New Perspectives on Stalinism - Academos

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New Perspectives on Stalinism Author(s): Sheila Fitzpatrick Source: Russian Review, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Oct., 1986), pp. 357-373 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/130466 . Accessed: 26/04/2011 10:46 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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The Russian Review, vol. 45, 1986, pp. 357-373

DISCUSSION

New Perspectives on Stalinism SHEILAFITZPATRICK* The nature of Stalinisml has always been a highly contentious question, charged with political significance for almost all disputants. In the early Cold War period, when the political charge was most explosive, Soviet and Western commentatorssharedthe assumptionthat what had emerged in the Soviet Union in the 1930s was both the historically inevitable outcome of the Bolshevik Revolution and a basically permanent and immutable new "Soviet system," though they disagreedvehemently about its nature. From the Soviet standpoint, the revolutionhad producedsocialism. From the western standpoint(excluding a small group of Soviet sympathizers),the productwas totalitariandictatorship. From both, the system was the antithesis of Western democracy and was its majorideological competitoron the internationalscene. In the decades after Stalin's death, changes in the Soviet Union led both sides to reassess theirjudgments, particularlyon the immutabilityof the Soviet system. Some features of Stalin's regime were repudiatedor criticized in the Soviet Union, and there were Soviet attemptsto separatethe legitimate "Leninist" outcome of the Revolution from the temporary "excesses" of the Stalin period. In the West, revision of Cold War premises in other areas finally prompted Sovietologists to reexamine the totalitarianmodel, which now came undercriticism for inherentpolitical bias as well as for inappropriatenessto contemporarySoviet reality.2 At the Bellagio conference organized by Robert C. Tucker in 1975, the term "Stalinism" was preferred to "totalitarianism," although the most vigorous objections to the totalitarianmodel related to the pre-Stalin period.3 Since then, political scientists have tended to move away from a totalitarianimage of the Soviet Union before and after Stalin, while tacitly accepting its applicabilityto the Stalinistsystem. *

An earlier version of this article was presentedat the ThirdWorld Congress of Slavic Studies in Washington,DC, November2, 1985. 1 I use "Stalinism" here as a convenient term for the new political, economic, and social structures that emerged in the Soviet Union after the great break associated with collectivization and the First Five-YearPlan. 2 For an excellent discussion of this reexamination,see Abbott Gleason, "'Totalitarianism' in 1984," Russian Review, vol. 43, 1984, pp. 145-159. 3 See Robert C. Tucker, ed., Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation,New York, 1977, especially the articleby StephenF. Cohen, "Bolshevism and Stalinism," pp. 3-29.

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Apart from the argumentabout models, however, there have been other developments affecting the direction of Western Soviet scholarship in recent years. The most relevant, for our purposes, is the entry of historiansinto a field long dominated by political scientists, the study of the Soviet Union from the Revolution of 1917 to the end of the Stalin period. Of course, there were always some historiansin the field, including some very good ones. But the new cohort is larger,with more sense of itself as a group and, in particular,a much stronger desire to assert an identity as historians. That assertion of professional identity is a way of making two points. First, the new cohort is telling other historians that Soviet history is a legitimate field (earliera controversialissue among Russian historians),drawing attentionto the recent improvementin access to Soviet archives and other primary sources, and emphasizing its own professional qualifications. Second, it is distinguishing itself from the older generation of Sovietologists, dominatedby political scientists' main interpretativeframework, the totalitarianmodel. Social history is a majorfocus of interestfor the new cohort of historians. This choice also involves assertion of separateidentity and implicit criticism of the earlier Sovietological preoccupation with politics and ideology. Without going too deeply into the chicken-and-egg question, social historianshave particularly good reason (or a particularlygood excuse) for dissatisfactionwith the totalitarianmodel: the model's assertion of the primacy of politics made social history seem a backwater,remote from the real dynamics of post-revolutionary Soviet development. In addition, the new cohort's identificationwith a broader community of social historianshas the effect (intendedor otherwise) of providing external reinforcement to its struggle against the perceived "Cold War bias" of earlier Sovietology. This particularbias is generally disliked by social historiansin other fields, whose instincts are often more radical than that of the historicalprofession as a whole. My purpose in this essay is to investigate the likely impact of historians, particularly social historians, on the study of the Stalin period. This is a participant'sreport, as I am currentlyworking on a social history of the 1930s, but it should not be read as a New Cohortmanifesto. It is both descriptive and prescriptive, and the prescriptionsare largely addressed to other social historians, who may well disagree with them. The question of interest to the broader audience of scholars in Soviet studies is what the new social historians may have to say on one of the big traditionalissues of Sovietology-the natureand dynamics of Stalinism. General Interpretationsof StalinistState and Society The overarchingtheme that Western historianshave commonly used for interpretingthe Stalin period is state against society, nachal'stvo against narod. This is a familiarframeworkin Russian historiography. According to this view, the state acts on society, trying to change and mold it in ways that serve state purposes; society acts primarilyby re-acting to state pressure, which it tries to

