I. Introduction
II. Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on 'Environmental' and Cultural Change
III. Cultural Adaptation to ‘Environmental’ Change
IV. Conclusion: ‘Environmental’ Resistance to Cultural Change
This paper considers the roles of professional history and popular historical consciousness in historical change. Firstly, it sketches the evolution of history-writing during the final years of the Soviet Union and the rapidly changing environment of post-Soviet Russia, developing some theoretical perspectives on the destabilisation of the ‘ecological’ balance of political culture, its potential societal consequences, and the processes of structural and cultural adaptation to new environmental conditions. The core of the paper, the second section, concerns itself with the historian’s role in the reconstitution of social memory. A detailed consideration of West German historiographical controversies concerning the interpretation of Nazism helps to elucidate the political and scholarly problematic of re-interpreting Russia’s Soviet past. In brief conclusion, the third section shifts the focus from problems of systemic change to problems of continuity, again referring to the experience of Germany, this time after re-unification, to suggest a set of factors hindering consensual cultural development in post-Soviet Russia.
"In a land without memory, everything is possible" (1)
1. With this doom-laden declaration, Michael Stürmer, an eminent right-wing German historian, fired one of the opening salvoes in what was to become known as the ‘historians’ debate’ (Historikerstreit), a controversy over the social and political meaning of history, which swept furiously through the feuilletons of the Federal Republic in the mid-1980’s. On the one hand, Stürmer continued, surveys warned that Germany was suffering from the most acute lack of communication between generations, the lowest levels of self-confidence and the greatest dissonance of values in the industrialised world. This made it ominously difficult to predict, even in the short term, how Germans would stand in regard to their country, the West and their own identity. Continuity could only be assumed, not taken for granted. On the other hand, he remarked, people everywhere in Germany were striving spontaneously to rediscover their heritage. Museums flourished, junk markets catered to popular nostalgia, historical exhibitions attracted throngs of visitors, and historical literature once again enjoyed wide popularity. These two phenomena - of pervasive cultural disorientation and the search for identity - were two sides of the same coin, Stürmer asserted, and both were of direct political concern. Firstly, cultural malaise derives from the loss of a coherent collective memory, and induces, and is itself intensified by, political uncertainty. Secondly, the re-construction of national identity requisite for restored cultural consensus has ineluctable political implications, for "in a land without history, whoever fills the memory, determines the concepts and interprets the past, shall win the future" (2). According to Stürmer, Germany’s "disorientation and futile quest for security" was no novelty. For nearly two centuries, processes of modernisation had been accompanied by crisis and catastrophe, culminating in Nazism. Unremitting structural upheaval had been both cause and consequence of a dislocated and debilitating political culture. Since 1945, however, the Third Reich’s dark shadows had rendered the achievement of social consensus on Germany’s past and future even more problematic. Historical debate had became politicised, partisan and divisive: the technocrats of the political right ignored history, while the left laboured it to death. For a state with global power and responsibilities, the Professor concluded, "the search for a lost history is not an abstract academic aspiration: it is morally legitimate and politically necessary" (3).
2. This polemic powerfully reasserted Nietzsche’s conception of history as a secular, surrogate state religion capable of promoting or undermining societal stability and continuity. Jürgen Habermas and other radical participants in the ensuing controversy naturally rejected the content of the conservatives’ historicist instrumentalisation of history, but nevertheless acknowledged in similar form the inescapably political dimension of the discipline and, consequently, the social responsibility of historians (4). This conception was not Nietzsche’s innovation. Indeed, since earliest times, the recognition of history’s power to contribute to or to destroy political legitimacy and social cohesion has been reflected in the educational policies and research agendas of dominant groups, governments and rebels throughout the world. Every history prefigures its future, and, independent of scholarly endeavour, immanent in each history is the potential for both its ‘use’ and ‘abuse’. Nietzsche, however, was the first post-Enlightenment thinker to elaborate history's political role and to assign it a primary social function in the constitution of the present. Marx, on the other hand, promoted history to the role of science of the future. For Marxist historians such as M. N. Pokrovsky, history was "the most political of all the sciences" (5). Indeed, Lenin’s favourite historian reduced his discipline (though he had no intention of reducing it) to "politics projected onto the past." However, for the Soviet regime that first eulogised, then denigrated, and finally rehabilitated Pokrovsky’s work, "all the talk of science and methodology [were] no more than fig-leaves covering the nakedness of ideology" (6). Communist regimes spared no effort to control or manipulate the writing of history. Firstly, Marxism-Leninism, the doctrine to which they appealed for legitimacy, was essentially an ideology of history, deriving its putative predictive powers from an analysis of the past and seeking validation in a myth of teleological progress. Secondly, they too recognised the formative role of history in the reciprocal relationship between collective memory and politics. "Historians," Khrushchev famously proclaimed in 1956, "are dangerous people. They are capable of upsetting everything. They must be directed" (7).
3. These utterances on the overtly political character of historical inquiry (on which point theory and practice for once coincide) suggest that an investigation into the role of history in present-day Russia may make a useful contribution to research on the nature of the post-Soviet transformation. It would be possible to approach this theme, and the complex of conceptual and empirical questions surrounding it, from the standpoints of diverse specialist disciplines and schools. How important is history, both as a professional discipline and as a general cultural phenomenon, as a determinant of collective identity, or is it true that "[g]etting history wrong is part of being a nation" (8)? What are the mechanisms employed by authoritarian regimes - and not only authoritarian regimes - to control the writing and propagation of history (9)? To what extent does power naturally impinge on the practice of history by defining the terms and boundaries of cultural discourse (10)? Should historical consciousness be characterised as primarily a ‘structuring’ or as a ‘structured’ phenomenon (11)? What role does history play in constituting political culture, and how useful is this concept for explaining political change (12)? However, in the hope of encouraging the widest possible consideration of these issues, the present paper eschews exclusivist methodology and instead adopts an eclectic comparative approach. As our point of departure for an exploration of the complex set of relations interlinking the cultural practice of history and its historical, political, economic, social and geographical environments, we propose to adopt the metaphor of an ‘ecological system’. The notion of a cultural phenomenon as an evolving organism existing in symbiosis with its dynamic and multi-dimensional habitat is freely adapted from political science, where the ‘ecological’ approach is derived from the assumption that "political behaviour must be understood in terms of an actor’s relationship to the environment; and the environmental factors that impinge on individual choice" (13). In substituting ‘historiography’ or ‘cultural production’ for ‘political behaviour’, this approach would run the risk of question-begging if it aspired to isolate direct causality or to quantify the weight of variable factors in this universe of relations. Instead, this paper's simple ambition is to map the landscapes of these environments and to note the contours of reciprocity, in the hope of identifying the most telling cultural signposts of transformation, and of prompting further empirical research into this hitherto neglected dimension of political change in Russia.
4. The first section of the present paper considers the evolution of historical consciousness in the final years of the Soviet Union and the rapidly changing environment of post-Soviet Russia, outlining some theoretical perspectives on the destabilisation of the ‘ecological’ balance and its potential consequences. During ‘environmental’ transformation, a society strives to re-establish this equilibrium through the construction of a new collective identity. However, it must first overcome the legacy of the past by means of political and judicial intervention (structural adaptation) and through a process of longer-term historical re-interpretation (cultural adaptation). The core of the paper, the second section, concerns itself with the historian’s role in the reconstitution of social memory. An initial consideration of West German historiographical controversies helps us then to elucidate the moral and political implications of a number of scholarly problems in the field of Soviet history. In brief conclusion, the third section shifts the focus from problems of ‘environmental’ change to problems of continuity, again using the experience of Germany, this time after re-unification, to suggest a set of factors hindering consensual cultural development in post-Soviet Russia.
5. History played a central function in Gorbachev’s strategy of controlled change during the late 1980’s. As has been noted above, the Soviet leadership had always been aware of history’s power. After the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev to the Soviet leadership in 1985, the official attitude towards this professional discipline and the Soviet past was gradually forced to change. In 1987, the new General Secretary announced that the "socialist law of truth" should fill in the "blank spots" of Soviet history (14). The ‘energy of history’ was to be harnessed to the programme of restructuring (perestroika) (15). Selective official revelations and re-interpretations were intended to instill in popular consciousness the notion of a Leninist ‘golden age’, destroyed by Stalin, which could be recaptured by the overcoming of the structural and mental legacy of the recent past (16). Although at first this Soviet ‘overcoming of the past’ was manifestly instrumental, regulated by the Communist Party through continuing censorship, control over archival sources and institutional pressures, historical inquiry in the new environment of openness (glasnost’) - designed to foster constructive (socialist) creativity - gathered an ineluctable momentum of its own, and progressively extended the boundaries of permissible historical discourse. This cumulative radicalisation of collective historical consciousness was driven by two forces from below. Firstly, a growing popular awareness that there existed many more ‘blank spots’ in their collective memory than the leadership was concerned to admit generated a vast enthusiasm for rediscovering - or rescuing - a captive past. By the summer of 1989, journals such as Argumenty i Fakty, which regularly ran historical stories, were selling over 31 million copies a week. Secondly, political debate was still severely circumscribed and the unsanctioned re-examination of history - primarily by journalists and political commentators, since most historians remained tied, by institution or instinct, to the evolving official line - acted as an ‘Aesopian’ language for political or economic disputes over the direction of contemporary systemic transformation. Bukharin, for example, stood for gradual transition to a market-based socialism. As the authorities responded to public demand, new revelations revealed yet more unknown aspects of the past and fuelled greater public interest in history. It became increasingly clear that historical interpretation could be directly political in its own right. This was most evident in the non-Russian republics, especially in the Baltics, where debate centred on the historical circumstances and legality of their incorporation by Stalin in the USSR. With the eventual surrender of the leadership to pressures for pluralism unleashed by glasnost’, the struggle over the historical consciousness of the people asserted its autonomy from party interference altogether. Eventually, as the regime moved further towards democracy, in 1990 abolishing the party’s monopoly on power, historical debate lost its surrogate function and, with this, its passionate intensity. In post-Soviet Russia, popular and political attention is focused on more urgent political and economic concerns, and history no longer has the capacity to mobilise public opinion. The spontaneous popular-historical challenge to Soviet-engineered collective memory was simultaneously a consequence of and one of the primary stimuli for the delegitimation of the political regime and its subsequent collapse. Rarely have historical interpretation and social memory so manifestly become not merely historical phenomena in their own right, but motors of historical change. In present-day Russia, although debate on history has become less universal and more confined to political and intellectual circles, it continues to represent for the observer a phenomenon of central relevance for understanding the ecological transformation of identity and political culture within the context of broader ‘environmental’ change. The following sections set out to clarify the contemporary relevance of history.
6. As early as 1990, a group of Soviet futurologists investigating the cultural preconditions and consequences of re-structuring, declared that "today, during a drastic turning-point in its history, our society as never before needs new, fresh ideas" (17). Two years later, the collapse of the Soviet Union and initial efforts to introduce western-style democratic institutions and free markets into post-Soviet Russia entailed an environmental break with the past that was more profound and dizzyingly precipitous than anyone could have predicted. Indeed, in many respects, the reforms represented "not merely the end of Soviet power, but one of the attempts to divert the course of Russian history onto a different path" (18).Westernising policy and the loss of territory seemed to mean surrendering core elements of Soviet-Russian identity: not only the sense of Soviet status and mission, but any claim to Russian exclusivity. The cri de coeur of a St. Petersburg intelligent that his entire "speculative spiritual future" had suddenly been "consigned to a past that itself had been cancelled out by the present" eloquently captures a general condition of cultural disorientation. As well as lamenting the universal decline in living standards and the loss of "global guiding theory", he mourns the demise of the "intellectual’s myth about the Russian people, which forces a reinterpretation of the history of Russian culture and of Russia generally" and the corresponding "perception of the developments in Russia as the ‘end of Russian history’" (19). Given the magnitude of the projected systemic transformation, it is little wonder that Stürmer’s forebodings for Germany in the 1980’s seem to pale before the twin threats of cultural debilitation and political instability in contemporary Russia.
7. To be effective, structural transformation needs to be accompanied by a re-structuring of cultural attitudes. "After all," notes a group of western political scientists, "democracy is more than a set of institutions; it requires sustenance from a myriad of political, social, legal, and economic values resident in the hearts and minds of the ordinary members of the polity" (20). However, whereas structural change may be abrupt, it is evident that cultural orientations to transformation emerge only over a longer period, since many internalised dispositions and assumptions, including those of historical consciousness and cultural identity, are products of long processes of socialisation (21). For this reason, the western political science literature on nation- and state-building - which had largely been overlooked by Sovietologists investigating Gorbachev’s perestroika - stresses that cultural change should precede systemic democratisation (22). However, this was not the case: "[f]reedom came like a bolt from the blue," wrote the Abkhazian author Fazil Iskander after the fall of the Soviet Union. "People were not ready" (23). According to the theoretical propositions of Harry Eckstein, abrupt discontinuity will produce a ‘formless’ and ‘entropic’ political culture (in other words, generalised anomie), because of the ‘inertia’ of persisting cultural orientations. Eckstein further asserts that the strength of countervailing forces is proportional to the speed of attempted change. The resulting cultural incoherence prompts diverse patterns of responsive behaviour - for example, resistance to authority, rule-bending opportunism and retreat into parochialism - which preclude effective short-term transformation (24). It is now evident that political life in Russia since 1992 has indeed manifested many such tendencies - retrogression, rebellion, corruption, cynicism, passivity and "anti-politics" - and that the trajectory of structural change has been powerfully modified (25). Present-day Russian politics also seems to vindicate some sociological work on the history of state formation which claims that nation-building is incompatible with simultaneous democratisation. Charles Tilly, for example, argues that cultural crisis catalysed by the enterprise of forging a cohesive national identity destabilises the political environment to such a degree that it precludes the pragmatic bargaining processes requisite for the establishment of a democratic polity (26).
