Bolshevik Ideas and Social Realities

Abstract

The Bolshevik party was the prime political motivating force in the Soviet state and society in the 1920s. Since it was authoritarian, partly by choice, partly as the result of external pressures, both before and after it came into power in October 1917, it is natural that historians should have concentrated their attention above all on the party’s development, functions and power over a backward nation. They have tended to study Soviet history de haut en bas, politically speaking. Other factors have served to reinforce this approach. Increasing specialisation amongst historians in this century has led to what J. H. Hexter calls the ‘tunnel’ method. Historians ‘split the past into a series of tunnels, each continuous from the remote past to the present, but practically self-contained at every point and sealed off from contact with or contamination by anything that was going on in any of the other tunnels. At their entrances these tunnels bore signs saying diplomatic history, political history… and so on.’ ¹ From the early days of foreign interest in Soviet affairs, the political tunnel has been dug the deepest, though it is rapidly being superseded by the economic tunnel, which is being increasingly and effectively exploited.