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resist, evade, or subvert by passive resistance. In scholarship on the Soviet period, particularlythe Stalin era, the state-school approachestablishedby Russian historians in the nineteenth century has been reinforced by a compatible concept of twentieth-century American political scientists, the totalitarian model. In this model, the Soviet totalitarianstate seeks to transform society according to Marxist-Leninistideology, using the CommunistParty as an agent of mobilizationand reinforcingits dictates with police coercion and terror. The society is reduced to an object, inert and featureless, which is shaped and manipulatedby the energetic action of the totalitarianregime. This view of state/society relations obviously encourages scholars to investigate state mechanismsratherthan social processes. Soviet studies, consequently, have focussed strongly on state and party, dealing with society almost exclusively in a context of state and party intervention. The scholarly literature on the Stalin period is full of studies of such intervention: forced collectivization, subordinationof tradeunions, labor discipline laws, the developmentof the Stakhanovitemovement under party sponsorship,harassmentof the old intelligentsia, the establishmentof partycontrols over cultureand scholarship,censorship, the Great Purge (seen as Stalin's "war against the nation," in Ulam's phrase),4 and so on. Some of these studies also deal with resentful social responses to state intervention,as in the case of peasants and collectivization or the intelligentsia and cultural controls. But this is the only kind of social response that is generally discussed, and social processes unrelated to state interventionare virtuallyabsentfrom the literature. In the interventionistepisodes, society is seen as a victim of state action, and its reaction is a mixture of covert hostility and passive acceptance of force majeure. Scholars have explained the lack of more effective societal resistance (both to the tsarist and Soviet state) in terms of the traditional"underdevelopment" of social classes and social organizationin Russia, and the state's ruthless use of coercion and terror. In addition, some theorists like HannahArendt have argued that totalitarianregimes "atomize" society, destroying or subordinating all the institutionsand associational forms that might lend themselves to active social resistance. "Society" is often an undifferentiatedwhole in Sovietological writing, since internalsocial relationshipsand processes have little relevance to the totalitarian model. For practical expository purposes, however, it is necessary on occasion to identify partsof the whole to which specific state interventionistacts are addressed. The terminology used usually corresponds to Soviet usage, namely, "workers," "peasants," and "intelligentsia." These are the two "non-antagonisticclasses" and the "stratum" identified as the basic groupings of Soviet society in the Stalin Constitutionof 1936. An earlier Soviet usage, more rigorously Marxist, subdivided the peasantry into class groups ranging from "kulak" to "poor peasant," and also distinguished between an old 4 Adam B. Ulam, Stalin, New York, 1973, title of ch. 8.

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"bourgeois" and new "proletarian" intelligentsia. Although Sovietologists generally dislike these classifications and put the terms in quotationmarks, it is virtually impossible to avoid using them when describing state policies: "kulaks," for example, may be an ambiguoussocial group, but what other label can be used for the targetsof the "dekulakization"policy? Thus, perhapsironically, Sovietologists have fallen into the habit of dealing with Soviet society in terms of Marxist-and even Stalinist-Marxist--classcategories. At times, readingWestern scholarshipon the Stalin period, one might also conclude that Sovietologists have accepted Stalinist premises about the disappearance of class antagonismsin Soviet society. Inter- and intra-classconflicts and tensions are as rare in the Western "totalitarian"model as they are in the Soviet "socialist" one. However, there is one notable exception to this rule. In following Trotsky (The Revolution Betrayed) and Djilas (The New Class), Sovietologists sometimes refer to an antagonistic relationship between an oppressedsociety and an exploiting, privileged bureaucraticelite. This is essentially a Marxist version of the old state-against-societyimage (from which, in fact, Trotsky probably derived it).5 Its appeal to Sovietologists is no doubt related to its congenial political implications,since both Trotskyand Djilas were indicting the Stalinist system as well as analyzing it. All the same, its place in the conventional wisdom of Sovietology is somewhat anomalous. This may be the point of origin of another curious Sovietological habit in writing about Soviet society, which is to attachnegative connotationsto the term "bourgeois" and generally positive ones to "proletarian." Marxist prejudice, as well as Marxist and Stalinist-Marxistanalysis, have found a modest place in the interstices of Sovietology's totalitarianmodel. Social HistoryApproaches a) Problems of structureand social interaction It is too early to reporton currentwork in progressin this field, since such work on the Stalin period is only just beginning. Nevertheless, it is importantto consider these problems, as the sketchy existing analytical frameworkoutlined above is clearly inadequate,being the productof casual borrowingfrom Soviet and other Marxist sources by Sovietologists whose main attention was elsewhere, and its revision may have significance for our understandingof the natureof Stalinism. I have drawn to some extent on my own experience of the problems of structurein planning a book on the social history of the 1930s,6and 5

Earlier, in his analysis of the 1905 Revolution, Trotsky had portrayedthe tsarist state as an essentially free-standing entity, not representativeof any class in the society but opposed to the society as a whole. In a review of the last volume of Trotsky's 1905 (Krasnaia nov', 1922, no. 3), Pokrovskyaccused him of borrowingthis non-Marxistconcept from one of the historiansof the state school, the liberalP. N. Miliukov. 6 The working title of this book, which should be finished in 1986, is Stalin's Russia: A Social History of the 1930s.


