical ofWestern Commu­nists and 'fellow-travellers', like the British Marxist economist Maurice Dobb and the Fabian socialists Beatrice and Sidney Webb, who ignored the 'darker sides of the Soviet regime' and defended them 'by transparent sophistry'.⁹⁴ During the Second World War, at the moment when the Soviet army and popular endurance halted the Nazi advance, Carr 'revived [his] initial faith in the Russian revolution as a great achievement and a historical turning-point'. 'Looking back on the 1930s,' he later wrote, 'I came to feel that my preoccupa­tion with the purges and brutalities of Stalinism had distorted my perspective. The black spots were real enough, but looking exclusively at them destroyed one's vision of what was really happening.'⁹⁵ For more than thirty years, Carr worked on his Soviet history as a story of a desperate and valiant attempt to go beyond bourgeois capitalism in a country where capitalism was weak, democracy absent and the standard of living abysmally low. Politically Carr was committed to democratic socialism, to greater equality than was found

not "necessary", but the possibility of a Stalin was a necessary consequence of the effort of a minority group to keep power and to carry out a vast social-economic revolution in a very short time. And some elements were, in those circumstances, scarcely avoidable.' (Was Stalin Really Necessary? Some Problems of Soviet Political Economy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1964) (pp. 17-39), p. 32.) See also, James Millar and Alec Nove, 'A Debate on Collectivization: Was Stalin Really Necessary?' Problems of Communism 25 (July-Aug. i976): 49-66.

93 Jonathan Haslam, The Vices of Integrity: E. H. Carr, 1892-1982 (London and New York: Verso, 1999); E. H. Carr, A History of Soviet Russia, 14 vols. (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, i950-78).

94 R. W Davies, 'Introduction', to Edward Hallett Carr, TheRussianRevolution, From Lenin to Stalin (1917-1929) (London: Palgrave, 2003), pp. xvi-xvii; Maurice Dobb, Soviet Economic Development since 1917 (London: Routledge, 1948); Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Green, 1935).

95 Davies, 'Introduction', p. xvii.

in most capitalist societies, and believed in public control and planning ofthe economic process and a stronger state exercising remedial and constructive functions.[86] Shortly before his death, he glumly remarked to his collaborator Tamara Deutscher, 'The left is foolish and the right is vicious.'[87]

His volume on the Bolshevik revolution appeared in 1950 and challenged the dominant emigre historiography on the October Revolution as a sinister coup d'etat. Carr stood between the Mensheviks, who thought that bourgeois democracy could have been built in Russia, and the Bolsheviks, who took the risk of seizing power in a country ill-prepared for 'a direct transition from the most backward to the most advanced forms of political and economic organisation . . . without the long experience and training which bourgeois democracy, with all its faults had afforded in the west'.[88] Turning later to the 1920s, Carr eschewed a struggle-for-power tale for a narrative that placed the feuding Bolsheviks within the larger economic and social setting. He tied Stalin's victories over Trotsky, Zinoviev and Bukharin to his ability to sense and manipulate opportunities that arose from the play of social forces. Still later Carr argued that collectivisation was unavoidable, given Russia's limited resources for industrialisation, and on this issue he differed from his collabora­tor, R. W Davies, who had become convinced that industrialisation at a modest pace had been possible within the framework of the New Economic Policy.[89]Carr's work was criticised for its sense of inevitability that tended to justify what happened as necessary and to avoid alternative possibilities.[90] Yet in its extraordinary breadth and depth (a study of twelve momentous years in four­teen volumes), Carr's history combined a sensitivity to political contingency, as in his analysis of Stalin's rise, and an attention to personality and character, as in his different assessments of Lenin and Stalin, with attention to structural determinations, like the ever-present constraints of Russian backwardness.

Carr's friend Isaac Deutscher was a lifelong rebel: a Jew who broke with religious orthodoxy and wrote poetry in Polish; a bourgeois who joined the outlawed Communist Party of Poland; a Communist who in i932 was expelled from the party for his anti-Stalinist opposition; a Trotskyist who remained inde­pendent and critical of the movement; and finally a historian who produced some of the most important works on Soviet history in his day but was shunned by academia.^ira In exile in England, both from his native Poland and the com­munist milieu in which he had matured, Deutscher turned first to journalism and then to a biography of Stalin, which appeared in i949.ⁱ⁽⁰² A 'study [of] the politics rather than the private affairs of Stalin', this monumental work by 'an unrepentant Marxist' challenged the liberal and conservative orthodoxies of the Cold War years and sought to rescue socialism from its popular conflation into Stalinism.[91] Deutscher laid out a law of revolution in which 'each great revolution begins with a phenomenal outburst of popular energy, impatience, anger, and hope. Each ends in the weariness, exhaustion, and disillusionment of the revolutionary people . . . The leaders are unable to keep their early promises . . . [The revolutionary government] now forfeits at least one of its honourable attributes - it ceases to be government by the people.'[92]°⁴ As in Trotsky's treatment so in Deutscher's, Stalin had been hooked by history. He became 'both the leader and the exploiter of a tragic, self-contradictory but creative revolution'.ⁱ⁰⁵

A year later Deutscher reviewed a powerful collection of memoirs by six prominent former Communists, the widely read The God that Failed, edited by the British socialist Richard Crossman. At that time a parade of former Com­munists - among them Andre Malraux, Ruth Fischer, Whittaker Chambers - had become public eyewitnesses ofthe nature ofthe movement and the USSR, all the more credible and authentic in the eyes of the public by virtue of their experience within and break with the party. Within a few years those who stayed loyal to Communist parties would be regarded by much of the public, particularly in the United States, as spies for the Soviet Union. Deutscher was pained, not so much by the apostasies of the ex-Communists, as by their embrace of capitalism. While he saw the ex-Communist as an 'inverted Stalinist', who 'ceases to oppose capitalism' but 'continues to see the world in black and white, [though] now the colours are differently distributed', Deutscher believed that the god was not bound to fail.[93] Himself a passionate opponent of Stalinism, Deutscher sought to distance what the Soviet Union had become from what the Bolsheviks had originally intended and from the possibility of a different socialism. His idealism and utopian aspiration distin­guished him from Carr's pragmatism and realism. His three-volume biography of Trotsky at once celebrated the intellectual and revolutionary and soberly revealed his faults and frailties.[94] Summing up his interpretation of the failure of socialism in the Soviet Union, he wrote: 'In the whole experience of modern man there had been nothing as sublime and as repulsive as the first Workers' State and the first essay in "building socialism".'[95] 'There can be no greater tragedy than that of a great revolution's succumbing to the mailed fist that was to defend it from its enemies. There can be no spectacle as disgusting as that of a post-revolutionary tyranny dressed up in the banners of liberty.'[96]

In the small world of British sovietology, Carr, the Deutschers, R. W Davies and Rudolf Schlesinger, the Marxist founder of Glasgow's Institute of Soviet and East European Studies and the journal Soviet Studies, stood on one side. On the other were the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin, London School of Economics historian Leonard Schapiro, Hugh Seton Watson, David Footman and much of the academic establishment. Carr was extremely critical of Schapiro's Origins of the Communist Autocracy (1955) and fought with Berlin over its publication.¹¹⁰ Carr never received the appointment he desired at Oxford and ended up back at his own alma mater, Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of sixty-three. His collaborator, Davies, became a leading figure at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies of the University of Birmingham, established in 1963, and it was to Birmingham that Moshe Lewin came to teach Soviet history in i968.