8. Of course, in any environment of change, the past will always to some extent cast its shadows over the present. As Gabriel Almond has indicated, during a prolonged process of transformation not only do "historical experience and [....] structural constraints and opportunities" work to transform "cultural propensities," but the "prior set of attitudinal patterns" will also operate to "impose significant constraints on effective behavioural and structural change" (27). In the words of another political scientist, "[t]he long-run effects of attempted revolutionary transformation will diverge considerably from revolutionary intentions and resemble more the prerevolutionary condition of society" (28). At the turn of the millennium, Russian politics certainly seems to lend credence to this fatalistic perspective. A conceptual analysis of culture as a component of environmental transformation must take care not to conflate contiguity and causality (29). Nevertheless, even if the theoretical literature does not offer conclusive demonstrations of the precise role of culture, our brief historical survey of glasnost’ and of the subsequent post-Soviet disorientation suggests that culture has indeed been one of the ecological variables which best explain the apparent failure of the Russian transition. If we accept Stürmer’s assertion that collective memory is a powerful constitutive element of political culture, then the next step in understanding the frustrated process of Russian democratisation is to examine the mechanisms of transmission of historical consciousness, and specifically, the role of history as both expression and political instrument of the transformation of social memory within post-Soviet Russia (30).
9. To provide initial conceptual orientation for this discussion, we turn to recent German history-writing and to the public controversies surrounding a particularly German notion, which has been graced with a peculiarly German name: Vergangenheitsbewältigung (31). This ultimately untranslatable word has been twisted into English in various ways: as ‘coming to terms with the past’, as ‘the overcoming of the past', or 'the mastery of the past’, or, in one especially inelegant formulation, as "to defeat and dispense with the threatening object that is the past" (32). On the one hand, the term conveys a sense of forcible command over the past, which may include judicial, bureaucratic and political interventions. On the other, it implies a process of subjective reconciliation, analogous to a therapeutic 'working through' of a psychological trauma, over a much longer term, both as a result of private, perhaps generational, accommodation, and of professional and popular historical discussion. Out of the semantic ambiguity of this concept developed the Historikerstreit on the relative importance of amnesia and commemoration in the forging of social memory, a debate that forced every German politician publicly to adopt a stance on the philosophy and methods of history, and forced professional historians to sink to politics. It is justifiable to claim that this concept is particularly German, even though it is to be used as a point of departure for considerations of the Russian transformation, because although other countries have experienced material and moral collapse, and the subsequent need to salvage from the rubble a sense of the past, of national identity, and of collective values and orientations appropriate to a new era - in other words a new 'political culture' - few other nations' scholars have proved themselves more eager to theorise the process and more sensitive to the central role of history as a means of re-socialisation, as a vital component in the process of democratisation.
10. Gotthard Jasper emphasises that Vergangenheitsbewältigung is a post hoc analytical construct rather than a descriptive term for a finite, local phenomenon (33). Consequently, although it has been hitherto used to understand West German attitudes to the Nazi period and measures taken to deal with the mental, institutional and material vestiges of the recent past, it may be used, with due sensitivity to German particularities, generally to infer the requisite procedures and conditions for any endeavour to overcome the cultural dislocations and tensions occasioned by sudden structural change. Jasper sketches an irregular succession of six ‘ideal type’ stages inferred from the West German process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. The first four phases are as follows: "the settling of accounts and shattered dreams" (retribution, disorientation, anomie); "Vergangenheitsbewältigung by decree" (administrative purging, lustration laws, rehabilitations of victims, dismantling of security structures, renaming of streets and towns, creation of new school and university curricula, archival regulations and selective revelations); "judicial Vergangenheitsbewältigung and production of scapegoats" (trials of former leaders and/or lesser-ranking security officials); and "taboos and repression" (a focus on the exigencies of state-building and a refusal to confront the continuing legacy of the past). These initial four phases involve shorter-term behavioural change and structural interventions in response to environmental transformation, and have the effect of either facilitating or thwarting (depending on the nature of intervention and degree of change effected) the longer-term coming to terms with the past. Firstly, this schema indicates that, in different contexts and at different stages of transformation, processes of cultural adaptation demand sometimes remembrance, sometimes forgetting. Secondly, it captures the immanent ambiguity of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, reflecting the fact that transformation involves not only subjective reorientation, but also structural reform. The deeply traumatised subject will not be cured by 'nature' and time alone. We propose that this schema may be exploited heuristically to identify the requisite interventions, and, especially, the significant structural and cultural continuities and absences of the post-Soviet Russian transformation, and to suggest important directions for further research (34). However, the focus of the present paper is not on general questions of cultural transformation, but on the role played in that process by historians and their histories. It is during the final two stages of Jasper’s schema, those of "moral accusations and political exploitation of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in generational conflict" and of "structural analysis", that the historian plays an increasingly formative and correspondingly controversial role in the process of cultural adaptation. The next section considers the development of West German historiography of Nazism during the last four decades in the light of this periodisation of change.
11. At the beginning of the 1960’s, intense discussion of the German national past revived. In part, this was due to the political coming of age of the post-war generation who rejected the authority of the post-Nazi establishment and their consensual politics, previously justified by the economic miracle and based on their acceptance of denazification as having drawn a line under the unfortunate episode of Hitlerism. The young radicals began to call to account leading individuals and institutions of the Federal Republic for their alleged complicity with the Nazi regime. A mass of incriminating material came to light forcing a new phase of purges and trials. In the universities, a generation of historians who had not held tenure during the Third Reich were reaching senior positions, and were beginning to look at German history in a new way. A key issue was the place of the Hitler regime in German history. Previously, scholars had stressed the discontinuity represented by this period. However, in 1961 a debate about Germany's First World war aims initiated a shift towards a more critical appraisal of the national tradition. Detailed archival research led Fritz Fischer to conclude that in 1914 Germany diplomacy had worked towards war with extensively expansionist objectives supported by the majority of the population. The obvious implication was that far from representing rupture in German history, Hitler inherited many of his ideas from earlier generations, and owed his broad support to his embodiment of popular aspirations inherent in the political and social structure of unified Germany (35). The establishment of new universities and new chairs of history provided a stimulus for the adoption of new approaches to the discipline, particularly influenced by western Marxism and Weberian social science. Critique of the Federal Republic was implicit in the structures of the new history. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, one of the foremost historians of the 1960’s and 1970’s, insisted that history played an essential political role as the "living, political, critical science of society," which both reflected contemporary social reality and acted upon it (36). In the view of the ‘critical historians’, only a comparative theoretical approach to the national tradition would provide a fuller understanding of the unique path of development experienced by Germany, and would generate a moral rejection of this heritage and the adoption in the Federal Republic of a self-consciously post-nationalist ‘civic patriotism’ (37).
12. According to Jasper’s ‘ideal type’ classification, as the generation directly implicated in the dictatorship gradually disappears, appraisal of the period in question becomes depersonalised and de-ideologised. Historians during this stage embark on sober investigations of everyday life under the former regime and its structural or psychological preconditions in national history. However, as the German political and intellectual environment of the early 1980’s turned back to the right, the explicit politicisation of historical debate persisted and even intensified. The Tendenzwende stimulated a series of professional and public controversies over the history of the Third Reich, which crescendoed in the Historikerstreit, discussed at the start of the present paper. These disputes took up with renewed vigour the central question of post-1945 German historiography, that of situating the Nazi regime. Firstly this meant situating it historically in Germany’s development. Was it, as the critical historians asserted, the culmination of a ‘special German path’ (Sonderweg), shaped by popular mentalities (a concept distinct from the suspect notion of ‘national character’), by political and economic structures, class relations or a particular experience of retarded industrialisation (38)? Conservatives denied the ‘abnormality’ of German development and represented the Third Reich (despite its name) as an aberration in the course of otherwise 'normal' German history? Others countered that no two countries share identical paths, so that the very concept of ‘normality’ was fallacious and politically loaded. The Historikerstreit was not only about the moral implications of interpretation but also about the political meanings of methods and concepts. The new Alltagsgeschichte, or ‘everyday history’ approach, by focussing ‘from below’ on the nature of social experience under Nazism rather than on the terroristic political system, revealed continuities in popular orientations which addressed, sometimes disturbingly, the German sense of national identity in the Federal Republic. The new so-called 'structuralist' approach emphasised the ‘polycratic’ nature of the Nazi state, characterised by competing bureaucracies and the ‘cumulative radicalisation’ of policy, and implied that the exclusive focus on ideology and leadership of the ‘intentionalist’ school not only failed adequately to explain the dynamics of the system, but provided an alibi for large number of civil servants, economic administrators, local officials, policemen and industrialists, many of whom had survived unmolested into the Federal Republic. In order better to understand the reality of the Third Reich, argued the critical historians, the scholar should apply the same eclectic methods to this subject of research as to any other periods of history. Without this ‘historicisation’ of the subject, they feared, the alleged ‘abnormality’ of Nazism would provide the basis for a renewed ‘historicism’ extolling a ‘healthy’ German tradition. Martin Broszat, the foremost theorist and practitioner of this approach explicitly linked questions of historiography to issues of collective memory:
"A normalisation of our historical consciousness and the communication of national identity through history can not be achieved by avoiding the Nazi era through its exclusion. Yet it seems to me that the greater the historical distance becomes, the more urgent it is to realise that bracketing the Hitler era out of history and historical thinking also occurs in a way when it is only dealt with from a political-moral perspective and not with the same differentiated applied historical method as other historical epochs ...." (39)
Only if historians employed a ‘normal’ approach could national memory be informed by a more profound and sensitive understanding of the past. The point was not to preclude moral judgement, but to postpone it so as to reconstruct the original orientations and intentions of actors framed in their own moral terms of reference - even if these are misplaced or repugnant - through the exercise of an empathetic Weberian ‘Verstehen’. One outcome of this approach, for example, would be to enable the traditional dichotomy between collaboration and opposition (which itself had been dichotomised in the two Germanies between mythologised, historicist accounts of respectively elite, i.e. Christian Democratic, and working class, i.e. Communist, anti-Nazism) to be reconstrued in a more differentiated fashion, more attentive to contemporary structural, societal and psychological constraints on and inducements to non-compliant action.
13. Broszat’s introduction of the concept of Resistenz to supplement, not to supplant, the study of Widerstand (opposition), sought to elucidate a broader range of ‘limiting effects’ or ‘partial opposition’, arising from conflicts intrinsic to the system, which thwarted or transformed the implementation of regime policy (40). The redefinition of ‘resistance’ echoes the re-conceptualisation of ‘power’ by the French theorist Michel Foucault. His later work sought to represent ‘power’ as an essentially productive force that inevitably induces local resistances, which themselves, in turn, produce reciprocal effects. Altogether, the ‘little tactics of the habitat’ contribute to an dynamic and volatile equilibrium in the system (41). Detlev Peukert partially mobilised this conception of resistance in his history of everyday life under the Nazi regime, differentiating among a wide range of strategies of ‘non-conformity’, more explicit ‘refusals’ of co-operation, open ‘protest’ and uncompromising ‘opposition’ (Widerstand) (42). Criticism of the Alltagsgeschichte approach pointed out that the defining character of the Third Reich was its criminal-ideological structure, and any effort to refocus attention on other, putatively more ‘normal’, aspects of its existence ran the risk of relativisation. On the one hand, it was argued, the ‘banality of evil’ is a necessary but insufficient explanation for Nazi barbarism (43). On the other hand, the adoption of the concept of Resistenz to embrace a range of societal behaviour such as apathy, shop-floor tactics of negotiation, individual evasion of commitments or the limited transgression of norms, denies the concept and act of resistance its unique political and moral force, since "the oppositional stances subsumed under the new concept of Resistenz had very little relevant effect on the ruling totalitarian regime or none at all" (44). Those who opposed the Alltagsgeschichte approach declared that the discipline of history necessarily involves the scholar in the exercise of moral judgement, whereas so-called ‘historicisation’ of the subject leads logically (though in practice not inevitably) to its reintegration in a cleansed ‘historicist’ tradition (45).