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on relevant discussions at recent meetings of Soviet social historians in the United States.7But it is also possible to make deductions about likely directions of futurework on the basis of social history's own logic. Social historians are in the business of analyzing society, which among other things means breakingit down into constituentparts. They are unlikely to be satisfied with hypotheses involving an undifferentiated"society," as in the state-against-societydichotomy discussed earlier. They will probably want to make finer distinctions than those of Stalinist-Marxistanalysis, with its three categories of "working class," "peasantry," and "intelligentsia"; they are bound to object in particularto the last, hybrid category, which puts lowly office-workersin the same group as professionals and administrators.They will surety find it difficult to accept the idea of a society without significantinternal tensions and conflicts (as in the "non-antagonistic"class relationshipsof Stalinist Marxism),or of a society so inert that all the dynamics are external(as in the totalitarianmodel). The first challenge for social historians of the Stalin period will be to decide what kind of social breakdown is most appropriate. The StalinistMarxist breakdown is clearly simplistic, especially when compared with the complex class analysis used by Soviet Marxistsin the 1920s. On the other hand, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Soviet society actually underwenta Great Simplificationin the course of Stalin's "revolution from above" at the beginning of the 1930s. Kulaks, nepman, and small traders disappearedfrom the roster,groups like artisansand peasantcraftsmenwere dispersed,and collectivization levelled old distinctions within the peasantry. Perhaps the result of this was to produce a very simple social structure,as well as a damaged one. But it is also reasonableto assume that, as the society recovered from the blows of the FirstFive-Year Plan period, it became more complex. Trotsky and other Marxist critics have drawn our attention to the emergence of a new social hierarchyin the 1930s. At the top of the hierarchy, in Trotsky's view, was the "bureaucracy," a quasi-ruling class by virtue of its control (though not ownership) of the means of production,possessing material privileges that set it apart from the rest of society. This idea has been quite influential among Western social historians.8However, some of scholars have alreadynoted that the bureaucracyitself was hierarchical,so that the social position and class interestsof those at the bottom were quite different from those at 7 I have in mind particularlythe last two meetings of the National Seminaron the Social History of Russia in the TwentiethCentury(Philadelphia,1983 and 1984), the two workshopson Social History of the Stalin period that I organized as a Senior Fellow at the HarrimanInstitute for the Advanced Study of the Soviet Union, Columbia University, in the spring of 1985, and the third workshopin this series, held in Austin in March 1986 underthe joint sponsorshipof the International Studies Program,Universityof Texas at Austin, and the HarrimanInstitute. 8 See, for example, Moshe Lewin, "The Social Background of Stalinism," in Tucker, ed., Stalinism,pp. 111-136.

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the top, perhaps at times directly opposed to them.9Trotsky, to be sure, had in mind the higher level of bureaucracywhen he talked of a new ruling class. But how high, and on what basis can a cut-off point be drawn? Soviet statisticians in the Stalin period sometimes used a category of "leading cadres and specialists,"10 based on nomenklatura distinctions, which might coincide with Trotsky's group (though state/partynomenklaturais an unsatisfactorycriterion for class membership in Marxist terms). But there is also the problem of the professional and technical intelligentsia, whose members were often but not necessarily employed by state institutions, sometimes in a "bureaucratic" (administrative)role and sometimes simply as specialists. This whole group sharedthe materialprivileges of the higher stratumof the bureaucracyand had a high level of education and other elite characteristics. When social historians come to grips with the problem of social hierarchy, they will have to decide what kind of elite they are looking for-a Marxist "ruling class," or simply the group with highest status and economic advantagesin the society. The answer has great significancefor our understandingof the social dynamics of Stalinism. There are other forms of emerging hierarchicalstratificationthat call for close investigation. The position of Stakhanoviteswithin the working class is a particularlyinteresting issue, but there are also a multiplicity of distinctions to be made between unskilled and skilled labor, "new" workers (fresh from the villages) and "old" ones, and workersin differentoccupations and branchesof industry, not to mention the distinctions among convict,11semi-free, and free labor to be found on the new constructionsites. The collectivized peasants and ruralsociety in general present an even more promisingfield of investigationfor those interested in emerging social hierarchies. The kolkhoz itself was a hierarchical structure, with a top stratum of white-collar workers (chairman, accountant,and so on), a middle stratumof skilled blue-collar workerslike tractor driversand mechanics, and, at the bottom, the rank-and-filekolkhoznikiwho did the actual field work and had only traditionalpeasant skills. Ruralsociety in a broader sense underwent significant changes after collectivization, as the numbers and proportionalweight of white-collar and administrativepersonnel and blue-collar workers increased,while those of peasants (kolkhoznikiand edinolichniki) diminished. Class differentiation, that favorite subject of the agrarianMarxists in the 1920s, is really a much more appropriatetheme for the

9 This point was stronglymade by Arch Getty at the first and thirdworkshopson Social History of the Stalin Period (see above, note 7). The approachis employed in Getty's publicationsand in the work of GaborRitterspom. 10 For definitionand dataon this category, see Sostav rukovodiashchikhrabotnikovi spetsialistov Soiuza SSR, Moscow, 1936. 1 In his comment on this paper as presented at the Third World Congress of Slavic Studies, Stephen F. Cohen suggested that convict laborers should be considered the bottom stratumin the generalhierarchyof Soviet society in the Stalin period. I am inclined to agree with him and with the implied criticism of social historiansfor disregardingthis group.