A socialist Zionist from his youth, Lewin escaped from his native Vilno ahead of the advancing Germans thanks to peasant Red Army soldiers who disobeyed their officer and winked him aboard their retreating truck. In wartime USSR he worked on collective farms, in a mine and a factory before entering a Soviet officer's school. He then returned to Poland and later emigrated to Israel. Upset with the direction that the Israeli state took during the i950s, he began studying history, moving on to Paris where he worked with Roger Portal and was deeply influenced by the social historical Annales school and by his friend, the sociologist Basile Kerblay. After teaching in Paris and Birmingham, he moved to the University of Pennsylvania in i978 where he and Alfred Rieber organised a series of seminars that brought a generation of younger historians from the study of Imperial Russia to the post-1917 period.

Lewin considered himself a 'historian of society', rather than simply of a regime. 'It is not a state that has a society but a society that has a state'.[97] His Russian Peasants and Soviet Power (1966) was the first empirical study of collec­tivisation in the West, and it was followed by his influential study, Lenin's Last Struggle (1967).[98] In sprawling essays on Stalinism he enveloped great social processes in succinct and pungent phrases: 'quicksand society', a 'ruling class without tenure'.[99] Lewin resurrected a Lenin who learned from his errors and tried at the end of his life to make serious readjustments in nationality policy and the nature of the bureaucratic state. Although he failed in his last struggle, Lenin's testament remained a demonstration that there were alternatives to Stalinism within Bolshevism. Lewin's reading of Leninism challenged the view of Bolshevism as a single consistent ideology that supplied ready formulae for the future. For Lewin, Bukharin offered another path to economic develop­ment, but once Stalin embarked on a war against the peasantry the massive machinery of repression opened the way to a particularly ferocious, despotic autocracy and mass terror.[100]

From political science to social history

By the time Lewin arrived in the United States, the privileges of material resources, state support and perceived national interest had made the American sovietological establishment the most prolific and influential purveyor of infor­mation on the Soviet Union and its allies outside the USSR. A veritable army of government employees, journalists, scholars and private consultants were hard at work analysing and pronouncing on the Soviet Union. In a real sense the view of the other side forged in America not only shaped the policy of one great superpower, but determined the limits of the dialogue between 'West' and 'East'. While the interpretations produced by American journalists and professional sovietologists were by no means uniform, the usual language used to describe the other great superpower was consistently negative - aggressive, expansionistic, paranoid, corrupt, brutal, monolithic, stagnant. Exchange stu­dents going to the USSR for a year of study routinely spoke of 'going into' and 'out of' the Soviet Union, as into and out of aprison, instead ofthe conventional 'to' and 'from' used for travel to other countries. Language itself reproduced the sense of Russia's alien nature, its inaccessibility and opaqueness.

Few professional historians in American universities studied Russia before the 1960s; fewer still ventured past the years of revolution until the 1980s. The doyen of Russian imperial history at Harvard, Michael Karpovich, stopped at the fall of tsarism in February 1917, 'announcing that with that event Russian history had come to an end'.[101] He and his colleague, the economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron, celebrated the cultural and economic progress that the late tsarist regime had made but which had been derailed with the wrong turn taken by the Bolsheviks. Marc Raeff at Columbia, the eloquent author of original studies of Russian intellectuals and officials, was equally suspicious of the ability seriously to study history after the divide of 1917. George Vernadsky at Yale focused primarily on early and medieval Russia that emphasised Russia's unique Eurasian character. Given that most archives in the Soviet Union were either closed or highly restricted to the few exchange students who ventured to Moscow or Leningrad beginning in the late 1950s, what history of the post- revolutionary period was written before the i970s was left almost entirely to political scientists, rather than historians. Robert Vincent Daniels's study of Communist oppositions in Soviet Russia in the 1920s, an exemplary case of historically informed political science, presented the full array of socialist alternatives imagined by the early revolutionaries and argued that the origins of Stalinist totalitarianism lay in the victory of the Leninist current within Bolshevism over the Leftist opposition, 'the triumph of reality over program'. Stalin typified 'practical power and the accommodation to circumstances' that won out over 'the original revolutionary objectives' which proved 'to be chimerical'.[102]

Russian studies in the United States ranged from more liberal, or what might be called 'detentist', views of the USSR to fervently anti-Communist interpretations that criticised mainstream sovietology from the Right. With Karpovich's retirement from the Harvard chair, the leading candidates were two of his students, Martin Malia and Richard Pipes, who in the next gener­ation would become, along with Robert Conquest of the Hoover Institution, the leading representatives of conservative views in the profession. Harvard gave the nod to Pipes, whose first major work was an encyclopedic study of the non-Russian peoples during the revolution and civil war that portrayed the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet state as a fundamentally imperial arrange­ment, a colonial relationship between Russia and the borderlands.[103] Using the activities and proclamations of nationalist leaders or writers as indicators of the attitudes of whole peoples, he played down the widespread support for social­ist programmes, particularly in the early years of the revolution and civil war, and touted the authenticity and legitimacy of the nationalists' formulations to the artificiality of the Communists' claims.

Robert Conquest, born in the year of the revolution, was a poet, novelist, political scientist and historian. Educated at Oxford, he joined the British Communist Party in 1937 but soon moved to the right. While serving in the Information and Research Department (IRD) ofthe Foreign Office (1948-56), a department known to the Soviets but kept secret from the Western public, he promoted and produced 'research precisely into the areas of fact then denied, or lied about by Sovietophiles'.[104] Even George Orwell supplied the IRD with 'a list of people he knew whose attitudes to Stalinism he distrusted'.[105] In the late 1960s Conquest edited seven volumes of material from IRD on Soviet politics, without acknowledgement that the books' source was a secret government agency or that the publisher, Frederick A. Praeger, was subsidised by the CIA. His first major book (of scholarship; he was already known for his poetry and science fiction) was a carefully detailed study of the political power struggle from the late Stalin years to Khrushchev's triumph.ⁱⁱ²⁰ But far more influential was his mammoth study of the Stalin Terror in i968, which, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago some years later, stunned its readers with the gruesome details of the mass killings, torture, imprisonment and exiling of millions of innocent victims.^m No elaborate theories for the purges were advanced, only the simple argument that 'Stalin's personal drives were the motive force of the Purge'.

For Conquest Stalinism was the apogee of Soviet communism, and the secret police and the terror its underlying essence. In another widely read book he argued that the Ukrainian famine of i93i-33 was a deliberate, state-initiated genocide against the Ukrainian peasantry/²² Most scholars rejected this claim, seeing the famine as following from a badly conceived and miscalculated policy of excessive requisitioning of grain, but not as directed specifically against ethnic Ukrainians. Disputes about his exaggerated claims of the numbers of victims of Stalin's crimes went on until the Soviet archives forced the field to lower its estimates/²³ Yet for all the controversy stirred by his writing, Conquest was revered by conservatives, enjoyed a full-time research position at the Hoover Institution from i98i, and was 'on cheek-kissing terms' with Margaret Thatcher and Condoleezza Rice.[106]

Interest in the Soviet Union exploded in the United States with the Soviet launching of the first artificial earth satellite, Sputnik, in October i957. A near hysteria about the USA falling behind the USSR in technology, science and education led to a pouring of funding into Soviet and East European studies. Yet the focus of attention remained on regime studies and foreign policy. In the 1960s political scientists focused on the distribution of power within the Soviet elite and the processes of decision-making. Well within the larger paradigm of totalitarianism, Kremlinology looked intently for elite conflict, even peering at the line-up on the Lenin Mausoleum to detect who was on top. Slow to revise their models of the USSR, scholars underestimated the significance of Khrushchev's de-Stalinisation reforms, emphasising instead the dysfunctional and brutal aspects of a regime seen as largely static and unchanging. Moscow's resort to force in the Soviet Bloc - suppressing the revolution in Hungary in 1956 and the 'Prague Spring' in Czechoslovakia in 1968 - only confirmed the images of a redeployed and only slightly modified Stalinism. But increasingly the evident differences, and even rivalries, between Communist regimes, as well as the growing variation and contention within Eastern Bloc countries led some observers to question the idea of Communism as monolithic, unchanging and driven simply by ideology or a single source of power.