14. As far as the politicians were concerned, it was still better simply to omit the Nazi years from the historical account. There was great public controversy following Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s opening of two historical museums perceived by many to expurgate the twelve years of Hitler’s rule, and to attribute undeserved centrality to the Federal Republic’s democratic, especially Christian Democratic, antecedents (46). These museums, it seemed, represented an attempt to establish in the popular consciousness the government's version of a ‘Whig’ view of history, "organising the historical story by a system of direct reference to the present" (47). The problem, of course, is that once it is recognised that history is not the past itself, but an imaginative reconstruction of it in the mind of the historian, it becomes difficult to define where re-interpretation ends and omission and distortion set in, or to identify the criteria by which the former and latter can be distinguished. This is especially true if one subscribes to a post-modernist philosophy that claims only politics or the rules inherent in discourse itself invest history with meaning. However, as Charles Maier demonstrates, while postmodern criteria might permit the observer to read all history as a present-centred political discourse, they do not morally justify shoddy practice or legitimise expedient revisionism (48). History can only take so much politics without deformation. But what ethical norms govern the use of history by politicians? In May 1985, US President Ronald Reagan and Kohl made a ceremonial visit to Bitburg military cemetery. In response to protests that the commemorative site included the graves of SS men, the President proclaimed that "those young men are victims of Nazism also ... They are victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps" (49). The visit, made at Kohl’s behest, and Reagan’s probably unwittingly though not unwillingly compliant comment, should be seen in the context of the German Chancellor’s wider political strategy of invoking national pride in German history, even in the German experience of World War Two, by recasting it within the contemporary narrative of a twentieth century global anti-communist crusade. This redefinition of the eastern front as a heroic struggle against Bolshevism and against the destruction of Germany was also articulated in the work of the respected conservative historian Andreas Hillgruber, one of the scholars involved in the Historikerstreit of 1986. A short essay by Hillgruber on the German army in retreat claimed to describe, without imposing retrospective moral judgement or contextualisation, the actions of its soldiers from the ‘normal’ experiential point of view of the participants themselves, whose only objectives, it was implied, were survival in the face of the murderous Red Army onslaught and defence of the Fatherland (50). The lineage of this approach in Broszat’s plea for ‘historicisation’ is clear. Hillgruber strives to elevate ‘identification’ to a historiographical technique, but, as one commentator notes, it is one in which "selectivity merges into a travesty of historical reality" (51). In his critical response, Jürgen Habermas charged that within Hillgruber’s methodological stance lurked the political project of rescuing the reputation of fighters "who have not yet been framed and devalued by our retrospective knowledge" (52). It is true that, although Hillgruber purports to have relinquished a moral framework, the effect he achieves simply substitutes for condemnation a sense of Götterdämmerung.
15. As well as situating the Nazi regime historically in Germany's development, the ‘historians’ debate’ was also about situating the Nazi regime conceptually and comparatively in the context of general history (53).The controversy pitted conservative historians, such as Hillgruber, Stürmer and Ernst Nolte, endeavouring to rescue German national identity and pride from the long shadow of the Hitler regime, against liberals and radicals, including Habermas and Broszat, who insisted that the German collective memory should not be sanitised. The conservatives represented National Socialism as first and foremost a defensive response to the threat of Bolshevism during what they saw as an extended ‘European civil war from 1917-1945’, and as comprehensible this way both in historical terms, and - this was at least implicit in some of their writings - also in moral terms. The Jewish Holocaust was understood as a phenomenon not qualitatively different from other massacres in history, such as the Armenian genocide of 1915, which they tried to prove offered a conscious precedent for the Nazis' murderous activity in the east. Of course, they made special mention of the mass 'class murder' committed in Soviet Russia, the 'Asiatic barbarity' of which - according to Ernst Nolte - drove the Nazis to commit their crimes (54). As we have already seen, many of their radical opponents had already accepted the methodological legitimacy of ‘historicizing' Nazism, but they objected that the conservatives were using scholarly issues as a smoke-screen for their essentially political objectives: relativising and offering apologetics for the unique horrors of Hitler’s Germany.
16. The West German Historikerstreit rendered visible the powerful political implications of certain general historiographical problems. It was, as one observer commented, "part of the larger controversy about the political uses of history and the relationship between historical consciousness and identity" (55). Many of its central issues had long been implicit in western history-writing on the Soviet Union, and had already surfaced in the Soviet Union during glasnost’. Does this mean we can speak of a post-Soviet Russian Vergangenheitsbewältigung? Perhaps one of the peculiarities of the contemporary Russian transformation is that administrative rehabilitations, personnel purges and other phenomena corresponding to the first three stages of Jasper’s model either did not materialise at all, or commenced before the collapse of the old regime and ceased soon after its downfall. (This may be because of the imperial character of the Soviet Union, which meant that the "settling of accounts" occurring in its national areas preceded and contributed to the regime’s collapse, unlike in many central and eastern European countries, where regime change was sudden and regarded as a form of national liberation, and was followed by conscious and vigorous efforts to cleanse the system of vestiges of communism). The rhetoric of history, so powerful a motor of change under Gorbachev, has become a secondary element in present-day Russian political discourse, exploited to symbolise, promote and lend colour to political positions, not substituting for or transforming policy (this would seem to equate with the fourth stage in Jasper’s model, when history is subordinated to and political and public energies are focused on the exigencies of state-building). Of course, comparisons of the post-Nazi and post-Soviet cases also suggest essential differences. The gradual debilitating process of internal structural and cultural change renders the collapse of the Soviet empire and its subsequent transformation quite distinct from the external defeat and foreign occupation which brought about the downfall of the Third Reich and the establishment of democracy in the western zones (for further discussion of this theme, see the conclusion to this paper). In particular, the sense of national guilt - and its denial - which has played such a crucial role in stimulating German historical sensibility is absent in Russia, perhaps owing to the different character of the crimes committed in the Soviet Union and the different relationship between perpetrators and victims. Nevertheless, from the consideration of German historical controversies above, it is possible tentatively to infer a number of broad topics of debate which may be expected to inform a present or future Russian pereosmyshlenie proshlogo (rethinking of the past), signalling the advent of the final two stages of Jasper’s model of post-authoritarian development, those of 'generational conflict' and 'structural analysis'. These themes are worth reconsidering here, not just from a standpoint of historiographical interest, but as elements of the adaptation of history, a component of political culture. to the new environment. In each section, we consider first western history-writing on Russia, and the contribution western historians may make to a post-Soviet reformulation of history, and secondly Soviet and post-Soviet Russian historiography, and the progress and prospects of its transformation.
17. The German debates on national history have called into question concepts of ‘normality’ or ‘abnormality’ and notions of geographical, cultural or economic determinism in state development. Nevertheless, the rhetorical or ritual invocation of Russia’s purported ‘uniqueness’ figures prominently in the historiographical discourse of the post-Soviet transformation. The quest for Russia’s defining difference has its own long heritage, and both western and domestic history-writing on Russia’s long durée swing between accentuating divergence or convergence in counterpoint with the contemporary geocultural orientation. Some western historians, such as George Vernadsky, have attributed Russia's difference to its Mongol inheritance of ‘Asiatic autocracy’ involving a non-feudal service elite, the dependence of the individual on the collective and the Crown’s monopoly on land ownership. Others have emphasised Russia’s failure to experience feudalism, the Renaissance or the Reformation (56). Using the work of Otto Hoetzsch, the German historian Werner Markert has proposed that it was Moscow’s unremitting territorial expansion and acquisition of a vast contiguous empire that produced the increasing centralisation of the state, the elimination of corporatist and rank or class-based interests, the levelling of social differentiation, and thus Russia’s effective internal, as well as external, ‘colonialisation’ (57). The purported peculiarity of Russian development has also been explained by the collision of westernising policies, forced on Russian rulers by external threats and fear of encirclement, with Muscovite oriental traditions. In this interpretation, Russia’s rulers sought to introduce western modes of governance and to achieve modernisation within the technical and administrative spheres, while simultaneously striving to repress those other aspects of modernity perceived to be potentially subversive, such as the rule of law, press freedom, socialism, democracy, national self-determination or political pluralism (58). Taking a different angle, Moshe Lewin has written that the "curse of Russian history" has been its leaders’ oft-chosen ambition to escape underdevelopment by imposing ‘extensive’ methods from above, a strategy which repeatedly has produced a "stagnation-prone statism" (59). Just as in Germany the Sonderweg question was subsumed into general debates of the Historikerstreit, the vociferous 'totalitarianism' controversy in Soviet studies (see following sections) served both to focus attention on questions of Russia's uniqueness and to distract from their scholarly substance. Theories of convergence for a time gained widespread credence among optimistic western liberals, but the experience of perestroika, the collapse of the Soviet regime and subsequent developments (notably the apparent failure of liberal economic reforms in post-Soviet Russia, and the peculiar hybrid system that has since emerged) are likely to discredit that approach and to rehabilitate attempts to formulate sui generis theses of Russian development (60).
18. In the Soviet historical profession, the question of mnogoulkadnost’ (the multiplicity of social-economic forms) and mnogomernost’ (the irregularity of historical development) periodically became the subject of intensive and controversial debate. These concepts posited the existence of real alternatives to the unilinear, uniform, law-governed (zakonomernii) form of historical change assumed by orthodox Soviet Marxism-Leninism. In the early 1970’s, a bitter controversy arose over the development of absolutism in western Europe and Russia. The studies of ‘revisionist’ Soviet scholars such as A. Gefter and A. Avrekh had both historical implications - why did Russia not follow the same path at the same time as the western nations? - and theoretical import - how can the dogmatic teleology of Marxism-Leninism be developed to accommodate differentiation? The historians implicated in the ‘New Direction’ were purged from their positions and their writings were speedily suppressed (61). During the late 1980’s there was a reprise of this debate - formulated now around the concept of ‘alternatives’ - that began increasingly to question even the material dialectical basis of Marxist theory, and sought not so much to modify the model, but to use its inherent anomalies to destroy it (62). In post-Soviet Russia, discussions of a ‘Russian Idea’ and of geopolitical or spiritual ‘Eurasianism’ are often represented as taking up the ‘Slavophile’ and ‘Westerniser’ controversy of the mid-nineteenth century, which persisted in emigré writings and also, though less overtly, among competing currents of Soviet intellectual opinion. The current debates, however, are prone either to lapse into obfuscation, mystification, racism and anti-semitism, or to fragment into a cacophony of conflicting political interests and opinions (63). But a sophisticated and credible reformulation of Russian national identity, in relation to both its international orientation and its multiethnic domestic population, is a necessary precondition for legitimising the policy choices of Russian leaders and creating stable consensus (although, as Michael Stürmer argued, consensus may also be a precondition of establishing a credible national identity). With this in mind, Boris Yeltsin at the start of his second term as Russian President convened a group of eminent scholars to deliberate on and formulate a new ‘national idea’, but his initiative failed to stimulate popular interest, and the committee soon conceded defeat. In the last decade, a few scholars, mainly of a new, younger generation, have begun to confront Russia’s long durée and the question of its uniqueness critically and constructively, without dogma or prejudice. The extent to which they will be able in future independently to address these issues depends on the direction contemporary Russia takes, in both internal and foreign policy, and on the impact of structural change on the profession and practice of history (64).
19. In many historiographical controversies relating to the longue durée of Russian and Soviet history, historians’ empirical or interpretative differences represent only the superficial expression of profoundly opposing dispositions to a fundamental philosophical question – the extent to which history is either indeterminate or teleological (65)? Was October a broad-based populist revolution, and therefore an organic development from Russian conditions, or a coup by a conspiratorial elite, inspired by alien philosophies and practices and then imposing them on Russia ? What were the defining features of the new Soviet regime, and to what extent did it differ from its tsarist predecessor? Did the Stalinist political system initiate an qualitatively new era in Soviet history after Lenin’s death, and to what degree did there already exist precedents for dictatorial centralisation and mass terror under Lenin’s rule or earlier? Were there alternative potential directions of development in the 1920’s, if so, to what extent were they feasible, and if feasible, why did they succumb to Stalinism? Can Stalin’s forced industrialisation and collectivisation be termed a ‘revolution from above’ and, if so, how should his rule be seen in the context of Russia’s long tradition of autocratic reformers? Was there a cultural ‘Great Retreat’ in the mid-1930’s, or a political-bureaucratic Thermidorean reaction which reasserted ‘traditional’ values? What continuities in ‘political culture’ and popular mentalities can be identified, and to what extent can they be attributed the privilege of causality? Such questions have long dominated western history-writing on the fall of the tsarist regime and the development of the Soviet Union (66). These controversies on Russian and Soviet continuities, conducted in both professional and public arenas, all too often transgressed the ill-defined conventional boundaries between historiography and political polemic because they were based not on empirical argument, but on irreconcilable views of the nature of historical inevitability associated with antagonistic ideological standpoints.
20. In the Soviet historical profession, at least until glasnost’, it was heretical even to raise many of these problems, precisely because of their necessary political implications. Within the Marxist view of history, revolution played the role of overcoming dialectical antitheses within an inexorable teleology. Thus Soviet history decreed firstly that the Soviet state must be qualitatively different from everything that had preceded it, although it had developed out of the contradictions of the former society and regime, and secondly that after 1917 the new state should progress through a series of preordained stages towards communism: the period of reconstruction, of the construction of socialism, of real socialism and finally of developed socialism (in fact, Soviet periodisation was ad hoc and expedient). Post-Stalinist historiography conceded that under Stalin a ‘cult of personality’ had developed, which had brought about abuses of power, deviations from Leninist principles and unwarranted repressions within the party, but denied that this had interrupted the linear development of Soviet society (67). During the late 1980’s, however, Gorbachev’s attempt to harness history to his reform strategy called into question the sacred continuity of Soviet history. Thus, to legitimise the reformers' desired direction of economic transformation, the question was raised of a ‘Bukharinite’ alternative’ to Stalinist forced industrialisation in the 1920’s, rehabilitations were decreed of leading economists of the NEP period and of Party officials repressed under Stalin, and a critical attitude to the establishment of a ‘command-administrative economy’ became widespread. From 1989, with the increasing delegitimation of Soviet rule, the press began to publish radically revisionist versions of such previously untouchable subjects as the fall of Tsarist Russia, the Constituent Assembly, and Lenin’s role in the establishment and development of the Soviet system, offering a picture of historical change fractured by indeterminacy and chance. In post-Soviet Russia, an incipient body of independent historiography, offering a sensitive and scholarly treatment of the crucial question of continuity, is struggling to assert itself as a necessary corrective to the polarisation of political discourse between two dominant tendencies: one repudiating Russia's Soviet heritage as a rupture in the nation's 'organic' development and striving to identify or invent antecedents and precedents in pre-revolutionary Russia; the other rejecting only the most recent post-Soviet period as an 'unnatural' deviation from Russia's longue durée and yearning to return to a mythologised late Soviet time of stability, consensus and material sufficiency and to a teleology of inexorable progress (68).
