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

1

Christopher Lasch, The American Liberals and the Russian Revolution (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1962; paperback edn: McGraw Hill, 1972), p. 1. All references in this chapter are from the latest edition listed, unless otherwise noted.

2

Marquis de Custine, Journey for Our Time: The Journals of Marquis de Custine, ed. and trans. Phyllis Penn Kohler (1843; New York: Pellegrini and Cudahy, 1951); Baron August von Haxthausen, The Russian Empire: Its People, Institutions andResources, 2 vols., trans. Robert Farie (1847; London: Chapman and Hall, 1856); Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace, Russia on the Eve of War and Revolution, ed. and intro. Cyril E. Black (1877; New York: Random House, 1961); Alfred Rambaud, The History ofRussiafrom the Earliest Times to 1877, trans. Leonora B. Lang, 2 vols. (1878; New York: Hovendon Company, 1886); Anatole Leroy- Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars and the Russians, 3 vols., trans. Zeniade A. Ragozin (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1902); George F. Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System, 2 vols. (New York: Century, 1891).

3

David C. Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 28-53.

4

Ibid., p. 37.

5

On American views of Russia and the revolution, see Lasch, The American Liberals and the RussianRevolution; andN. Gordon Levin, Jr., Woodrow Wilson andWorldPolitics: America's Response to War and Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968); Peter G. Filene, Americans and the Soviet Experiment, 1917-1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967); Peter G. Filene (ed.), American Views of Soviet Russia, 1917-1965 (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1968).

6

Arno J. Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918-1919 (New York: Alfred P. Knopf, 1967), p. 260. See also his Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917-1918 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959).

7

John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919); Louise Bryant, SixMonths inRussia: An Observer's Account ofRussiabefore and during the Proletarian Dictatorship (New York: George H. Doran, 1918); Bessie Beatty, The Red Heart of Russia (New York: Century, 1918); Arthur Ransome, Russia in 1919 (New York: B. W Huebsch, 1919); The Crisis inRussia (London: Allen and Unwin, 1921); Albert Rhys Williams, Through the Russian Revolution (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921). See also the accounts in Filene, Americans and the Soviet Experiment; Filene, American Views of Soviet Russia; Lasch, The American Liberals and the Russian Revolution.

8

Walter Laqueur, The Fate of the Revolution: Interpretations of Soviet History from 1917 to the Present (London: Macmillan, 1967; revised edn New York and London: Collier Books, 1987), p. 8.

9

'Thirty different times the power of the Soviets was definitely described as being on the wane. Twenty times there was news of a serious counter-revolutionary menace. Five times was the explicit statement made that the regime was certain to collapse. And fourteen times that collapse was said to be in progress. Four times Lenin and Trotzky were planning flight. Three times they had already fled. Five times the Soviets were "tottering." Three times their fall was "imminent" . . . Twice Lenin had planned retirement; once he had been killed; and three times he was thrown in prison' (Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, 'A Test of the News', The New Republic (Supplement), 4 Aug. 1920; cited in Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore, pp. 198-9).

10

Quotations from Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore, pp. 94, 95.

11

Ibid., p. 98.

12

Times (London), 5 Jan. 1920; cited in E. Malcolm Carroll, Soviet Communism and West­ern Opinion, 1919-1921, ed. Frederic B. M. Hollyday (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), p. 13.

13

From Serfdom to Bolshevism: The Memoirs of Baron N. Wrangel, 1847-1920, trans. Brian and Beatrix Lunn (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1927), p. 291.

14

Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (London, 1920; New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), p. 101.

15

Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment inRussia (New York: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1923; London: C. W Daniel, 1925).

16

Sir Bernard Pares, Russia between Reform and Revolution: Fundamentals of Russian History and Character, ed. and intro. Francis B. Randall (New York: Schocken Books, 1962), p. 3. The book was first published in 1907.

17

On Pares, see Laqueur, The Fate of the Revolution, pp. 173-5.

18

Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore,pp. 60-1. 19 Ibid., p. 110.

19

20 TerrenceEmmonsandBertrandM. Patenaude(eds.), War,Revolution,andPeaceinRussia:

20

The Passages of Frank Golder, 1914-1927 (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1988).