Sovietology stood somewhat distant from mainstream political science, which employed an empiricism and observation that was impossible for stu­dents of the USSR. The 'behaviouralist revolution' in political science in the i960s was palely reflected in Soviet studies and was soon replaced by policy analysis, comparative case studies and the deployment of concepts borrowed from Western studies such as corporatism, pluralism, interest groups and civil society. Turning to the study of the Soviet Union as a 'political system', a 'process of interaction between certain environmental influences and the consciously directed actions of a small elite group of individuals working through a highly centralised institutional structure', scholars now emphasised the environmental, cultural and historically determined constraints on the Soviet leaders, rather than their revolutionary project to transform society or their total control over the population.[107] They investigated how decisions were made; which interest groups influenced policy choices and were to have their demands satisfied; how popular compliance and the legitimacy of the regime was sustained in the absence of Stalinist terror; and whether the system could adapt to the changing international environment. By looking at institutions and how they functioned, many sovietologists noted the structural similarities and practices the Soviet system shared with other political systems.[108]

A particularly influential methodology in Soviet studies - and in which sovi­etology made an impact on mainstream political science - was the political culture approach. The concept possessed a long pedigree, going back at least to Rene Fulop-Miller's The Mind and Face of Bolshevism (1927) and Harper's work on civic training, if not to earlier work on national character.¹²⁷ In part a reaction against the psychocultural studies of the 1940s that had attributed political attitudes of a national population to child-rearing and family prac­tices (e.g. the swaddling thesis), political culture studies held that political systems were affected by political attitudes and behaviours that made up a separate cultural sphere available for analysis.¹²⁸ Beliefs, values and sym­bols provided a subjective orientation to politics that defined the universe in which political action took place.¹²⁹ Associated with Frederick Barghoorn, Robert C. Tucker and the British political scientists Stephen White and Archie Brown, political culture focused on consistencies in political behaviour and attitudes over the longue duree.¹³⁰ Tucker's 'continuity thesis', for exam­ple, connected Stalin's autocracy to tsarism, the Communist Party to the pre-revolutionary nobility, and collectivisation to peasant serfdom. Harvard medievalist Edward Keenan carried this path-dependent version of political culture even further in a determinist direction when he explored the influ­ence of what he called 'Muscovite political folkways' on the Soviet Union. As impressive as such megahistorical connections appear, the political culture approach faltered when it tried to explain change over time or the precise

Systems', Slavic Review 26, i (Mar. i967): 3-i2.) For Meyer an important difference was 'that Communist systems are sovereign bureaucracies, whereas other bureaucracies exist and operate within larger societal frameworks'.

127 Rene Fulop-Miller (1891-1963), GeistundGesichtdesBolschewismus: DarstellungundKritik des kulturellen Lebens in Sowjet-Russland (Zurich: Amalthea-Verlag, 1926); The Mind and Face ofBolshevism:An Examination of Cultural Life in Soviet Russia (London and New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1927); Samuel Northrup Harper, Civic Training: Making Bolsheviks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931).

128 Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946); Margaret Mead, Soviet Attitudes toward Authority: An Interdisci­plinary Approach to Problems of Soviet Character (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951); Nathan Leites, The Operational Code of the Politburo (New York: The Rand Corporation 1951); A Study of Bolshevism (New York: Free Press, 1953); Gorer and Rickman, The People of Great Russia.

129 Lucian Pye and Sidney Verba (eds.), Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 513; Robert C. Tucker, Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia: From Lenin to Gorbachev (New York: W W Norton, 1987), p. 3.

130 Frederick C. Barghoorn, Politics in the USSR (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966,1972); Stephen White, Political Culture in Soviet Politics (London: Macmillan, 1979); Archie Brown, Polit­ical Culture and Communist Studies (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1985).

mechanisms that carried the culture from generation to generation over

centuries. [109]

Tucker supplemented political culture with studies of the dictator and turned to psycho-history as a way to understand Stalin. As a young American diplomat stationed in Moscow in the last years of Stalin's rule, Tucker became enthralled by Karen Horney's Neurosis and Human Growth, particularly her concept of the 'neurotic character structure'. Adverse emotional experiences in early life, wrote Horney, may lead to formation of an idealised image of oneself, which may then be adopted as an idealised self, which has to be realised in action, in a search for glory. Walking down Gorky Street sometime in 1951, Tucker began to wonder if the grandiose images of the Stalin cult were not an idealised self, Stalin's own 'monstrously inflated vision of himself'.[110] Stalin's rise to power and his autocracy were to be understood as the outcome of four major influences - Stalin's personality, the nature of Bolshevism, the Soviet regime's historical situation in the 1920s and the historical political culture of Russia ('a tradition of autocracy and popular acceptance of it'). Despite Tucker's attempt to explain history through personality, psycho-history had little resonance in the profession. Most historians were unimpressed by an approach that underplayed ideas and circumstances and treated historical fig­ures as neurotic or psychopathic.[111] Rather than Freud, it was Marx and Weber who influenced the next generation of historians, as they turned from a focus on personality and politics to the study of society, ordinary people, large struc­tures and impersonal forces.

The first revisionism: 1917

The political and social turmoil of the 1960s - civil rights struggles, opposi­tion to the Vietnam War, student challenges to the university and resistance to imperial dominance, whether Western colonialist or Communist - had a profound effect on the academy in general, historical writing in particu­lar and sovietology even more specifically. Young scholars in the late 1960s questioned not only the Cold War orthodoxies about the Manichean division of free world from slave, but also the usually unquestioned liberal assumptions about valueless social science. While detachment and neutrality were valued as methodology, the concern for a history with relevance to the politics of one's own time and place gave rise to a deep scepticism about the histories that had been written to date. 'Social history', 'radical history' and 'history from below' were in their earliest formations challenges to the political nar­ratives and state-centred histories of earlier years. They were self-consciously 'revisionist'.

The Cold War convictions that Soviet expansionism had forced a reluctant United States to turn from isolationism to a global containment policy, that the Cold War was almost entirely the fault of Stalin's territorial and political ambitions and that if left unchecked by Western power Communism would conquer the world were seriously challenged in the i960s by a revisionist scholarship on the origins of the Cold War. Moderate revisionists allotted blame for the division of the world to both superpowers, while more radical revisionists proposed that the United States, in its dedication to 'making the world safe for free market capitalism', was the principal culprit. The historians who wrote the new Cold War histories were almost exclusively historians of American foreign policy who had only limited knowledge of Soviet history and no access to Soviet archives. No parallel history from the Soviet side would be available until the end of the Cold War. Yet the revisionist undermining of the orthodox liberal consensus profoundly affected many young scholars who were then able to interrogate hitherto axiomatic foundational notions about the Soviet Union and the nature of communism.

