For all the claims that the old controversies of the Cold War had ended with the end of the Soviet Union, the problematical meaning of the Soviet Union remains an open question among scholars and in the public sphere. While some continue to look for some deep essence that determined the nature of the USSR, others search for the contradictions and anomalies that disrupt any easy model. Neutrality remains a worthy if elusive stance, complete objectivity an unattainable ideal. While conservative scholars celebrate what they see as the victory of their views over 'left-wing' sovietology, and the pursuit of modernity appears dubious to many scholars, Russian and Soviet studies, ironically, hold firm to the broad liberal values that marked Western attitudes towards the East a century ago. Without a 'socialist' alternative with which to contend, pundits proclaim that the expectations of the modernisationists have been realised - a single world gravitating towards capitalist democracy. The West continues to regard itself as superior in what is now called the globalising world, and its most zealous advocates are prepared to export its political and economic forms, even if it requires military force, against the resistance of those who reject Western modernity and its liberal values. The states of the former Soviet Union exist in a twilight of a failed socialism but without the full light of the anticipated democratic capitalist dawn. As those who had insisted that capitalist economics and democratic politics would wipe away the East's deviant past confront the persistence of Soviet institutions, practices and attitudes long after the collapse, they must humbly reconsider the power of that past. Whether one thinks of this as the 'Leninist legacy' or Soviet path dependency or the continuities of a relatively fixed Russian (or Georgian or Uzbek) political culture, looking backwards in order to understand the present and future has become ever more imperative for social science.
101 Tamara Deutscher, 'On the Bibliography of Isaac Deutscher's Writings', Canadian Slavic Studies 3,3 (Fall i969): 473-89. See also the reminiscences in David Horowitz (ed.), Isaac Deutscher: The Man andhis Work (London: MacDonald, i97i).
102 Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, i949; Vintage paperback edn: New York, i960; 2nd edn: Oxford and New York, i966). Page references to Deutscher are from the 2nd edn.
120 Robert Conquest, Power and Policy in the USSR: The Struggle for Stalin's Succession, 19451960 (London: Macmillan, i96i).
121 Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties (London: Macmillan, i968); The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, i990).
122 Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, i986).
123 This subject remains highly controversial. For example, Conquest estimated i5 million deaths in the collectivisation and famine, while a study based on archival records by R. W Davies and S. G. Wheatcroft lowers that figure to 5,700,000. The total number of lives destroyed by the Stalinist regime in the i930s is closer to i0-ii million than the 20-30 million estimated earlier. From i930 to i953, over3,778,000 people were sentenced for counter-revolutionary activity or crimes against the state; of those, 786,000 were executed; at the time of Stalin's death, there were 2,526,000 prisoners in the USSR and another 3,8i5,000 in special settlements or exile. (Ronald Grigor Suny The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, i998), p. 266.)
141 The phrase is E. P. Thompson's, quoted in Eley, 'Edward Thompson, Social History and Political Culture', p. i6.
171 Pipes, Vixi, pp. i63-8.
188 Terry Martin, 'Modernization or Neo-Traditionalism? Ascribed Nationality and Soviet Primordialism', in Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism, New Directions (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 348-67; Kenneth Jowitt, 'Neo-Traditionalism' (i983), reprinted in his New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, i992), pp. ш-58; VictorZaslavsky, TheNeo-StalinistState:Class, Ethnicity, and Consensus in Soviet Society (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, i982).
189 Andrew G. Walder, Neo-traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, i986).