Stalin's Russia - interpretations

Historiography of Stalin's Russia Summary for GCSE Although Soviet writers were forced to praise Stalin while he was alive, things changed after he died. In 1956, Khrushchev denounced Stalin, and Soviet historians were instructed to look more critically at his rule, particularly collectivisation, the Purges, and the Cult of Stalin. However, after Khrushchev fell from power in 1964, some Soviet historians wanted to stop criticizing Stalin, and since the Soviet Union fell in 1991, many people in Russia have started to view Stalin again as Russia’s greatest historical figure. The first Western historians of Stalin wrote during the Cold War. They portrayed Stalin’s government as totalitarian, with a ‘top-down’ repressive government, and Stalin himself as a monster responsible for many atrocities. They drew a ‘straight line’ from Lenin’s ideas to Stalin’s terror. By contrast, however, during the 1970s-1990s, revisionist historians took a different approach. They focused on the ‘bottom-up’ pressures which affected government policies, depicting Stalin’s government as a ‘weak government’ in which local officials often interpreted its directives in their own way. They also saw ‘Stalinism’ as a separate, unique phenomenon. After the fall of the Soviet Union released large amounts of archival material for historians, both sides found new evidence to support their cause, and most historians nowadays tend to tread a middle line, aware that they are studying a way of life and attitudes to government which are very different to those of people in the West.
... in Soviet historiography, ... in Western historiography
Stalin in Soviet Historiography Soviet and Russian writers, isolated from the rest of the world, and subject to state control to a greater degree than historians in the West, developed their own historiography.
During the ‘Thaw’ During Stalin’s reign, of course, writers could only praise Stalin, who himself edited and was credited with the Short Course history of the Soviet Union taught in schools. After Stalin’s death in 1953, however, things changed. You will probably know that at the 20th Party Congress in 1956 Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s atrocities and called for history to be revised in that respect. What you may not know is that his speech was preceded in January of that year by a meeting of historians (historians are often the questioners, the disruptors) which had openly criticised Soviet historiography, particularly: the black & white ‘heroic’ portrayal of the 1905 and 1917 revolutions; the whitewashing of collectivisation; the cult of Stalin; and the withholding of archival materials. As a result, the official 1959 History of the Communist Party requested by the 20th Congress, whilst praising Stalin for collectivisation and blaming Yezhov and Beria for the Purges, stated that praise had “turned his head” and that the cult of personality had “caused particularly great damage”. Moreover, the historical journal Vosprosy istorii (History Questions) was instructed in 1962 to ‘liquidate’ “the mistakes and distortions of historical truth promulgated by the cult of personality of Stalin”. As a result, when a revised History was published in 1962, it: had erased all positive comments about Stalin; cited Stalin as causing the excesses of collectivisation and of using the murder of Kirov to start a purge; and claimed that by purging the generals and industry, Stalin was responsible for the USSR’s lack of preparedness in 1941.
After the fall of Khrushchev The fall of Khrushchev in 1964 allowed a backlash. After 1966, traditionalist Soviet historians began to call for an end to the attacks on the cult of personality, criticism of collectivisation etc., on the grounds that they were hidden deviationism. And respected historian AV Nekrich was dismissed from his post when he not only criticised Stalin as a war leader, but added: “because of us, the little people, Stalinism began”. These calls were vigorously opposed by liberal historians. One, Piotr Yakir – whose father, an army Commander, had been executed in 1937 – objected to the term ‘Comrade Stalin’: “Stalin was nobody’s comrade and, above all, not ours”. Another, the Old Bolshevik AV Snegov, who had only just been released from a prison camp, declared that Stalin “should have been shot”. They were not disciplined; it was still ok in the Soviet Union to criticise Stalin, as long as you did not undermine the Soviet state.
After the fall of the Soviet Union Strangely, therefore, it was after the Soviet Union fell in 1991 that the rehabilitation of Stalin really took hold. People old enough to remember looked back nostalgically, not at the terror and repression, but to the stability and the USSR’s world power. In 2003 journalist Yelena Prudnikova declared that "the country, deprived of high ideals in just a few decades, has rotted to the ground”, and she bemoaned the “sorry state, when every foreigner could teach us life”. 'Stalin Centres' have opened where it is argued that: “Stalin’s economy, Stalin’s politics, Stalin’s culture gave the whole world an impetus forward”. Public polls regularly find Stalin to be Russia’s greatest historical figure; in 2019, 70% of Russians approved of his role in Russian history; and Putin openly praised Stalin as a “great man” in 2022. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, around half a dozen new Stalin monuments have been erected (“accompanied by Z-propaganda”), and 22 monuments commemorating victims of the Purges have been vandalised or destroyed.
