By the i980s, despite the resistance of Pipes and a few others, the revisionist position had swept the field of i9i7 studies, and the term 'revisionism' migrated to characterise a group of social historians investigating the vicissitudes of the working class and the upheavals of the Stalin years.
The fate of labour history: from social to cultural
Social history was never a unified practice, either in its methodologies or its interests, but rather a range of approaches, from social 'scientific' quantification to cultural anthropologies, concerned with the expansion of the field of historical enquiry. The major effect of the turn to the social was the broadening of the very conception of the political in two important ways. First, borrowing from the insights of feminism and the legacy of the New Left that the 'personal is political', politics was now seen as deeply embedded in the social realm, in aspects of everyday life farbeyond the state andpolitical institutions.[116] The turn towards social history reduced the concern with labour politics, but 'politics in the broader sense - the power relations of various social groups and interests - intruded in the lives of Russian workers too directly and persistently to be ignored'.[117] Second, the realm of politics was recontextualised within society, so that the state and political actors were seen as constrained by social possibilities and influenced by actors and processes outside political institutions.[118]Not surprisingly, this rethinking of power relations would eventually involve consideration of cultural and discursive hegemony and exploration of 'the images of power and authority, the popular mentalities of subordination'.ii4ii
The great wave of interest in the Russian working class crested in the last decades of the Soviet experience, only to crash on the rocks of state socialism's demise. Some labour historians in Britain and the United States challenged Soviet narratives of growing class cohesion and radical consciousness in the years up to the revolution with counter-stories of decomposition,
ronald grigor sunt
fragmentation and accommodation, while others elaborated a grand march of labour not far removed from the Soviet account. From peasant to peasant worker to hereditary proletarian, the Russian worker moved from the world of the village to the factory, encountering along the way more 'conscious' worker activists and Social Democratic intellectuals, who enlightened the worker to his true interests and revolutionary political role. Workers' experience involved the unfolding of an immanent sense of class, the 'discovery' of class and the eventuality, even inevitability, of revolutionary consciousness (under the right circumstances or with the strategic intervention of radical intellectuals). Categories, as well as narrative devices, were drawn either from sources themselves saturated with Marxist understandings or directly from Soviet works.
The classic picture of Soviet labour in the 1930s had been provided by the former Menshevik Solomon Schwarz, who wrote in 1951 about the draconian labour laws that had essentially tied workers to factories and eliminated their ability to resist.[119] By the 1980s the focus had shifted from an emphasis on state intervention and repression to the nature of the work process and the informal organisation of the shop floor. Several accounts, eventually dubbed 'revisionist', related the enthusiasm of workers for the exertions of rapid industrialisation of the early 1930s. Young skilled workers joined the 'offensives' against 'bourgeois' specialists, moderate union leaders and others dubbed 'enemy'. This group of workers in particular, standing between their older, skilled co-workers disoriented by the industrialisation drive and peasant migrants to the factories, were committed to the notion of building social- ism.[120] Tens of thousands of radicalised workers left for the countryside to 'convince' the peasants to join the collective farms.[121] Rather than successfully 'atomising' the working class, the state, powerful as it appeared, was limited in its ability to coerce workers. With working hands scarce, workers found areas of autonomy in which they could 'bargain' with the state, and factory bosses had to compete with one another for skilled labour. Even as they lost the ability to act in an organised fashion, in thousands of small ways workers were able to affect the system.[122] Shop-floor studies and micro-histories undermined the overly simple political interpretation of Stalinist society and, more particularly, the totalitarian model, in which an all-powerful state rendered an atomised population completely impotent.
Social history was often uncomfortable with its pedigree in Marxism and a base-substructure model of explanation ('it's the economy, stupid!'). Following the pioneering work in other historiographies by E. P. Thompson, William H. Sewell, Jr., Gareth Stedman Jones, Joan Wallach Scott and others, Russian historians began to pay more attention to language, culture and the available repertoire of ideas.[123] Investigating class formation in the post-Thompsonian period involved not only exploring the structures of the capitalist mode of production or the behaviour of workers during protests and strikes, but also the discourses in which workers expressed their sense of self, defined their 'interests', and articulated their sense of power or, more likely, powerless- ness. Whatever the experience of workers might have been, the availability of an intense conversation about class among the intellectuals closest to them provided images and language with which to articulate and reconceive their position. While structures and social positions, or even 'experience', influence, shape and limit social actors, they do not lead to action or create meaning in and of themselves. The discourses, cultures and universes of available meanings through which actors mediate their life experience all have to be added
into the mix. [124]
The study of Stalinism: the next revisionism
The term 'Stalinism' has its own genealogy, beginning in the mid-i920s even before the system that would bear its name yet existed. Trotsky applied the word to the moderate 'centrist' tendencies within the party stemming from the 'ebbing of revolution' and identified with his opponent, Stalin.[125]
By 1935 Trotsky's use of Stalinism gravitated closer to the Marxist meaning of 'Bonapartism' or 'Thermidor', 'the crudest form of opportunism and social patriotism'.[126] Even before Trotsky's murder in August 1940, Stalinism had become a way of characterising the particular form of social and political organisation in the Soviet Union, distinct from capitalism but for Trotskyists and other non-Communist radicals not quite socialist. Not until the falling away of the totalitarian model, however, did scholars bring the term Stalinism into social science discussion as a socio-political formation to be analysed in its own right. For Tucker Stalinism 'represented, among other things, a far-reaching Russification of the already somewhat Russified earlier (Leninist) Soviet political culture'.[127] For his younger colleague at Princeton, Stephen F. Cohen, 'Stalinism was not simply nationalism, bureaucratization, absence of democracy, censorship, police repression, and the rest in any precedented sense . . . Instead Stalinism was excess, extraordinary extremism, in each.'[128]Taking a more social historical perspective, Lewin saw Stalinism as a deeply contradictory phenomenon:
The Stalinist development brought about a different outcome: as the country was surging ahead in economic and military terms, it was moving backwards, compared to the later period in tsarism and even the NEP, in terms of social and political freedoms. This was not only a specific and blatant case of development without emancipation; it was, in fact, a retreat into a tighter-than-ever harnessing of society to the state bureaucracy, which became the main social vehicle of the state's policies and ethos.[129]
116
Geoff Eley 'Edward Thompson, Social History and Political Culture: The Making of a Working-Class Public, i780-i850', in Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland (eds.),
117
Ziva Galili, 'Workers, Strikes, and Revolution in Late Imperial Russia',
118
Here the work of Moshe Lewin has been particularly influential, integrating political history with his own brand of historical sociology
120
SheilaFitzpatrick,
121
Lynne Viola,
122
Lewis Siegelbaum,
123
E. P. Thompson,
124
For work that reflects the interest inlanguage, discourse and representation, see Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii,
125
Robert H. McNeal, 'Trotskyist Interpretations of Stalinism', in Robert C. Tucker (ed.),
127
Tucker, 'Introduction: Stalinism and Comparative Communism', in Tucker,