THE RUSSIAN FRONT

[This is the first of a four-part series of posts concerning “The Past, Present, and Possible Future of Russian History in America.” For background information on this series, click here.]

A brief history of Russian history, 1945-1991

Although the scholarly study of Russia’s past may be said to have begun as early as the mid-eighteenth century with the publication of Mikhail Lomonosov’s Short Russian Chronicle (1760), Russian history, as an established academic field, is a relative newcomer to the United States.¹ Originating in Slavic language programs created near the turn of the twentieth century first at Harvard (1896) then, later, Berkeley (1901) and Columbia (1915), Russian history did not truly come of age in the United States until well after the Second World War.² After languishing for over half a decade as a woefully under funded and exotic subject principally of interest to the children of immigrants, Slavics rocketed to academic prominence thanks to the 1958 National Defense Education Act (NDEA). Passed in response to the USSR’s launch of Sputnik in 1957, Title VI of the NDEA aimed to address America’s perceived national security needs by providing for the training of international experts, especially those possessing skills in less commonly taught languages viewed critical to the nation’s geopolitical interests. Under the initial terms of the congressional mandate, the federal government funded nineteen “language and area centers” to facilitate the expansion of language instruction and related subjects in higher education. Title VI simultaneously created three other programs: modern foreign language fellowships (today known as Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships); international research and studies; and language institutes. Along with the language and area centers, these programs “formed a comprehensive approach to foreign language and world region education intended to prepare the United States for current and future global challenges.”³ Even though Title VI was international in scope and intentionally designed to promote the study of regions around the globe, owing to the centrality of the USSR to then contemporary American domestic and foreign policy considerations, the study of Russian language, culture, and history benefited greatly from the initial and subsequent reauthorizations of the program. More than any other factor, Title VI was responsible for the rapid development of Russian history in the United States.

Given the highly tense geopolitical atmosphere that coincided with the earliest years of the Cold War, it is not surprising that the majority of work undertaken by the first generation of post-war Russian historians focused on attempting to explain the nature and origins of the Soviet Union’s political system. Building upon interpretations developed by liberal Russian émigré historians such as Michael Florinsky and Paul Miliukov in the years that preceded World War II and employing methodological models developed by theorists and social scientists including Hannah Arendt and Jacob Talmon, the first “school” of American-born historians of Russia saw clear parallels between the dictatorial origins of the Soviet state and the similarly dictatorial systems that had emerged in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany.⁴ Characterized by a totalist ideology, a single party state, and a fully developed secret police possessing monopoly control over mass communications, operational weapons, social organizations, and the economy, the USSR, in this view, was one of three “totalitarian” political systems that had emerged in the first half of the twentieth century to challenge American and European representative democracy.⁵

Largely denied access to Soviet archival documents, this first generation of post-war American historians developed their understanding of the Soviet past by focusing on the memoirs, treatises, and published sources left by the Communist Party’s founding figures.⁶ They argued, accordingly, that the origins of the Soviet Union’s social and political system could be traced to the intellectual inheritance and dictatorial methods of the Bolshevik Party. As with the Fascists in Italy and the Nazis in Germany, the Bolsheviks’ rise to power was understood to have been an unnecessary tragedy that derailed Imperial Russia’s slow (but democratic) development and propelled the country down an uncharted path toward centralized planning, one-party dictatorship, and state-sponsored terror. In contrast to Soviet Marxists who claimed that the Revolution was the product of a broad-based proletarian uprising, these American historians saw October as little more than a coup d’état occasioned by the crises that accompanied the First World War and orchestrated by a conspiratorial, disciplined, and monolithic Bolshevik Party under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin. Having seized power illegally and unable to win the support of the population at large, the Bolsheviks proceeded to impose their will on an atomized country through campaigns of terror, political repression, and mass murder.

Beginning in the late 1960s, the paradigms employed by the first generation of post-war Russianists were abandoned in favor of new approaches that emerged from methodological innovations and the partial opening of Soviet archives made possible by détente. In contradistinction to the top-down, state-centered political approach of the so-called “totalitarian school,” these newer approaches emphasized the agency of social and economic factors in producing historical changes “from below.” Influenced by the Annales school and the work of British labor historian E. P. Thompson, this second generation of social historians sought to repeal the canon enunciated by their predecessors and to establish a new research agenda that shifted attention “away from political elites [toward] the people in the streets.”⁷ Although these self-proclaimed “revisionist” social historians, like the Cold War scholars they criticized, were themselves driven by basic ideological assumptions concerning the nature of the Soviet experience, their paradigmatic shift produced a number of important studies that broadened historical methodology while simultaneously uncovering new aspects of the nation’s past.⁸

Spearheaded by Leopold Haimson’s 1964 essay on class polarization in late Imperial Russia, the newer cohort of Russian scholars inverted previous suppositions concerning the historical roots of Russian social, political, and economic development.⁹ In Haimson’s view, the widening and deepening social antagonisms seemingly evident in the decade leading up to 1914 were indications of the Imperial state’s failure to adapt to the growing challenges of industrial and political modernization. Unlike the advanced nations of Western Europe (which had managed to achieve considerable degrees of social and political stability), the apparent distention of class tensions in urban Russia prior to the outbreak of the First World War was evidence that the tsarist system had proven incapable of transcending deep-seated antagonisms produced by the maintenance of its traditional estate-based (soslovie) society.