21

Ibid., p. 65.

22

Ido Oren, Our Enemies andUS: America's Rivalries andtheMakingofPoliticalScience (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 47-90.

23

Ibid., pp. 59-60.

24

Ibid., p. 61; Charles E. Merriam, The Making of Citizens: A Comparative Study of Methods of Civic Training (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), p. 222.

25

Samuel N. Harper, The Russia I Believe in: The Memoirs of Samuel N. Harper, 1902-1941, ed. Paul V Harper (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945).

26

Oren, Our Enemies and US, pp. 111-16.

27

Ruth Epperson Kennell, Theodore Dreiser and the Soviet Union, 1927-1945 (New York: International Publishers, 1969), pp. 25-6.

28

Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore, pp. 132-6.

29

Ibid., p. 136. He later turned to politics and was elected Democratic senator from Illinois.

30

Ibid., p. 152. 31 Ibid., p. 258.

31

Ibid., p. 255; Klaus Mehnert, DieJugendin Sowjetrussland(Berlin: S. Fischer, 1932), pp.34-9.

32

Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore, p. 260.

33

Edmund Wilson, 'An Appeal to Progressives', The New Republic 45 (14 Jan. 1931): 234-8; Filene, American Views, pp. 76-7.

34

Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore, p. 165. 36 Ibid., p. 184.

35

37 Will Durant, The Tragedy of Russia: Impressions from a Brief Visit (New York: Simon and

36

Schuster, 1933, p. 21; Filene, American Views, p. 89.

37

Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander: An AutobiographicalJourney (New York: Rinehart, 1956).

38

Maurice Hindus, A Traveler in Two Worlds, intro. Milton Hindus (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971), p. 311.

39

Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1937).

40

William Henry Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, 1917-1921 (New York: Macmillan, 1935; New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1965).

41

Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore, pp. 199-243; S.J. Taylor, Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times's Man in Moscow (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). See also the recent controversy over rescinding Duranty's Pulitzer Prize: Jacques Steinberg, 'Times Should Lose Pulitzer from 30's, Consultant Says', New York Times, 23 Oct. 2003; 'Word for Word/The Soft Touch: From Our Man in Moscow, In Praise of Stalinism's Future', New York Times, 26 Oct. 2003.

42

Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), pp. 112-18, 154-6.

43

Ibid., p. 273. Eastman himself denied that he was ever a 'follower' of Trotsky though he was closely associated with the opposition to Stalin and Stalinism. (See his 'Biographical

44

'An Open Letter to American Liberals', Soviet Russia Today 6 (Mar. 1937): 14-15; Filene, American Views, p. 119.

45

Joseph E. Davies, Mission to Moscow (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1941), pp. 269-72.

46

Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting ofHistory (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, i940; Anchor Books, i953).

47

Wald, The New York Intellectuals, pp. 157-63.

48

Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (New York: Free Press, 1987; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 185-221. Other pro-Soviet films of the war years included: North Star, written by Lillian Hellman; Song of Russia; Days of Glory; Counter-Attack; Three Russian Girls; and Boyfrom Stalingrad.

49

Nicholas S. Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1946). An earlier reference to 'the Great Retreat' can be found in C. L. R.James, WorldRevolution, 1917-1936: TheRiseandFalloftheCommunistInternational (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1937). Born in Trinidad, James emigrated to Britain where he became a leading Trotskyist. Best known for his study of the Haitian revolution, The Black Jacobins (1938), he was also the translator of Souvarine's biography of Stalin into English.

50

Timasheff,The GreatRetreat, pp. 361-2.

51

John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941 -1947 (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1972), p. 321.

52

'X' [George F. Kennan], 'The Sources of Soviet Conduct', Foreign Affairs 25 (July 1947): 566.

53

The point about the shift from national character to ideology is made convincingly by Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore, pp. 264-71.

54

Thomas Bender, 'Politics, Intellect, and the American University, 1945-1995', in Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske (eds.), American Academic Culture in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 29.

55

John G. Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory: The Genealogy of an American Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 218.

56

Stephen F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since 1917 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, i985), p. i7.

57

Charles Thomas O'Connell, 'Social Structure and Science: Soviet Studies at Harvard', Ph.D. diss, UCLA, 1990; Martin Oppenheimer, 'Social Scientists and War Criminals', New Politics 6,3 (ns) (Summer 1997): 77-87.

58

Both citations are from Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London: Allen Lane, 2002), p. 183.

59

CarlJ. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cam­bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956; revised edn, New York: Frederick A.

60

This catalogue of causes is indebted to Alfred Meyer, 'Coming to Terms with the Past', Russian Review, 45, 4 (Oct. 1986): 403; Waldemar Gurian, Bolshevism: An Introduction to Soviet Communism (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1956); Stefan Possony, Lenin: The Compulsive Revolutionary (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1964); Robert C. Tucker, Stalin As Revolutionary, 1879-1929 (New York: Norton, 1973); 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: McGraw-Hill, 1951); A Study of Bolshevism (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1953); Geoffrey Gorer and John Rickman, The People of Great Russia: A Psychological Study (New York: Chanticleer Press, 1950).

61

Gorer and Rickman, The People of Great Russia, pp. 189,191-2.

62

Merle Fainsod, Smolensk under Soviet Rule (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958; Rand Corporation, 1958; Vintage Books, 1963), p. 446. For a Russian look at the effect of the Smolensk archive on American sovietology, see Evgenii Kodin, Smolenskii arkhiv i amerikanskaia sovetologiia (Smolensk: SGPU, 1998).

63

Barrington Moore, Jr., Soviet Politics - The Dilemma of Power: The Role of Ideas in Social Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950; New York: Harper Torch- book, 1965), pp. 1-12, 402-5, 430. See also his Terror and Progress: Some Sources of Change and Stability in the Soviet Dictatorship (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954; New York: Harper Torchbook, 1966).

64

Barrington Moore, Terror and Progress, pp. xiii-xiv, 173-4,179-231.

65

Robert C. Tucker, 'The Dictator and Totalitarianism', World Politics 17, 4 (July 1965):

555-83.

66

Herbert J. Spiro and Benjamin R. Barber presented a paper on totalitarianism at the i967 meeting of the American Political Science Association. The quotations here are from the published version, 'Counter-Ideological Uses of "Totalitarianism"', in Politics and Society 1,1 (Nov. 1970) (pp. 3-21): 9; see also, Herbert J. Spiro, 'Totalitarianism', in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan and Free Press, 1968-76), vol. xvi, pp. i06b-ii2b. At the invitation of Professor William G. Rosenberg of the University of Michigan I presented a paper on the panel, 'Uses of the Soviet Past - A Critical Review', at the 1970 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. The response from many in the audience to the paper, 'The Abuses of the Soviet Past', which primarily criticised the totalitarian model, was hostile, even accusatory. I decided not to pursue this line ofinquiry in print until many years later.

67

On the end of ideology discussion, see Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, i960; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); and Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp. 56-62,109-10.

68

Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, The Permanent Purge - Politics in Soviet Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), p. 27.

69

Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Ideology and Power in Soviet Politics (New York: Praeger, 1962), pp. 80, 88-9.

70

Adam B. Ulam, 'The Russian Political System', in Samuel H. Beer and Adam B. Ulam (eds.), Patters of Government: The Major Political Systems of Europe, 2nd edn revised (New York: Random House, i962), pp. 670, 656, 646; cited in Spiro and Barber, 'Counter- Ideological Uses', pp. i3-i4.

71

Ulam, 'The Russian Political System', p. 646; Spiro and Barber, 'Counter-Ideological Uses', p. i9.

72

Key texts for the Marxists are: Max Horkheimer and Theodor W Adorno, Dialec­tic of Enlightenment (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), originally published as Dialektik der Aufkldrung (New York: Social Studies Association, 1944); Herbert Marcuse, Soviet Marxism: ACritical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958); One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964); and Negations (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). For post-modernist critics, see Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989); and his Intimations of Postmodernity (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).

73

From Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, i960), as cited in Oren, Our Enemies and US, p. 126.

