From the issue dated February 6, 2004
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Where the Cold War Still Rages'Totalitarian' and 'revisionist' historians debate who was right; some say it's time to move on
During the cold war, a debate flourished among American scholars studying Russian history: What fueled the survival of the Soviet regime? Unlike the two superpowers themselves, the opposing sides waged no proxy wars. They fought each other with the tenacity of babushkas on a bread line, armed with dueling theses and impassioned critiques. One group of scholars, known as the "totalitarians," argued that the oppressive power wielded by Soviet leaders compelled Soviet citizens to work as cogs in the system, ensuring the regime's survival. The other group, the "revisionists," held that the Soviet people themselves provided the support necessary to keep the regime afloat. The opposing historians locked horns for more than two decades. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of its zealously guarded archives, new information came to light that held the promise of resolving the debate. And it did -- to a point. For today's generation of Russian historians, the totalitarian-revisionist divide plays only a peripheral role in their research, which focuses on topics that include multinationalism and cultural differences in the far-flung empire. Few young scholars any longer voice support for either the totalitarian or the revisionist school; most draw upon works from both sides and adopt a dispassionate, middle-of-the-road stance. In some corners of the field, though, the debate rages on. A smattering of books, book reviews, newspaper editorials, and magazine articles published in recent years illustrates the fervor of those who continue to argue over the role of popular support in upholding the Soviet regime. Time has not healed all wounds. In a book review published in The Los Angeles Times in 2000, the historian Martin Malia, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley and an advocate of the totalitarian viewpoint, denounced a new book on Stalinism by the leading revisionist J. Arch Getty, a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles, as an "exercise in denial-with-a-social-science-face." Mr. Getty responded with a letter to the editor calling Mr. Malia "a specialist on the 19th century who has never done original research on the Soviet era" and dismissing the critique as "nonsense." The persistence of this scholarly divide -- marginalized as it may be -- is a disheartening phenomenon for some historians. "The totalitarian-versus-revisionist argument was a very productive one for a short time," says David C. Engerman, an assistant professor of history at Brandeis University. "But it ceased to be productive long before it ceased to be active." 'Moving On' The end of the cold war froze the political urgency of the issue, but the debate itself remained unresolved. Nor did the subsequent mass opening of Russian archives build any consensus between totalitarians and revisionists, as some had expected. Instead, the new stream of information reinforced their differences. The totalitarians in particular, upon discovering firsthand accounts of the terror and suffering endured by the Soviet population, used the information to bolster their claims that Soviet citizens were helpless victims of a merciless regime. The archival documents, in combination with the collapse of the Soviet Union itself in 1991, prove "that the regime was not stable and not popular," says Richard Pipes, a longtime leader of the totalitarian school. The former professor of history at Harvard University chronicles his experiences in Russian scholarship in his autobiography, Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger, published in November by Yale University Press. Mr. Pipes served as an adviser to President Ronald Reagan and helped to shape that administration's hard-line stance on Soviet affairs. Materials found in the archives since 1991, he argues, show that the revisionists have "suffered a great defeat." Key members of the revisionist school, though, have raised no white flags. Sheila Fitzpatrick, who is described by colleagues as having been the "pace setter" for revisionist historians in the 1970s, says that access to Soviet archives has given scholars "the opportunity to see how things work in much more detail," but that "I wouldn't say that my sort of general picture has changed in some dramatic way." Revisionists also argue that totalitarians are wrong to neglect the ways that the Soviet regime did benefit its people. In the March 2000 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Mr. Getty argued that "terror does not wholly negate achievements such as universal literacy, one of the best technological-education systems in the world, the first man in space, free education and health care, and security in old age." Ms. Fitzpatrick, a professor of history at the University of Chicago, and others have used information uncovered in the archives to show how members of Soviet society were able to cope with the hardships under Soviet rule. She notes, however, that her research is not focused on proving or disproving the existence of popular support for the regime. "The interests of historians change," she says. "People exhaust one line of investigation, and then they move on to other approaches." To Mr. Pipes, the revisionists' claim to have moved on is itself troubling. "They simply went on without looking backwards at what they have done," he says. "They have never explained or apologized for their mistakes." Mr. Malia, a contemporary of Mr. Pipes and a leading totalitarian historian himself, says wiping the slate clean of revisionist arguments is essential to provide a proper grounding for the subsequent generation of researchers. A "valid new historiography of the Soviet Union," he wrote in a fall 2002 issue of the foreign-policy magazine National Interest, "can be built only by reversing revisionism's explanatory priorities." But reversing revisionism seems absent from the agenda of most Russian historians today. "I think there's much to be gained from both sides" of the debate, says Cathy A. Frierson, a professor of Russian history at the University of New Hampshire and a former student of Mr. Pipes. "They're not mutually exclusive." The Great Divide There was a time when mutual exclusivity was just the term to describe the revisionist and totalitarian camps. Beginning in the 1960s, their sharp, often polemical critiques of each other's work played out in the pages of