Stalinism as Traditional Political Culture

Abstract

J. Arch Getty, Practicing Stalinism: Bolsheviks, Boyars, and the Persistence of Tradition. 359 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. ISBN-13 978-0300169294. $45.00. J. Arch Getty has played a major role in defining our understanding of Soviet history. His 1985 book on purges was an important study within the so-called revisionist school. (1) There he advanced a new understanding of political violence in the Soviet Union that was different from the then-dominant paradigm of a violence conceived, ordered, and carried out carefully from above through an efficient chain of command. His new book represents both continuity and rupture with his earlier works. Just as he did 30 years ago, Getty tries to understand the origins of the political violence that peaked in 1937-38. In this respect, Practicing Stalinism echoes his earlier book and in a certain sense represents a completion of 30-years' research, bringing in archival sources that were unavailable at the beginning of the 1980s. As in his earlier work, in his new book Getty is interested in conflicts, tensions, groups, and rivalry. But many of his interpretations are new: most noticeably, the role of Iosif Stalin is conceptualized in a different way, and the dictator occupies a far more central place in Getty's new book. Practicing Stalinism combines two layers of argumentation. core chapters of the book (chaps. 3-8) focus on political conflicts in Stalin's USSR that are mostly interpreted in terms of struggle between clans and groups, and as center-periphery tensions. In this part of the book, Getty studies the personal and political conflicts of the 1920s and 1930s, discussing the actors, development, and resolution. But in the first chapters of the book--and this is new--the author attempts to situate these struggles within the broader context of the modernization/tradition debate. (2) Arch Getty opens his book by drawing continuities among Ivan IV's Muscovy, Stalins USSR, and Vladimir Putin's Russia. He also underscores these continuities in the epilogue. It is through this persistence of Russian traditionalism that Getty seeks to explain many of the phenomena he is discussing. Getty follows in the footsteps of several other scholars of Soviet history by uncovering signs of archaism in interwar Soviet political practices. (3) In the first two chapters of the book, he discusses some of these archaic practices from a long-term perspective. For the pre-Soviet period of Russian history, Getty mostly relies on secondary sources; he reveals numerous practices the first appearances of which may be found as early as in 16th-century Russia but can be seen again in the Soviet Union. These practices include restricted access of foreigners to Russia, denunciatory letters written to the authorities, the existence of an aristocracy with a particular status, and collective responsibility. This assertion of the persistence of tradition, which features even in the subtitle of the book, is almost always pervasive. For example, Getty twice mentions, The famous 'anointing' photographs of Stalin alongside Lenin recall those of Nicholas II alongside his son Aleksei and preview those for sale today in Moscow of Putin skiing and chatting with Medvedev (4, 89). He also speaks on numerous occasions of boyars and king's men in the Stalin period. Getty's main point is that these practices represent something totally and specifically Russian. In his opinion, they were neither Soviet nor Stalinist but Russian. Getty explains: Because we find this understanding of politics and government from Riurik to Putin, at all levels of the hierarchies at all times and places, it was inescapable. This was the deep structure by which Russia had always been governed (95). Getty's interpretation of the persistence of archaic practices differs markedly from the neotraditional model earlier proposed by Terry Martin. (4) In his seminal article Martin claimed: Neo-traditional societies, rather, represent an alternative form of modernization, one that includes the most characteristic processes of market-driven modernization (industrialization, urbanization, secularization, universal education, and literacy), but one which likewise produces a variety of practices that bear a striking resemblance to characteristic features of traditional pre-modern societies. …