Beginning in the late i960s, younger historians of Russia, primarily in the United States, began to dismantle the dominant political interpretation of the i9i7 Revolution, with its emphasis on the power of ideology, personal­ity and political intrigue, and to reconceptualise the conflict as a struggle between social classes. The older interpretation, largely synthesised by anti- Bolshevik veterans of the revolution, had argued that the Russian Revolution was an unfortunate intervention that ended a potentially liberalising politi­cal evolution of tsarism from autocracy through constitutional reforms to a Western-style parliamentary system. The democratic institutions created in February i9i7 failed to withstand the dual onslaught from the Germans and the Leninists and collapsed in a conspiratorial coup organised by a party that was neither genuinely popular nor able to maintain itself in power except through repression and terror. Informed by participants' memoirs, a visceral anti-Leninism and a steady focus on political manoeuvring and personalities, this paradigm depicted Bolsheviks as rootless conspirators representing no authentic interests of those who foolishly followed them.

The social historians writing on 1917 in the 1970s and 1980s proposed a more structuralist appreciation of the movements of social groups and a displace­ment of the former emphasis on leaders and high politics. By looking below the political surface at the actions and aspirations of workers and soldiers, they revealed a deep and deepening social polarisation between the top and bottom of Russian society that undermined the Provisional Government by preventing the consolidation of a political consensus - Menshevik leader Iraklii Tsereteli's concept of an all-national unity of the 'vital forces' of the country - so desired by moderate socialists and liberals. Rather than being dupes of radical intellectuals, workers articulated their own concept of autonomy and lawfulness at the factory level, while peasant soldiers developed a keen sense of what kind of war (and for what regime) they were willing to fight. More convincingly than any of their political opponents, the Bolsheviks pushed for a government of the lower classes institutionalised in the soviets, advocated workers' control over industry and an end to the war. By the early autumn of 1917, a coincidence of lower-class aspirations and the Bolshevik programme resulted in elected Leninist majorities in the soviets of both Petrograd and Moscow and the strategic support of soldiers on the northern and western fronts. But, after a relatively easy accession to power, the Bolsheviks, never a majority movement in peasant Russia, were faced by dissolution of political authority, complete collapse of the economy and disintegration of the country along ethnic lines. As Russia slid into civil war, the Bolsheviks embarked on a programme of regenerating state power that involved economic centralisation and the use of violence and terror against their opponents.

The political/personality approach of the orthodox school, revived later in Pipes's multi-volume treatment, usually noted the social radicalisation but offered no explanation of the growing gap between the propertied classes and the demokratiia (as the socialists styled their constituents), except the disgust of the workers, soldiers and sailors with the vacillations ofthe moderate socialists and the effectiveness of Bolshevik propaganda.[112] Historians of Russian labour described the growing desperation of workers after the inflationary erosion of their wage gains of the early months of the revolution and the lockouts and closures of factories. The parallel radicalisation of soldiers turned the ranks against officers as the government and the moderate leadership of the soviets failed to end the war. As the revolutionary year progressed, tsentsovoe obshchestvo (propertied society) and the liberal intelligentsia grew increasingly hostile towards the lower classes and the plethora of committees and councils, which they believed undermined legitimately constituted authority. Taken together these works demonstrated that the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917 with considerable popular support in the largest cities of the empire. What remained a matter of dispute was the degree, consistency, durability and meaning of that support.

Recognising that revolutions, by their very nature, are illegitimate, extra- legal actions overthrowing constituted political regimes, social historians did not explicitly pose the question of their 'legitimacy' as if Soviet power required the sanction of academic historians. On the other hand, the 'political conspir­atorial' interpretation, dominant in the West for the first fifty years of Soviet power, implied the illegitimacy ofthe Communist government and contained within it a powerful argument for political opposition to the Soviet regime. Conservative historians, such as Malia and Pipes, rejected the notion that the revolution 'had gone wrong' in the years after Lenin or been 'betrayed' by Stalin, and argued instead that 'Stalin was Lenin writ large, and there cannot be a democratic source to return to'.[113] In the late 1980s and 1990s Soviet intel­lectuals, disillusioned by the economic and moral failures ofthe Soviet system, found these views, as well as the concept of totalitarianism, consonant with their own evolving alienation from Marxism. When Gorbachev proposed a rereading of Soviet history but tried to limit the critique to Stalinism, daring intellectuals opened (after 1987) a more fundamental attack on the legacy of the revolution. The interpretation of the October seizure of power as either a coup d'etat without popular support or as the result of a fortuitous series of accidents in the midst of the 'galloping chaos' of the revolution re-emerged, first among Soviet activists and politicians, journalists and publicists and later in the West in the discussion around the publication of Pipes's own study of the Revolutions of 1917.[114] Yet most Western specialists writing on the revolu­tion considered the thesis that the revolution was popular, both in the sense of involving masses of people and broad support for Soviet power (if not the Bolshevik party itself), 'incontrovertible'.[115]

By the i980s, despite the resistance of Pipes and a few others, the revisionist position had swept the field of i9i7 studies, and the term 'revisionism' migrated to characterise a group of social historians investigating the vicissitudes of the working class and the upheavals of the Stalin years.

The fate of labour history: from social to cultural

Social history was never a unified practice, either in its methodologies or its interests, but rather a range of approaches, from social 'scientific' quantifica­tion to cultural anthropologies, concerned with the expansion of the field of historical enquiry. The major effect of the turn to the social was the broadening of the very conception of the political in two important ways. First, borrowing from the insights of feminism and the legacy of the New Left that the 'personal is political', politics was now seen as deeply embedded in the social realm, in aspects of everyday life farbeyond the state andpolitical institutions.[116] The turn towards social history reduced the concern with labour politics, but 'politics in the broader sense - the power relations of various social groups and interests - intruded in the lives of Russian workers too directly and persistently to be ignored'.[117] Second, the realm of politics was recontextualised within society, so that the state and political actors were seen as constrained by social possi­bilities and influenced by actors and processes outside political institutions.[118]Not surprisingly, this rethinking of power relations would eventually involve consideration of cultural and discursive hegemony and exploration of 'the images of power and authority, the popular mentalities of subordination'.ⁱⁱ⁴ⁱⁱ

The great wave of interest in the Russian working class crested in the last decades of the Soviet experience, only to crash on the rocks of state socialism's demise. Some labour historians in Britain and the United States challenged Soviet narratives of growing class cohesion and radical conscious­ness in the years up to the revolution with counter-stories of decomposition,

ronald grigor sunt

fragmentation and accommodation, while others elaborated a grand march of labour not far removed from the Soviet account. From peasant to peasant worker to hereditary proletarian, the Russian worker moved from the world of the village to the factory, encountering along the way more 'conscious' worker activists and Social Democratic intellectuals, who enlightened the worker to his true interests and revolutionary political role. Workers' experience involved the unfolding of an immanent sense of class, the 'discovery' of class and the eventuality, even inevitability, of revolutionary consciousness (under the right circumstances or with the strategic intervention of radical intellectuals). Cate­gories, as well as narrative devices, were drawn either from sources themselves saturated with Marxist understandings or directly from Soviet works.

The classic picture of Soviet labour in the 1930s had been provided by the former Menshevik Solomon Schwarz, who wrote in 1951 about the draco­nian labour laws that had essentially tied workers to factories and eliminated their ability to resist.[119] By the 1980s the focus had shifted from an empha­sis on state intervention and repression to the nature of the work process and the informal organisation of the shop floor. Several accounts, eventually dubbed 'revisionist', related the enthusiasm of workers for the exertions of rapid industrialisation of the early 1930s. Young skilled workers joined the 'offensives' against 'bourgeois' specialists, moderate union leaders and others dubbed 'enemy'. This group of workers in particular, standing between their older, skilled co-workers disoriented by the industrialisation drive and peasant migrants to the factories, were committed to the notion of building social- ism.[120] Tens of thousands of radicalised workers left for the countryside to 'convince' the peasants to join the collective farms.[121] Rather than successfully 'atomising' the working class, the state, powerful as it appeared, was limited in its ability to coerce workers. With working hands scarce, workers found areas of autonomy in which they could 'bargain' with the state, and factory bosses had to compete with one another for skilled labour. Even as they lost the ability to act in an organised fashion, in thousands of small ways work­ers were able to affect the system.[122] Shop-floor studies and micro-histories undermined the overly simple political interpretation of Stalinist society and, more particularly, the totalitarian model, in which an all-powerful state ren­dered an atomised population completely impotent.

