How the West wrote the Soviet history from Cambridge history of Russia, volume 3

As a popular consensus developed that nothing less than history itself has decisively proven the Soviet experience a dismal failure, historians of Communist anciens regimes turned to summing up the history of the recent past.¹⁷⁸ Among the more inspired post-mortems was Martin Malia's The Soviet Tragedy, which turned the positive progress of modernisation into a darker view of modernity. Launching a sustained, ferocious attack on Western sovietology, which, in his view, contributed to a fundamental misconception and misunderstanding of the Soviet system by consistently elevating the centrality of society and reducing ideology and politics to reflections of the socio-economic base, Malia put ideology back at the centre of causation with the claim that the

SmallPeoples of the North (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994); Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-193 9 (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 2001).

177 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 193 os (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

178 Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994); Francois Furet. The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, trans. Deborah Furet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Stephane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, AndrzejPaczkowski, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, In Deniaclass="underline" Historians, Communism, and Espionage (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003).

Soviet leadership worked consistently to implement integral socialism, that is, full non-capitalism. In one of his most redolent phrases, he concluded, 'In sum, there is no such thing as socialism, and the Soviet Union built it.'[153]Because the moral idea of socialism is utopian and unrealisable, the only way it could be 'realised' on the ground was through the terroristic means that Lenin and Stalin used. The collapse of the Soviet system was inevitable; the regime was illegitimate and doomed from the beginning; its end was inscribed in its 'genetic code'.

Malia placed the Soviet project in the larger problematic of modernity from the Enlightenment on. Socialism, the logical extension of the idea of democracy, was the highest form of this modernist illusion. In a similar vein Stephen Kotkin offered a seminal study of the building of the industrial monument, Magnitogorsk, in which he borrowed insights from Foucault to show how Stalin's subjects learned to 'speak Bolshevik' as they built 'a new civilisation'.[154]Kotkin dismissed the idea of 'the Russian Revolution as the embodiment of a lost social democracy, or, conversely, as a legitimation of Western society through negative example'. Instead, he likened 'the Russian Revolution to a mirror in which various elements of the modernity found outside the USSR are displayed in alternately undeveloped, exaggerated, and familiar forms'.[155] Like Malia, Kotkin saw ideology as having 'a structure derived from the bedrock proposition that, whatever socialism might be, it could not be capitalism. The use of capitalism as an anti-world helps explain why, despite the near total improvisation, the socialism built under Stalin coalesced into a "system" that could be readily explained within the framework of October.'¹⁸² Positioning himself apart from both Fitzpatrick, who argued that Stalinism was the conservative triumph of a new post-revolutionary elite, and Lewin, who saw that triumph as a betrayal of the initial promise of the revolution (preserved by Lenin) and a backward form of modernisation, Kotkin argued that what Stalin built was socialism, the only real fully non-capitalist socialism the world has ever seen.¹⁸³

If a political dedication to socialism was rendered 'academic' for most Western scholars after 1991, particularly in the United States, interest in the internal workings of the Soviet system, the USSR as a distinct culture, the construction of subjects and subjectivity and the officially ascribed and self-generated identifications of Soviet citizens remained high. Neither the notion of atomised, cowed 'little screws' or crypto-liberals acting as if they were believers adequately captured the full, complex range of Soviet subjectivity. Different people, and sometimes the same individual, could both resist and genuinely conform, support the regime performatively or with real enthusiasm. Even dissent was most often articulated within 'the larger frame of the Soviet Revolution', appropriating the language of the regime itself.[156] That frame was extraordinarily powerful, as are hegemonic discursive formations in any society, but it also was never without contradictions, anomalies or imprecise meanings that allowed for different readings and spaces for action. Soviet power, Foucault would have told us, had its creative side as well as its repressive aspects and constituted a landscape of categories and identifications that may have precluded 'any broad, organised resistance challenging the Soviet state', but also permitted much small-scale subversion of the system, from evasion of duties, slowdowns at the workplace and evasion of orders from above.[157] As historians as different as Lewin, Fitzpatrick and Malia have contended, ordinary citizens agreed with the regime that together they were building socialism, even as they incessantly complained about the failure of the authorities 'to deliver the goods'.

