The Stalin Period as an Historical Problem

Abstract

Since I was a discussant of Sheila Fitzpatrick's spirited brief for a newer social history when she first presented it in 1985, and since I read the revised version and the comments upon it published in the Russian Review with interest, I am pleased to offer my own comments here. They derive my long trek through the Stalinist 1930s while writing Stalin's Revolution Above: An Interpretive History, which, I am glad to say, is nearing completion. First, something on the history of the field. As some of Fitzpatrick's commentators noted, the totalitarian paradigm was in decline well before the latterday social historians made their appearance. Its early critics were scientists.1 By the mid 1960s, the need for new ways in the field was so evident that in 1967 the American Council of Learned Societies set up a Planning Group on Comparative Communist Studies to explore new approaches. One of the group's projects was based on the idea that Russian Bolshevism and the Communist movements that arose under its tutelage have been culture-transforming movements and that the sociopolitical systems they established on taking power are a new form of or political culture, which in time assimilates elements of the given country's prerevolutionary culture into an amalgam of old and new. This approach historicizes Soviet and Communist studies. One result is breaking down the artificial barrier that the totalitarian paradigm interposed between Russian and Soviet history, as though Russia ended on November 6, 1917,2 and a wholly new entity, the Soviet Union, sprang into being on November 7. The cultural approach also carries on implicit warning against an overly hard and fast dichotomy between from above and from below. Leaders of Communist-ruled countries are not immune to