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1930s. Indeed, it is arguable that Russia's long-awaited "rural bourgeoisie" finally materializedin the 1930s, albeit not in the expected form. Of course the discovery that Stalinist society was hierarchicallystratified is scarcely unexpected (what society is not?) and in itself is unlikely to change anyone's thinkingabout the natureof Stalinism. But on what principleswas the stratificationbased? What kind of relations existed between different strataand classes? How could individuals improve their social and economic status, or protect themselves from the sudden reversals of fortune that often overtook those who were successful in this society? The answers to such questions, if social historians can find them, may well be highly relevant to our general understandingof Stalinism. We already have certain general notions about status in Stalinist society: that the kolkhoz peasantry ranked lowest, both for economic reasons and because the kolkhozniki were not issued internal passports, which implied second-class citizenship; that ruralin general rankedlower than urban;and that the white-collar professional and administrativegroup was accorded highest status, which is often held to indicate the "embourgeoisement" of the Stalinist regime. The last premise, of course, begs a question that is relevantto all status issues, namely, whether the regime was imposing its values on the society or vice versa. Privileged access to material goods and services was a concomitant of elite status in Stalinist society.12This point may be carriedfurther. It is possible that, in this society where scarcity and privation were the norm, the degree of preferentialaccess to deficit commodities was the major determinantof status distinctions, or rather,of those status distinctions that were peculiarly "Stalinist," being products of the "revolution from above" and its aftermathrather than reflecting Bolshevik-revolutionaryor traditional Russian values. While some aspects of this question are difficult to investigate because various forms of elite privilege were concealed from the public eye (in contrastto the highly publicized privileges of Stakhanoviteworkers and peasants), the task of determining degrees of preferential access for different social and occupational groups is greatly facilitatedby the existence of formal rationingsystems thathad exactly this function. Urban rationing was in force for approximatelyhalf the Stalin period-from 1929 to 1935, and again from 1941 to 1947-as well as earlier, during World War I and the Civil War years. A comparison of the changing ration priorities of social and occupational groups over this period should contribute a great deal to our understandingof the regime's changing sense of statushierarchies. Moreover,the 1929-35 rationingsystem was a peculiar hybrid of industrialworking-class and white-collar elite priority access via "closed distributionpoints" (zakrytyeraspredeliteli) serving specific groups of factory workers, engineers, government officials, and so on; here social 12 See Mervyn Matthews,Privilege in the Soviet Union: A Studyof Elite Life-Stylesunder Communism,London, 1978.

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historianswill find much to illuminatethe genesis and evolving organizingprinciples of Stalinistsocial structureand privilege. Of course, formal priorityof access cannot be equated with actual access. In practice, everyone working in state and cooperative trade, or in the supplyand-procurementsdepartmentsof industrialenterprises and other state institutions, had informal privileges of access to goods that exceeded those of their counterpartsworking outside the commercial sphere. This fact points up the importance of making vertical as well as horizontal distinctions in our social analysis. So far, scholars have noted only a few significantvertical distinctions, for example, between administratorsand technical specialists in the white-collar elite. But the vertical distinctions between commercial and non-commercial occupations at all levels are of great interest, not only because the commercial sector was large but also because it had many unusualcharacteristics. Because of its "second economy" (black market) connections and residual "NEP spirit," employment in the commercial sector carried low prestige despite its material advantages; it constituted an exception to our general hypothesis linking social status with preferentialaccess to goods. Low prestige was most noticeable at the bottom of the commercial hierarchy,with jobs like sales clerk. At the top, managersof large departmentstores, commercial directors of enterprises and the like clearly had entree to the broader social elite, though this advantagewas partlyrelated to the services they could renderother elite members. Advancementin the commercial sector was evidently much less dependent on education and party membership-the two standardcriteria for upward mobility in the Stalin period-than was the case in other spheres. All this suggests more than an interestingspecial case, understandablyneglected by Soviet historians,for study by Western social historians. It raises the possibility that we are still greatly underestimatingthe diversity and complexity of Stalinist society, partly because we have implicitly accepted some of the limitationsand prejudicesof Stalinist-Marxistanalysis of it. b) Implicationsof High Social Mobility Until recently, social mobility was a neglected theme in Soviet studies. Western Sovietologists often assumed that the process was irrelevantin a totalitariansociety, or for that mattera society that claimed to be building socialism. Marxistsanalyzing Soviet society were equally uninterested,since social mobility is not a traditionalMarxist concept. My discussion of regime-sponsored upwardmobility into the elite in Educationand Social Mobility and elsewhere13 drew attentionto the subject, but some scholars were uneasy about the positive value-loading of the term in American usage (where upwardmobility is closely linked with ideas of democracy and opportunity),and others were more struck by the aspect of regime sponsorshipthanthe process itself. 13 Sheila Fitzpatrick,Educationand Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921-1934, Cambridge, 1979, and "Stalin and the Makingof a New Elite, 1929-1938," Slavic Review, vol. 38, 1979.


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However, it is the process itself and its remarkabledimensions that are likely to preoccupy social historiansof the Stalin period. This society is impossible to analyze adequately in purely static terms because of the exceptional social and geographicalmobility of the population. Tens of millions of peasants moved to towns and became workers in the 1930s. A large segment of the old working class moved into white-collar and managerial occupations. Private tradersand businessmenwere forced out of their old occupationsand had to find new ones; "kulaks" were deported from the villages and resettled in distant regions, where many became workers in the new industrial enterprises. The World War II and postwar demobilizationof the army led to furtherlarge-scale mobility. But war and specific regime policies encouraging various types of mobility explain only partof the general phenomenon. More than anythingelse, it was a necessary by-product of the Soviet Union's rapid industrialization, which createdmore white-collar,professional, and managerialjobs, at the same time expandingthe blue-collarlaborforce and drawingpeasantsinto the towns. For this reason, the general trend of mobility in the Stalin period was upward, despite the occurrence of downward mobility from the privileged classes after the Revolution and dramaticepisodes of elite purging in the 1930s. As I have argued elsewhere, the phenomenon of large-scale upward mobility needs to be incorporatedinto our interpretationof Stalinism,because the Stalinist regime claimed and almost certainlyreceived credit for enabling membersof the lower classes to improve their social position.14But this is not the only way in which recognition of high social mobility may affect our generalizations about Stalinism. One familiar generalizationconcerns the weakness of social classes and associationalbonds, and the consequent inability of society to resist state power or curb its expansion. Many scholars have regarded this "atomization" or social fragmentationas part of the dynamics of totalitarianism. But it can be linked equally-and not necessarily incompatibly-with the enormous social mobility of the early Stalin period, which inevitably weakened traditionalassociational bonds and reduced class consciousness and the capacity for social organization. To take an obvious example, a working class consisting largely of yesterday's peasants (as was the case of the Soviet working class in the 1930s) is unlikely to generate assertive labor unions. A peasantry whose young men are leaving to work in the towns may offer comparativelylittle aggressive resistance to state initiatives,even when the policy is as unpopularas collectivization appearsto have been in the countryside. A new elite, such as that emerging in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, will not have the same esprit de corps, independence and, habits of collective self-assertion as one that is long established and firmlyentrenched.

