From political science to social history
By the time Lewin arrived in the United States, the privileges of material resources, state support and perceived national interest had made the American sovietological establishment the most prolific and influential purveyor of information on the Soviet Union and its allies outside the USSR. A veritable army of government employees, journalists, scholars and private consultants were hard at work analysing and pronouncing on the Soviet Union. In a real sense the view of the other side forged in America not only shaped the policy of one great superpower, but determined the limits of the dialogue between 'West' and 'East'. While the interpretations produced by American journalists and professional sovietologists were by no means uniform, the usual language used to describe the other great superpower was consistently negative - aggressive, expansionistic, paranoid, corrupt, brutal, monolithic, stagnant. Exchange students going to the USSR for a year of study routinely spoke of 'going into' and 'out of' the Soviet Union, as into and out of aprison, instead ofthe conventional 'to' and 'from' used for travel to other countries. Language itself reproduced the sense of Russia's alien nature, its inaccessibility and opaqueness.
Few professional historians in American universities studied Russia before the 1960s; fewer still ventured past the years of revolution until the 1980s. The doyen of Russian imperial history at Harvard, Michael Karpovich, stopped at the fall of tsarism in February 1917, 'announcing that with that event Russian history had come to an end'.[101] He and his colleague, the economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron, celebrated the cultural and economic progress that the late tsarist regime had made but which had been derailed with the wrong turn taken by the Bolsheviks. Marc Raeff at Columbia, the eloquent author of original studies of Russian intellectuals and officials, was equally suspicious of the ability seriously to study history after the divide of 1917. George Vernadsky at Yale focused primarily on early and medieval Russia that emphasised Russia's unique Eurasian character. Given that most archives in the Soviet Union were either closed or highly restricted to the few exchange students who ventured to Moscow or Leningrad beginning in the late 1950s, what history of the post- revolutionary period was written before the i970s was left almost entirely to political scientists, rather than historians. Robert Vincent Daniels's study of Communist oppositions in Soviet Russia in the 1920s, an exemplary case of historically informed political science, presented the full array of socialist alternatives imagined by the early revolutionaries and argued that the origins of Stalinist totalitarianism lay in the victory of the Leninist current within Bolshevism over the Leftist opposition, 'the triumph of reality over program'. Stalin typified 'practical power and the accommodation to circumstances' that won out over 'the original revolutionary objectives' which proved 'to be chimerical'.[102]
Russian studies in the United States ranged from more liberal, or what might be called 'detentist', views of the USSR to fervently anti-Communist interpretations that criticised mainstream sovietology from the Right. With Karpovich's retirement from the Harvard chair, the leading candidates were two of his students, Martin Malia and Richard Pipes, who in the next generation would become, along with Robert Conquest of the Hoover Institution, the leading representatives of conservative views in the profession. Harvard gave the nod to Pipes, whose first major work was an encyclopedic study of the non-Russian peoples during the revolution and civil war that portrayed the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet state as a fundamentally imperial arrangement, a colonial relationship between Russia and the borderlands.[103] Using the activities and proclamations of nationalist leaders or writers as indicators of the attitudes of whole peoples, he played down the widespread support for socialist programmes, particularly in the early years of the revolution and civil war, and touted the authenticity and legitimacy of the nationalists' formulations to the artificiality of the Communists' claims.
Robert Conquest, born in the year of the revolution, was a poet, novelist, political scientist and historian. Educated at Oxford, he joined the British Communist Party in 1937 but soon moved to the right. While serving in the Information and Research Department (IRD) ofthe Foreign Office (1948-56), a department known to the Soviets but kept secret from the Western public, he promoted and produced 'research precisely into the areas of fact then denied, or lied about by Sovietophiles'.[104] Even George Orwell supplied the IRD with 'a list of people he knew whose attitudes to Stalinism he distrusted'.[105] In the late 1960s Conquest edited seven volumes of material from IRD on Soviet politics, without acknowledgement that the books' source was a secret government agency or that the publisher, Frederick A. Praeger, was subsidised by the CIA. His first major book (of scholarship; he was already known for his poetry and science fiction) was a carefully detailed study of the political power struggle from the late Stalin years to Khrushchev's triumph.ii20 But far more influential was his mammoth study of the Stalin Terror in i968, which, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago some years later, stunned its readers with the gruesome details of the mass killings, torture, imprisonment and exiling of millions of innocent victims.m No elaborate theories for the purges were advanced, only the simple argument that 'Stalin's personal drives were the motive force of the Purge'.
For Conquest Stalinism was the apogee of Soviet communism, and the secret police and the terror its underlying essence. In another widely read book he argued that the Ukrainian famine of i93i-33 was a deliberate, state-initiated genocide against the Ukrainian peasantry/22 Most scholars rejected this claim, seeing the famine as following from a badly conceived and miscalculated policy of excessive requisitioning of grain, but not as directed specifically against ethnic Ukrainians. Disputes about his exaggerated claims of the numbers of victims of Stalin's crimes went on until the Soviet archives forced the field to lower its estimates/23 Yet for all the controversy stirred by his writing, Conquest was revered by conservatives, enjoyed a full-time research position at the Hoover Institution from i98i, and was 'on cheek-kissing terms' with Margaret Thatcher and Condoleezza Rice.[106]
Interest in the Soviet Union exploded in the United States with the Soviet launching of the first artificial earth satellite, Sputnik, in October i957. A near hysteria about the USA falling behind the USSR in technology, science and education led to a pouring of funding into Soviet and East European studies. Yet the focus of attention remained on regime studies and foreign policy. In the 1960s political scientists focused on the distribution of power within the Soviet elite and the processes of decision-making. Well within the larger paradigm of totalitarianism, Kremlinology looked intently for elite conflict, even peering at the line-up on the Lenin Mausoleum to detect who was on top. Slow to revise their models of the USSR, scholars underestimated the significance of Khrushchev's de-Stalinisation reforms, emphasising instead the dysfunctional and brutal aspects of a regime seen as largely static and unchanging. Moscow's resort to force in the Soviet Bloc - suppressing the revolution in Hungary in 1956 and the 'Prague Spring' in Czechoslovakia in 1968 - only confirmed the images of a redeployed and only slightly modified Stalinism. But increasingly the evident differences, and even rivalries, between Communist regimes, as well as the growing variation and contention within Eastern Bloc countries led some observers to question the idea of Communism as monolithic, unchanging and driven simply by ideology or a single source of power.
102
Robert Vincent Daniels,
103
Richard Pipes,
104
Robert Conquest, 'In Celia's Office',