74

The classic statement on the priority of order over democracy in the process of devel­opment can be found in Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968). Huntington saw the USSR and other Soviet-style states as examples of a high level of development and social stability. On modernisation theory see Gilman, Mandarins of the Future.

75

Gabriel Almond, Political Development: Essays in Heuristic Theory (Boston: Little, Brown,

i970), p. 232.

76

WW Rostow and Alfred Levin, The Dynamics of Soviet Society (New York: W. W Norton, i952; Mentor Books, i954), p. 89.

77

Allan A. Needell, 'Project Troy and the Cold War Annexation of the Social Sciences', in Christopher Simpson (ed.), Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences During the Cold War (New York: New Press, i998), p. 23; Bruce Cumings, 'Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and International Studies During and After the Cold War,' ibid., pp. i67-8. Then at Harvard, historian Robert V Daniels worked on the project at MIT because Harvard had a rule against classified research and farmed such work out to otherinstitutions. Daniels disagreed with Rostow's single factor analysis-that the pursuit of power was a complete explanation - and eventually broke with Rostow over authorial credit before the commercial publication of the book. (Personal communication with the author, i9 March 2004.)

78

W. W. Rostow, The Stages ofEconomic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, i960), p. i04.

79

Ibid., pp. 163,133. Rostowlater became a key adviser to President Lyndon Baines Johnson and an architect ofthe American intervention in Vietnam.

80

Zbigniew Brzezinski, 'The Nature of the Soviet System', Slavic Review 20,3 (Oct. 1961): 35i-68.

81

David Granick, The Red Executive: A Study of the Organization Man in Russian Industry (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, i960); Joseph S. Berliner, Factory and Manager in the USSR (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957).

82

Brzezinski, 'The Nature ofthe Soviet System'; Alfred G. Meyer, 'USSR, Incorporated', Slavic Review 20, 3 (Oct. i96i): 369-76. Among the most influential authorities on mod­ernisation theory as applied to the Soviet Union was Princeton's Cyril E. Black, who edited TheTransformationofRussianSociety: Aspects of Social Change Since 1861 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, i960), and later organised the team that published Cyril E. Black, MariusB.Jansen, Herbert S. Levine, MarionJ. Levy, Jr., Henry Rosovsky, Gilbert Rozman, Henry D. Smith, II, S. Frederick Starr, The Modernization of Japan and Russia: A Comparative Study (New York: Free Press, i975).

83

Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, p. 8; Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, pp. 228-34.

84

Among works in the 'modernisation school' that continued to subscribe to the language of totalitarianism, one might include Raymond A. Bauer, Alex Inkeles and Clyde Kluck- hohn, How the Soviet System Works: Cultural, Psychological and Social Themes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956; New York: Vintage Books, 1961); Alex Inkeles and Raymond A. Bauer, The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961). Moshe Lewin, Political Undercurrents of Soviet Economic Debates: From Bukharin to the Modern Reformers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), uses a modified modernisation framework but without the liberal telos. For an account that rejects the convergence thesis, see Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel Huntington, Political Power: USA/USSR (New York: Viking Press, 1964).

85

In a famous essay in the journal Encounter, economic historian Alec Nove asked, 'Was Stalin Really Necessary?' (Apr. 1962). Andhe concluded that the 'whole-hog Stalin... was

86

Ibid., p. xviii.

87

Tamara Deutscher, 'E. H. Carr - A Personal Memoir', New Left Review 137 (Jan.-Feb. 1983): 85.

88

E. H. Carr, A History of Soviet Russia:The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923 (London: Macmillan, 1950; Pelican Books, 1966), vol. I, p. 111.

89

Davies, 'Introduction', p. xxxiv.

90

Carr's critics were often impressed by his industriousness and command of the material but wary of his stances towards the Soviet Union. Historian James Billington wrote, 'The work is scrupulously honest and thorough in detail, but the perspective of the whole remains that ofa restrained but admiring recording angel ofthe Leninist Central Committee' (World Politics (Apr. 1966): 463). And even his good friend Isaac Deutscher thought Carr too much the political instead of social historian, who 'is inclined to view the State as the maker of society rather than society the maker of the State' (Soviet Studies 6 (1954-5): 340; Isaac Deutscher, Heretics andRenegades and Other Essays (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 95; cited in Davies, 'Introduction', p. xxx).