14 In Educationand Social Mobility,pp. 16-17 and 254, and in "Stalin and the Making of a New Elite," pp. 401-402.

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The high level of state coercion characteristic of the Stalin period is anotherbasic Sovietological theme that deserves reconsiderationin the context of high social mobility. These two phenomena clearly had a complex interdependentrelationship,and neither can be adequatelytreatedwithout reference to the other. The casual connections worked both ways. On the one hand, state coercion produced involuntarysocial mobility, as in the deportationof kulaks, the expropriationof nepmen, the Great Purge and the deportationof "class enemies" from the newly acquired western territoriesin the 1940s. On the other hand, spontaneous social mobility on the scale of the early '30s created organizationaland control problems for the state that promptedfurthercoercive actions, as in the case of the labor discipline measuresand the 1932 passportlaw (originally introducedto prevent mass exodus from village to town as famine grippedlarge areas of the countryside). While the "totalitarian" view of Stalinist rule correctly emphasizes the regime's transformationalistaspirationsin explaining coercion and terror,it is surely misleading to imply that, in the absence of effective societal resistance to the state, the coercion was gratuitousand unrelatedto any social problem. It was related to an acute social problem but that problem was excessive mobility ratherthan resistance. Moreover,the mobility of the populationwas as much an impediment to the regime's efforts at social engineering as a consequence of them. For all its "totalitarian" ambitions and repressive policies, the actual control exercised by the Stalinist regime was often limited, as social historians looking from the bottom up have begun to point out.15One of the limitations was that controls were difficult to apply to rootless and unpredictablymobile segments of the population. Another was that the same rootlessness and mobility were characteristicof the Communists and bureaucraticcadres who were supposedto implementthe regime's policies and controls.16 A related theme in the literature on totalitarianism,the importance of "indoctrination"in the Stalinist system, may also be seen from a new perspective by social historians. The regime was undoubtedlydisposed to indoctrinate its citizens, not just in the sense of teaching Marxist-Leninistdogma but also and more significantly in the broader sense of inculcating new social and cultural norms. However, this disposition need not be regarded solely as totalitarian imperative: the stress on indoctrinationand education had a practical social justificationas well, and could even be interpretedas a response to societal demands,in additionto meeting a perceived state interest. In Stalinist society, large numbers of citizens needed to learn new skills and master new social roles because they had recently changed their social position throughupwardmobility. These needs were a responsibilityfor the regime, on the one hand, and a burden on individuals, on the other. Factories had to 15 See below, pp. 367-372. 16 J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet CommunistParty Reconsidered, 1933-1938, Cambridge,1985, especially pp. 34, 61.


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assimilate and train new workers, but at the same time new workers fresh from the villages needed to learn the rules of urban and factory life in order to survive. The same imperativesapplied at all levels of society startingwith the kolkhoz, where new conventions had to be masteredby officials and peasantsalike. At the top level of society, new elite members had to learn technical and managerialskills as well as acquiringthe kul'turnost'appropriateto their status. The term "indoctrination"is clearly too narrowfor the process of social and political vospitanie, not to mention basic education and technical training, that absorbedso much of the regime's and society's attentionin the 1930s. But the subject, however labelled, is important;and social historiansare unlikely to restrictit to transmissionof ideology or accept the notion that society's role was purely passive. A more promisingapproachis suggested by Vera Dunham,who describes the emerging "middleclass values" of the Stalin period as the result of negotiation ("the Big Deal") between the regime and the society's elite.17A similar process of negotiation might be discerned in the development of norms for the new kolkhozy,for the regime's original intentions were clearly modified in response to village realities and the traditionalpatterns of peasant life. In some cases-perhaps including that of the Stalinist elite-negotiation of values might be seen as a three-way process, with the arrivistes (new workers, new elite members, and so on) learning from their precursors(old workers, "bourgeois" intelligentsia) under regime supervision, while adding their own contribution to the culturalmix. c) The View "fromBelow": Social Initiativesand Responses Social historians are generally inclined to prefer the perspective "from below"-that is, from within the society, or even from the grass-roots viewpoint of ordinarylower-class citizens-to the governmentaland elite perspective "from above." Those who are now working on the Soviet period are no exception; indeed, their interest in history from below may be accentuated because of the reactionagainsttotalitarian-modelscholarship,which imposed an extreme version of the perspective "from above" on Soviet studies. "Revisionist" social and political historians of the younger generation like Arch Getty, Roberta Manning, and Gabor Rittersporn18 counterpose local picturesfrom-life (often drawn from the Smolensk Archive, which is our major accessible source of primarydata on conditions outside the center in the 1930s) to the