21. From the early 1950's until the early 1970's, during the height of the first Cold War, Soviet studies in the west was dominated by the so-called ’totalitarian’ model, which focused attention on the primary importance of central politics and the personalities of the party-state leadership. In part, this was a consequence of the espousal by historians of ‘ideographic’ methodology, which is premised on a coincidence of the ‘real’ and the ‘actual’, the uniqueness of historical phenomena, an emphasis on voluntarism and indeterminacy, and a consequent rejection of generalising theory or the conceptual excavation of unobservable structures and forces (69). Of course, this methodology is both derived from and reinforces a specific ideological predisposition, which rejects statist attempts to formulate and implement general laws of human behaviour. In part, the 'totalitarian' model was, as Steve Smith has pointed out, a mirror-image of the Soviet regime’s self-presentation as monolithic and efficient, an expression of the primacy of politics which corresponded to the dominating structural-functional paradigm in western political science, which assumed a high degree of congruence between institutional form and performance (70). Therefore, as in the ‘intentionalist’ approach to Nazi politics, a reading of the ideological and strategic deliberations of the Soviet leadership was considered to provide a necessary and sufficient explanation of its actions (71).In part, also, the focus on state structures and ideology was a consequence of direct Cold War politicisation of Sovietology, which sought to accentuate the ‘abnormality’ of the enemy state. A further constraint on academic perspectives was imposed by the narrow range and problematic nature of sources available for research. Other than the Trotsky and Smolensk archives, source materials were limited to published works, notably public speeches, printed congress resolutions and laws, highly unreliable official statistics, the coded political discourse of specialist Soviet journals, Soviet and émigrémemoirs, and the Moscow press. In the 1970's, an assertive 'revisionist’ historiography developed in reaction to the perceived dominance of the ‘totalitarian’ school and its focus on ‘state’ as opposed to ‘society’, ‘centre’ above ‘periphery’, ‘intentions’ rather than structural constraints and autonomous forces. The 'revisionist' historians generally belonged to a new, younger generation. They were seeking to launch their careers and secure faculty tenure, and politically were influenced by increasing anti-Vietnam radicalism in the United States, by a new climate of détente in international relations and by the apparent stability of Soviet politics and society. Having begun finally to assimilate methods and concepts borrowed from other disciplines, western historians of the Soviet Union manifested the enthusiasm of new converts to ‘nomothetic’ methodology, which exploits conceptualisation, explicit use of theory and deductive-hypothetical method to reveal latent processes and mechanisms. This approach also, of course, implies a certain political standpoint, which favours universalising concepts and tends towards teleology. Some of these historians were influenced by structuralist ideas, other by ‘behaviouralism’, which looked less at fixed structures, and more at the fluid workings of a holistic system, stressing institutional failure, political conflict, local or sectoral resistance to the centre and its constant state of flux (72). There was also keener discussion of the supposed convergence of east and west, which implied that the Soviet system should no longer be regarded as ‘pathological’, or at least that it was undergoing a process of 'normalisation'. This ‘revisionist’ historiography of the Soviet past was neither monolithic nor programmatic, comprising many diverse approaches and interpretations, and unified merely by an uneasiness with the 'totalitarian' model. The least radical 'revisionist' stance proposed that the regime simply had less control over policy implementation than the ‘totalitarian’ thesis implied, execution of directives being frequently improvised, and their consequences unforeseen. This behaviouralist approach was initially compatible with the 'totalitarian' model conceived as an 'ideal type', and recalled Merle Fainsod's 'inefficient totalitarianism', although it was noted that 'inefficiency' of a higher order would progressively weaken the utility of the model (73). In a recent paper on the repressions in the Birobidzhan, for example, Robert Weinberg explicitly argues against the 'totalitarian' model. However, although he presents evidence of local activists contradicting central directives in pursuit of their own radical grievances, he insists that it was the centre that gave initial impetus to the purges, with the aim of breaking the power of entrenched local ‘family circles’ (74). He stresses the need to make a distinction between central political orchestration and total central control, drawing a parallel with the management of a planned economy, in which inevitable systemic inefficiencies obstruct perfect plan implementation (75). A similar interpretation asserts that the regime, aware of the limits of its own capabilities, issued generic 'signals' from above in order to stimulate specific local policies from the grass-roots (76). Getty's Origins of the Great Purges advanced a more radical revision of the 'totalitarian' interpretation. He proposed that the party in the 1930's was "inefficient, fragmented, and split several ways by internal factional conflict," especially within local organisations and between district, regional and central organs (77). The party’s own reforms of its record-keeping procedures and its membership purges (the chistki, proverka and obmen) were not part of a continuous, 'rising crescendo' of purges, but bureaucratic-administrative measures, aimed mainly at rooting out 'passive' elements, and at re-establishing central control over party membership registrations, confusion over which had served to strengthen the autonomy of 'quasi-feudal' local secretaries. The Great Purges, in Getty's view, were related to the attack launched by Ezhov and Zhdanov on this mid-level party bureaucracy, and exploited by NKVD officials and both party leaders and the party rank-and-file to defend or consolidate their positions. Getty considered Stalin's assault on former oppositionists, Old Bolsheviks and the Army in the series of Moscow show trials to be a discrete phenomenon, and therefore all but ignored these events (78). Throughout the period, Getty emphasised, Stalin made "crucial decisions" but made them "tentatively, belatedly and like most powerful politicians, by choosing or arbitrating among various options" (79). Getty's interpretation consciously downplayed both terror and the voluntaristic nature of the regime, and instead stressed the autonomous and proactive roles of the bureaucracy and society. He concluded that "[a]lthough the Soviet government was certainly dictatorial (or tried to be), it was not totalitarian" (80).
22. In the Soviet Union until glasnost’, contemporary domestic history was naturally the most politically sensitive academic subject, and consequently became the preserve of trusted and tame historians, generally working under the auspices of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, and faithful to the dictates of ideological prescription and partiinost’ (party loyalty). In this way, political history became synonymous with party history, which brooked no discussion of factions or oppositions unless to condemn their heresies. All the major textbooks of Soviet history reflect this perspective, which in effect represented a morally-inverted Soviet version of the 'totalitarian' model. Under Gorbachev, the rehabilitation of pre-war oppositional groups and the consideration of alternative paths of development permitted an examination of more diverse aspects of political rule, including studies of regional elites. Nonetheless, historians continued to propagate the view of the Stalinist and post-Stalinist regimes as monoliths, because it was now in the interests of reformers to insist on the inherent inflexibility of the ‘command-administrative system’ and therefore its need for fundamental restructuring. The democratic opposition, on the other hand, wholeheartedly adopted the western 'totalitarian' version, with all its anti-Soviet and anti-Marxist connotations. While the newly-opened archives have permitted some more nuanced consideration of conflicting decision-making interests within the Soviet leadership, Russian historiography generally remains polarised between the two models of monolithism, the Soviet-style and western Cold War models, reflecting the inability of post-Soviet history-writing to emancipate itself fully from political instrumentalisation and conceptual cliché. We have seen how in German historiography, once the moral implications of both ‘intentionalist’ and ‘structuralist’ approaches were made explicit and their methodological terms subjected to exacting theoretical dissection, it became possible to develop a more discerning and eclectic treatment of the subject. Similarly, if post-Soviet historians, both western and Russian, are to achieve a better appreciation of the complexities, ambiguities and nuances of Stalinist state and society, they must also be sensitive - not subservient - to the theoretical assumptions they introduce via the methods of their enquiry and to the contemporary political connotations of the models they employ.
23. Some older liberal historians had early on rejected the political primacy of the ‘totalitarian’ school but resisted the stark dichotomy made by many of the later ‘revisionists’ between ‘state’ and ‘society’. In retrospect, Moshe Lewin wrote: "what had been missing was the idea of a Soviet ‘social system’ and, in turn, the conceptualisation of a dynamic process in which all the subsystems interact in time and space, yielding ever more complex and intricate patterns" (81). Lewin himself aimed at synthesis, guided by the belief that "it is society that has economic and political institutions and produces values, cultures, leaders, and personalities" (82). From a similar standpoint, Stephen Cohen considered the Terror to be not merely a political, ‘top-down’ phenomenon but also an inseparable aspect of Stalinist society, and highlighted its demographic dimensions, its relationship with the social phenomena of collectivisation, industrialisation and urbanisation, its impact on social and geographic mobility, its creation of a large social group of forced labourers, and its social psychological effects on the population at large (83). However, younger historians, motivated by the same historiographical trends that influenced Wehler’s ‘critical school’ and Alltagsgeschichte in Germany, the Annales school in France, and the History Workshop in Britain, more determinedly rejected state-centred research in favour of ‘history from below’. In an influential historiographical review of the new trend, Sheila Fitzpatrick identified several broadly revisionist approaches adopted by this cohort of social historians (84). The first concerned itself with problems of structure and social interaction, and sought to 'disaggregate' social groups, with a view to revealing their internal tensions (e.g. skilled versus unskilled labour, hierarchical differentiation within the kolkhoz peasantry, different interests within the bureaucracy), and the implications of such nuanced stratification (e.g. the impact of the Stakhanovite campaign on worker hierarchies). A second approach focused on the high social and geographical mobility which accompanied urbanisation and industrialisation, and proposed that this was responsible for weakening traditional bonds of association (whereas, traditionally, social atomisation and anomie were considered planned consequences of totalitarian coercion), and, by creating organisational and control problems, for stimulating the systemic 'need' for terror and indoctrination. Social mobility, in turn, was accelerated by the opportunities opened by mass arrests and deportations. A third, more contentious, approach posited adegree of intended or unintended pluralism in the system. Some historians suggested that the regime's policies were devised to appeal to certain social constituencies, others that state policy was modified in the process of implementation by informal social negotiation between diverse central and social interests, among whom Stalin was sometimes relegated to the role of mediator. Vera Dunham, for example, posited a 'Big Deal' between the new élite and the regime, which prompted a return to middle-class cultural values in the late 1930's (85). Fitzpatrick found evidence of 'cultural revolution' which, although initiated by the centre (by means of the Shakhty and Industrial Party trials) as a mobilising strategy, was subsequently "not only generated by forces within the society but also served to create societal support (as well as societal opposition) for the regime" (86). Lynne Viola and Hiroaki Kuromiya have investigated processes and phenomena which they conceived as representing a reciprocal relationship of negotiation between the regime and the working class (87). Gabor T. Rittersporn took Getty’s 'revisionist' line even further, asserting that "[t]he struggles of 1936-1938 were unleashed by popular discontent with the arbitrariness, corruption and inefficiency of the ruling strata" (88). However, as Fitzpatrick notes, Rittersporn failed to demonstrate in which way the masses influenced their rulers and both elsewhere and later in the same article conceded that they played merely a passive role (89). She concluded that the available evidence (as of 1985) did not substantially change the traditional, predominant historiographical view of the Stalinist regime as initiator of social change in the 1930’s. With the opening of the archives, and the revelation of substantial evidence confirming Stalin's central role in unleashing the repressions, rigid conceptual dichotomies of state/society, politics/culture or centre/periphery collapse. Historians seek instead, in the words of two recent historiographical reviews, firstly, to "reject the notion of a diffuse responsibility and causality that portrays Stalin as only a distant figure chairing an executive board or as a mediator of rival groups or factions" (90), while, secondly, allowing for "elements of inertia and initiative generated in the matrix of popular culture and social action despite or apart from the state" (91),which may have acted to shape the final outcome of policies imposed from above (92). This new, holistic approach permits historians to appropriate Foucauldian notions of resistance (or Broszat’s similar concept of Resistenz) to describe gradations of non-compliance. Fitzpatrick, for example, in her 1994 monograph on the peasantry, identified a range of strategies used by her subjects to manage the traumatic experience of forced collectivisation and to assert their own collective or individual interests. She lists what she terms ‘strategies of resistance’ (inactivity, apathy, flight, seasonal migration, rumour-mongering); ‘strategies of management’ (implicit negotiation over terms of collectivisation); ‘strategies of active accommodation’ (exploitation of opportunities to assert individual interests above the collectivity); and ‘strategies of manipulation’ (use of denunciations to provoke state action coinciding with the peasants’ interests) (93). An American journal has recently dedicated an issue to problems of ‘resistance’ in Russian and Soviet history (94).