Stalin in Western Historiography Western historiography of Stalin’s reign is characterised by accusation and extreme nastiness. This is partly because, still, Stalinism MATTERS in the West in a way that other historical phenomena do not.
The 'totalitarians' The first Western historians of Stalin – names such as Richard Pipes, Robert Conquest, Robert Service – were writing with an almost total lack of sources (apart from émigré accounts) and at the height of the Cold War. They therefore constructed accounts which, generally, had the following characteristics: ‘Top-down’: that Stalin’s state was totalitarian (a single mass-party led by one man; an ideology of force; the use of terror, propaganda and lack of freedom; centralised bureaucratic government). ‘Red Tsar’: that Stalin was a monster, and played a central role in the atrocities of collectivisation, the Purges and WWII. There was room here also for George Kennan (1970) to claim that Stain had started off as a tsarist informer (and therefore wanted to eliminate anyone who might expose him), and for Robert Tucker (1972) and others to play pyscho-history on why Stalin was mentally ill (his father beat him and his face was disfigured). ‘Straight Line’: many ‘totalitarian’ historians see a direct causal link from Lenin to Stalin’s repressive regime: i.e. Stalin was not a deviation from Lenin, but a fulfilment of Lenin’s vision: “Lenin laid the police state foundations which made Stalin’s monstrous feats technically possible” (George Leggett, writing about the Cheka, 1981)/ “Lenin’s authoritarianism, intolerance of dissent, and enthusiasm for terror and dictatorship all point towards Stalinism” (Simon Hartfree, 1996). The 'Straight Line' was important in the Cold War because it presented Communism as an evil ideology which ended up in tyranny. In the 1970s and 1980s, these ideas came under criticism, but their advocates fought back aggressively. And when the Russian archives opened up after 1991, the ‘totalitarians’ founds lots of evidence to back up their interpretations, so ‘totalitarian’ ideas are still common – even dominant – today (e.g. Martin Malia, Oleg Khlevniuk, Anne Applebaum). It is easy to portray the early historians as products of their times. Richard Pipes was a member of the US Security Council under Ronald Reagan. Robert Conquest was a speech-writer for Margaret Thatcher. Robert Service argued that Marxism was an “infection” and a “virus”. However, Service actively refutes the insinuation that they were therefore biased; the horrors he researched in the Russian Revolution, he said, were why he hated Communism, not the other way round. Service concludes (2011): “Stalin was a mass terrorist with a gross personality disorder. It is a pity that he ever lived. But he was able to do what he did because he was also a leader of exceptional talent.”
Alternative interpretations a. Western Marxists Although they were often accused of being Stalinists, tbh Western Communists were generally embarrassment by Stalin – the exemplar of everything their capitalist opponents were warning people about. Most Western Marxists therefore followed Trotsky (1936), who had called Stalin’s reign: “The Revolution Betrayed” and declared the Soviet Union under Stalin to be either ‘a degenerated workers’ state’ or ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ – two very similar concepts of a state run by and for an elite party bureaucracy … exactly the kind of state you read about in George Orwell’s 1984. Tony Cliff (1947) described Stalin’s system as ‘state capitalism’, where a revolution from below had been elbowed out of power by officialdom, which assumed the mantle of the former capitalist elite, crushing the workers and the peasants, and taking their product, in order to compete on world markets against other capitalist nations.