17 Vera S. Dunham,In Stalin's Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction, Cambridge,1976. 18 See Getty, Origins of the Great Purges, and "Party and Purges in Smolensk, 1933-1937," Slavic Review, vol. 42, 1983; RobertaT. Manning, "Governmentin the Soviet Countrysidein the Stalinist Thirties: The Case of Belyi Raion in 1937," Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 301, Pittsburgh,n.d.; GaborT. Rittersporn,"The State Against Itself: Social Tensions and Political Conflict in the U.S.S.R. 1936-1938," Telos, no. 41, 1979, and "Societe et appareild'6tat sovietiques 1936-1938: Contradictionset interferences,"Annals E.S.C., no. 4, 1979.

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generalizations earlier derived from central policy pronouncementsand laws, and note the vast discrepanciesbetween them. Of course, the perspective from below inevitably differs from that from the top; policies are never implemented exactly in the manner that policymakers intend; local conditions vary, so that the experience of one region or locality cannot be assumed to be typical. I think, however, there is little doubt that the accumulationof local and specific case studies will significantlychange some of the conventional wisdom on the Stalin period. Stalinist policy-makers, like Western Sovietologists, were far removed from Soviet society, and probably thereforeexceptionally prone to schematicerrorin theirperceptionof it. But the interestingquestion is how far revisionism based on the perspective "from below" can take us on the Stalin period. In the accepted Sovietological view, the great social changes of this era were productsof radical policies initiated by Stalin's regime without significant social support and ruthlessly implemented without regard to society's responses. The paradigmis "revolution from above," Stalin's own term for forced-pace industrialization,collectivization, and other similarly ambitiousand socially disruptivepolicies of the First Five-Year Plan period. The same frameworkis applied to the Great Purges of the late 1930s. A perspective "from below" might suggest alterations of greateror less magnitudeor lead scholarsto abandonthe frameworkaltogether. Three types of alternativeexplanationscan be distinguishedin published revisionist work and informal discussions. The first emphasizes that the regime had less actual control over society than it claimed, that its actions were often improvisedratherthan part of a granddesign, that implementationof its radical policies often diverged from the policy-makers' intentions, and that the policies had many unplannedand unanticipatedsocial consequences. The second, taking revisionism a step further,sees the regime's policies as appealingto definite social constituencies, responding to social pressures and grievances, and liable to be modified in practice throughprocesses of informalsocial negotiation. The thirdand most challenging approachwould describe such policies as the product of initiative from below ratherthan attributingthem to the regime's initiative from above. The first approach is not necessarily incompatible with the concept of "revolution from above" or even the totalitarianmodel, if totalitarianismis taken as an ideal type ratherthan a literal descriptionof historical reality. It is, after all, impossible to imagine an actual historical situation in which political control was absolute, laws were implemented to the letter and in complete accordancewith the legislators' intentions,and the political leaders had a grand design detailed enough to cover every contingency. Such hypotheses (though not absent from past Sovietological scholarship) fly in the face of common sense. However, a number of recent scholarly works emphasizing improvisation, accident, inefficiency, and practical failures of regime planning and


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control19conclude that the accumulationof such evidence underminesthe totalitarian model of the Stalinist system to the point where it is no longer worth using. This is the import of Arch Getty's study of party organization, which stresses the tenuousnessof central control over local organs and the party's inability to keep accurate membership files in the 1930s.20 Roberta Manning's work on Belyi raion makes a similar point, noting that there were far too few control personnel (including NKVD) in the Western Oblast, particularlythe countryside, to perform the functions usually attributed to them.21 Peter Solomon's research on local judicial and administrativeorgans points in the same direction,22and his descriptionof the evolution of Soviet penal policy in the early 1930s offers a strikingrefutationof any simple notion of GrandDesign in a sphereof particularrelevance to totalitariantheory.23 The implicationsfor the "revolution from above" framework24are not so clear. In principle, "revolution from above" can accommodatea fair amountof improvisation,disorganization,and unanticipatedconsequences, even though it has not always been seen in these terms in the past. It could be argued, indeed, that the concept is essentially incompatiblewith notions of detailedplanningand rigorous supervision by central authorities. An interestingrecent paper on the collectivization campaignof the winter of 1929-30 makes a convincing case that local improvisation of various kinds abounded, and radical initiatives often came from lower-level officials before they were sanctionedby top-level party decisions.25This finding may mean-as the authorseems to conclude-that the process was not "revolution from above," or at least not revolution from the very top. But such a conclusion sheds little light on the reasons why lower-level officials took these apparentlyrisky initiatives. If they did so because they were getting radical "signals" from above (as they certainly were in this case), we are left with the old "revolution from above" framework,but perhaps gain a new insight into the process by which it was carriedout. It may be that Stalinist "revolution from above" not only permittedbut actually required lower-level officials to respondto urgentbut imprecise "signals" by improvisingand taking initiatives that, if unsuccessful, could always be disavowed by the leadership. 19 These themes are not totally new in the literature. They are prominent,for example, in Merle Fainsod's SmolenskunderSoviet Rule, Cambridge,MA, 1958. 20 Getty, Origins of the Great Purges, especially pp. 31-37. 21 RobertaT. Manning, "The Collective FarmPeasantryand the Local Administration:Peasant Lettersof Complaintin Belyi Raion in 1937," paperpresentedat the 1983 meeting of National Seminarfor the Study of Russian Society in the TwentiethCentury,pp. 7-12, 15. 22 Peter H. Solomon, "Local Political Power and Soviet Criminal Justice 1922-1941," Soviet Studies, vol. 37, no. 3, July 1985. 23 Peter H. Solomon, "Soviet Penal Policy, 1917-1934: A Reinterpretation,"Slavic Review, vol. 39, 1980. 24 The best statementon this is Robert C. Tucker, "Stalinism as Revolution From Above," in Tucker,ed., Stalinism,pp. 77-108. 25 Lynne Viola, "The Campaignto Eliminatethe Kulak as a Class, Winter 1930: A Note on the Legislation," paperpresentedat XVI National Conventionof AAASS, New York, 1984.