24. History writing in the Soviet Union also traditionally concentrated on the actions of the political leadership and party faithful. The ‘history of the common people’ beloved of left-wing historians in the west was transformed by Soviet Marxism-Leninism into societal aggregations and statistical indicators marking the state's inexorable progress towards socialism and communism. Regional or local studies focused on party triumphs in production, construction or defence, or on 'ethnographic' description of material culture, folklore and popular traditions, and served more as public relations exercises for local industry or the local Party leadership than as scholarship (95). There were few efforts to conceptualise everyday Soviet life, since to do so without implicit criticism of official propaganda or ideological tenets was impossible. During glasnost’, the prevalent journalistic history sought sensation in revealing the lives of prominent individuals and in penetrating the secrecy of high politics. Post-Soviet approaches to the 'history of everyday life' and 'microhistory', heavily influenced not only by Lotman's semiotics, but also by western historiographical ideas (especially the Annales school), hitherto discouraged or at times proscribed as 'bourgeois falsification', aim to explore popular mentalities and practices under the former regime without denying the potency of state power or degenerating into antiquarianism or folksy idealisations. Together with an impressive flowering of regional and local historical studies, this form of historiography, perhaps because its novelty attracts a younger generation of scholars and because its scope and subject matter necessitate a high degree of methodological and conceptual ingenuity, innovation, subtlety and sensitivity, has produced a richer crop of recent work than contemporary 'macrohistories' of Soviet society, of high politics, of 'great leaders' or of the Russian longue dureé.
25. The Historikerstreit served in German historiography to make explicit and, to some extent, to elucidate the political implications of scholarly positions. As Saul Friedländer recognised in his correspondence with Broszat on the historiography of Nazism, the historian cannot escape imposing a moral framework on the subject. It is better therefore to acknowledge the insuperability of one's own subjective stance, and openly to integrate it into historiography as a "second dimension of historical thought" (pace Collingwood), than naively to lull oneself and one's readers into a false sense of dissociated objectivity (96). As another writer has phrased it, "one does not doff an idiosyncrasy as easily as one dons a white coat" (97). 'Revisionist' structural and social history of Stalin’s Russia incited the same suspicions and controversies concerning the public use of history as had attended German historians' efforts to ‘normalise’ the historical subject (though it failed to attract the same degree of public interest). Getty accused the 'totalitarian' school of politicisation: "[t]here is always a danger," he declared, "that our scholarship could become subservient to the urge to denounce .... The tail wags the dog: critical use of sources, validity of scientific deduction, and strength of argument - the traditional measures of scholarly worth - take second place to the perceived values of the author" (98). Stephen Cohen also objected to the intrusion of "Cold War zealotry", and in retrospect declared that a "Sovietological version of the Whig view of history underlay the consensus of cold-war Soviet studies" (99). Robert Conquest, a leading proponent of the 'totalitarian' model, however, insisted that his moral condemnation of Stalinism was determined by an analysis of the phenomenon, and not vice-versa: "the process was not in fact that one started off as a Cold Warrior and then sought out unpleasant Soviet conduct and intentions to suit one's prejudice. The opposite was true: one became a Cold Warrior on discovering those unpleasantnesses" (100). The 'totalitarian' historians accused the 'revisionists' of seeking to exculpate the vozhd’ [leader], since their ‘structuralist’ approach or their research focus on 'society' as a sphere autonomous of 'state’ implied at least a de-emphasis of Stalin's role. While Getty, for example, proclaimed that the work of Robert Conquest belonged "to the genre of nineteenth century idealist historians who used personal accounts and literary sources to write about heroes and antiheroes," Conquest accused Getty of writing apologetic history in the vein of David Irving, the notorious extreme right-wing historian of Nazi Germany (101). Cohen turned his fire not only on the 'totalitarian' school, but also on "those younger social and institutional historians of the 1930's .... [who] .... downplay the ugliest aspects of the Soviet experience .... minimising or obscuring the colossal human tragedies and material losses." In 1985, Cohen wrote that it was still "too early to judge whether this unfortunate trend in the new scholarship derives from an overreaction to the revelatory zeal of cold-war Sovietology, the highly focused nature of social historical research, or an unstated political desire to rehabilitate the entire Stalin era" (102). In their own defence, the revisionists (unknowingly echoing Broszat) expounded the view that explicit or a priori moralising was historiographically obstructive (103). They intended nomothetic concepts such as 'centre-periphery' or 'social mobility' to carry explanatory power without judgmental overtones. However, as German criticism of Hillgruber’s research into the eastern front had made evident, the refusal to impose one retrospective moral framework may leave an ambiguous space into which another, more ominous one, may insinuate itself. As Habermas remarked, the inescapably political dimension of history necessitates the adoption of a moral stance: "we can only create national self-consciousness out of our better traditions, appropriated not blindly but critically from our history" (104). In the light of such assertions, the aspiration of some 'revisionist' scholars to achieve a neutral historicisation of their subject rings naive or disingenuous. History written since the post-1991 opening of the Soviet archives has demonstrated that many of Conquest's and Cohen's suspicions of 'revisonism' were unfounded, or at least that many (but not all) 'revisionist' historians, and the new generation of young scholars who are currently establishing themselves in the profession, are eager to revise revisionism and to engage with subtleties of interpretation and argument which supercede and render redundant many of the sharpest points of earlier controversy. Thus, in an attempt to explore the subjectivities of individuals in the past without succumbing to amoralism-by-default, Stephen Kotkin's recent work on Magnitogorsk deploys a more sophisticated, differentiated ‘historicisation’ of the subject. Explicitly appealing to Foucault (to whom he dedicates the book), Kotkin firmly situates his description of the ‘tactics of everyday life’ within the context of the totalising dynamic of a pathological modernity (105). The young British historian, Sarah Davies, has identified the existence of a range of alternative popular discourses in the Stalinist 1930’s, which operate counter to and are sometimes appropriated by and transform the official discourse, but she does so not to deny the terroristic character of the regime, nor the central role of Stalin (106). In the field of German history, practitioners have developed an eclectic range of ethical postmodernist strategies to permit the reconciliation of historiographical ‘normalisation’ with explicit moral condemnation (107). Certain historians of the Soviet Union would do well to refer to this recent literature before indulging in renewed polemics.
26. In the Soviet Union, history-writing was necessarily historicist. For one thing, the narrow and dogmatic Soviet interpretation of Marxist dialectical materialism promoted the conception of the present as the inevitable culmination of preceding development. Secondly, the principle of partiinost' dictated that the historian could only achieve objectivity in explicating the law-governed (zakonomernie) processes of history by identifying himself with the Communist Party (or, more accurately, the Party's Central Committee), as the embodiment of History's progressive driving force. In the words of a leading Soviet historian of the post-war era: "The history of the CPSU is living Marxism in action, fulfilling the connection of the theory of scientific communism with the practice of communist construction in the USSR" (108). Political supervision, institutional constraints or incentives and the regulation of the archives ensured that Soviet history-writing extolled Soviet society, denigrated past regimes and ‘bracketed’ (to use Broszat’s term) awkward problems such as Stalinism (109). Under Gorbachev, as we have seen, history remained present-focused and subservient to political debate. In July 1987, V. A. Grigor’ev, head of the Central Committee Department of Science and Educational Establishments, stated that, "new thought must be elaborated .... on a true party approach to the evolution of past and present" (110). Dmitri Volkogonov, a military apparatchik-turned-historian, wrote a major biography of Stalin which expressed official ambivalence to interpreting the past: "[i]t is customary to see the 1930's as a decade of massive tragedy, but it was also a time of unprecedented enthusiasm, achievement and huge effort by the workers" (111). The archives released documents selectively, and only to approved individuals or agencies, such as Gorbachev's Politburo ‘Commission on the Further Examination of Materials Concerning the Repressions of the 30’s, 40’s and early 50’s’. On the basis of the Commission's archival work, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet issued a decree in January 1989 declaring void all decisions of non-judicial (secret police) committees, clearing the way for the rehabilitation of over two million victims of the repressions by April 1990 (112). The Commission then published its collected statements in a book edited by A.N. Yakovlev, which was clearly designed to establish the Communist Party's anti-Stalinist credentials (113). A speech by Gorbachev was printed on the frontispiece, emphasising the need for a full rehabilitation of victims of Stalinist illegality and despotism. A commentary on the Riutin statement (a declaration of opposition to Stalinist policy circulated by a high party official in the early 1930’s) declared that such actions redounded to the honour of the Party, a strange conclusion to be drawn from the facts (Riutin was imprisoned and later shot). Another published collection of articles adopted a similar interpretation, proclaiming as "heroes" of the Terror those from whose murder it was logically feasible (if not always empirically plausible) to assume opposition to Stalin, including Rakovsky, Riutin, Syrtsov, Shliapnikov, Medvedev, Muralov, Piatnitskii and Raskol'nikov (114). This correlation of repression with innocence was evidently intended to re-establish the 'honour of the Party'. Indisputably, a great number of party members were repressed, but this does not automatically refute their complicity in the enforcement of the Terror (most secret policemen also belonged to the party). During glasnost’, as we have seen, the historical profession lagged far behind the work of the journalistic publitsisty. Nonetheless, by 1988, historians were seeking to cast off the image of koniunkturchiki, and to establish proper historical method as the standard for research. Three Soviet historians (writing in a western publication) called for an end to,"illiustrativnost'...sensationalism and political time-serving [....] After all, a truly scientific study of historical experience, which must be the foundation of perestroika in history is quite incompatible with attempts to 'fortify' some contemporary cause or 'justify' or indict aspects of the past in the eyes of a later generation" (115). In post-Soviet Russia there is, for the moment, little direct political control over history-writing, although access to some of the central archives, notably the archive of the former KGB and the Presidential archive, remains highly restricted (116). Historians themselves have re-adjusted to the new pluralistic cultural environment, to the extent that they now write more or less whatever they wish to write, but this does not mean that all have succeeded in casting off habits of historicism, dogma and political pragmatism (117).
27. To conclude this section, it is necessary to note that there are many additional historiographical problems, often of great subtlety or sophistication, exercising contemporary historians and theorists of history. Western historiography of the Soviet Union, for many reasons, including its overt Cold War politicisation and its institutional seclusion as 'area studies', has lagged far behind German historiography in acknowledging and addressing these issues and only now is beginning to engage with debates conducted and sometimes concluded years or decades ago in other fields. In particular, the centrality of the Holocaust in the historiography of the Nazi regime ensured that commentators became immediately and sharply conscious of and sensitive to the potential implications of their responses to such apparently abstract problems as historical relativism and the question of truth, or the aesthetics of the historical narrative (118). Few Russian or foreign historians of Soviet history have even started to confront these problems, and there is still only minimal innovation in the field and little integration from other sources of new theoretical perspectives and methodological practices. The conclusion suggests some reasons why this otstalost' (backwardness) might still persist.
28. The first section of this paper argued that successful post-authoritarian transformation of the socio-political environment needs to be accompanied by cultural adaptation. A crucial component of this adaptation is the renewal of a sense of national identity. According to Jasper's model of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the early stages of post-dictatorship transition involve primarily symbolic or structural interventions in the reconstruction of nationhood (such as renaming streets and towns, introducing new educational curricula and archival regulations, and prosecuting former regime personnel). The discipline of history, though making its contribution to these processes (if only to reinforce popular amnesia about the recent past, or uncover incriminating documents for the judicial 'settling of scores') plays a subsidiary and subservient role to politics and popular opinion as it strives to rediscover its independence and its multiplicity of voices. Scholarly history-writing, by its nature a drawn-out, inertial phenomenon, only begins in the longer-term to work on constituting the pluralistic collective memory requisite for civil society, during the ultimate fifth and sixth stages of 'generational conflict' and 'structural analysis'. By this time, and as a precondition of a free historiography, the 'environmental' transition to democracy will be more or less secure, albeit perhaps without firm intellectual consensus on the nature of the nation. (Such conflict seems to be intrinsic to all liberal democratic states, especially those which have already undergone a half-century or so of post-dictatorship or post-imperial transition and which are currently confronting the challenges of closer regional integration, 'globalisation' and multiculturalism). Civil society requires historiographical difference within consensual bounds. The second section of this paper considered in detail the historian’s role in the reconstitution of social memory, analysing West German historiographical controversies concerning the interpretation of Nazism with a view to elucidating the political and scholarly problematics of re-interpreting Russia’s Soviet past. In this brief concluding section, we will shift our focus from problems posed for historiography and national identity by ‘environmental’ change to problems posed by continuities, to suggest some reasons why post-Soviet historiography is still struggling to escape from the shadows of its past, and is as yet only tentatively engaging in genuine 'structural analysis'. Again, a brief glance at the German experience should suggest some directions for further historiographical or political-cultural research on the Russian transformation.
29. During the last decade, Germany has been subjected to a second wave of historiographical soul-searching by the sudden and almost universally unforeseen reunification of the two German states, by subsequent structural problems of dealing with the immediate legacy of the German Democratic Republic, by problems of the cultural assimilation of the eastern Länder into the west, and by the troubling re-emergence of far-right activity in the early 1990’s. In response, German intellectuals have revisited many of the themes of earlier controversies, but within a wider and more urgent debate over national identity now Germany has expanded to occupy its traditional nation-state borders . This persisting debate involves more than historically, conceptually and comparatively situating the Nazi period (and now the socialist system also, with its 100 kilometres of secret police files) into a legitimating narrative of German history. Of course, this alone is more problematic than it was before reunification, given that East Germans had been socialised under a regime which fiercely repudiated any continuity with Nazi Germany, and that since 1989 the epithet 'totalitarian' has entered popular discourse for both the Nazi and the East German political systems (as well as for the Soviet Union and its other eastern European satellites), which has obvious, and often quite intended, relativising implications (119). As well as immediate debates over prosecutions, street names, curricula, and procedures of dealing with data files on over six million private citizens, reunification also focused attention on the geographical (or 'geopolitical', to use a recently rehabilitated term) problem of German history (120). In particular, recent controversies have developed on Bismarck’s Prussian-led unification, the symbolic and structural impact of returning the capital to Berlin, and alternative regional identities; on immigration, the Diaspora and the 'blood right' to citizenship; on foreign policy and the deployment of armed forces abroad; on German citizens' knowledge of and participation in the Jewish Holocaust; on the symbolism of the German currency; and on the tensions between Germany’s geographical position in middle Europe, with economic interests and security concerns historically in the east, and its political position at the very core of the modern western European community.