The effect of this interpretive innovation was not unlike Marx’s reading of Hegel (in which the German economist was said to have turned the philosopher “on his head”) as Haimson reversed long-held assumptions concerning the fundamental nature and evolution of Imperial society. Central to his argument, Haimson maintained that contradictions within the Imperial order actually prevented the further fruitful development of Russian political, economic, and social life. In this view, October 1917 was understood not as an unfortunate (and avoidable) coup resulting from Bolshevik conspiracy and the dislocations of war, but rather as a popularly supported and socio-economically conditioned revolution. This revolution, in turn, made possible the transformation of Russian society from the archaic tsarist system into a new society of workers and peasants that would reestablish Russia on the path to modernity through the construction of socialism. As a result of October, Russia had corrected its wayward historical trajectory. From these conclusions the view emerged that, in the wake of the Revolution, Soviet Russia was just another modernizing country attempting to attain the common European goal of a developed industrial economy, albeit along a path distinct from that pursued by the capitalist West.¹⁰

Arguments concerning the manifest failures of tsarism notwithstanding, the subsequent evolution of the one-party state, the purges, and show-trials produced a dilemma for scholars sympathetic to October and the cause of social history. If Soviet Russia indeed represented an alternative path towards modernization, made possible by a revolution undertaken from below, how could one explain the destructive state-directed developments of the Gulag and Terror? The attempt to address this apparent inconsistency led to new directions in the study of the Soviet past that focused increasing attention upon the 1920s and 1930s.

In order to account for the excesses of the thirties, some revisionist scholars drew distinctions between the more-or-less democratic order intended by Lenin and the authoritarian reality associated with Stalin.¹¹ They argued that the popular social revolution inspired by the Russian people and guided by Lenin had been fundamentally transformed by the social and political pressures increasingly placed upon the Party in the years that followed the Civil War. In support of this view, attempts were made to identify possible “alternatives” to the horrific events of the 1930s by investigating the policies and personalities that had been defeated by Stalin during the course of the 1920s.¹² Particular attention was devoted to the “New Economic Policy” (NEP) of 1921-1925 as an indication of the alternative direction that the country might have taken had other figures triumphed or had Lenin lived.¹³ Ultimately, these scholars endeavored to demonstrate that the popularly supported social revolution launched in 1917 was thrown off-track by the aberration of Stalinism. By decoupling Stalin’s real crimes from Lenin’s alleged intentions, these revisionists hoped to preserve the moral legitimacy of socialism while simultaneously demonstrating that the system, despite a temporary detour into terror, had the capacity to return to its democratic and progressive roots.

A more intrepid explanation for the advent of Stalinism was articulated by Sheila Fitzpatrick. In a radical departure from those revisionists eager to distance “true” Bolshevism from Stalinism, Fitzpatrick acknowledged that Stalin’s excesses were, indeed, the real fulfillment of the Leninist legacy. Focusing on the pressures produced by economic problems and social conflicts during the 1920s and 1930s, Fitzpatrick contended that answers to the Stalinist conundrum could be found not in politics, but in the dynamic relationships between distinctive social groups and classes. In her view, the origins of (and support for) Stalinist excesses were located “below,” amid the ranks of the populace competing for power, status, and apartments during a period when the Soviet regime was busily constructing its governing administration. In this view, the Soviet Union of the 1930s appeared much like any other state operating under difficult circumstances. Fitzpatrick concluded that the meaning of the Russian revolution could be identified by the formula of “terror, progress, and upward mobility.”¹⁴ Following the path blazed by Fitzpatrick, other historians would attempt to normalize the madness of the 1930s by downplaying Stalin’s role in the purges and the number of his victims.¹⁵

The questions raised and conclusions reached by the practitioners of the revisionist school of social history produced a contentious (and sometimes personal) debate in which scholars on both sides of the historiographical divide attempted to demonstrate the moral, political and/or methodological shortcomings supposedly evident in their opponents’ scholarship. In numerous essays, roundtables, and polemics, historians contested each other’s findings and motivations all the while professing the accuracy and objectivity and their own research.¹⁶ In many respects, the debate engendered by the partisans “from below” was a helpful development that enlivened Russian history by introducing new methods and raising new questions. In other respects, however, the debate proved damaging by polarizing the profession along largely generational lines. Still, by the mid-1980s the historiographical shift had been completed as the revisionists found themselves entrenched as the field’s prevailing orthodoxy.