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The second revisionist approachputs regime policy in a social context, and assumes that the social context (grievances, pressures, sources of support, responses) must to some degree shape, constrainand modify the actions of the party leadership. The pioneering work was Vera Dunham's thesis of "the Big Deal" between the new elite and the regime as a source of Stalinist "middleclass values."26 This was followed by work on the CulturalRevolution27and upwardmobility into the elite via the education policies of the First Five-Year Plan, which, I argued, were both an appeal to one of the regime's basic social constituencies and a source of future social support.28The regime's relationship with the working class during the First Five-Year Plan has since been investigatedin several studies,29and there is work in progresson the social context of collectivization.30Ritterspor and Getty have suggested new perspectives on the Great Purges, linking them in different ways with tensions within the bureaucracyand with populargrievances againstthe new Soviet bosses.31 This approachchallenges the totalitarian-modelassumptionthat society is irrelevantto an understandingof Stalinist political processes. It also tends to reduce the role of terrorand coercion, if only by suggesting that other factors are relevant as well, and this has been one of the most controversialaspects of the revisionist argument. Critics have asserted that any reduction of the traditional emphasis on terroramountsto white-washingof the Stalinistregime, or at least unacceptableabdicationof moral judgment.32This is a complicated issue, since historiansusually do not accept such a priori limitationson interpretation, and in this case are likely to dismiss the criticisms as manifestationsof ColdWar bias. However, leaving aside the question of moral judgment33 and 26 Dunham,In Stalin's Time, ch. 1. For a discussion of the technical intelligentsiaand the regime that also touches questions of values, see KendallE. Bailes, Technologyand Society underLenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet TechnicalIntelligentsia,1917-1941, Princeton,1978. 27 Sheila Fitzpatrick,ed., CulturalRevolutionin Russia 1928-1931, Bloomington, IN, 1978. 28 Fitzpatrick,Educationand Social Mobility. 29 For example, Lynne Viola, "The Campaignof the 25,000ers: A Study of the Collectivization of Soviet Agriculture,1929-1931," Ph.D. dissertation,Princeton, 1984; HiroakiKuromiya,"Politics and Social Change in Soviet Industry during the 'Revolution from Above,' 1928-1931," Ph.D. dissertation,Princeton, 1985. 30 RobertaManningis interestedin the question of social supportand antagonismswithin the village community at the end of the 1920s. In a paperon "Peasants After Collectivization" presented at the second workshop on Social History of the Stalin Period (ColumbiaUniversity, April 1985), I suggested that the modificationsin kolkhozpolicy in 1930-35 were the outcome of informal "social negotiation" between the regime and the peasantry. 31 Getty, Origins of the Great Purges; Rittersporn,"The State Against Itself." 32 See, for example, L. Kolakowski's note on Sovietological revisionists in Survey,vol. 21, no. 4, 1975, pp. 87-89, or LeonardSchapiro's review of my Russian Revolutionin Times LiterarySupplement,March 18, 1983, p. 269. 33 A good deal of criticism on avoidance of explicit moraljudgment has been directed at meand correctly,in a sense, since I have an idiosyncraticposition on this issue that is no more congenial to most other revisionists than it is to our critics. My original, and somewhatnaive, notion was that historiansand social scientists were bound by a kind of Hippocraticoath to be as objective and nonpartisan as was humanly possible. I retreatedfrom this position after being deluged by counter-