Social history was often uncomfortable with its pedigree in Marxism and a base-substructure model of explanation ('it's the economy, stupid!'). Following the pioneering work in other historiographies by E. P. Thompson, William H. Sewell, Jr., Gareth Stedman Jones, Joan Wallach Scott and others, Russian historians began to pay more attention to language, culture and the available repertoire of ideas.[123] Investigating class formation in the post-Thompsonian period involved not only exploring the structures of the capitalist mode of production or the behaviour of workers during protests and strikes, but also the discourses in which workers expressed their sense of self, defined their 'interests', and articulated their sense of power or, more likely, powerless- ness. Whatever the experience of workers might have been, the availability of an intense conversation about class among the intellectuals closest to them provided images and language with which to articulate and reconceive their position. While structures and social positions, or even 'experience', influence, shape and limit social actors, they do not lead to action or create meaning in and of themselves. The discourses, cultures and universes of available mean­ings through which actors mediate their life experience all have to be added

into the mix. [124]

The study of Stalinism: the next revisionism

The term 'Stalinism' has its own genealogy, beginning in the mid-i920s even before the system that would bear its name yet existed. Trotsky applied the word to the moderate 'centrist' tendencies within the party stemming from the 'ebbing of revolution' and identified with his opponent, Stalin.[125]

By 1935 Trotsky's use of Stalinism gravitated closer to the Marxist meaning of 'Bonapartism' or 'Thermidor', 'the crudest form of opportunism and social patriotism'.[126] Even before Trotsky's murder in August 1940, Stalinism had become a way of characterising the particular form of social and political organisation in the Soviet Union, distinct from capitalism but for Trotskyists and other non-Communist radicals not quite socialist. Not until the falling away of the totalitarian model, however, did scholars bring the term Stalin­ism into social science discussion as a socio-political formation to be analysed in its own right. For Tucker Stalinism 'represented, among other things, a far-reaching Russification of the already somewhat Russified earlier (Leninist) Soviet political culture'.[127] For his younger colleague at Princeton, Stephen F. Cohen, 'Stalinism was not simply nationalism, bureaucratization, absence of democracy, censorship, police repression, and the rest in any precedented sense . . . Instead Stalinism was excess, extraordinary extremism, in each.'[128]Taking a more social historical perspective, Lewin saw Stalinism as a deeply contradictory phenomenon:

The Stalinist development brought about a different outcome: as the country was surging ahead in economic and military terms, it was moving backwards, compared to the later period in tsarism and even the NEP, in terms of social and political freedoms. This was not only a specific and blatant case of devel­opment without emancipation; it was, in fact, a retreat into a tighter-than-ever harnessing of society to the state bureaucracy, which became the main social vehicle of the state's policies and ethos.[129]

Stalinism was now a way of describing a stage of development of non-capitalist statist regimes in developing countries dominated by a Leninist party, as well as an indictment of undemocratic, failed socialist societies.

A key question dividing Soviet studies was the issue of continuity (or rup­ture) between the regimes of Lenin and Stalin. Was Stalinism implicit in orig­inal Marxism or the Leninist version, or had there been alternatives open to the Bolsheviks? Along with Tucker and Lewin, Cohen was one of the major opponents ofthe view that saw Stalin as the logical or even inevitable outcome of Leninism. While it had its roots in earlier experiences, Stalinism was qual­itatively different from anything that went before or came after.[130] Original

Bolshevism had been a diverse political movement in which Leninism was but one, albeit the dominant, strain. In the years of the New Economic Policy (1921-8) Bolsheviks, far from united in their plans for the future socialist society, presided over a far more tolerant and pluralistic social order than would fol­low after Stalin's revolution from above. Stalin's policies of 1929-33 rejected the gradualist Bukharinist programme of slower but steady growth within the framework of NEP and in its place built a new state that 'was less a product of Bolshevik programs or planning than of desperate attempts to cope with the social pandemonium and crises created by the Stalinist leadership itself in 1929-33'.[131]

The cohort of social historians of Stalinism that emerged in the 1980s was not particularly interested in broad synthetic interpretations of Stalinism or Marxist-inspired typologies. Their challenge was directed against the top- down, state-intervention-into-society approach and proposed looking primar­ily at society, while at the same time disaggregating what was meant by soci­ety. They looked for initiative from below, popular resistance to the regime's agenda, as well as sources of support for radical transformation.[132] Some stressed the improvisation of state policies, the chaos of the state machinery, the lack of control in the countryside. Others attempted to diminish the role of Stalin. As they painted a picture quite different from the totalitarian vision of effective dominance from above and atomisation below, these revisionists came under withering attack from more traditional scholars, who saw them as self-deluded apologists for Stalin at best and incompetent, venal falsifiers at worst.[133]

For Sheila Fitzpatrick, the standard Trotskyist formulation of the bureau­cracy standing over and dominating society was far too simplistic, for the lower echelons of the bureaucracy were as much dominated as dominating.[134]Fascinated by the upward social mobility into the elite that characterised early Soviet society, she introduced Western audiences to the vydvizhentsy (those thrust upward from the working class).[135] In contrast to those Western scholars who argued that the erosion of the working class was key to the eventual evolution of the Bolshevik regime from a dictatorship of the pro­letariat to a dictatorship of the bureaucracy, Fitzpatrick contended that the real meaning of the revolution was the coming to power of former work­ers who occupied the key party and state positions in significant numbers. 'The Bolsheviks', according to Fitzpatrick, 'had made an absurd, undeliverable promise to the working class when they talked of a "dictatorship of the prole­tariat". The oxymoron of a "ruling proletariat", appealing though it might be to dialectical thinkers, was not realizable in the real world.'[136] Workers, in her view, had become 'masters' of Russian society by moving into the old masters' jobs. The longue duwe of the revolution became a tale of upward social mobility that encompassed modernisation (escape from backwardness), class (the fate of the workers) and revolutionary violence (how the regime dealt with its enemies).[137]

Along with the collectivisation of peasant agriculture and the vicious de- kulakisation campaigns, the principal subject of enquiry for revisionist histori­ans in the 1980s was the Great Terror ofthe late 1930s. Earlier, political scientists, like Brzezinski, had proposed that purging was a permanent and necessary component oftotalitarianism in lieu of elections.[138] Solzhenitsyn, whose fiction and quasi-historical writing on the Gulag Archipelago had enormous effect in the West, saw the purges as simply the most extreme manifestation of the amoral- ity of the Marxist vision, and the Ezhovshchina as an inherent and inevitable part of the Soviet system.[139] Tucker and Conquest saw the Great Purges as an effort 'to achieve an unrestricted personal dictatorship with a totality of power that [Stalin] did not yet possess in 1934'.[140] Initiation of the purges came from Stalin, who guided and prodded the arrests, show trials and executions forward, aided by the closest members of his entourage. Similarly Lewin argued that the purges were the excessive repression that Stalin required to turn a naturally oligarchic bureaucratic system into his personal autocracy. Here personality and politics merged. Stalin could not 'let the sprawling administration settle and get encrusted in their chairs and habits', which 'could also encourage them to try and curtail the power of the very top and the personalized ruling style of the chief of the state - and this was probably a real prospect the paranoid leader did not relish'.[141]