b. 'Revisionism' In Britain, Marxist historians pioneered a form of history that did not focus on the rulers and politics, but on the masses and society. This ‘bottom-up’ approach changed the way people did History: Stalinist revisionism seems to have started in the early 1970s, and developed into the 1980s – names such as Elizabeth Fitzpatrick, Lynne Viola, J Arch Getty, Jerry Hough. You have to be careful, because there is no monolithic ‘revisionist’ standpoint – they tend to disagree with each other as violently as they do with the ‘totalitarians’ – but, generally speaking, you can see the following themes in their work: ‘Bottom-up’: revisionist historians ascribed much more agency to the public than did the ‘totalitarians’. Stalin’s Purges of 1937-8, for instance are portrayed simply as Stalin’s reaction to opposition – of which the NKVD files provided lots of evidence after they were released post-1991. Fitzpatrick’s Homo Sovieticus (2000) was repressed, but had “strategies of self-protection”, knew how to ‘play the system’ and ‘take risks’. Above all, revisionist historians suggested that the Soviet Union was subject to the global developments of the time, such as urban growth, the increase in managerial roles, and better education & literacy. ‘Weak government’: Hough (1975) argued that there was no such thing as unrestricted power – ALL power is “situational and relational”. Arch Getty found (1985) that the purges were more chaotic than depicted by the 'totalitarians'; local officials were much less controlled than thought, and local issues affected how effectively they were implemented. Other revisionists discovered opposition and interest groups pressurising decisions, and differences between towns and the periphery. “There could be no talk of ‘total’ power”, concluded Fitzpatrick (2008). ‘Stalinism’: when an historians’ conference in Italy in 1984 met to discuss ‘Stalinism’ it caused an outrage. How could a single word cause such an outcry? … because using it instead of 'totalitarianism' suggested that ‘Stalinism’ was something discrete & unique, and denied the Straight Line. As Marcel Liebman put it (1975): ‘nothing was less like the dictatorial autocracy of Stalinism than the kind of authority that Lenin exercised in the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet state.’ The problem about ‘bottom-up’ arguments is that, if taken to extremes, they can appear to absolve those in power from blame – for instance Arch Getty has suggested that Stalin, although "creator, product, and symbol" of the dominant bureaucracy that drove the terror, could not be individually culpable. This has led to many revisionists – and Arch Getty in particular – being labelled apologists for “a regime which has sent millions of innocent men, women and children to die by execution or in a labour camp” (Schapiro, 1983). Nevertheless, when the Russian archives opened up after 1991, ‘revisionists’ founds lots of evidence to back up their interpretations, so Fitzpatrick summarises (2008): “In the west, the reigning ideology was Cold War anti-Sovietism and the agenda was to show the evil of the Soviet system. In the Soviet Union, the reigning ideology was the Marxist-Leninist version of Hurrah-patriotism, the agenda being to show that the Soviet Communist Party and government had always been on the right side of history. Not surprisingly, the revisionists were highly critical of both these biases.”	Did You Know Another point of contention between the 'totalitarians' and the 'revisionists' was the Holodomor (the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-3). Robert Conquest (1986) portrayed it as a deliberate, knowing decision by Stalin, and the American historian James Mace (1986) declared it a 'genocide'. Arch Getty (1987), by contrast, stated that there was no evidence of intention, that the cause was a poor harvest and government incompetence, and that there was evidence the govenment tried to alleviate the famine. The debate still continues, and in 2006 the Ukrainian parliament passed a bill recognizing the 1932-33 famine as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people.
Stalin in Western Historiography To end this study with a thud rather than a bang, most modern historians declare themselves to be in neither camp, want simply to mine the archival material, and offer overlapping explanations which: address both political AND social factors; acknowledge both the oppressive nature of Stalin's regime AND the complexities & contradictions within it; and recognise that an interplay of ideology, personal ambition, & structural factors shaped Stalin’s rule. Stephen Kotkin (2014), for example: “rejects the inherited wisdom about Stalin's psychological makeup, showing us instead how Stalin's near paranoia was fundamentally political, and closely tracks the Bolshevik revolution's structural paranoia, the predicament of a Communist regime in an overwhelmingly capitalist world, surrounded and penetrated by enemies. At the same time, Kotkin demonstrates the impossibility of understanding Stalin's momentous decisions outside of the context of the tragic history of imperial Russia.” As for the Straight Line, George Breslauer (2021) adopts a compromise position which suggests that: “the Leninist heritage facilitated, but did not determine, the Stalinist Revolution-from-Above or the Great Terror”. And while historians like Sarah Davies (1997) have focused on cultural and ideological dimensions, e.g. examining propaganda and popular opinion, others such as Yoram Gorlizki (2020) have explored the strategies of Soviet regional leaders.
The failings of Western historiography In 2001, the US-based Russian historian Irina Pavlova argued that the revisionist views of modern Western historians (see below) “have hurled us back several decades” to “something very similar to the view promulgated by Khrushchev in his efforts to expose Stalin’s Cult of Personality”. How has this happened? “Western historians have approached the study of Soviet society in the 1930s using the yardstick of Western civilization and an understanding of relations between state and society that prevails in the West”; they are therefore using “conceptual approaches based on alien cultures” and have not taken into account “the specific features of a different culture”. They have not developed appropriate interpretations to describe the “uniquely Russian historical process”. Language: Western histories use terms such as ‘War Communism’, ‘NEP’, ‘collectivisation’ which do not fully describe the Soviet reality. Such words are “intuitive and mundane [rather than meaningful]”: they therefore function: “as a set of words that take the place of concepts rather than as concepts themselves”. She cites as specific examples the Russian words: • vlast (often translated in the West as ‘government’ but better rendered ‘state power’ and can also mean ‘control’ or ‘force’), and • gosudarstvo (which the West translates ‘state’ or ‘country’ but derives from a Russian word meaning ‘master’.) What distinguishes Russian history, she asserts, is the special sociocultural role played by state power, and Western historians who argue for history ‘from below’ have just missed the point.