Debates on Stalinism

Mark Edele

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526148957
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Debates on Stalinism introduces major debates about Stalinism during and after the Cold War. Did 'Stalinism' form a system in its own right or was it a mere stage in the overall development of Soviet society? Was it an aberration from Leninism or the logical conclusion of Marxism? Was its violence the revenge of the Russian past or the result of a revolutionary mindset? Was Stalinism the work of a madman or the product of social forces beyond his control? The book shows the complexities of historiographical debates, where evidence, politics, personality, and biography are strongly entangled. Debates on Stalinism allows readers to better understand not only the history of history writing, but also contemporary controversies and conflicts in the successor states of the Soviet Union, in particular Russia and Ukraine.

Part I
Biography and historiography

1
A ‘withering crossfire’: debating Stalinism in the Cold War

A modest proposal

In 1986, a 45-year-old scholar, a professor at the University of Texas in Austin with three major books and an important edited collection under her belt, published a survey of emerging social history scholarship on Stalinism. This article, she pleaded, ‘should not be read as a New Cohort manifesto’. Rather, it was an investigation of ‘the likely impact of historians, particularly social historians, on the study of the Stalin period’. Her claims were modest: ‘What has emerged from the recent scholarship’, she wrote, ‘is an appreciation that no political regime, including Stalin's, functions in a social vacuum.’ At the end of the essay she made a proposal for a methodological innovation, which, from our vantage point in the early twenty-first century, seems as unadventurous as her treatment of the historiography. Instead of exclusively focusing on state–society relations, social historians should look at social relations relatively independent of the state. Removing the state ‘from centre stage’ would allow scholars ‘to formulate new questions and develop a real social-history perspective on the Stalin period’.¹

What happened next is hard to understand for those who have grown up after the Soviet Union ended. In the words of the then editor of the scholarly journal in which Sheila Fitzpatrick's ‘New Perspectives on Stalinism’ was published, she had been ‘lured … into a withering crossfire’.² This chapter reviews this fight, which played out in the pages of The Russian Review in 1986 and 1987. It introduces many influential players in anglophone Stalinism studies and gives readers a first glimpse of the fierceness of the Cold War debate which is often referred to – misleadingly as we shall see – as a debate between ‘revisionists’ and ‘totalitarians’.

We can learn several basic lessons from the spectacle of the 1986–87 brawl: first, that history can be deeply political – for better or for worse; second, that once academia becomes politicized to the extent it was in the 1980s, things can turn very nasty. In academic debates, as we will see again and again in this book, personality, politics and disciplinary identity are entangled so strongly with each other and with feelings of loyalty and betrayal, vanity and resentment, that reducing an exchange to one of these dimensions makes little analytical sense. Historians are human beings. This simple fact means that we can try to understand their behaviour and their writing – the task of this book.

‘Deeply troubled’

The attacks on Fitzpatrick's article were kicked off by Stephen Cohen, a political scientist teaching at Princeton. Cohen had the distinction of having invented the ‘Bukharin alternative’ – the thesis that Stalin was not really necessary. Had only his more learned colleague in the Politburo, Nikolai Bukharin, won the factional fights of the 1920s, Bolshevism would have had a much more human face.³ Cohen, then, was a man of the Left. His defence of Leninism against the charge of guilt by association with Stalinism remains the most eloquent exposé of the differences between the two regimes ever since Leon Trotsky had separated them by ‘a river of blood’.⁴

Cohen was ‘deeply troubled’, he charged, ‘by two important omissions in Fitzpatrick's article’, which despite her disclaimer he declared a ‘New Cohort manifesto’. Fitzpatrick's first fault was that she had not quoted Cohen enough. Part of her target had been the ‘totalitarian model’, a social science approach to Stalinism which had helped frame much of the earlier research. There were, however, some political scientists working on the Soviet Union, Cohen among them, who had ‘rejected the totalitarian model's blinkered obsession with “the Kremlin”’. It did not matter that these scholars had not written about Stalinism or that they had ‘not actually investigated Soviet society itself’, as Cohen admitted. They should have been quoted anyway. Fitzpatrick's craft consciousness as a historian – the essay had asked what would change with historians taking over the interpretation of Stalinism – clearly irritated the political scientist.

Secondly, Fitzpatrick had not paid tribute to the establishment. Moshe Lewin, ‘the doyen of social history in Soviet studies’, had not received the respect he deserved. This criticism was somewhat odd. After all, Fitzpatrick was writing not about old men but about a new cohort, to whom Lewin, born in 1921, patently did not belong. Moreover, his work had not been ignored. Instead, she had gently criticized Lewin as a follower of Trotsky, a classification which Cohen dismissed. This denial of Lewin's Trotskyite tendencies was even odder, as the founder of the Red Army was one of Lewin's ‘admired predecessors’, as one of ‘Misha's’ friends would write later.⁵

Fitzpatrick's article had created, Cohen continued, ‘the impression that the new social historians have no scholarly predecessor or intellectual debts’. ‘The golden rule of revisionist scholars must be’, he mansplained, ‘credit others as you would have others credit you.’ Somewhat contradictorily, however, he also repeated what Fitzpatrick had stated in her own essay: social history research was only beginning. It would require ‘dozens of scholars, many diverse monographs, and years of work’. Fitzpatrick should publish less, he implied, and not formulate hypotheses: ‘ample data should precede large generalizations’.⁶

Cohen then hit her with the greatest stick in the arsenal of polemics on the Soviet Union: the Terror. In all revisionist writing, he claimed, ‘the terror is ignored, obscured, or minimized in one way or another’. In The Russian Revolution (1982), Fitzpatrick had indeed expressed scepticism about estimates of millions of repression deaths (executions plus deaths in custody) during the Great Terror of 1937–38. Following calculations made by her former husband, the political scientist Jerry Hough, who had used available census data, she wrote that ‘a figure in the low hundreds of thousands seems more plausible’. We now know that this number was way off the mark – as were the estimates in the millions. The NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) registered 681,692 executions in 1937–38. Adding liquidations of non-political prisoners and mortality in detention leads to an overall number of repression deaths during these two lethal years of between 950,000 and 1.2 million.⁷

The Great Terror played a major role in the argument of Education and Social Mobility (1979), however, which showed that the Stalinist 1930s were a period of immense social mobility. The Terror, in Fitzpatrick's narrative, was the moment when cadres of working-class origins, who had been trained in the late 1920s and early 1930s, got the good jobs because their elders had been shot. In The Russian Revolution too, the supposed whitewasher of Stalin had called the Great Purge of 1937–38 a ‘monstrous postscript’ to the Revolution with a ‘casualty rate … as high as 70 per cent’ among top a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of figures
• General editor’s foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Debates on Stalinism: an introduction
• Part I: Biography and historiography
• Part II: Cold War debates
• Part III: Contemporary debates
• New perspectives on Stalinism? A conclusion
• Further reading
• Index