Revisionists explained the purges as a more extreme form of political infight­ing. High-level personal rivalries, disputes over the direction of the moderni­sation programme, and conflicts between centre and periphery were at the base of the killing. J. Arch Getty argued that 'the Ezhovshchina was rather a radical, even hysterical, reaction to bureaucracy. The entrenched officehold­ers were destroyed from above and below in a chaotic wave of voluntarism and revolutionary Puritanism.'[142] Dissatisfaction with Stalin's rule and with the harsh material conditions was palpable in the mid-i930s, wrote Gabor T. Rittersporn, and the purges were fed by popular discontent with corrup­tion, inefficiency and the arbitrariness of those in power.[143] Several writers focused on the effects of the purges rather than their causes, implying that intentions may be read into the results. A. L. Unger, Kendall E. Bailes and Fitz- patrick showed how a new 'leading stratum' of Soviet-educated 'specialists' replaced the Old Bolsheviks and 'bourgeois specialists'.[144] The largest numbers of beneficiaries were promoted workers and party rank-and-file, young techni­cians, who would make up the Soviet elite through the post-Stalin period until Gorbachev took power. Stalin, wrote Fitzpatrick, saw the old party bosses less as revolutionaries than 'as Soviet boyars (feudal lords) and himself as a latter-day Ivan the Terrible, who had to destroy the boyars to build a modern nation state and a new service nobility'.[145]

Soviet power, however, could never rule by terror alone. In Weberian terms, the regime needed to base itself on more than raw power; it needed to create legitimated authority with a degree of acquiescence or even consent from the people. Social historians were able to record both displays of enthusi­asm and active, bloody resistance. Lynne Viola recorded over 13,700 peasant disturbances and more than 1,000 assassinations of officials in 1930 alone, while

Jeffrey Rossman uncovered significant worker resistance in the textile indus­try under Stalin, protests accompanied by the rhetoric of class struggle and commitment to the revolution.[146] Sarah Davies read through police reports (svodki) to discover that popular opinion in Stalin's Russia was contradictory and multivalent, borrowing the themes set down by the regime and sometimes turning them in new directions.[147] Workers, for example, favoured the affirma­tion action measures during the First Five-Year Plan that gave them and their families privileged access to education but were dismayed at the conservative 'Great Retreat' of the mid-i930s. Davies's Russians do not fit the stereotype of a downtrodden people fatally bound by an authoritarian political culture. Given half a chance, as during the elections of i937, Soviet citizens brought their more democratic ideas to the political process. Along with grumbling about the lack of bread and alienation from those with privileges, ordinary Soviets retained a faith in the revolution and socialism and preserved a sense that the egalitarian promise of 1917 had been violated. Class resentments and suspicion of those in power marched along with patriotism and a sense of social entitlement.

From above to below, from centre to periphery

Revisionism's assault on older interpretations of Communism during the years of detente (roughly 1965-75) gained such wide acceptance within the academy in the late 1970s and early 1980s that conservatives felt beleaguered and marginalised in the profession. Yet representatives of earlier conceptuali­sations still had the greater resonance outside the circles of specialists, within the public sphere, and in government. Zbigniew Brzezinski served as National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter (i977-8i), while Richard Pipes spent two years on the National Security Council as resident expert on the USSR early in the administration of Ronald Reagan (1981-3). Brzezinski was instrumental in the turn towards a harder line towards the Soviet Union, which after the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in December i979 escalated into a covert war aiding Muslim militants against the Kabul government and the Soviets. Pipes proudly took credit for toughening the anti-Soviet line of

President Reagan, already a dedicated anti-Communist but prone at times to sentimentality.^ As a historian primarily of tsarist Russia, he brought back to Washington views based on ideas of national character and culture that had long been abandoned by professional historians.[148]

Political history had often meant little more than the story of great men, monarchs and warriors, while social history was by its nature inclusive, bring­ing in workers, women and ethnic minorities. As more women entered the field, gender studies gained a deserved respectability. Gail Lapidus's pioneer­ing study was followed by monographs on women workers, the women's liberation movement, Soviet policies towards women and the baleful effects of a liberation that kept them subordinate and subject to the 'double bur­den' of work outside and inside the home. Just as it had once been accept­able for historians to treat all humankind as if it were male, so the study of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union was long treated unapologetically as if these empires were homogeneously Russian. For the first several decades, emigres with strong emotional and political affiliations with nationalist move­ments and personal experiences of the brutalities of Stalinism were the prin­cipal writers on non-Russians. Their studies, so often pungently partisan and viscerally anti-Communist, were relegated to a peripheral, second-rank ghetto within Soviet studies and associated with the right-wing politics of the 'captive nations'. Nationalities were homogenised; distinctions between them and within them were underplayed; and political repression and economic development, with little attention to ethnocultural mediation, appeared ade­quate to explain the fate of non-Russian peoples within the Soviet system. Since studying many nationalities was prohibitively costly and linguistically unfeasible, one nationality (in the case of the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, the Ukrainians) was chosen to stand in for the rest.

Though in Friedrich and Brzezinski's locus classicus of the totalitarian model nationalities were not mentioned as potential 'islands of separateness', along with family, Church, universities, writers and artists, in time scholars began to think of the non-Russian nationalities as possible 'sources of cleavage' in the Soviet system and, therefore, of significance. Inkeles and Bauer noted that 'national and ethnic membership constitutes a basis for loyalties and identifications which cut across the lines of class, political affiliation, and gen­eration'.[149] In the wake of the dismantling of the totalitarian model, more empirical and historical studies focused on non-Russians. Zvi Gitelman, like Gregory J. Massell, told a story of Communist failure 'to combine modern­ization and ethnic maintenance', largely because of the poor fit between the developmental plans of the party and the reservoir of traditions and interests of the ethnic population. Secularised Jewish Communists set out to destroy the old order among the Jews, Bolshevise Jewish workers and reconstruct Jewish life on a 'socialist' basis, but as successful as they were in eliminating Zionism and Hebrew culture and encouraging Yiddish culture, they failed to 'eradicate religion, so firmly rooted in Jewish life'.[150] In Central Asia the failure to mobilise women as a 'surrogate proletariat' with which to overturn the patriarchal social regime led to a curious accommodation with traditional society.[151]

Much sovietological work on nationalities and nationalism accepted uncriti­cally a commonsensical view of nationality as a relatively observable, objective phenomenon based on a community oflanguage, culture, shared myths ofori- gin or kinship, perhaps territory. Nationalism was seen as the release ofdenied desires and authentic, perhaps primordial, aspirations. This 'Sleeping Beauty' view of nationality and nationalism contrasted with a more historicised view that gravitated towards a post-modernist understanding of nationality as a constructed category, an 'imagined community'. A 'Bride of Frankenstein' view of nationality and nationalism asserted that, far from being a natural component of human relations, something like kinship or family, nationality and the nation are created (or invented) in a complex political process in which intellectuals and activists play a formative role. Rather than the nation giving rise to nationalism, it is nationalism that gives rise to the nation. Rather than primordial, the nation is a modern socio-political construct. By the 1990s this 'modernist' view of the construction of nations within the Soviet empire began to appear in a number of studies in the Soviet field.[152]

Soviet studies in the post-Soviet world

By the 1990s the former Soviet Union had become a historical object, an impe­rial relic to be studied in the archives, rather than an actual enemy standing defi­antly against the West. At the same time the dominance of social history gave way to greater acceptance of new cultural approaches. Instead of British Marx­ists or the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, the principal influences now came from French social and cultural theorists, such as Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu; the Germanpolitical theorist Jiirgen Habermas; the American cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz; and the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Scholars gravitated to investigating cultural phenomena, like rituals and festivals, popular and ethnic culture and the daily life of ordinary people, topics that increasingly became possible to investigate with the open­ing of Soviet archives at the end of the 1980s. Fitzpatrick's own work turned in an ethnographic direction, as she scoured the archives to reconstruct the lost lives of ordinary workers and peasants.¹⁷⁷ Historians moved on from the 1930s to 'late' Stalinism and into the post-Stalin period. The 'cultural turn' led to an interest in the mentalities and subjectivities of ordinary Soviet citizens.

