Cultural Revolution Revisited

Abstract

I read Michael David-Fox's article What is Revolution? with pleasure. In the first place, it is an intriguing combination of interpretive essay and Begri/fsgeschichte, not a common genre in our field, whose subject made me think again about issues that have not been in the forefront of my scholarly agenda in recent years. In the second place, he begins with an expression of surprise that the Cultural paradigm put forward in my 1974 and 1978 articles and the 1978 edited volume has been so unreflectingly accepted and little problematized.1 That same thing has puzzled me for years. Moreover, whenever I see the term Revolution used routinely, like any other standard category of Soviet history, I have to suppress irritation at seeing it unfootnoted as well as proprietorial pride. It is as if the Soviet Revolution of 1928-31 were one of the eternal verities. But in fact there was no Soviet Revolution, historiographically speaking, until that 1978 volume appeared. It was my discovery or, if you prefer, my invention.2 I came to the topic of in a very different way from Michael DavidFox. He sets out to trace the history of a concept, which in part means tracing the usages of a term. I, on the other hand, had encountered a historical phenomenon in the course of my empirical research and needed to find a name for it. This naming gave me a good deal of trouble, though settling on cultural revolution was certainly not as agonizing as deciding on the term vydvizhentsy for the beneficiaries of Soviet affirmative action in the 1920s and 1930s. I was aware, of course, that Lenin (and, following him, generations of Soviet historians) had used the term in a different sense than the one I proposed, but I did not feel constrained by terminological piety-rather the contrary. The name Cultural seemed appropriate to me, in the first place because it was the term most used by contemporary participants and, in the second place, because it suggested an analogy to the Chinese Revolution of the 1960s. Although David-Fox has taken 1978, the publication date of Cultural.Revolution, as the date of the historiographical discovery, the conference on which this volume was