Communist history: seeing it whole. A reply to critics

Abstract

If beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder, writing on Communism and its history is clearly an aesthetic feast. There is of course a transparent political accounting for the variety of tastes in this area, but there is no denying their divergences, as the responses to my “Rethinking the Historiography of United States Communism” indicate. Both Melvyn Dubofsky, an old friend and former teacher, and James Barrett, whose company and commitments I have shared since we were both graduate students, find me hard on New Left-inspired historical writing on Communism and kinder to an older traditionalist/institutionalist school, the originator of which was Theodore Draper. But they both sidestep why it is that I have accented certain texts and react to them the way I do, coming at this question of seeming “preference” from a very different set of sensibilities and political judgements. John Earl Haynes, associated with the 1990s revitalization of the Draper project, does not spend time splitting hairs about my likes and dislikes. He sees my essay as an exploration of how both so-called New Left revisionist and Draperesque traditionalist orientations have misunderstood the nature of Communist history in the US. In this he is quite right. That said, Haynes insists, unlike Dubofsky and Barrett, that the “chief target” of my “historiographic criticism” is Theodore Draper, and that I avoid serious critique of New Left-inspired scholarship because it is “not worthy” of the effort. In this I think he has misread me. The only offshore comment, that of John McIlroy, who writes as a somewhat unorthodox Trotskyist, seems rather uninterested in the New Left vs. traditionalist opposition that preoccupies US scholars. But he tilts discernibly toward a defense of Draper. Finally, if Dubofsky insists in seeing in my essay a devil discovery of Stalin, McIlroy wants to expand the naming of evil by placing Zinoviev at Uncle Joe’s side. So the cartography of critique to which I must reply is one in which the boundaries of difference criss-cross and the terrain shifts. No short response can do justice to this rough mapping of positions, but let me start with what I perceive to be the most common area of concerned skepticism regarding my article. It is of course a highly charged and obviously politicized realm,