As a popular consensus developed that nothing less than history itself has decisively proven the Soviet experience a dismal failure, historians of Com­munist anciens regimes turned to summing up the history of the recent past.¹⁷⁸ Among the more inspired post-mortems was Martin Malia's The Soviet Tragedy, which turned the positive progress of modernisation into a darker view of modernity. Launching a sustained, ferocious attack on Western sovietology, which, in his view, contributed to a fundamental misconception and misunder­standing of the Soviet system by consistently elevating the centrality of society and reducing ideology and politics to reflections of the socio-economic base, Malia put ideology back at the centre of causation with the claim that the

SmallPeoples of the North (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994); Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-193 9 (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 2001).

177 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 193 os (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

178 Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994); Francois Furet. The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, trans. Deborah Furet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Stephane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, AndrzejPaczkowski, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003).

Soviet leadership worked consistently to implement integral socialism, that is, full non-capitalism. In one of his most redolent phrases, he concluded, 'In sum, there is no such thing as socialism, and the Soviet Union built it.'[153]Because the moral idea of socialism is utopian and unrealisable, the only way it could be 'realised' on the ground was through the terroristic means that Lenin and Stalin used. The collapse of the Soviet system was inevitable; the regime was illegitimate and doomed from the beginning; its end was inscribed in its 'genetic code'.

Malia placed the Soviet project in the larger problematic of modernity from the Enlightenment on. Socialism, the logical extension of the idea of democ­racy, was the highest form of this modernist illusion. In a similar vein Stephen Kotkin offered a seminal study of the building of the industrial monument, Magnitogorsk, in which he borrowed insights from Foucault to show how Stalin's subjects learned to 'speak Bolshevik' as they built 'a new civilisation'.[154]Kotkin dismissed the idea of 'the Russian Revolution as the embodiment of a lost social democracy, or, conversely, as a legitimation of Western society through negative example'. Instead, he likened 'the Russian Revolution to a mirror in which various elements of the modernity found outside the USSR are displayed in alternately undeveloped, exaggerated, and familiar forms'.[155] Like Malia, Kotkin saw ideology as having 'a structure derived from the bedrock proposition that, whatever socialism might be, it could not be capitalism. The use of capitalism as an anti-world helps explain why, despite the near total improvisation, the socialism built under Stalin coalesced into a "system" that could be readily explained within the framework of October.'¹⁸² Positioning himself apart from both Fitzpatrick, who argued that Stalinism was the con­servative triumph of a new post-revolutionary elite, and Lewin, who saw that triumph as a betrayal of the initial promise of the revolution (preserved by Lenin) and a backward form of modernisation, Kotkin argued that what Stalin built was socialism, the only real fully non-capitalist socialism the world has ever seen.¹⁸³

If a political dedication to socialism was rendered 'academic' for most West­ern scholars after 1991, particularly in the United States, interest in the internal workings of the Soviet system, the USSR as a distinct culture, the construction of subjects and subjectivity and the officially ascribed and self-generated iden­tifications of Soviet citizens remained high. Neither the notion of atomised, cowed 'little screws' or crypto-liberals acting as if they were believers ade­quately captured the full, complex range of Soviet subjectivity. Different peo­ple, and sometimes the same individual, could both resist and genuinely con­form, support the regime performatively or with real enthusiasm. Even dissent was most often articulated within 'the larger frame of the Soviet Revolution', appropriating the language of the regime itself.[156] That frame was extraordi­narily powerful, as are hegemonic discursive formations in any society, but it also was never without contradictions, anomalies or imprecise meanings that allowed for different readings and spaces for action. Soviet power, Foucault would have told us, had its creative side as well as its repressive aspects and constituted a landscape of categories and identifications that may have pre­cluded 'any broad, organised resistance challenging the Soviet state', but also permitted much small-scale subversion of the system, from evasion of duties, slowdowns at the workplace and evasion of orders from above.[157] As historians as different as Lewin, Fitzpatrick and Malia have contended, ordinary citizens agreed with the regime that together they were building socialism, even as they incessantly complained about the failure of the authorities 'to deliver the goods'.

While post-Soviet scholars rejected the concept of modernisation, with its optimism about the universality and beneficence of that process, a darker, more critical view of modernity became the talisman for a distinct group of younger historians who wished to contest the idea of Soviet exceptionalism.[158]An unusually protean term, modernity was used to explain everything from human rights to the Holocaust. Following the lead of theorists like Zygmunt Bauman and James Scott, the 'modernity school' noted how Bolsheviks, like other modernisers, attempted to create a modern world by scientific study of society, careful enumeration and categorisation of the population and the application of planning and administration.[159] For Russianists the frame of 'modernity' presented an all-encompassing comparative syndrome in which the Soviet experiment appeared to be a particularly misguided effort that led to unprecedented violence and state-initiated bloodshed.

In reaction to the 'modernity school' some historians and political scientists, attentive to the insights of Max Weber, considered the neo-traditionalist aspects of the Soviet experience that denied or contradicted the move to a generalised modernity.^i8S Simply put, the modernity school emphasised what was similar between the West and the Soviet Union, and the neo-traditionalists were fas­cinated by what made the USSR distinct. Modernity was concerned with the discursive universe in which ideas of progress and subjugation of nature led to state policies that promoted the internalisation and naturalisation of Enlight­enment values. Neo-traditionalism was more interested in social practices, down to the everyday behaviours of ordinary people. Whereas modernity talked about the 'disenchantment of the world', in Weber's characterisation of secularisation, neo-traditionalists were impressed by the persistence of reli­gion, superstition and traditional beliefs, habits and customs. Their attention was turned to status and rank consciousness, personalities and personal ties (in Russia phenomena such as blat (pull, personal connections), family circles, tolkachy (facilitators)), patron-client networks, petitioning and deference pat­terns. Kenneth Jowitt saw neo-traditionalism as a corruption of the modernist ideals of the revolutionary project, while sociologist Andrew Walder, in an influential study of Chinese Neo-traditionalism (i986), argued that the more the regime tried to implement its core principles, the more neo-traditional elements came forth.^iS9 Abolishing the market and attempting to plan pro­duction and distribution led to soft budgeting, shortages, distribution systems based on rationing or privileged access. Petitioning was an effective substitute for recourse to the law or the possibility of public action. The end of a free press elevated the importance of gossip and rumour, and the efforts of a modernising state to construct nationality eventually led to embedding peoples in a story of primordialist ethnogenesis. The reintroduction of ascribed identities, res­urrecting the idea if not the actual categories of soslovnost' (legally ascribed categories), was characteristic of the inter-war period, in the way the Soviets dealt with both class and nationality.[160]