Russian-studies journals. Tenured positions and other prestigious posts, some people allege, were denied on the basis of allegiance to one side or the other. "It got rather personal and nasty," says Eve Levin, an associate professor of history at the University of Kansas and editor of The Russian Review, a leading journal in the field. She and other historians say the clash between the groups began as a generational conflict. In the years following World War II, the field of Russian studies expanded significantly, with more and more American historians engaged in studying the United States' looming new nemesis. At first, with tension between the two wartime allies increasing by the month, academic exchanges between the United States and the Soviet Union were virtually nonexistent, and most scholars could perform their research only from a considerable distance. As a consequence of the limits faced by that first generation of researchers, the theme of Soviet governance ruled the discipline, according to Ms. Frierson. She co-edited Adventures in Russian Historical Research, a compilation of essays from Russian historians published in September by M.E. Sharpe Inc. They "began by studying politics and ideology," she explains, "because those were the materials that were readily available." Thus was born the totalitarian camp. In 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Premier Nikita Khrushchev signed an agreement on academic exchanges between their countries that forever changed the landscape of Russian research in the United States. It also fostered the birth of the revisionist movement. By the 1960s, 30 to 40 American scholars were traveling to the Soviet Union every year. Many stayed long enough to spend thousands of hours poring through Soviet archives, even though their access was severely limited by Soviet authorities, who discouraged any research that they believed could cast the regime in a negative light. Nonetheless, the scholars found themselves privy to a considerably greater array of materials than ever before, leading to new threads of research. Brandeis's Mr. Engerman, who is working on a book about the evolution of American scholarship on Russia, says it was American scholars' firsthand experience in the Soviet Union that led some of them to understand the country "as a living, breathing system," and to take an interest not only in its leaders but also in its people. Those who came to be called revisionists were influenced not only by that experience and the data they found in the Soviet archives, but also by the "intellectual ferment in coincidence with political ferment" of the '60s, Mr. Engerman says. The notion of looking at history from the "bottom up rather than the top down," as adherents put it, began taking hold. New areas of study, like women's history and African-American history, grew in popularity. In Russian studies, the focus on social history put the revisionists squarely at odds with their predecessors. The old-line "cold warriors" faulted the new generation of scholars for being too sympathetic to the Soviet Union and, in the spirit of détente, committing "sins of omission" by failing to put due emphasis on the horrors, like the Stalinist purges, inflicted by the regime on its own people. In criticizing one another's work, the warring historians did not mince words. "The revisionists are wrong," wrote Peter Kenez, a professor of history at the University of California at Santa Cruz, in a 1986 issue of The Russian Review. "Their views are so outlandish that I wonder what makes them see the past the way they do." In the same issue, the revisionist historian Stephen F. Cohen, a professor of Russian studies and history at New York University, fired back at the totalitarians, calling their work "one-dimensional." The whole of Russian-studies scholarship, he argued, "desperately needs social history, as well as sociological research, if the field is to expand its sketchy empirical knowledge." Common Ground Michael David-Fox, an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland at College Park and editor of Kritika, a Russian-studies journal, says the revisionists and the totalitarians have more in common than they might think. In an article to be published in the winter 2004 issue, he writes that "in its rejection of the totalitarian 'thesis,' the revisionist 'antithesis' adopted the fundamental logic of its totalitarian father: the revisionists replaced the primacy of ideology and politics with the primacy of 'social forces.'" The two schools, he says, are "conceptual twins." What distinguishes members of the current generation of Russian-history researchers from those who came before is their refusal to organize themselves around any one issue, Mr. David-Fox writes: "The post-revisionist generation has left its mark by rejecting the 'primacy' of anything if it is understood as the single key to the entire Soviet phenomenon." Current Russian scholarship indeed displays "less of a sense that one faction, one party, or one person would have all the right answers," says Ms. Frierson, of New Hampshire. A wider diversity of views has grown, she says, and happily so. "We look at the vituperative nature" of the old debates, she says, "and we don't want to be a part of that." Much of the Russian historical research of the past decade has focused on specifics rather than on syntheses of Russian history within a given framework. One book praised by scholars in the field, including totalitarians, is Magnetic Mountain (1997), by the Princeton University history professor Stephen M. Kotkin, who told the story of the Stalin-mandated industrialization of a community in the Ural Mountains. Steven A. Barnes, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies who has examined the inner workings of Soviet gulags, received his doctorate in history this past summer. He looks upon the fierce conflicts in the older generation with bemusement. Both the totalitarians and the revisionists "seemed to have to go to great lengths to prove things that we should take as common sense," he says. He and other young scholars "recognize that there were a lot of valid arguments made by participants on both sides of the debate." Nonetheless, Mr. David-Fox says, neither the revisionists nor the totalitarians seem likely to relinquish their original positions. "I think it's human nature," he says. "No one likes to go back and say, 'I was wrong.'" http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 50, Issue 22, Page A12 |
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education