Introduction
RONALD GRIGOR SUNY
The history of Russia in the twentieth century (and particularly the Soviet period) has undergone several important historiographical shifts in emphasis, style, methodology and interpretation. From a story largely centred on the state, its leaders and the intellectual elite, Russian history became a tale of social structures, class formation and struggles and fascination with revolution and radical social transformation. Political and intellectual history was followed by the wave of social history, and a whole generation of scholars spent their productive years investigating workers, peasants, bureaucrats, industry and agriculture. From the revolution attention moved to the 1920s, on to the Stalinist 1930s, and at the turn of the new century has crossed the barrier of the Second World War (largely neglecting the war itself) into the late Stalin period (1945-53) and beyond. In the last decade and a half the 'cultural' or 'linguistic turn' in historical studies belatedly influenced a new concentration on cultural topics among Russianists - celebrations and rituals, representations and myths, as well as memory and subjectivity. One revisionism followed another, often with unpleasant displays of hostility between schools and generations. The totalitarian model, undermined by social historians in the 1970s, proved to have several more lives to live and reappeared in a 'neo-totalitarian' version that owed much of its vision to a darker reading of the effects of the Enlightenment and modernity.
The historiography of the USSR was divided by the Cold War chasm between East and West and by political passions in the West that kept Left and Right in rival camps. On the methodological front deductions from abstract models, perhaps necessitated by the difficulty of doing archival work in the Soviet Union, gave way by the 1960s to work in Soviet libraries and archives. The access to primary sources expanded exponentially with the collapse of the USSR, and the end of the Cold War allowed scholars in Russia and the West to work more closely together than in the past, even though polemics about the Soviet experience continued to disturb the academy While the end of the great divide between Soviet East and capitalist West portended the possibility of a neutral, balanced history of Russia in the twentieth century, old disputes proved to be tenacious.
Still, Russian historiography has benefited enormously from the newly available source base that made possible readings that earlier could only be imagined. One can even say that the dynamic political conflicts among scholars in the past have actually enriched the field in the variety of approaches taken by historians. At the moment there are people practising political, economic, social and cultural history and dealing with topics that earlier had been on the margins - sexuality, violence, the inner workings of the top Soviet leadership, non-Russian peoples and the textures of everyday life in the USSR.
It is easy enough to begin with the observation that Russia, while part of Europe (at least in the opinion of some), has had distinguishing features and experiences that made its evolution from autocratic monarchy to democracy far more difficult, far more protracted, than it was for a few privileged Western countries. Not only was tsarist Russia a relatively poor and over-extended member of the great states of the continent, but the new Soviet state was born in the midst of the most ferocious and wasteful war that humankind had fought up to that time. A new level of acceptable violence marked Europe in the years of the First World War. Having seized power in the capital city, the new socialist rulers of Russia fought fiercely for over three years to win a civil war against monarchist generals, increasingly conservative liberal politicians, peasant armies, foreign interventionists, nationalists and more moderate socialist parties. By the end of the war the new state had acquired habits and practices of authoritarian rule. The revolutionary utopia of emancipation, equality and popular power competed with a counter-utopia of efficiency, production and social control from above. The Soviets eliminated rival political parties, clamped down on factions within their own party and pretentiously identified their dictatorship as a new form of democracy, superior to the Western variety. The Communists progressively narrowed the scope of those who could participate in real politics until, first, there was only one faction in the party making decisions and eventually only one man - Joseph Stalin.
Once Stalin had achieved pre-eminence by the end of the 1920s, he launched a second 'revolution', this one from above, initiated by the party/state itself. The ruling apparatus of Stalin loyalists nationalised totally what was left of the autonomous economy and expanded police terror to unprecedented dimensions. The new Stalinist system that metastasised out of Leninism resurrected the leather-jacket Bolshevism of the civil war and violently imposed col- lectivised agriculture on the peasant majority, pell-mell industrialisation on workers and a cultural straitjacket on the intelligentsia. Far more repressive than Lenin had been, Stalinist state domination of every aspect of social life transformed the Soviet continent from a backward peasant country into a poorly industrialised and urban one. The Stalinist years were marked by deep contradictions: visible progress in industry accompanied by devastation and stagnation in agriculture; a police regime that saw enemies everywhere at a time when millions energetically and enthusiastically worked to build their idea of socialism; cultural revival and massive expansion of literacy and education coinciding with a cloud of censorship that darkened the field of expression; and the adoption of the 'most democratic constitution in the world' while real freedoms and political participation evaporated into memories.
However brutal and costly the excesses of Stalinism, however tragic and heroic the Soviet struggle against Fascism during the Second World War, and however devastated by the practice of mass terror, Soviet society slowly evolved into a modern, articulated urban society with many features shared with other developed countries. After Stalin's death in 1953, many in the West recognised that the USSR had become a somewhat more benign society and tolerable enemy than had been proposed by the Cold Warriors. The 1960s and 1970s were a particularly fruitful moment for Western scholarship on the Soviet Union, as the possibility to visit the country and work in archives allowed a more empirical investigation of earlier mysteries. With the development in the late 1960s of social history, historians in the West began exploring the origins of the Soviet regime, most particularly in the revolutionary year 1917, and they radically revised the view of the October Revolution as a Bolshevik conspiracy with little popular support. Other 'revisionists' went onto challenge the degree ofstate control over society during the Stalin years and emphasised the procedures by which workers and others maintained small degrees of autonomy from the all-pervasive state. Gradually the totalitarian model that dominated in the 1940s and 1950s lost its potency and was largely rejected by the generation of social historians.
From its origins Soviet studies was closely involved with real-world politics, and during the years of detente the Soviet Union was seen through the prism of the 'developmental' or 'modernisation' model. Implicit in this interpretation was a sense that the social evolution of the Soviet system could eventually lead to a more open, even pluralistic regime. The potential for democratic evolution of the system seemed to be confirmed by the efforts of Gorbachev in the late 1980s to restrain the power of the Communist Party, awaken public opinion and political participation through glasnost', and allow greater freedom to the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet borderlands. Yet with the failure of the
Gorbachev revolution this reading of Soviet history was bitterly attacked by the more conservative who harked back to more fatalistic interpretations - that the USSR was condemned by Russian political culture or its utopian drive for an anti-capitalist alternative to a dismal collapse.