91

Ibid., p. xv. 'Unrepentant Marxist' comes from one of Deutscher's most severe critics, Leopold Labedz. See his two-part article, 'Deutscher as Historian and Prophet', Survey 4i (Apr. i962): i20-44; 'Deutscher as Historian and Prophet, II', 3, i04: i46-64. For a more balanced critique of Deutscher's work, see J. I. Gleisner, 'Isaac Deutscher and Soviet Russia', Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham, Discussion Papers, Series RC/C, no. 5, Mar i97i.

92

Deutscher, Stalin, pp. i73-5. i05 Ibid., p. 569.

93

Deutscher, Heretics and Renegades, p. 15.

94

IsaacDeutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921; The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921­1929; The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929-1940 (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1954,1959,1963).

95

Ibid., vol. iii, p. 510. 109 Deutscher, Heretics and Renegades, p. 12.

96

110 Haslam, The Vices of Integrity, pp. 157-65.

97

Personal communication with the author, 13 Mar. 2004.

98

Moshe Lewin, LaPaysannerie etlepouvoirsovietique, 1928-1930 (LaHaye: Mouton, 1966); RussianPeasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization, trans. Irene Nove (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968); Le Dernier Combat de Lenine (Paris: Minuit, 1967); Lenin's Last Struggle (New York: Random House, 1968).

99

Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History ofInterwar Russia (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985); Russia-USSR-Russia: The Drive andDriftof a Superstate (New York: New Press, i995).

100

Lewin, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates; Le Siecle sovietique (Paris: Fayard/Le Monde diplomatique, 2003); originally in English and published as Russia's Twentieth Century: The Collapse of the Soviet System (London: Verso, 2005).

101

Meyer, 'Coming to Terms with the Past', p. 403.

102

Robert Vincent Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, i960), pp. 4-5.

103

Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1954; revised edn, 1997). Similar views of Russian/Soviet imperialism were expressed in other works of the time: Walter Kolarz, Russia andher Colonies (New York: FrederickA. Praeger, 1952); OlafCaroe, Soviet Empire: The Turks of Central Asia and Stalinism (New York, 1953); Robert Conquest, The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (London: Macmillan, i960), reprinted and expanded as The Nation Killers:The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (London: Macmillan, 1970); Hugh Seton-Watson, The New Imperialism (Chester Springs, Pa.: 1962); and outside scholarship: US Congress, Senate Committee on the Judiciary The Soviet Empire (Washington, 1958; revised edn, 1965).

104

Robert Conquest, 'In Celia's Office', Hoover Digest (1999), no. 2; www-hoover.stanford. edu/publications/digest/992/conquest.html, p. 3.

105

Ibid.

106

Conquest, 'In Celia's Office', p. 2.

107

Richard Cornell (ed.), The Soviet Political System: A Book of Readings (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, i970), p. 3.

108

For Alfred G. Meyer, a bureaucratic model ofthe USSR was needed to supplement the outdated totalitarian model. (See his 'The Comparative Study ofCommunist Political

109

For an alternative look at early Russian political culture, see Valerie A. Kivelson, Autoc­racy in the Provinces: The Muscovite Gentry and Political Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996).

110

Robert C. Tucker, 'A Stalin Biographer's Memoir', in Samuel Baron and Carl Pletsch (eds.), Introspection in Biography (Hillsdale, N.J.: Analytic Press, 1985), pp. 251-2; Tucker, 'Memoir of a Stalin Biographer', University: A Princeton Magazine (Winter 1983): 2.

111

Psycho-historical methodologies are more prevalent in pre-Soviet than Soviet historiography.

112

Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); Russiaunder the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993); Three Whys of the Russian Revolution (London: Pimlico, 1998).

113

Martin Malia, 'The Hunt for the True October', Commentary 92,4 (Oct. 1991): 21-2. Pipes makes a similar argument: 'The elite that rules Soviet Russia lacks a legitimate claim to authority... Lenin, Trotsky, and their associates seized power by force, overthrowing an ineffective but democratic government. The government they founded, in other words, derives from a violent act carried out by a tiny minority' (Richard Pipes, 'Why Rus­sians Act Like Russians', Air Force Magazine (June 1970): 51-5; cited in Louis Menasche, 'Demystifying the Russian Revolution', Radical History Review 18 (Fall 1978): 153).

114

An earlier version of the accidental nature of the October Revolution can be found in Robert V Daniels, Red October: The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1967); Pipes, The Russian Revolution.

115

Terence Emmons, 'Unsacred History', The New Republic, 5 Nov. i990:36.

116

Geoff Eley 'Edward Thompson, Social History and Political Culture: The Making of a Working-Class Public, i780-i850', in Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland (eds.), E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, i990), p. i3.

117

Ziva Galili, 'Workers, Strikes, and Revolution in Late Imperial Russia', International Labor and Working-Class History 38 (Fall, i990): 69.

118

Here the work of Moshe Lewin has been particularly influential, integrating political history with his own brand of historical sociology

119

Solomon Schwarz, Labor in the Soviet Union (New York: Praeger, 1951).

120

SheilaFitzpatrick, Education and SocialMobility in the SovietUnion, 1921-1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin's Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928-1932 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

121

Lynne Viola, TheBestSons of the Fatherland: Workers in the VanguardofSoviet Collectivization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

122

Lewis Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935-1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization: The Formation of Modern Soviet Production Relations, 1928-1941 (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1986).

123

E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963); Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832-1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

124

For work that reflects the interest inlanguage, discourse and representation, see Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); and Mark D. Steinberg, Voices of Revolution, 1917 (NewHavenandLondon: Yale University Press, 2001); and his Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910-1925 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002).

125

Robert H. McNeal, 'Trotskyist Interpretations of Stalinism', in Robert C. Tucker (ed.), Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 31.

126

Ibid., p. 34.

127

Tucker, 'Introduction: Stalinism and Comparative Communism', in Tucker, Stalinism, p. xviii.

128

Cohen, 'Bolshevism and Stalinism', in Tucker, Stalinism, p. 12.

129

Lewin, 'The Social Background of Stalinism', in Tucker, Stalinism, p. 126.

130

Stephen F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since 1917 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 48.

131

Ibid., p. 64. See his Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,i973).

132

For a bold attempt to find initiative for state policies from below, see Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931 (Bloomington and London: Indiana Uni­versity Press, 1978).

133

See e. g. Richard Pipes, Vixi, Memoirs of a Non-Belonger (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. i26, 22i-3, 242.

134

Sheila Fitzpatrick, 'New Perspectives on Stalinism', Russian Review 45, 4 (Oct. 1986): 36i-2.

135

Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility.

136

Sheila Fitzpatrick, 'The Bolshevik Dilemma: Class, Culture and Politics in the Early Soviet Years', Slavic Review 47, 4 (Winter 1988): 599-613.

137

Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution 1917-1932 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 8; 2nd edn (1994), pp. 9-13. Fitzpatrick's interpretation of the revolution took a darker tone in the 2nd edn, published after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Revolution here is about illusions and disillusions, euphoria, madness and unrealised expectations (pp. 8-9).

138

Brzezinski, The Permanent Purge.

139

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (various editions, 1973-8).

140

Tucker, 'Introduction: Stalin, Bukharin, and History as Conspiracy', in Tucker and Cohen (eds.), The Great Purge Trial (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1965), p. xxix; Conquest, The Great Terror, p. 62.

141

Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System, p. 309.

142

J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933­1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 206.

143

Gabor T. Rittersporn, Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications: Social Tensions and Political Conflicts in the USSR 1933-1953 (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood, 1991).

144

A. L. Unger, 'Stalin's Renewal of the Leading Stratum: A Note on the Great Purge', Soviet Studies 20,3 (Jan. 1969): 321-30; Kendall E. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917-1941 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 268, 413; Sheila Fitzpatrick, 'Stalin and the Making of a New Elite', Slavic Review 38,3 (Sept. 1979): 377-402.

145

Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, p. 159.

