Abstract
If it is true to say that English-language scholarship on the USSR on the whole prefers facts to theories, it is something of an event when one of its journals publishes, in a single issue, five articles on the merits of a ‘new trend’ in the historiography of Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s, which are couched in such general terms as to render any particular points of factual evidence almost irrelevant. Although well-mannered, the debate betrays signs of a keenly-felt division between American specialists on Soviet history. It contests issues which arise from the pre-factual and post-factual phases of historical writing, i.e., the a priori ideas that shape research topics and weave findings into readable versions of reality. The purpose of this paper is to summarise the debate and reflect further on the following three problem areas: the ascription of normal phenomena to the Stalin period; the attribution of responsibility for Stalinist crimes; and the presence of dogmatic thought in the historiography of the period.
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Notes
Fainsod, M., Smolensk under Soviet Rule (London: Macmillan, 1958);
Schapiro, L., The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, second edition (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1970);
Conquest, R., The Great Terror, revised edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971).
Lewin, M., The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (London: Methuen, 1985).
I believe this to be particularly true of Getty, J. Arch, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985).
Viola, Lynne, The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987);
Selznick, P., The Organizational Weapon: a Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics (Glencoe. Illinois: Free Press of Glencoe. 1960).
Fitzpatrick, S., Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–34 (Cambridge University Press, 1979);
Fitzpatrick, S. (ed), Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–31 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978);
Fitzpatrick, S., The Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982);
J. Getty, G. Rittersporn, 1978 L’etat en lutte contre lui-meme: Tensions sociales et confits politiques en U.R.S.S. 1936–1938, 3–7
Getty, J. Arch, op. cit., Rittersporn, G., ‘L’etat en lutte contre lui-meme: Tensions sociales et confits politiques en U.R.S.S. 1936–1938’, Libre, 1978, pp. 3–37; Manning, Roberta T., ‘Government in the Soviet countryside in the Stalinist thirties: the case of Belyi raion in 1937’, Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 301, Pittsburgh n.d.; Viola, L., op. cit.; Thurston, Robert W., ‘Fear and belief in the USSR’s “Great Terror”: response to arrest, 1935–1939’. Slavic Review. vol. 45. No. 2. pp. 213–44.
See note 6 above, plus: Dunham, Vera, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976);
Siegelbaum, Lewis, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). The list of works on ‘social’ topics could be extended by the inclusion of those written by British and European-based scholars. Fitzpatrick, however, seems to be concerned with American scholarship only, and her celebration of the ‘new cohort’ is delimited accordingly.
Cohen, S. F., ‘Bolshevism and Stalinism’, in Tucker, Robert C. (ed), Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., Inc., 1977).
Schapiro, L., ‘The Russian Revolution’, Times Literary Supplement, 18 March 1983. p. 269.
Kolakowski, L., in Survey. vol. 21. no. 4. 1975. pp. 87–9.
Bracher, Karl Dietrich, Zeitgeschichtliche Kontroversen, quoted in Kershaw, Ian, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of In-terpretation (London: Edward Arnold. 1985) p. 16.
This discussion is heavily indebted to Iggers, Georg G., New Directions in European Hitoriography, revised edition (London: Methuen, 1985); and White, Hayden, Metahistory: the Historical Imagination of Nine-teenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1973). Neither of these authors, however, place a particularly strong emphasis on the ‘focus on what is unique’ vs. ‘focus on what is general’ dilemma of historical writing, and neither is to blame for labelling the respective tendencies as ‘idingraphic’ and ‘nmmothetic’.
White, Hayden, Metahistory: the Historical Imagination of Nine-teenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1973).
Schapiro, L. in Times Literary Supplement. 18 March 1983. p. 269.
E.g., von Laue, T. H., Why Lenin, Why Stalin? (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966); or Deutscher, I., Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949)
E.g., Millar, James R., ‘Mass collectivization and the contribution of Soviet agriculture’, Slavic Review, December 1974;
Hunter, H., ‘The over-ambitious first five-vear plan’. Slavic Review. June 1973.
See Nove, A., ‘Was Stalin really necessary?’, Problems of Communism, vol. 25, July–August 1976.
For conflicts of attitude to ‘industrial culture’ that existed within the industrialising establishment see, e.g., Andrle, V., Workers in Stalin’s Russia: Industrialization and Social Change in a Planned Economy, 1929–1939 (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1988) ch. 3.
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© 1992 Nick Lampert and Gábor T. Rittersporn
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Andrle, V. (1992). Demons and Devil’s Advocates: Problems in Historical Writing on the Stalin Era. In: Lampert, N., Rittersporn, G.T. (eds) Stalinism: Its Nature and Aftermath. Studies in Soviet History and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12260-8_2
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