Class and State in the Early Soviet Period: A Reply to Sheila Fitzpatrick

Abstract

Sheila Fitzpatrick's essay strikes this reader as a worthy introduction to an important theme in early Soviet history-the relationship between the embryonic Soviet state and the fluid working class of the revolutionary years. Regrettably it deals with the question rather superficially and somewhat polemically, and as it skims through major methodological and conceptual matters it fails to locate them in ongoing discussions. In treating the question of the social base of Bolshevism, I would suggest, there is something to be gained by engaging more consciously some of the insights afforded by three current debates in the social sciences-the divisive controversy over Marxism as a valid form of historical analysis, the debate on the state as autonomous actor, and the rich empirical and theoretical work on the formation of working classes. In the course of this short article Sheila Fitzpatrick manages both to reject Marxist class analysis and to smuggle it back in to prove her principal thesis. Presumably because Russian class structure was weak and underdeveloped, Marxist analysis was inappropriate to Russian social reality and led the Bolsheviks into false understandings of the maturity of the working class and the development of proletarian consciousness. Even in her rush to deny the validity of class analysis, something which in recent years has become something of a personal crusade, Fitzpatrick relies on a relatively crude notion of class as a statistically definable group. Classes here appear and dissolve as people change occupation, and the weak class structure that crumbled under the effect of war, revolution, and civil war caused the Bolsheviks a crisis of legitimation that even led to doubts about the vanguard class. In her suspicion about the utility of class concepts, Fitzpatrick hardly stands alone. Within Russian history scholars like Gregory Freeze and Alfred Rieber have questioned the use of the word class (even soslovie in the case of Freeze) as a useful category for understanding Imperial Russia, and few western scholars have employed class language in a rigorous way to describe the period after the civil war. More broadly the crisis within Marxist thought about the hard core of axioms to which the orthodox might subscribe, the retreat from the older base-superstructure model, as well as the poststructuralist challenge to key Marxist categories, have all contributed to a state of siege for Marxism in the academy at the very time when much of the most interesting work in social science is informed by and indebted to earlier work by Marxist historians and sociologists.1 Indeed Marxism has so deeply penetrated the vocabulary of social science that it may no longer be susceptible to surgical removal, as Fitzpatrick, despite her misgivings about Marxism, seems to demonstrate in her own essay. Given the heavy-handed practice of both western sectarians and many Soviet histo-