Abstract
The conventional wisdom that the source of policy in the Stalin era was Stalin, aided at most by nicely calculated combinations of secretarial subordinates, corresponds quite closely to what we know about the later Stalinism, and most precisely to the phase into which its cultural policies were frozen after the war. Then the attack on Aleksandrov (1948) did take the philosophical establishment unawares, and seemed to illustrate the method of both ‘cult of personality’ and ‘totalitarian leadership’ in acting without regard for precedent or established orthodoxy, apparently by caprice. In further cases, arbitrariness was combined with ambiguity, intended to cause fear or isolation amongst the intelligentsia. Thus the posthumous attack on Marr (1950) was calculated to bring confusion, provoke faction-fighting and dispute over the ‘party line’ which extended far beyond the chosen field, linguistics, into all the social sciences, where scholars vied with one another in the ‘decoding’ of and ‘drawing of conclusions’ from Stalin’s statements. But was this always so? Does the conventional wisdom not stem principally from the memory of these last years, ones of policy stagnation and intellectual decline, which is then projected back in explanation of the pre-war period?
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Notes
L. B. Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (London, 1960) P. 343.
In English: E. Preobrazhensky, The New Economics (Oxford, 1965);
E. Preobrazhensky, A. V. Chayanov on the Theory of the Peasant Economy (Homewood, Ill., 1966);
E. B. Pashukanis, Law and Marxism: A General Theory (London, 1978); and
L. G. Vygotsky, Mind in Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1978).
This seems to be the central thesis in Baruch Knei-Paz, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky (Oxford, 1978).
His masterful manipulation of a ‘Right danger’ is described by R. V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1960).
Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (London, 1974) p. 285.
An eye-witness was A. Avtorkhanov, Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party (London, 1959).
The number rose from 16o,000 to 511,000 over this period, largely through the expansion of workers’ faculties. See M. P. Kim (ed.), Kul’turnaya revolyutsya v SSSR, 1917–65 gg. (Moscow, 1967) pp. 134, X64, 187.
These trials are discussed by Roy Medvedev in Let History Judge (London, 1972) pp. 110–37, where he rejects their legality.
A. I. Vyshinsky, K polozheniyu na fronte pravovoi teorii (Moscow, 1937).
Ia. V. Starosel’skii, Problemayakobinskoi diktatury (Moscow, 1930), for instance, quoted in Schapiro, The CPSU p. 470.
A. Binevich and Z. Serebryansky, Andrei Bubnov (Moscow, 1964) pp. 78–9.
E. D. Polivanov, Stat’i po obshchemu yazykoznanyu, comp. A. A. Leont’ev, (Moscow, 1968) pp. 23–4.
See L. Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (Oxford, 1978) vol. n1.
On RAPP see S. Sheshukov,.Neistovye revniteli: Iz istorii literaturnoi bor’by 20-kh. godov (Moscow, 1970);
and Edward J. Brown, The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature, 1928–32 (New York, 1953).
A. N. Afinogenov, Tvorcheskii metod teatra. Dialektika tvorcheskogo protsessa (Moscow-Leningrad, 1931).
Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Culture and Politics Under Stalin: A Reappraisal’, Slavic Review xxxv, no. 2 (1976) 224–30.
T. H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the USSR, 1917–1967 (Princeton, NJ, 1968) pp. 441–4.
N. Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope (London, 1971) pp. 140–1.
See N. Babel (ed.), Isaac Babel: The Lonely Tears, 1925–1939 (New York, 1964).
I. Shkapa, Sem’ let s Gor’kim (Moscow, 1964) pp. 249–50.
David Joraysky, The Lysenko Affair (Cambridge, Mass., 1970) pp. 94–5.
P. H. Solomon, Soviet Criminologists and Criminal Policy Specialists in Policy-Making (London, 1978) pp. 19–20.
Contrast S. Frederick Starr, ‘Visionary Town Planning during the Cultural Revolution’, in Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931 (Bloomington, Ind., and London, 1978) pp. 207–40.
Anatole Kopp, Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and City Planning, 1917–1935 (New York, 1970).
Kendall E. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin (Princeton, NJ, 1978).
On their privileges, M. Lewin, ‘Society and the Stalinist State’, Social History, 11 (1976) 172.
Loren R. Graham, The Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Communist Party, 1927–1932 (Princeton, NJ, 1967) pp. 110–14.
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© 1980 A. Kemp-Welch
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Kemp-Welch, A. (1980). Stalinism and Intellectual Order. In: Rigby, T.H., Brown, A., Reddaway, P. (eds) Authority, Power and Policy in the USSR. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04326-2_7
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