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political bias, there is a real problem here for social historians,namely, how to deal with state coercion and terrorin the Stalin period. The first reaction probably was (as the critics suspected) to steer clear of the subject on the grounds that it had been sufficiently or even excessively emphasized by the previous generation. But the more recent trend34 has been toward reworking the subject-this time, it is hoped, without some of the earlier polemical excesses-in the context of social history. The controversies surroundingthe second revisionist approach tend to obscure the fact that it is relatively cautious in its revisionism and leaves much of the traditionalstructureof Sovietological interpretationintact. Virtually all the work is compatible with the idea of Stalinist "revolution from above," althoughit adds the new and very importantconcept of supportingor responsive social constituencies. A frequent image is that of the regime "unleashing" social forces35to accomplish its purposes. It is generally not argued that social pressureswere strongenough to force the regime into radical action or that subsequent policy modificationsor "concessions" to aggrieved social groups were regime responses to assertive social resistance. The new scholarshipadds social voices and interests to the picture and it portraysthe bureaucracyas a complex social entity, not a mere transmissionbelt, but at least some of the older Sovietological interpretationscould assimilatethese changes withouttoo much trouble. The thirdrevisionist approach,substitutinginitiativefrom below for initiative from the regime at the great turningpoints of the Stalin era, would be much more difficult for other schools to incorporate. This makes it very attractivein principle to Young Turks, but in practice there are not many examples in the published or unpublishedliterature. The idea comes, I think, from my introduction to Cultural Revolution in Russia,36 where I suggested "revolution from below" as an alternativehypothesis to "revolutionfrom above." The argument in my article in that volume was more cautious, suggesting participation"from below" ratherthan any decisive revolutionaryinitiativefrom that quarter. None of the other contributorsactually excluded regime initiative or asserted that examples, and am now half persuadedthat those who incline to take the role as detachedobserverdo so (like the "alien, indifferent,and polemically-disposed" Sukhanov) mainly because of quirks of personalityand temperament.But I still think the Sukhanovsmake good historians. 34 "State Coercion and Social Responses" was the subject of the third workshopon the Social History of the Stalin Period, held in Austin, Texas, on March7-8, 1986. 35 The image, borrowed from the Bolshevik literateur Voronsky, is used in Sheila Fitzpatrick, "CulturalRevolution in Russia, 1928-1932," Journal of ContemporaryHistory, 1974, no. 1, p. 35. See also Getty, Origins of the Great Purges, p. 155, passim. 36 Fitzpatrick,ed., Cultural Revolution, pp. 6-7. In this passage, which has been widely interpretedas a revisionist manifesto, I contrasteda traditional"revolutionfrom above" interpretationof CulturalRevolution with a new interpretationthat found "important6lements of 'revolution from below.' " Although my own preferencefor the latterwas clearly indicated,I had to concede "initiative" to the partyleadershipeven while suggesting that the process was "generatedby forces within the society." It will be noted that I have since shifted towardTucker'sposition on the importanceof "revolutionfrom above."

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social pressures for Cultural Revolution were irresistible.37 A scholar who may come close to this position is Rittersporn on the Great Purges: he states that "the struggles of 1936-1938 were unleashed by popular discontent [my emphasis] with the arbitrariness, corruption and inefficiency of the ruling strata."38 This statement seems to promise more than his subsequent argument delivers, since he concedes that the masses were passive and "incapable of organized resistance,"39 and does not show how or why, under these circumstances, their discontent should have acted so powerfully on the rulers. How are we to account for the absence of specific, documented cases of revolutionary "initiative from below" in recent scholarship? One possibility is that scholars are being prudent, having discovered that even modest socialsupport hypotheses arouse indignation and controversy. Another possibility is that they are having trouble making this particular argument fit the data on such major episodes as Cultural Revolution, collectivization, and the Great Purges. It is always tempting to turn conventional wisdom on its head, but this approach may actually do less than justice to the real revisionist contribution to understanding of the Stalin period. What has emerged from the recent scholarship is an appreciation that no political regime, including Stalin's, functions in a social vacuum. There were social pressures and constituencies influencing Stalinist policy formation, though these were comparatively weak during the "revolution from above" phase. More importantly, there were social constraints, social responses and informal processes of negotiation between the regime and social groups that had a very significant impact on policy implementation-that is, on the nature and outcome of Stalin's "revolution from above" in practice. Social historians have made their debut in studies of the Stalin period by challenging the totalitarian model and arguing that it gives a one-sided and simplistic picture of the interaction of state and society. The new data presented appear to bear out this claim, although in my opinion they do not yet significantly change the old picture of the Stalinist regime as initiator of social change in the 1930s. They do show, however, that the regime had only limited control over the outcome of the radical policies it had initiated. The regime's unusual capacity and inclination for generating "revolution from above" was something quite different from a capacity and an inclination for planned social 37 In my article "CulturalRevolution as Class War" in Fitzpatrick,ed., Cultural Revolution, I identifieda numberof social constituenciesactively or passively supportingCulturalRevolution, but located the actual initiative-the "signal" that launchedthe movement-in the partyleadership. Of the other contributors,FrederickStarr and KaterinaClark emphasized the radical utopian spirit of architects and writers and the absence of day-to-day party control and direction of their activities. However, while they saw these groups as taking the initiative in their own professions, they also saw them as responding to opportunitiesand a favorable climate that were external to their professions and not createdby their activity. 38 "The State Against Itself," p. 87. 39 "The State Against Itself," p. 103.


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engineering. It could set off explosions that destroyed or damaged certain features of the social landscape, but its ability to rebuild according to preselectedblueprintsappearsmuch more doubtful. It is perhaps surprisingthat, despite its interest in social history, the new cohort of historians has concentrated so heavily on the old Sovietological questions-framed by an earliergenerationof social scientists-about the political system. We have not yet discarded the assumptionthat the only significant social relations in the Soviet Union are those in which society relates to government. This tendency may be understandable,given the Stalinist context, and even legitimate, given the recent trend in social history to "bring the state back in." But surely there is a special problem in the case of Soviet social history: we seem to be bringing the state back in without ever having removed it from center stage. We may risk losing an opportunityto formulatenew questions and develop a real social-historyperspectiveon the Stalin period. It seems to me that social historians have made their point on the totalitarianmodel and should now try turningtheir attentionelsewhere. We are starting to investigate a society with, for example, a remarkablyhigh level of social and geographicalmobility, a new patternof social stratification,and (according to a rather suspect piece of conventional wisdom) no internal class or social conflicts worth discussing. We have a lot to work on. We might even find, before bringingthe state back in, that Stalinismhad some social as well as political dynamics-which would, after all, be both the most logical and the most original contributionsocial historianscould make to the field.