30. Once more, many of these issues find their distant echo in the present-day Russian disorientation. In the absence of a defining 'other' (at least during an initial period of détente with the west, which at the turn of the century may already be drawing to a close), and without the legitimating functions of Soviet ritual and discourse, the essentially political quest for a common historical identity to promote social and federal cohesion and confidence in the new ruling elites, requires some sort of consensus on the constitution of a new collective memory. But if, as the German debates have shown us, history is a continuation of politics by other means (and all the more so during systemic transitions), or if, as Pokrovsky claimed more subtly, it is "politics projected onto the past", then with no consensus on the nature of contemporary Russia, how will it be feasible to adopt a normative approach to its history? Again, German discussions of historical consciousness analysed above may suggest some of the ‘environmental’ factors inhibiting the establishment of a coherent, consensual political culture, and hence a mature historiography, in the new Russia. Foremost among them are: the birth of a new state within historically unprecedented, and not entirely undisputed, borders; the existence of ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking diasporas on the wrong side of these borders; the problem of conceptualising nationality and national history within a multiethnic state; regional diversity and pressures for autonomy; a dislocation, as in Germany but on a far grander scale, between geographical realities ('Eurasia') and cultural self-perception; the delegitimisation of old structures of thought and government, yet with the survival in power of the old elite; the establishment of new institutions and introduction of new policies that are rapidly subverted and rendered illegitimate in the eyes of the population by the enduring power of bureaucratic networks and security structures, with corrupt and clandestine practices; the failure to establish a rule of law in any sphere of life, epitomised by the Head of State's contempt for his own national Constitution; and finally, of course, the economic crisis, the growth of crime and the population's preoccupation with everyday subsistence. Of course, the present crisis in which Russia finds itself is essentially different from the post-1990 German experience. Germany underwent national re-unification within the integrating structures of the Federal Republic’s functioning democracy and powerful economy; Russia has suffered the loss of superpower status, of an extended empire and its centuries-old imperial identity, systemic delegitimisation, collapse and impoverishment. In Germany, debate on a new nationalism centres on the responsibilities of perceived power, in Russia it is complicated by the apprehension of relative impotence and a loss of ostensive purpose. In Germany, the nature and scope of most historical debate, both professional and popular, testifies to the maturity and resilience of democracy and to the existence of national traditions of civil society. Russia's very nationhood is contested (and contestable), and the success of its first experiment with democracy and civil society is by no means a foregone conclusion. If, as some sociological work proposes, nation-building is incompatible with simultaneous democratisation (see Section II above), then Russia, still trapped in the violent process of defining a post-imperial identity, is caught in a vicious circle. So long as Russia's project of mastering the Soviet past remains uncertain and open, so must the enterprise of predicting the future of Soviet history.
30. For that very reason, as the present paper has been intended to demonstrate, it is useful to consider not just the structural elements of ‘environmental’ transformation, but also the writing of history (and, more generally, historical-cultural production, such as museum development, heritage preservation policy, historical literature and film) during the first decade of the new Russian state. It is to be hoped that the present paper will stimulate further, more empirical, research into the problems of contemporary Russian historiography. Since the works which achieve prominence are those which resonate in harmony with the aspirations and exigencies of the period in which they are produced, it is hoped that when the various forms of historical production have been subjected to such interrogation, it will be possible to divine the divergent discourses operating in Russia today, and to make a start at understanding the dynamics and characteristics of the range of new political cultures, national identities, collective memories and histories shaping and themselves summoned into being by Russia’s troubled transformation.
Nick Baron (e-mail here) works in University of Manchester, UK, as a Research Associate in the School of History and Classics. He is currently working on the theme "Power, Populations and Space in Stalinist Russia" within a project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Board entitled "Population Displacement, State-Building and Social Identity in the Lands of the Former Russian Empire, 1917-1930." Among his recent publications are: ‘Centres and Peripheries of Economic Decision-Making: A Case Study of the Karelian ASSR’, in E.A. Rees and R.W. Davies (eds.), Centre-Local Relations in the Soviet Command Economy (Macmillan, 2000); ‘Perestroika, Politicians and Pandora’s Box: the Collective Memory of Stalinism during Soviet Reform’, European Review of History - Revue européenne d’Histoire, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1997. He is owner of an internet discussion list on historical aspects of forced migration and population displacement. For information on how to subscribe, please refer to: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/forced-migration-history/
This paper is based on a presentation given at the annual BASEES conference, Cambridge, March 1996, as a member of a panel convened by Professor R.W. Davies discussing the ‘Politics of Contemporary Soviet History’. I should like to thank Professor Davies, Dr. Arfon Rees (University of Birmingham) and Dr. Peter Davies (University of Manchester) for useful comments on the draft of this paper. Where possible, I have provided references to English texts or translations of German material.
M. Stürmer, ‘Geschichte in Geschichtslosen Land’ [History in a Land without History], in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 25 April 1986, reprinted in "Historikerstreit": Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung (Munich, Piper Verlag, 1987), p. 36. (back to text)
Stürmer, p.36. The conscious or unwitting evocation of the Party slogan from Orwell’s 1984 is obvious: "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past",in George Orwell, 1984 (Harmondsworth, 1965), p. 199. This has been noted in Richard J. Evans, ‘The New Nationalism and the Old History: Perspectives on the West German Historikerstreit’, in Journal of Modern History, 59 (December, 1987), p. 788, n. 75.(back to text)
Stürmer, p. 38. (back to text)
"In the public arena, for political education, for museums and history teaching, the question of the production of apologetic historical accounts is a directly political question.", Jürgen Habermas, ‘Vom öffentlichen Gebrauch der Historie’ in "Historikerstreit", pp. 252, translated as ‘Concerning the Public Use of History’, in New German Critique, No. 44, Spring/Summer, 1988, pp. 40-50. (back to text)
M. N. Pokrovsky, Istoricheskaia Nauka I Borba Klassov, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1933), p. 360. (back to text)
M. Ferro, The Use and Abuse of History, or How the Past is Taught (London, 1984), p. viii. (back to text)
Cited in Nancy Heer, Politics and History in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), p. 11. (back to text)
See the literature on nationalism, national identity and nation-building, especially, E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780. Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1990), p. 12; see also E.J.Hobsbawm and T.Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983); A.D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, 1986); E. Tonkin, M. McDonald, M. Chapman (eds), History and Ethnicity (London, 1989); J. Fentress, C. Wickam, Social Memory (Oxford, 1994); K. Robbins, ‘National Identity and History: Past, Present and Future’ in K. Robbins, History, Religion and Identity in Modern Britain (Oxford, 1993); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983), Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983); John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester, 1982). For the best use of this approach in Soviet studies, see Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past (Stanford, Calif., 1993), esp. Ch. 1. (back to text)
There is an extensive politological and historical literature on history under authoritarian regimes, for example, K.F. Shteppa, Russian Historians and the Soviet State (New Brunswick, 1962); Heer, Politics and History; S.H. Baron, N. Heer (eds), Windows on the Russian Past: Essays on Soviet Historiography Since Stalin (Columbus, Ohio, 1977); J. Barber, Soviet Historians in Crisis, 1928-1932 (London, 1981); R.W. Davies, Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution (London, 1989); A. Dorpalen, German History in Marxist Perspective, the East German Approach (Detroit, 1985). For a critical survey of democratic countries’ attitudes to history, see M. Ferro, The Use and Abuse of History; Harvey J. Kaye, The Power of the Past. Refelections on the Crisis and Promise of History (Minneapolis, MN, 1991). (back to text)
Literature on discourse theory is diverse and often abstruse. The best short introduction to the various uses of the concept is Ernesto Laclau, ‘Discourse’, in Robert E. Goodin, Philip Pettit (eds), A Companion to Political Philosophy (Oxford, 1996) pp. 431-438. For application of this concept to Soviet history, see especially the entertainingly bewildering S.Medvedev, ‘USSR: Deconstruction of the Text (At the Occasion of the 77th Anniversary of Soviet Discourse)’ in K. Segbers, S. De Speigeleire (eds), Post-Soviet Puzzles. Mapping the Political Economy of the Former Soviet Union Vol. 1 (Baden-Baden, 1995), pp. 83-120; and also Rachel Walker, ‘Marxism-Leninism as Discourse: the Politics of the Empty Signifier and the Double Bind’, in British Journal of Political Science, 19, 1989, pp. 161-189; Joseph Schull, ‘What Is Ideology? Theoretical Problems and Lessons from Soviet-Type Societies’, in Political Studies, 40, 1992, pp. 728-741. (back to text)
For the best venture to reconcile the hoary sociological dualism between ‘agency’ and ‘structure’, see P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, 1977). For more accessible considerations of the problem and his response, see, for example, P. Bourdieu, L. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Cambridge, CUP, 1992); R. Jenkins , Pierre Bourdieu (London, 1992). (back to text)
See the political culture literature, for example, Brown, Gray (eds), Political Culture and Political Change; Archie Brown (ed), Political Culture; Stephen White, Political Culture and Soviet Politics (London, 1979). For samples of recent empirical work, see Gibson, Duch, Tedin, ‘Democratic Values’; J. Hahn, ‘Continuity and Change in Russian Political Culture’, British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 21, 1991, pp. 393-421. (back to text)
Robert Huckfield, Politics in Context: Assimilation and Conflict in Urban Neighbourhoods (New York, 1986), p. 1, cited in Frederic J. Fleron, Jr, ‘Post-Soviet Politicsl Culture in Russia: An Assessment of Recent Empirical Investigations’, in Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 48, No. 2, p. 248. (back to text)
Pravda, 14 February 1987, cited in R.W. Davies, Soviet History, pp. 130-131. (back to text)
See S. Wheatcroft, ‘Unleashing the Energy of History, Mentioning the Unmentionable and Reconstructing Historical Awareness, Moscow [January-June] 1987’, Australian Slavonic and East European Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1987), pp. 85-132, and ‘Steadying the Energy of History and Probing the Limits of Glasnost’: Moscow July to December 1987’, ASEES, 1, 2 (1987), pp. 554-114. (back to text)
See, for example, Thomas Sherlock, ‘Politics and History Under Gorbachev’, in Alexander Dallin, Gail W. Lapidus, The Soviet System In Crisis. A Reader of Western and Soviet Views (Westview Press, Boulder, S.F., 1991), pp. 270-290. (back to text)
Kurginyan, Goncharov, Gromiko (eds), Postperestroika. Kontseptual'naya Model' Razvitiya Nashego Obshchestva (Moscow, 1990). (back to text)
V. Agafonov, V. Rokityansky (eds), Rossiya v Poiskakh Budushchego (Moscow, 1993), p. 195. (back to text)
Mikhael Berg, in Moscow News, 18 February 1993. (back to text)
James L. Gibson, Raymond M. Duch, Kent L. Tedin, ‘Democratic Values and the Transformation of the Soviet Union’ in The Journal of Politics, Vol. 54, No. 2, May 1992, p. 330. (back to text)
See, for example, Gabriel Almond, G. Bingham Powell, Comparative Politics: System, Process and Policy (Boston, Mass, 1978), p. 78. This assumption underlies most of the political culture literature, see note 12 above. But note also the alternative literature on institutional and rational choice models of change: for bibliographies see Archie Brown, Soviet Politics and Political Science (London, 1974), pp. 522-71, Scott A. Buckner, ‘Beyond Soviet Studies: The New Institutional Architecture’, in Daniel Orlovsky (ed), Beyond Soviet Studies (Washington, D.C., Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1995), pp. 198-221, Geoffrey Evans and Steven Whitefield, ‘Identifying the Bases of Party Competition in Eastern Europe’, in British Journal of Political Science, No. 23, 1993, p. 529, notes 25-28. (back to text)
