Stalinism and the 'View from below'

Abstract

It appears that, after decades of relative neglect, the Smolensk archive has become a prime source on the social history of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Sheila Fitzpatrick's New Perspectives on Stalinism pointed to several studies that rely heavily on these files to provide a new perspective on Stalinist society below. This growing interest in the archive raises, however, a serious methodological problem deriving from its inherent limitations as a source. I fear that decades of neglect may be followed by a few years of potentially misleading use of the archival documents. The files can provide valuable information, on the condition that they not be asked to yield too much. Two studies of the 1930s making extensive use of the archive are, despite their substantial merits, flawed by excessive reliance on Smolensk materials. J. Arch Getty's recent Origins of the Great Purges works from the picture of chaos in personnel movement and ineffectiveness of central Party controls in Smolensk Party activities to suggest similar conditions in the entire country. Yet would it not be tenable to assume that backward rural regions such as Smolensk, of marginal national importance, would experience milder surveillance (and greater personnel turmoil) than key areas such as the Donbas or the Central Industrial Region?1 A similar case of mistaken identity appears in Roberta Manning's essay on local Party rule and rural economic conditions in 1937.2 Her material is drawn from the study of one remote district, a place unlikely to reveal the secrets of Party treatment of the peasantry characteristic of that year and of the country at large. The methods of local history require particular attention to those parameters that admit, or exclude, a subject on the basis of its representativity in the larger political or social context. Smolensk documents can illuminate significant national trends and suggest answers to key issues of Communist state-building in the interwar years, but only if we keep clearly in mind the peculiarities of the region, the relevance of the topic to current national problems, and the powers and competence of the state or Party agency generating the documents under study.