Jeffrey Rossman uncovered significant worker resistance in the textile industry under Stalin, protests accompanied by the rhetoric of class struggle and commitment to the revolution.[146] Sarah Davies read through police reports (svodki) to discover that popular opinion in Stalin's Russia was contradictory and multivalent, borrowing the themes set down by the regime and sometimes turning them in new directions.[147] Workers, for example, favoured the affirmation action measures during the First Five-Year Plan that gave them and their families privileged access to education but were dismayed at the conservative 'Great Retreat' of the mid-i930s. Davies's Russians do not fit the stereotype of a downtrodden people fatally bound by an authoritarian political culture. Given half a chance, as during the elections of i937, Soviet citizens brought their more democratic ideas to the political process. Along with grumbling about the lack of bread and alienation from those with privileges, ordinary Soviets retained a faith in the revolution and socialism and preserved a sense that the egalitarian promise of 1917 had been violated. Class resentments and suspicion of those in power marched along with patriotism and a sense of social entitlement.
From above to below, from centre to periphery
Revisionism's assault on older interpretations of Communism during the years of detente (roughly 1965-75) gained such wide acceptance within the academy in the late 1970s and early 1980s that conservatives felt beleaguered and marginalised in the profession. Yet representatives of earlier conceptualisations still had the greater resonance outside the circles of specialists, within the public sphere, and in government. Zbigniew Brzezinski served as National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter (i977-8i), while Richard Pipes spent two years on the National Security Council as resident expert on the USSR early in the administration of Ronald Reagan (1981-3). Brzezinski was instrumental in the turn towards a harder line towards the Soviet Union, which after the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in December i979 escalated into a covert war aiding Muslim militants against the Kabul government and the Soviets. Pipes proudly took credit for toughening the anti-Soviet line of
President Reagan, already a dedicated anti-Communist but prone at times to sentimentality.^ As a historian primarily of tsarist Russia, he brought back to Washington views based on ideas of national character and culture that had long been abandoned by professional historians.[148]
Political history had often meant little more than the story of great men, monarchs and warriors, while social history was by its nature inclusive, bringing in workers, women and ethnic minorities. As more women entered the field, gender studies gained a deserved respectability. Gail Lapidus's pioneering study was followed by monographs on women workers, the women's liberation movement, Soviet policies towards women and the baleful effects of a liberation that kept them subordinate and subject to the 'double burden' of work outside and inside the home. Just as it had once been acceptable for historians to treat all humankind as if it were male, so the study of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union was long treated unapologetically as if these empires were homogeneously Russian. For the first several decades, emigres with strong emotional and political affiliations with nationalist movements and personal experiences of the brutalities of Stalinism were the principal writers on non-Russians. Their studies, so often pungently partisan and viscerally anti-Communist, were relegated to a peripheral, second-rank ghetto within Soviet studies and associated with the right-wing politics of the 'captive nations'. Nationalities were homogenised; distinctions between them and within them were underplayed; and political repression and economic development, with little attention to ethnocultural mediation, appeared adequate to explain the fate of non-Russian peoples within the Soviet system. Since studying many nationalities was prohibitively costly and linguistically unfeasible, one nationality (in the case of the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, the Ukrainians) was chosen to stand in for the rest.
Though in Friedrich and Brzezinski's locus classicus of the totalitarian model nationalities were not mentioned as potential 'islands of separateness', along with family, Church, universities, writers and artists, in time scholars began to think of the non-Russian nationalities as possible 'sources of cleavage' in the Soviet system and, therefore, of significance. Inkeles and Bauer noted that 'national and ethnic membership constitutes a basis for loyalties and identifications which cut across the lines of class, political affiliation, and generation'.[149] In the wake of the dismantling of the totalitarian model, more empirical and historical studies focused on non-Russians. Zvi Gitelman, like Gregory J. Massell, told a story of Communist failure 'to combine modernization and ethnic maintenance', largely because of the poor fit between the developmental plans of the party and the reservoir of traditions and interests of the ethnic population. Secularised Jewish Communists set out to destroy the old order among the Jews, Bolshevise Jewish workers and reconstruct Jewish life on a 'socialist' basis, but as successful as they were in eliminating Zionism and Hebrew culture and encouraging Yiddish culture, they failed to 'eradicate religion, so firmly rooted in Jewish life'.[150] In Central Asia the failure to mobilise women as a 'surrogate proletariat' with which to overturn the patriarchal social regime led to a curious accommodation with traditional society.[151]
Much sovietological work on nationalities and nationalism accepted uncritically a commonsensical view of nationality as a relatively observable, objective phenomenon based on a community oflanguage, culture, shared myths ofori- gin or kinship, perhaps territory. Nationalism was seen as the release ofdenied desires and authentic, perhaps primordial, aspirations. This 'Sleeping Beauty' view of nationality and nationalism contrasted with a more historicised view that gravitated towards a post-modernist understanding of nationality as a constructed category, an 'imagined community'. A 'Bride of Frankenstein' view of nationality and nationalism asserted that, far from being a natural component of human relations, something like kinship or family, nationality and the nation are created (or invented) in a complex political process in which intellectuals and activists play a formative role. Rather than the nation giving rise to nationalism, it is nationalism that gives rise to the nation. Rather than primordial, the nation is a modern socio-political construct. By the 1990s this 'modernist' view of the construction of nations within the Soviet empire began to appear in a number of studies in the Soviet field.[152]
Soviet studies in the post-Soviet world
By the 1990s the former Soviet Union had become a historical object, an imperial relic to be studied in the archives, rather than an actual enemy standing defiantly against the West. At the same time the dominance of social history gave way to greater acceptance of new cultural approaches. Instead of British Marxists or the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, the principal influences now came from French social and cultural theorists, such as Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu; the Germanpolitical theorist Jiirgen Habermas; the American cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz; and the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Scholars gravitated to investigating cultural phenomena, like rituals and festivals, popular and ethnic culture and the daily life of ordinary people, topics that increasingly became possible to investigate with the opening of Soviet archives at the end of the 1980s. Fitzpatrick's own work turned in an ethnographic direction, as she scoured the archives to reconstruct the lost lives of ordinary workers and peasants.177 Historians moved on from the 1930s to 'late' Stalinism and into the post-Stalin period. The 'cultural turn' led to an interest in the mentalities and subjectivities of ordinary Soviet citizens.
146
Lynne Viola,
147
Sarah Davies,
148
Of Russians he wrote: 'Centuries of life under a harsh and capricious climate and an equally harsh and capricious government had taught them to submit to fate. At the first sign oftrouble they withdraw like turtles into their shells and wait for the danger to pass. Their great strength lies in their ability to survive even under the most adverse conditions; their great weakness is their unwillingness to rebel against adversity. They simply take misfortune in stride; they are much better down than up. If they no longer can take it, they drink themselves into a stupor' (Ibid., pp. 239-240; see also, pp. 62-3).
150
Zvi Gitelman,
151
Gregory J. Massell,
152
Ronald Grigor Suny