The Karelian ASSR

Abstract

This chapter seeks to suggest a novel approach to the study of Stalinist decision-making. It does so with a view to overcoming the dichotomy between agent-centred and structure-dominated historiographies that for so long has weakened conceptual innovation in this field. Emphasis on agency, characteristic of the so-called ‘totalitarian’ historians, has pushed most popular historiography — and much serious work — towards an untenable methodology of unbounded voluntarism. On the other hand, emphasis on the causal primacy of structure tends towards a faceless functionalism. Neither approach is able to capture the reciprocal and dynamic interaction between human deeds and the contexts in which they are embedded that characterises historical change. A more fruitful framework of analysis is suggested by ‘structuration’ theory, which concentrates the researcher’s attention on the sources, character and consequences of this creative interaction, while situating the decision-making agent’s mediation of cultural, psychological, material and other prior ‘structures’ within a field of competing power interests. Such an approach seeks to ‘find in each successive state of the phenomenon under examination both the result of previous struggles to maintain or modify it, and the principles … of subsequent transformations.’¹

I am grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for funding the research on which this chapter was based.