See, for example, Robert Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1971), p. 15; Dankwort Rustow, ‘Transitions to Democracy’’, Comparative Politics, 2, 3, 1970, p. 350; Lucien Pye, ‘Identity and Poltical Culture’, in Leonard Binder et al., Crisis and Sequences in Political Development (Princeton, Princeton University Press), p. 112. (back to text)
Cited in Agafonov, Rokityansky, Rossiya, p. 125. (back to text)
Harry Eckstein, ‘A Culturalist Theory of Political Change’, in American Political Science Review, Vol. 82, No. 3, September 1988, p. 296-299. (back to text)
See, for example, Jeremy Lester, Modern Tsars and Princes: the struggle for hegemony in Russia (London, 1995). (back to text)
See Tilly (ed), The Formation of Nation States in Western Europe (Princeton, Princeton Universtiy Press, 1975), cited in Gabriel Almond, ‘The Record of Soviet Studies’ in Orlovsky, Beyond Soviet Studies, p. 198. (back to text)
Gabriel Almond, ‘Communism and Political Culture Theory’, in Comparative Politics, October 1983, p. 128. (back to text)
Eckstein, ‘A Culturalist Theory’, p. 298. (back to text)
See the response to Eckstein by Herbert Werlin, in APSR, Vol. 84, No. 1, March 1990, which argues that "the uncertainty about the causes of political culture motivates its use as a catch-all explanation, much as the psychosomatic one in medicine." [p. 251] For example, Stephen White claims that "Soviet political culture is rooted in the historical experience of centuries of autocracy." [‘The USSR: Patterns of Autocracy and Industrialism’, in Archie Brown, Jack Gray (eds), Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States (London, 1977), pp. 25]. He describes selective aspects of Russian history, infers a putative ‘traditional’ political culture of collectivism, passivity and reliance on the State, then looks for confirmation of his hypothesis in a questionable range of surveys of Soviet political attitudes and behaviour. For critiques of the cultural approach,see Mary McCauley, ‘Political Culture Communist Politics: One Step Forwards, Two Steps Back’ in Archie Brown (ed), Political Culture and Communist Studies (London, 1984); Stephen Welch, The Concept of Political Culture (London, 1993)]. Recent empirical research has also questioned the claim that distinctive features of a society’s past give its citizens a unique pattern of political values, see A. Miller, W. Reisinger, V. Hesli (eds), Public Opinion and Regime Change: the New Politics of Post-Soviet Societies (Oxford, 1993). (back to text)
The literature on political culture has all too often assumed continuity and overlooked the mechanisms of cultural transmission. Stephen White has concocted a list of such mechanisms too comprehensive to be meaningful: family, literature, religion, oral tradition and social custom, art, music and folk culture, institutions, environment, timeless exigencies of power [‘Soviet Political Culture Reassessed’, in Brown (ed), Political Culture, pp. 83-84]; John Miller narrows it down to private tradition, official socialisation, and rational choice within persisting objective circumstances, which hardly seems more helpful [‘Political Culture: Some Perennial Questions Reopened’ in ibid., p. 47). An emphasis on history (broadly understood) as a mediation between past and present has been more noticeable in the historical literature on nation-building, see note 8. (back to text)
The literature on this is almost exclusively in German. See, for example, Clemens Burrichter, Günther Schödel, "Ohne Erinnerung keine Zukunft!" Zur Aufarbeitung von Vergangenheit in einigen Gesellschaften unserer Tage ["Without Memory, no Future!" On the Working Through of the Past in some Contemporary Societies] (Köln, 1992); Christa Hoffmann, Stunden Null? Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Deutschland 1945 und 1989 [Zero Hours? Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Germany, 1954 and 1989] (Bonn, Berlin, 1992). (back to text)
Martin Travers, ‘History Writing and the Politics of Historiography: The German Historikerstreit’, in Australian Journal of Politics and History, 37, 1991, p. 258, n. 2. (back to text)
‘"Vergangenheitsbewältigung". Historische Erfahrungen und Politischen Voraussetzungen’ [‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung: Historical Experience and Political Preconditions’], in Burrichter, Schödel, "Ohne Erinnerung keine Zukunft!". (back to text)
Note, for example, that Jasper remarks that free public opinion and a relatively reconstructed judiciary are basic preconditions for overcoming the past. For a survey of persisting controls in Russia on media of communication and information, see Lester, Modern Tsars, pp.36-38, and relevant issues of RFE/RL Research Reports and Transition. For a discussion of the rebuilding of the Russian legal system, see, Richard Sakwa, Russian Politics and Society (London, 1993), pp. 83-92. Other aspects of continuity that stymie a coming to terms with the past in contemporary Russia are briefly considered in the conclusion below. (back to text)
See, for example, John A. Moses, The Politics of Illusion. The Fischer Controversy in German Historiography (London, 1975); Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History. The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, Conn., 1968); Iggers, The Social History of Politics: Critical Perspectives in West German Historical Writing since 1945 (Leamington Spa, 1985). (back to text)
‘Einleitung’ in H.-U. Wehler, Krisenherde des Kaiserreichs 1871-1918 (Göttingen, 1970), p. 9, cited in Georg C. Iggers, New Directions in European Historiography (Middletown, Conn., 1984), p. 107. (back to text)
See, for example, Wehler, ‘Historiography in Germany Today’, in J. Habermas (ed), Observations on "The Spiritual Situation of the Age" (Cambridge, Mass., 1984). (back to text)
A national-conservative variant of the ‘special path’ is the ‘geopolitics’ approach , which asserts that "Germany’s fate is her geography" [Hagen Schulze, cited in Jürgen Kocka, ‘Hitler sollte nicht durch Stalin und Pol Pot verdrängt werden. Über Versuch deutscher Historiker, die Ungeheuerichkeit von NS-Verbrechen zu relativieren.’[Hitler ought not be pushed aside by Stalin and Pol Pot. On the attempts of German historians to relativise the monstrosity of NS crimes] in Historikerstreit, p. 139]. According to Kocka, this approach was regaining currency as a symptom of the swing to the right in the 1980’s. The British historian A.J.P. Taylor had earlier employed a geopolitical approach not to exculpate but to indict Germany in his notorious post-war work, The Course of German History. A Survey of the Development of Greman History (London, Methuen, 1961). (back to text)
Nach Hitler. Der Schwierige Umgang mit unserer Geschichte [After Hitler. The Difficult Treatment of our History] (Munich, 1986), p. 153, translated by Ian Kershaw in The Nazi Dictatorship. Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (London, 1993), p. 182. For a selection of Broszat’s essays translated into English, see Peter Baldwin (ed), Reworking the Past. Hitler, the Holocaust and the Historians’ Debate (Boston, Mass., 1990). (back to text)
For the clearest summary of the debate over resistance and Resistenz, see Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, Chap. 8, pp.150-179. (back to text)
See, for example, Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1978), Part 4. (back to text)
Detlev Peukert, Volksgenossen und Gemeinschaftsfremde (Cologne, 1982), p. 97. The English translation is published as Inside Nazi Germany. Conformity and Opposition in Everyday Life (London, 1987). (back to text)
Broszat and Saul Friedländer, ‘A Controversy about the Historicisation of National Socialism’, in New German Critique, 44, 1988, p. 109, also reprinted in Peter Baldwin (ed), Reworking the Past, pp. 1-45. (back to text)
Jürgen Schmädeke, Peter Steinbach (eds), Der Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus (Munich, Zurich, 1985), p. 1121-2, cited and translated in Kershaw, Nazi Dictatorship, p. 160. (back to text)
Friedländer, ‘Some Reflections on the Historicisation of National Socialism’, in Baldwin (ed), Reworking the Past. Hitler p. 88-101. (back to text)
See, for example, Beatrice Heuser, ‘Museums, Identity and the Warring Historians: Observations on History in Germany’, Historical Journal, 33, 1990, pp. 417-445. (back to text)
See Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1965). (back to text)
Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), p. 168ff. (back to text)
Cited in Geoffrey Hartman, Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (Bloomington, 1986). (back to text)
Andreas Hillgruber, Zweierlei Untergang. Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europäischen Judentums [Two Forms of Ruin. The Destruction of the German Empire and the End of European Jewry] (Berlin, 1986). (back to text)
Travers, ‘History Writing and the Politics of Historiography’, p. 250. (back to text)
Habermas, ‘Eine Art Schadensabwickung. Die apologetischen Tendenzen in der deutschen Zeitgeschichtsschreibung’, in Historikerstreit, p. 64. (back to text)
The main English texts on the controversy are Baldwin (ed), Reworking the Past; Maier, The Unmasterable Past; Richard J. Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (New York, 1989); ‘Special Issue on the Historikerstreit’, in New German Critique, 44, Spring/Summer 1988. (back to text)
See Dominic LaCapra, ‘Representing the Holocaust: Reflections on the Historians’ Debate’, in Friedlander (ed), Probing the Limits of Representation. Nazism and the "Final Solution" (Cambridge, Mass., 1992) p. 113ff.; Dominic LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust. History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, 1994). (back to text)
Mary Nolan, ‘The Historikerstreit and Social History’, New German Critique, 44, 1988, p. 53. (back to text)
For example, Nikolai Tolstoy, ‘Russian National Character’, in Michael Hurst (ed) States, Countries, Provinces (Bourne End, Kensal Press, 1986), p. 129. (back to text)
From offprint of Werner Markert, ‘Rußland und die abendländische Welt. Zum Problem der Kontinuität in der russischen Geschichte’ [Russia and the West. Comments on the Problem of Continuity in Russian History], lecture to the J.G. Herder Research Council, Marburg University, 18 October, 1953. (back to text)
See, for example, the discussion between Henry L. Roberts, ‘Russia and the West: A Comparison and Contrast’, and Marc Raeff, ‘Russia’s Perception of Her Relationship with the West’, in Slavic Review, 23, 1, 1964, pp. 1-12 and 13-19. (back to text)
Lewin, ‘Society, Past and Present, in Interpreting Russia’, in Orlovsky, Beyond Soviet Studies, p. 70. (back to text)
But see also, accounts which underline the commonalities of western and Russian history, for example, S. Frederick Starr, ‘A Usable Past’, in Dallin and Lapidus, The Soviet System in Crisis, pp. 11-15, Aleksandr Spepanskii, ‘Liberal’naya Rossiya, kotoruyu my poteryali’, Svobodnaya Mysl’, 12, 1995, pp. 93-100. (back to text)
See, for example, A. Ya. Avrekh, ‘Russkii Absolutizm i ego Rol’ v Utverzhdenii Kapitallizma v Rossii’, Istoriya SSSR, 2, 1968; Avrekh, ‘Ytrachenoe "Ravnovesie"’, Istoriya SSSR, 4, 1971; P. Sh. Ganelin, ‘Tvorcheskii Put’ A. Ya. Avrekha’, Istoriya SSSR, 4, 1990, pp. 102-111; Samuel H. Baron, Nancy W. Heer, ‘The Soviet Union. Historiography Since Stalin’, in Georg C. Iggers, Harold T. Parker, International Handbook of Historical Studies. Contemporary Research and Theory (Westport, Connecticut, 1979), pp. 289-291; J. Keep, ‘The Current Scene in Russian Historiography’, Survey, 19, 1, 1973, pp. 3-20; George M. Enteen, ‘A Recent Trend on the Historical Front’, Survey, 20, 4, 1974, pp. 122-131. (back to text)
For an introduction to the methodological and empirical debates of late perestroika, see, for example, ‘Perestroika, History and Historians. Roundtable, Moscow, January 1989’, Journal of Modern History, 62, December, 1990, pp. 782-830; P.V. Volobuev, ‘Perestroika and the October Revolution in Soviet Historiography’, Russian Review, 51, 1992, pp. 566-576. (back to text)
See, for example, Vera Tolz, ‘Russia: Westernizers Continue to Challenge National Patriots’ and Igor Torbakov, ‘The "Statists" and the Ideology of Russian Imperial Nationalism’, in RFE/RL Research Report, 1, 49, 11 December, 1992, pp. 1-16; A. S. Panarin, V.A. Senderov et al., ‘Evraziistvo: za i protiv, vchera i segodnya (materiali "kruglogo stola")’, Voprosy Filosofii, 6, 1995, pp. 3-48; V. N. Podopriroga, T. I. Krasnopevtseva, ‘Russkii Vopros v Sovremennoi Rossii’, Voprosy Filosofii, 6, 1995, pp.64-74; O.D. Volkogonova, ‘Evrasiistvo: evolyutsiya idei’, Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta, Seiya 7, Filosofiya, 4, 1995, pp. 26-43. (back to text)
See, for example, Ivan Koval’chenko, ‘Mnogomernost’ Istoricheskogo Razvitiya. Tipologiya, periodizatsiya, tsivilizatsionnii podkhod’, Svobodnaya mysl’, 10, 1995, pp. 77-88. (back to text)
See especially, Isaiah Berlin, Historical Inevitability (Oxford, OUP, 1954). (back to text)
See, for example, J.L.H. Keep, The Russian Revolution. A Study in Mass Mobilisation (London, 1976); Marc Ferro, October 1917. A Social History of the Russian Revolution (London, 1980); R. Pipes, The Russian Revolution (London, 1990); Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 1917-1932 (Oxford, 1982); Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Life, 3 vols. (London, 1985-1992); M. Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power (London, 1968); Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Inter-War Russia (London, 1985); Roger Pethybridge, The Social Prelude to Stalinism (London, 1974); James R. Millar, Alec Nove, ‘A Debate on Collectivisation. Was Stalin Really Necessary?’, Problems of Communism, July-August 1976, pp. 49-62; Robert Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution From Above, 1928-1941 (New York, 1990); Tucker (ed), Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York, 1977); Colin Ward, Stalin’s Russia (London, 1993); Sarah Davies, Propaganda and Popular Opinion in Soviet Russia, 1934-1941 (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford, 1994). (back to text)
