Fetishizing the Soviet Collapse: Historical Rupture and the Historiography of (Early) Soviet Socialism

Abstract

I Iistorians of the Soviet Union and nonspecialists alike have misunderstood the relationship between the Soviet collapse and the historiography of the Soviet Union. There has been a fetishization of the collapse. Fetishize is a strong word, but lest any take umbrage I include myself among the fetishizers, and use it here to reveal, rather than to reproach. Nor do I intend, by employing the word, to suggest pathology. Rather, I mean the investing of a phenomenon?in this case the collapse?with unwarranted reverence and even awe. What is it about the Soviet collapse that we have so revered? For one thing, many have asserted that the collapse?including its shock waves in Eastern Europe? has been the decisive factor in generating the shifts in perspective, such as new paradigms and the attendant changes in thematic focus, and, more broadly, in providing the impetus for the field's emergence out of not-so-splendid isolation into the historical mainstream by drawing on new theories and concepts, as well as non-Russian historiographies.1 So