Ironically, the greatest challenge to the interpretive approach developed by social historians came not from a contrary band of historians, but from the vicissitudes of history itself. With the collapse of the USSR in 1991, those who had searched for divergent paradigms within the system suddenly found themselves without a system from which to draw their paradigms. In the aftermath of The Fall, questions concerning the “legitimacy” of the October experiment and (dis)continuities between Lenin and Stalin quickly became irrelevant. In a similar vein, attempts to “assess the usefulness or otherwise” of Soviet “alternatives” no longer appeared particularly profitable.¹⁷

[On to Part Two]

1. George Vernandsky, Russian Historiography: A History. (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1978), 3 [↩]
2. For a brief account of these earliest programs, see Horace G. Hunt, “On the History of Slavic Studies in the United States,” Slavic Review 46:2 (1987): 294-301 [↩]
3. A brief history of Title VI programs is available on the home page of the U.S. Department of Education. See, http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ope/iegps/history.html. The number of language and area studies centers (or, National Resource Centers as they are now known) has grown to over 165 today [↩]
4. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian, 1958) and Jacob Talmon, The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952) [↩]
5. Carl J. Friedrich, “Totalitarianism: Recent Trends,” Problems of Communism 17:3 (1968), 33. Two of the earliest works produced by the “totalitarian” school of Russian historians are: Carl J. Friederich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956) and Raymond A. Bauer, Alex Inkeles, and Clyde Kluckhohn, How the Soviet System Works: Cultural, Psychological, and Social Themes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956) [↩]
6. See, for example, Adam B. Ulam, The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia (New York: Macmillan, 1965); Merle Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953) and Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York: Random House, 1960) [↩]
7. Ronald G. Suny, “Towards a Social History of the October Revolution,” American Historical Review 88 (1983): 51 [↩]
8. Among the more important early works of the revisionist historians are, Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968); Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976); Marc Ferro, October 1917: A Social History of the Russian Revolution, trans. by Norman Stone (London: Routledge, 1980) and David Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Seizure of Power: From the July Days 1917 to July 1918 (London: Macmillan, 1984) [↩]
9. Leopold Haimson, “The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917,” Slavic Review 23 (1964): 619-642 and 24 (1965): 1-22 [↩]
10. One excellent example of the attempt to describe Soviet politics in terms of the institutional patterns of developing societies is Jerry Hough’s metathesis of Merle Fainsod’s How Russia is Ruled. See Jerry F. Hough and Merle Fainsod, How the Soviet Union is Governed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). Other works that reflect this approach include: Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York: Pantheon, 1985); J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) and Susan G. Solomon, ed., Pluralism in the Soviet Union: Essays in Honor of H. Gordon Skilling (New York: St. Martin’s, 1982) [↩]
11. For one such early attempt see Stephen F. Cohen, “Bolshevism and Stalinism,” in Robert C. Tucker, ed., Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York: Norton, 1977), 3-29 [↩]
12. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1937 (New York: Knopf, 1973) and Moshe Lewin, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates: From Bukharin to the Modern Reformers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974) [↩]
13. Lewis Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society Between Revolutions, 1918-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch and Richard Stites, eds., Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991) and Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1968) among others. The social historians’ fundamental tenet concerning the reformability of Soviet socialism was seemingly valorized during the mid-1980s when the NEP was seized upon by Mikhail Gorbachev as a legitimating symbol for the reforms of perestroika. On this see Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994), 418-419 [↩]
14. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 1917-1932 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 8. Fitzpatrick’s position has undergone significant modifications in subsequent editions of this book [↩]
15. Gábor T. Rittersporn, Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications: Social Tensions and Political Conflicts in the USSR, 1933-1953 (New York: Harwood, 1991); J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges and J. Arch Getty and Roberta Manning, eds., Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) [↩]
16. The number of published works that address these issues is immense. Among the more noteworthy contributions to the debate are: Vladimir Andrle, “Demons and Devil’s Advocates: Problems in Historical Writing on the Stalin Era,” in Nick Lampert and Gábor T. Rittersporn, eds., Stalinism: Its Nature and Aftermath (New York, 1992), 25-47; Martin Malia, “The Hunt for the True October,” Commentary 92 (1991): 21-28; Edward Acton, Rethinking the Russian Revolution (New York: E. Arnold, 1990); Walter Lacquer, The Fate of the Revolution: Interpretations in Soviet History from 1917 to the Present, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1987); Abbot Gleason, “‘Totalitarianism’ in 1984,” Russian Review 43 (1984): 145-159 and the previously cited, Suny, “Towards a Social History of the October Revolution.” In addition, multiple-article discussions appear in the following: The National Interest 31 (1993): 68-122; Slavic Review 47 (1988): 599-626 and Russian Review 45 (1986): 355-413 and 46 (1987): 375-431 [↩]
17. Lewis Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society Between Revolutions, 3 [↩]

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