After 1991 sovietological political scientists had lost their subject and turned to a cluster of new questions: how did a great state self-destruct; why did the Cold War end; will the 'transition' from command to market economy, from dictatorship to democracy, be successful; are post-Soviet transitions compara­ble to democratisation in capitalist states?[161] Several explained the Gorbachev 'revolution' as largely emanating from the very top of the Soviet political struc­ture and emphasised the agency of the General Secretary, his chief opponent, Boris Yeltsin, and other actors over structural factors. Others focused on insti­tutions, the actual 'Soviet constitution' of power and the loss of confidence and eventual defection of Soviet apparatchiki to the side of the marketeers and self-styled democrats. Still others argued that Leninist nationality poli­cies had created a structure of national polities within the USSR that fostered potent nationalist constituencies and proved to be a 'time bomb' that with the weakening of central power tore the union apart. Rather than national­ism as the chief catalyst of state collapse, they found that state weakness and disintegration precipitated nationalist movements.[162]

'Transitologists' who had studied the fall of Latin American and Iberian dic­tatorships had developed a model of democratisation that largely eschewed the cultural, social and economic prerequisites for successful democratisa- tion that modernisation theorists had proposed. Instead, they argued that getting the process right - namely negotiating a 'pact' between the old rulers and the emerging opposition - was the best guarantee for effective demo­cratic transition.[163] Post-sovietologists disputed the universal applicability of the transitological model by specifying the differences between non-market economies and capitalist societies and authoritarian dictatorships in the West and 'totalitarian' states in the East.[164] Michael McFaul showed how the tran­sition in Russia was revolutionary, occurred without pacting, and involved mass participation - all of which were excluded from the original model.[165]But as the new century began and Vladimir Putin solidified his power in the Kremlin, the jury remained out on how consolidated, liberal or effectively representative Russian (or, for that matter, Ukrainian, Armenian or any other) democracy was.

Even as it claimed to break with the old sovietology, Western scholarship reproduced many of its older concerns a decade and a half after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and remained true to fundamental assumptions deriving from Western liberalism. The T-model had counterposed the indoctrinated, believing 'Soviet Man' against an imagined, free, liberal individual in the West, a person self-directed and capable of independent thought.[166] Cold War scholars were dismayed by the destruction of the individual in Sovietised societies and the inability of citizens to resist the regime effectively. They found it hard to believe in the authentic commitment of people to such an illiberal project as Stalinism or to accept the legitimacy of such political deviance from a Whig trajectory. Images of Koestler's Rubashov confessing to crimes he had not committed or Orwell's Winston Smith capitulating to Big Brother powerfully conveyed Soviet socialism's threat to liberal individuality. Yet, as social historians had demonstrated, Soviet subjects were neither atomised nor completely terrorised and propagandised victims of the system; they managed to adapt to and even shape the contours imposed from above.

When post-Soviet scholars or journalists looked back at the seventy-four years of the Soviet experience, they most often turned to the Stalinist horrors as the emblem of Leninist hubris. In 1999 a team of scholars produced a massive catalogue of crimes, terror and repression by Soviet-style communisms. The Black Book of Communism contended that 'Communist regimes did not just commit criminal acts (all states do so on occasion); they were criminal enter­prises in their very essence: on principle, so to speak, they all ruled lawlessly, by violence and without regard for human life.'[167] Given this foundational claim, it followed that 'there never was a benign, initial phase of communism before some mythical "wrong turn" threw it off track'.¹⁹⁸ Its violence was a deliberative, not a reactive, policy of the revolutionary regimes and was based in Marxist 'science' that elevated the class struggle to the central driving force of history. The aim of The Black Book was not only to show that the very essence of communism was terror as a form of rule, but even more ambitiously to demonstrate that communism was not just comparable to fascism but was actually worse than Nazism. The Black Book lay the burden of guilt on intellec­tuals, those who thought up, spread and justified the idea that liberation and secular salvation ought to be purchased at any price.

Yet in its attempt to judge Soviet killing by the standard of Nazi crimes, The Black Book actually de-historicised Soviet violence. Context and causation were less important than the equation with the colossal, seemingly inexplicable evil that led to the Holocaust. These claims led to an intense international debate around The Black Book that recapitulated arguments that had divided historians of the Soviet Union for decades: is explanation to be sought in the social or the ideological? Is there an essential connection between all communist movements that stems from communism's roots in Leninism that produces the violence that has accompanied them in all parts of the world? Or are these movements, while related, more particularly the products of their own social, political and cultural environments?

For all the claims that the old controversies of the Cold War had ended with the end of the Soviet Union, the problematical meaning of the Soviet Union remains an open question among scholars and in the public sphere. While some continue to look for some deep essence that determined the nature of the USSR, others search for the contradictions and anomalies that disrupt any easy model. Neutrality remains a worthy if elusive stance, complete objectivity an unattainable ideal. While conservative scholars celebrate what they see as the victory of their views over 'left-wing' sovietology, and the pursuit of modernity appears dubious to many scholars, Russian and Soviet studies, ironically, hold firm to the broad liberal values that marked Western attitudes towards the East a century ago. Without a 'socialist' alternative with which to contend, pundits proclaim that the expectations of the modernisationists have been realised - a single world gravitating towards capitalist democracy. The West continues to regard itself as superior in what is now called the globalising world, and its most zealous advocates are prepared to export its political and economic forms, even if it requires military force, against the resistance of those who reject Western modernity and its liberal values. The states of the former Soviet Union exist in a twilight of a failed socialism but without the full light of the anticipated democratic capitalist dawn. As those who had insisted that capitalist economics and democratic politics would wipe away the East's deviant past confront the persistence of Soviet institutions, practices and attitudes long after the collapse, they must humbly reconsider the power of that past. Whether one thinks of this as the 'Leninist legacy' or Soviet path dependency or the continuities of a relatively fixed Russian (or Georgian or Uzbek) political culture, looking backwards in order to understand the present and future has become ever more imperative for social science.

101 Tamara Deutscher, 'On the Bibliography of Isaac Deutscher's Writings', Canadian Slavic Studies 3,3 (Fall i969): 473-89. See also the reminiscences in David Horowitz (ed.), Isaac Deutscher: The Man andhis Work (London: MacDonald, i97i).

102 Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, i949; Vintage paperback edn: New York, i960; 2nd edn: Oxford and New York, i966). Page references to Deutscher are from the 2nd edn.

120 Robert Conquest, Power and Policy in the USSR: The Struggle for Stalin's Succession, 1945­1960 (London: Macmillan, i96i).

121 Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties (London: Macmillan, i968); The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, i990).

122 Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, i986).

123 This subject remains highly controversial. For example, Conquest estimated i5 million deaths in the collectivisation and famine, while a study based on archival records by R. W Davies and S. G. Wheatcroft lowers that figure to 5,700,000. The total number of lives destroyed by the Stalinist regime in the i930s is closer to i0-ii million than the 20-30 million estimated earlier. From i930 to i953, over3,778,000 people were sentenced for counter-revolutionary activity or crimes against the state; of those, 786,000 were executed; at the time of Stalin's death, there were 2,526,000 prisoners in the USSR and another 3,8i5,000 in special settlements or exile. (Ronald Grigor Suny The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, i998), p. 266.)

141 The phrase is E. P. Thompson's, quoted in Eley, 'Edward Thompson, Social History and Political Culture', p. i6.

171 Pipes, Vixi, pp. i63-8.

188 Terry Martin, 'Modernization or Neo-Traditionalism? Ascribed Nationality and Soviet Primordialism', in Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism, New Directions (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 348-67; Kenneth Jowitt, 'Neo-Traditionalism' (i983), reprinted in his New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, i992), pp. ш-58; VictorZaslavsky, TheNeo-StalinistState:Class, Ethnicity, and Consensus in Soviet Society (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, i982).

189 Andrew G. Walder, Neo-traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, i986).