Sovietology stood somewhat distant from mainstream political science, which employed an empiricism and observation that was impossible for students of the USSR. The 'behaviouralist revolution' in political science in the i960s was palely reflected in Soviet studies and was soon replaced by policy analysis, comparative case studies and the deployment of concepts borrowed from Western studies such as corporatism, pluralism, interest groups and civil society. Turning to the study of the Soviet Union as a 'political system', a 'process of interaction between certain environmental influences and the consciously directed actions of a small elite group of individuals working through a highly centralised institutional structure', scholars now emphasised the environmental, cultural and historically determined constraints on the Soviet leaders, rather than their revolutionary project to transform society or their total control over the population.[107] They investigated how decisions were made; which interest groups influenced policy choices and were to have their demands satisfied; how popular compliance and the legitimacy of the regime was sustained in the absence of Stalinist terror; and whether the system could adapt to the changing international environment. By looking at institutions and how they functioned, many sovietologists noted the structural similarities and practices the Soviet system shared with other political systems.[108]
A particularly influential methodology in Soviet studies - and in which sovietology made an impact on mainstream political science - was the political culture approach. The concept possessed a long pedigree, going back at least to Rene Fulop-Miller's The Mind and Face of Bolshevism (1927) and Harper's work on civic training, if not to earlier work on national character.127 In part a reaction against the psychocultural studies of the 1940s that had attributed political attitudes of a national population to child-rearing and family practices (e.g. the swaddling thesis), political culture studies held that political systems were affected by political attitudes and behaviours that made up a separate cultural sphere available for analysis.128 Beliefs, values and symbols provided a subjective orientation to politics that defined the universe in which political action took place.129 Associated with Frederick Barghoorn, Robert C. Tucker and the British political scientists Stephen White and Archie Brown, political culture focused on consistencies in political behaviour and attitudes over the longue duree.130 Tucker's 'continuity thesis', for example, connected Stalin's autocracy to tsarism, the Communist Party to the pre-revolutionary nobility, and collectivisation to peasant serfdom. Harvard medievalist Edward Keenan carried this path-dependent version of political culture even further in a determinist direction when he explored the influence of what he called 'Muscovite political folkways' on the Soviet Union. As impressive as such megahistorical connections appear, the political culture approach faltered when it tried to explain change over time or the precise
Systems', Slavic Review 26, i (Mar. i967): 3-i2.) For Meyer an important difference was 'that Communist systems are sovereign bureaucracies, whereas other bureaucracies exist and operate within larger societal frameworks'.
127 Rene Fulop-Miller (1891-1963), GeistundGesichtdesBolschewismus: DarstellungundKritik des kulturellen Lebens in Sowjet-Russland (Zurich: Amalthea-Verlag, 1926); The Mind and Face ofBolshevism:An Examination of Cultural Life in Soviet Russia (London and New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1927); Samuel Northrup Harper, Civic Training: Making Bolsheviks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931).
128 Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946); Margaret Mead, Soviet Attitudes toward Authority: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Problems of Soviet Character (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951); Nathan Leites, The Operational Code of the Politburo (New York: The Rand Corporation 1951); A Study of Bolshevism (New York: Free Press, 1953); Gorer and Rickman, The People of Great Russia.
129 Lucian Pye and Sidney Verba (eds.), Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 513; Robert C. Tucker, Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia: From Lenin to Gorbachev (New York: W W Norton, 1987), p. 3.
130 Frederick C. Barghoorn, Politics in the USSR (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966,1972); Stephen White, Political Culture in Soviet Politics (London: Macmillan, 1979); Archie Brown, Political Culture and Communist Studies (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1985).
mechanisms that carried the culture from generation to generation over
centuries. [109]
Tucker supplemented political culture with studies of the dictator and turned to psycho-history as a way to understand Stalin. As a young American diplomat stationed in Moscow in the last years of Stalin's rule, Tucker became enthralled by Karen Horney's Neurosis and Human Growth, particularly her concept of the 'neurotic character structure'. Adverse emotional experiences in early life, wrote Horney, may lead to formation of an idealised image of oneself, which may then be adopted as an idealised self, which has to be realised in action, in a search for glory. Walking down Gorky Street sometime in 1951, Tucker began to wonder if the grandiose images of the Stalin cult were not an idealised self, Stalin's own 'monstrously inflated vision of himself'.[110] Stalin's rise to power and his autocracy were to be understood as the outcome of four major influences - Stalin's personality, the nature of Bolshevism, the Soviet regime's historical situation in the 1920s and the historical political culture of Russia ('a tradition of autocracy and popular acceptance of it'). Despite Tucker's attempt to explain history through personality, psycho-history had little resonance in the profession. Most historians were unimpressed by an approach that underplayed ideas and circumstances and treated historical figures as neurotic or psychopathic.[111] Rather than Freud, it was Marx and Weber who influenced the next generation of historians, as they turned from a focus on personality and politics to the study of society, ordinary people, large structures and impersonal forces.
The first revisionism: 1917
The political and social turmoil of the 1960s - civil rights struggles, opposition to the Vietnam War, student challenges to the university and resistance to imperial dominance, whether Western colonialist or Communist - had a profound effect on the academy in general, historical writing in particular and sovietology even more specifically. Young scholars in the late 1960s questioned not only the Cold War orthodoxies about the Manichean division of free world from slave, but also the usually unquestioned liberal assumptions about valueless social science. While detachment and neutrality were valued as methodology, the concern for a history with relevance to the politics of one's own time and place gave rise to a deep scepticism about the histories that had been written to date. 'Social history', 'radical history' and 'history from below' were in their earliest formations challenges to the political narratives and state-centred histories of earlier years. They were self-consciously 'revisionist'.
107
Richard Cornell (ed.),
108
For Alfred G. Meyer, a bureaucratic model ofthe USSR was needed to supplement the outdated totalitarian model. (See his 'The Comparative Study ofCommunist Political
109
For an alternative look at early Russian political culture, see Valerie A. Kivelson,
110
Robert C. Tucker, 'A Stalin Biographer's Memoir', in Samuel Baron and Carl Pletsch (eds.),
111
Psycho-historical methodologies are more prevalent in pre-Soviet than Soviet historiography.