See, for example, Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, in Bertram D. Wolfe, Stalin’s Ghost (New York, Praeger, 1957);M.P. Kim (ed), Istoriya SSSR epokha sotsializma (1917-1957gg) (Moscow, Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1957), p. 450ff; B.N. Ponomarev (ed), History of the CPSU (Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960), p. 513; somewhat more critical of Stalin is A.P. Kychkin, V.P. Danilov (eds), Postroenie sotsializma v SSSR, 1933-1941gg, 2nd series, vol. IX of B. N. Ponomarev, Istoriya SSSR (Moscow, Nauka, 1971), p. 196ff. (back to text)
See especially for glasnost' history, Davies, Soviet History, Part I; Alec Nove, Glasnost’ in Action (Boston, Unwin Hyman, 1990), Chaps 2, 3, 4; V.S. Lel’chuka, Istoriki Sporyat. Trinadtsat’ Besed (Moscow, Izdatel’sstvo politicheskoi literatury, 1988), and for post-Soviet history, R.W. Davies, Soviet History in the Yeltsin Era (London, 1996). (back to text)
See, for example, Vladimir Andrle, ‘Demons and Devil’s Advocates: Problems in Historical Writing on the Stalin Era’, in N. Lampert, Gabor T. Rittersporn (eds.), Stainism: Its Nature and Aftermath (London, Macmillan, 1992), pp. 34-39. But note that not all scholars espousing the ‘totalitarian’ model pursued the ‘ideographic’ approach, as many were self-consciously theorising political scientists. For a more detailed exposition of this section, see Nick Baron, ‘The Anatomy of Historiographical Controversy. Situating the Totalitarian-Revisionist Dispute over the Nature of Stalinist Russia in Historical and Theoretical Context’, unpublished discussion paper, distributed by Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University fo Birmingham, January 1997. (back to text)
Steve Smith, ‘Writing the History of the Russian Revolution after the Fall of Communism’, Europe-Asia Studies, 46, 4, 1994, p. 567. (back to text)
For a fuller discussion of the substantive and theoretical implications for Soviet history writing of the German ‘structuralist’ and ‘intentionalist’ debate, see Geoff Eley, ‘History with the politics left out - again?’, Russian Review, 45, 4, 1986, pp. 385-394. (back to text)
See, for example, Jerry F. Hough’s version of Fainsod’s How Russia is Ruled (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1953), tellingly retitled How the Soviet Union Is Governed (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1979). David Remnick calls this revision (or "reversal") "egregious", see ‘Getting Russia Right’, New York Review of Books, 22 September, 1994, p. 20. (back to text)
See Merle Fainsod, Smolensk Under Soviet Rule (London, Macmillan, 1958), pp. 449-451. (back to text)
R. Weinberg, ‘Purge and Politics in the Periphery: Birobidzhan in 1937’, Slavic Review, 52, 1, 1993. (back to text)
In his response to Amy Knight’s criticism, Slavic Review, 52, 3, 1993. (back to text)
This has been the thesis presented in, for example, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants. Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivisation (Oxford, OUP, 1994). (back to text)
Getty, Origins of the Great Purges. The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938 (Cambridge, CUP, 1985), p. 6. (back to text)
P. Kenez comments that Getty was "looking closely in the wrong place." See 'Stalinism as Humdrum Politics', p. 399. In Getty's favour, a paragraph of his 'Conclusion' belatedly qualifies his focus on the centre-periphery conflict as only one of the important issues of the period, others of which he lists as "foreign policy, Stakhanovism, the timely promotion of ‘new men’, nationality questions, education, social conflict, and Stalin's personality..." Getty, Origins, p. 197. (back to text)
Getty, Origins, p. 6. Note Getty's citation of Martin Broszat's work, The Hitler State (New York, 1981), [Origins, note 18, p. 222] which presented Hitler as a 'weak dictator'. This confirms the behaviouralist assumptions underlying his interpretation. Note also Getty's generalisation "... like most powerful politicians." He will (deservedly) find it hard to live down his assertion that "many thousands of innocent people were arrested, imprisoned and sent to labour camps. Thousands were executed." Origins, p. 9. For a recent resurgence of academic antagonism, see Conquest, R., 'Playing Down the Gulag', Times Literary Supplement, 24 February 1995, and exchange among Rittersporn (17 March), Getty (24 March), Helen Szamuely (31 March), Conquest (14 April), Conquest, ‘Small Terror, few dead’, TLS, 31 May 1996, pp. 3-5. (back to text)
Getty, Origins, p. 198. It was not 'totalitarian' because it lacked the sophisticated technological means required. Does this mean that the regime, in Getty's view, nevertheless aspired to totalitarianism? (back to text)
Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon. A Historical Interpretation (London, Radius, 1988) pp. 2-3. (back to text)
Lewin, ‘Society, Past and Present, in Interpreting Russia’, in Orlovsky, Beyond Soviet Studies, p. 60. (back to text)
Cohen, ‘Stalin’s Terror as Social History’, Russian Review, 45, 4, 1986, p. 378. (back to text)
Fitzpatrick, 'New Perspectives,' Note that she refers to all these approaches as 'social history,' although it is quite clear that some of the interpretations she outlines constitute political history. (back to text)
Dunham, V.S., In Stalin's Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge: CUP, 1976). (back to text)
Fitzpatrick, S., 'Introduction' in Fitzpatrick, S. (ed.), Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 7. See also idem, 'Cultural Revolution as Class War,' in ibid., p.12, and idem, 'Culture and Politics under Stalin: a Reappraisal,' Slavic Review, vol.35, no.2 (June 1976), pp. 211-231. (back to text)
Viola, L., The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Collectivisation (Oxford: OUP, 1987); Kuromiya, H., Stalin's Industrial Revolution: The Formation of Modern Soviet Production Relations (Cambridge: CUP, 1988). (back to text)
Rittersporn, G.T., 'The State against itself: Social Tensions and Political Conflict in the USSR, 1936-1938', Telos, No. 41, (1979), p. 87; see also Getty, 'Party and Purge in Smolensk', pp. 60-79; idem, Origins. (back to text)
Rittersporn, G.T., 'Soviet Politics in the 1930's: Rehabilitating Society', Studies in Comparative Communism, vol.19, no.2 (Summer 1986); idem, Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications: Social Tensions and Political Conflicts in the USSR, 1933-1953 (Reading: Harwood Academic & Chur, 1991). (back to text)
Orlovsky, Daniel T., 'The New Soviet History', in Journal of Modern History, vol.62, no.4 (December 1990), p. 846. (back to text)
Wildman, A., 'Is a Social History of Stalinist Russia Possible?' Russian Review, vol.52, no.3 (July 1993), p. vi. (back to text)
For example, the contributions stressing the importance of action ‘from above’ by Kuromiya, Hoffman, Starkov, and Viola, in J. Arch Getty, Roberta Manning (eds), Stalinist Terror. New Perspectives (Cambridge, CUP, 1993). See also the recent anthology Fitzpatrick, Sheila (ed.), Stalinism. A Reader (London, Routledge, 1999). (back to text)
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasant. Resistance and Survivall in the Russian Village after Collectivisation (Oxford, OUP, 1994). For the use of Foucault’s concepts of power and resistance, see also Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain. Stalinism as a Civilisation (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995), esp. pp. 21-23 and notes 90-92. (back to text)
Special Issue, ‘Resistance to Authority in Russia and the Soviet Union’ Kritika, New Series, Vol. 1, No. 1, Winter 2000. (back to text)
See, for example, Eileen Consey Maniichuk, ‘Ethnography and the Localist Movement in Russia, 1921-1930’, Unpublished paper presented to the Soviet Industrialisation Project Seminar, University of Birmingham, May, 1993. (back to text)
R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, OUP, 1961), p. 248. (back to text)
Passmore, J., 'The Objectivity of History', in Gardiner, Philosphy of History (Oxford: OUP, 1974), p. 156. (back to text)
Getty, J. Arch, 'The Politics of Stalinism', in Nove, A. (ed.), The Stalin Phenomenon (London: Weidenfield & Nicholson, 1993), p. 105. (back to text)
Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience. Politics and History Since 1917 (Oxford, OUP, 1985), pp. 15, 20. (back to text)
Conquest, 'Reluctant Converts', Times Literary Supplement, 11 February, 1994, p. 8. (back to text)
See, for example, the polemical exchanges following Getty, ‘Starving the Ukraine:Review of Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-famine, by Robert Conquest’, London Review of Books, 7 January, 1987, Conquest LRB, 7 May, Getty, LRB, 21 May, Conquest, LRB, 1 October, Getty, LRB, 29 October; and following Getty, Rittersporn, Viktor N. Zemskov, ‘Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A first approach on the basis of archival evidence’, American History Review, 98, 4, 1993, Conquest, AHR, June 1994, Getty, AHR, December 1994; and following Conquest, ‘Playing Down the Gulag’, Times Literary Supplement, 24 February 1995, Rittersporn (17 March), Getty (24 March), Helen Szamuely (31 March), Conquest (14 April). (back to text)
Cohen, Rethinking, p. 33. (back to text)
For the relevance of Broszat’s concepts in more recent western history-writing on Stalinism, see the discussion in Hellbeck, ‘Speaking Out: Languages of Affirmation and Dissent in Stalinist Russia,’ Kritika, Vol. 1, No. 1, Winter 2000. (back to text)
Habermas, ‘Von öffentlichen Gebrauch der Historie’, in Historikerstreit, p. 248. (back to text)
Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain. (back to text)
Davies, Propaganda and Public Opinion. (back to text)
See, for example, Peukert, ‘Alltag und Barbarei. Zur Normalität des Dritten Reiches’ [The ‘Everday’ and Barbarism. Comments on the Normality of the Third Reich], in Dan Diner (ed), Ist der Nationalsozialismus Geschichte? Zur Historisierung und Historikerstreit [Is National Socialism History? On ‘Historicisation’ and the Historikerstreit] (Franfurt-am-Main, Fischer, 1987), pp. 51-61. (back to text)
Ponomarev, B.N., 'Istoricheskii opyt KPSS - na sluzhbu kommunisticheskomu stroitel'stvu' in Voprosy Istorii KPSS, No.4 (1966), p. 36. (back to text)
In one of the Soviet history journals, Istoriya SSSR, not a single article on Stalin was published between 1957 and 1976. 'Stalinism' as historical terminology was not employed by Soviet historians. The Bol'shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia (1957) stated that "The campaign by reactionary, imperialistic circles against their own invented notion of "Stalinism" in fact represents an attack on the revolutionary working class." [p.424]. As late as February, 1986, Gorbachev told French reporters from L'Humanité that 'Stalinism' was an anti-communist construct devised to attack socialism and the Soviet Union. See Sherlock, T., 'Politics and History under Gorbachev', p. 270, in Dallin, A., Lapidus, G.W., The Soviet System in Crisis, a Reader (Boulder, San Francisco: Westview Press, 1991). (back to text)
Pravda, 15 June 1987, cited in Davies, Soviet History in the Gorbachev Era, p. 32. (back to text)
D. Volkogonov, Stalin. Triumph and Tragedy (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1991), p. 194. (back to text)
Pravda, 6 June 1990, quoted in Davies, 'History and Perestroika', p. 134. (back to text)
Iakovlev, A.N. (ed.), Reabilitatsia, Politicheskiie protsessy 30-50-x godov (Moskva: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1991). (back to text)
See Afanas'ev, A.V. [note, Aleksandr, a correspondent on Komsomol'skaya Pravda, not Iurii, the historian], Oni ne Molchali, (Moskva: Politizdat, 1991). (back to text)
Drobizhev, V.Z., Pivovar, E.I., Sokolov, A.K., 'Perestroika and the Study of Sources on Soviet Social History', in Sheila Fitzpatrick, Lynne Viola, Researcher's Guide to Sources on Soviet Social History in the 1930’s (New York, London, M.E. Sharpe, 1990), p. 216. (back to text)
See, for example, Mark Kramer, ‘From the Russian Archives. Archival Research in Moscow: Progress and Pitfalls’, Cold War International History Project Bulletin, 3, 1993. (back to text)
See, for example, George Enteen, ‘Vzglyad so storony: o sostoyanii i perspektivakh rossiiskoi istoriografii’, Voprosy Istorii, 9, 1994; Vladimir Kozlov, ‘Rossiiskaya istoriya. Obzor idei i kontseptsii, 1992-1995 gody’, Svobodnaya Mysl’, 3, 1996, pp. 99-113; V.P. Danilov, ‘Sovremmenaya rossiskaya istoriografiya: v chem vykhod iz krizisa?’, Novaya i Noveishaya Istoriya, 6, 1993, pp.95-101; Mikhail Levit, ‘Nepredskazuemoe proshloe i oprokinutaya politika’, Uchitel’skaya gazeta, 10-11, 17 March 1992, pp. 8-9. (back to text)
See, for example, Friedlander (ed), Probing the Limits of Representation; Dominic LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust; James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust. Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1988), Alan Rosenberg, Gerald E. Myers (eds), Echoes from the Holocaust. Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time (Philadephia, Temple University Press, 1987); Michaell Marrus (ed), The Nazi Holocaust. Historical Articles on the Destruction of the European Jews, Vol. 1. Perspectives on the Holocaust (Westport, Meckler, 1989); Marrus, The Holocaust in History (London, Penguin, 1987). (back to text)
An attack on this tendency which perhaps goes to the opposite extreme of apologetics for the DDR regime, is Ludwig Elm, Nach Hitler. Nach Honecker - Zum Streit der Deutschen um die eigene Vergangenheit [After Hitler. After Honecker - On the Germans’ Dispute over their own History] (Berlin, 1991). (back to text)
See, for example, Armin Mitter, ‘Die Aufarbeitung der DDR-Geschichte’, in Mitter, Eckhard Jesse (eds), Die Gestraltung der deutschen Einheit. Geschichte, Politik, Gesellschaft (Bonn, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 1992), pp. 365-387. (back to text)