146

Lynne Viola, PeasantRebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture ofPeasantResistance (New York: Oxford University Press, i996), pp. i05, i36, passim; Jeffrey Rossman, 'The Teikovo Cotton Workers' Strike of April 1932: Class, Gender, and Identity Politics in Stalin's Russia', Russian Review 56, i (Jan. i997): 44-69.

147

Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934-1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

148

Of Russians he wrote: 'Centuries of life under a harsh and capricious climate and an equally harsh and capricious government had taught them to submit to fate. At the first sign oftrouble they withdraw like turtles into their shells and wait for the danger to pass. Their great strength lies in their ability to survive even under the most adverse conditions; their great weakness is their unwillingness to rebel against adversity. They simply take misfortune in stride; they are much better down than up. If they no longer can take it, they drink themselves into a stupor' (Ibid., pp. 239-240; see also, pp. 62-3).

149

Inkeles and Bauer, The Soviet Citizen, p. 339.

150

Zvi Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics: The Jewish Sections ofthe CPSU, 1917­1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 3-4, 6-7, 491-2.

151

Gregory J. Massell, The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919-1929 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974).

152

Ronald Grigor Suny The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993); Yuri Slezkine, 'The Soviet Union as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism', Slavic Review 53, 2 (Summer 1994): 414-52; Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the

153

Ibid., p. 496.

154

Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995).

155

Ibid., p. 387. 182 Ibid., p. 400. 183 Ibid., pp. 5,379 n. 21.

156

Jochen Hellbeck, 'Speaking Out: Languages of Affirmation and Dissent in Stalinist Russia', Kritika 1,1 (Winter 2000): 74.

157

Ibid., p. 80.

158

See e. g. David L. Hoffman and Yanni Kotsonis (eds.), Russian Modernity: Politics, Know­ledge, Practices (New York: St Martin's Press, 2000); Amir Weiner, MakingSense ofWar:The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Peter Holquist, '"Information is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work": Bolshevik Surveillance in its Pan-European Context', Journal of Modern History 69, 3 (Sept. 1997): 415-50. While eclectic and inclusive in its selection of articles, the journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, which began publication in the winter of 2000, has established itself as the mouthpiece of what its editors conceive of as 'post-revisionist' scholarship, attempting to move beyond the debates of the Cold War years. (See, particularly, the editorial introduction, 'Really-existing Revisionism?' in Kritika 2, 4 (Fall 2001): 707-11.)

159

Bauman wrote, 'In my view, the communist system was the extremely spectacular dramatization of the Enlightenment message ... I think that people who celebrate the collapse of communism, as I do, celebrate more than that without always knowing it. They celebrate the end of modernity actually, because what collapsed was the most decisive attempt to make modernity work; and it failed. It failed as blatantly as the attempt was blatant' (Intimations ofPostmodernity, pp. 22i-2).

160

Sheila Fitzpatrick, Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia', in Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism, New Directions, pp. 20-46; Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire.

161

For an analytical and critical review ofpost-sovietology, see David D. Laitin, 'Post-Soviet Politics', Annual Review of Political Science, 2000,3:117-48.

162

Suny, The Revenge of the Past; Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

163

Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, i99i); and Adam Przeworksi et al., Sustainable Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, i995).

164

Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Michael McFaul, Russia's Unfin­ished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001); Philippe C. Schmitter with Terry Lynn Karl, 'The Conceptual Travels of Transitologists and Consolidologists: How Far to the East Should They Attempt to Go?' Slavic Review 53,1 (Spring 1994): 173-85; Valerie Bunce, 'Should Transitologists Be Grounded?' Slavic Review 54, 1 (Spring 1995): 111-27; Terry Lynn Karl and Philippe C. Schmitter, 'From an Iron Curtain to a Paper Curtain: Grounding Transitologists or Students of Postcommunism?' Slavic Review 54, 4 (Winter 1995): 965-978; and Valerie Bunce, 'Paper Curtains and Paper Tigers', ibid., pp. 979-87.

165

McFaul, Russia's Unfinished Revolution.

166

For development of this theme, to which this paragraph is indebted, see the insightful discussion in Anna Krylova, 'The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies', Kritika 1,1 (Winter 2000): 119-46.

167

Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism, p. xvii. 198 Ibid., p. xviii.