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Stalinism was now a way of describing a stage of development of non-capitalist statist regimes in developing countries dominated by a Leninist party, as well as an indictment of undemocratic, failed socialist societies.

A key question dividing Soviet studies was the issue of continuity (or rupture) between the regimes of Lenin and Stalin. Was Stalinism implicit in original Marxism or the Leninist version, or had there been alternatives open to the Bolsheviks? Along with Tucker and Lewin, Cohen was one of the major opponents ofthe view that saw Stalin as the logical or even inevitable outcome of Leninism. While it had its roots in earlier experiences, Stalinism was qualitatively different from anything that went before or came after.[130] Original

Bolshevism had been a diverse political movement in which Leninism was but one, albeit the dominant, strain. In the years of the New Economic Policy (1921-8) Bolsheviks, far from united in their plans for the future socialist society, presided over a far more tolerant and pluralistic social order than would follow after Stalin's revolution from above. Stalin's policies of 1929-33 rejected the gradualist Bukharinist programme of slower but steady growth within the framework of NEP and in its place built a new state that 'was less a product of Bolshevik programs or planning than of desperate attempts to cope with the social pandemonium and crises created by the Stalinist leadership itself in 1929-33'.[131]

The cohort of social historians of Stalinism that emerged in the 1980s was not particularly interested in broad synthetic interpretations of Stalinism or Marxist-inspired typologies. Their challenge was directed against the top- down, state-intervention-into-society approach and proposed looking primarily at society, while at the same time disaggregating what was meant by society. They looked for initiative from below, popular resistance to the regime's agenda, as well as sources of support for radical transformation.[132] Some stressed the improvisation of state policies, the chaos of the state machinery, the lack of control in the countryside. Others attempted to diminish the role of Stalin. As they painted a picture quite different from the totalitarian vision of effective dominance from above and atomisation below, these revisionists came under withering attack from more traditional scholars, who saw them as self-deluded apologists for Stalin at best and incompetent, venal falsifiers at worst.[133]

For Sheila Fitzpatrick, the standard Trotskyist formulation of the bureaucracy standing over and dominating society was far too simplistic, for the lower echelons of the bureaucracy were as much dominated as dominating.[134]Fascinated by the upward social mobility into the elite that characterised early Soviet society, she introduced Western audiences to the vydvizhentsy (those thrust upward from the working class).[135] In contrast to those Western scholars who argued that the erosion of the working class was key to the eventual evolution of the Bolshevik regime from a dictatorship of the proletariat to a dictatorship of the bureaucracy, Fitzpatrick contended that the real meaning of the revolution was the coming to power of former workers who occupied the key party and state positions in significant numbers. 'The Bolsheviks', according to Fitzpatrick, 'had made an absurd, undeliverable promise to the working class when they talked of a "dictatorship of the proletariat". The oxymoron of a "ruling proletariat", appealing though it might be to dialectical thinkers, was not realizable in the real world.'[136] Workers, in her view, had become 'masters' of Russian society by moving into the old masters' jobs. The longue duwe of the revolution became a tale of upward social mobility that encompassed modernisation (escape from backwardness), class (the fate of the workers) and revolutionary violence (how the regime dealt with its enemies).[137]

Along with the collectivisation of peasant agriculture and the vicious de- kulakisation campaigns, the principal subject of enquiry for revisionist historians in the 1980s was the Great Terror ofthe late 1930s. Earlier, political scientists, like Brzezinski, had proposed that purging was a permanent and necessary component oftotalitarianism in lieu of elections.[138] Solzhenitsyn, whose fiction and quasi-historical writing on the Gulag Archipelago had enormous effect in the West, saw the purges as simply the most extreme manifestation of the amoral- ity of the Marxist vision, and the Ezhovshchina as an inherent and inevitable part of the Soviet system.[139] Tucker and Conquest saw the Great Purges as an effort 'to achieve an unrestricted personal dictatorship with a totality of power that [Stalin] did not yet possess in 1934'.[140] Initiation of the purges came from Stalin, who guided and prodded the arrests, show trials and executions forward, aided by the closest members of his entourage. Similarly Lewin argued that the purges were the excessive repression that Stalin required to turn a naturally oligarchic bureaucratic system into his personal autocracy. Here personality and politics merged. Stalin could not 'let the sprawling administration settle and get encrusted in their chairs and habits', which 'could also encourage them to try and curtail the power of the very top and the personalized ruling style of the chief of the state - and this was probably a real prospect the paranoid leader did not relish'.[141]

Revisionists explained the purges as a more extreme form of political infighting. High-level personal rivalries, disputes over the direction of the modernisation programme, and conflicts between centre and periphery were at the base of the killing. J. Arch Getty argued that 'the Ezhovshchina was rather a radical, even hysterical, reaction to bureaucracy. The entrenched officeholders were destroyed from above and below in a chaotic wave of voluntarism and revolutionary Puritanism.'[142] Dissatisfaction with Stalin's rule and with the harsh material conditions was palpable in the mid-i930s, wrote Gabor T. Rittersporn, and the purges were fed by popular discontent with corruption, inefficiency and the arbitrariness of those in power.[143] Several writers focused on the effects of the purges rather than their causes, implying that intentions may be read into the results. A. L. Unger, Kendall E. Bailes and Fitz- patrick showed how a new 'leading stratum' of Soviet-educated 'specialists' replaced the Old Bolsheviks and 'bourgeois specialists'.[144] The largest numbers of beneficiaries were promoted workers and party rank-and-file, young technicians, who would make up the Soviet elite through the post-Stalin period until Gorbachev took power. Stalin, wrote Fitzpatrick, saw the old party bosses less as revolutionaries than 'as Soviet boyars (feudal lords) and himself as a latter-day Ivan the Terrible, who had to destroy the boyars to build a modern nation state and a new service nobility'.[145]

Soviet power, however, could never rule by terror alone. In Weberian terms, the regime needed to base itself on more than raw power; it needed to create legitimated authority with a degree of acquiescence or even consent from the people. Social historians were able to record both displays of enthusiasm and active, bloody resistance. Lynne Viola recorded over 13,700 peasant disturbances and more than 1,000 assassinations of officials in 1930 alone, while