While post-Soviet scholars rejected the concept of modernisation, with its optimism about the universality and beneficence of that process, a darker, more critical view of modernity became the talisman for a distinct group of younger historians who wished to contest the idea of Soviet exceptionalism.[158]An unusually protean term, modernity was used to explain everything from human rights to the Holocaust. Following the lead of theorists like Zygmunt Bauman and James Scott, the 'modernity school' noted how Bolsheviks, like other modernisers, attempted to create a modern world by scientific study of society, careful enumeration and categorisation of the population and the application of planning and administration.[159] For Russianists the frame of 'modernity' presented an all-encompassing comparative syndrome in which the Soviet experiment appeared to be a particularly misguided effort that led to unprecedented violence and state-initiated bloodshed.

In reaction to the 'modernity school' some historians and political scientists, attentive to the insights of Max Weber, considered the neo-traditionalist aspects of the Soviet experience that denied or contradicted the move to a generalised modernity.^i8S Simply put, the modernity school emphasised what was similar between the West and the Soviet Union, and the neo-traditionalists were fascinated by what made the USSR distinct. Modernity was concerned with the discursive universe in which ideas of progress and subjugation of nature led to state policies that promoted the internalisation and naturalisation of Enlightenment values. Neo-traditionalism was more interested in social practices, down to the everyday behaviours of ordinary people. Whereas modernity talked about the 'disenchantment of the world', in Weber's characterisation of secularisation, neo-traditionalists were impressed by the persistence of religion, superstition and traditional beliefs, habits and customs. Their attention was turned to status and rank consciousness, personalities and personal ties (in Russia phenomena such as blat (pull, personal connections), family circles, tolkachy (facilitators)), patron-client networks, petitioning and deference patterns. Kenneth Jowitt saw neo-traditionalism as a corruption of the modernist ideals of the revolutionary project, while sociologist Andrew Walder, in an influential study of Chinese Neo-traditionalism (i986), argued that the more the regime tried to implement its core principles, the more neo-traditional elements came forth.^iS9 Abolishing the market and attempting to plan production and distribution led to soft budgeting, shortages, distribution systems based on rationing or privileged access. Petitioning was an effective substitute for recourse to the law or the possibility of public action. The end of a free press elevated the importance of gossip and rumour, and the efforts of a modernising state to construct nationality eventually led to embedding peoples in a story of primordialist ethnogenesis. The reintroduction of ascribed identities, resurrecting the idea if not the actual categories of soslovnost' (legally ascribed categories), was characteristic of the inter-war period, in the way the Soviets dealt with both class and nationality.[160]

153

Ibid., p. 496.

154

Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995).

155

Ibid., p. 387. 182 Ibid., p. 400. 183 Ibid., pp. 5,379 n. 21.

156

Jochen Hellbeck, 'Speaking Out: Languages of Affirmation and Dissent in Stalinist Russia', Kritika 1,1 (Winter 2000): 74.

157

Ibid., p. 80.

158

See e. g. David L. Hoffman and Yanni Kotsonis (eds.), Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (New York: St Martin's Press, 2000); Amir Weiner, MakingSense ofWar:The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Peter Holquist, '"Information is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work": Bolshevik Surveillance in its Pan-European Context', Journal of Modern History 69, 3 (Sept. 1997): 415-50. While eclectic and inclusive in its selection of articles, the journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, which began publication in the winter of 2000, has established itself as the mouthpiece of what its editors conceive of as 'post-revisionist' scholarship, attempting to move beyond the debates of the Cold War years. (See, particularly, the editorial introduction, 'Really-existing Revisionism?' in Kritika 2, 4 (Fall 2001): 707-11.)

159

Bauman wrote, 'In my view, the communist system was the extremely spectacular dramatization of the Enlightenment message ... I think that people who celebrate the collapse of communism, as I do, celebrate more than that without always knowing it. They celebrate the end of modernity actually, because what collapsed was the most decisive attempt to make modernity work; and it failed. It failed as blatantly as the attempt was blatant' (Intimations ofPostmodernity, pp. 22i-2).

160

Sheila Fitzpatrick, Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia', in Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism, New Directions, pp. 20-46; Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire.