Tucker 1987
Tucker 1987
Tucker 1987
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The Russian Review, vol. 46, 1987, pp. 424-427
1
Early critiques include my "Toward a ComparativePolitics of Movement-Regimes" (1961)
and "The Dictator and Totalitarianism"(1965), both reprintedin my The Soviet Political Mind,
revised edition (New York, 1971). The second essay retainedthe idea of totalitarianismfor the Sta-
lin period but found the classical version, as developed by Arendtand others, wanting in its omission
of the dictatorand his personalityfrom the dynamicsof totalitarianism.
2 As Alfred
Meyer remembersMichael Karpovichteachinghis Harvardstudents.
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Stalin as Historical Problem 425
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426 The RussianReview
Dzhugashvili's Russia.
As for the role of social historiansin writing the history of Stalin's Russia,
I would say that they have a valuable part to play, but-to use Maurice
Mandelbaum'sdistinctionbetween "general" and "special" histories-only as
writers of the latter, which "trace various aspects of culture as they arise and
change in a society," in contrast to general histories, which are "concerned
with the natureof and the changes in particularsocieties."5
Soviet studies already abound in good special histories.6What is missing
is general history. Apartfrom portionsof history textbooks, we have no general
history of Soviet Russia in Stalin's time or, specifically, of the Stalinist 1930s.
When such general histories do appear, they cannot possibly take the form of
social histories of the sort for which Fitzpatrickcalls in her article. They will
have to be works in which political, social, economic, cultural and intellectual
events cohere in a complex way and in which-Stalinist Russia being the
subject-the state will be the prime actor in the story. That seems to be some of
what Geoff Eley said in his comment, and, if so, I completely concur.
A social history of the Stalinist 1930s could illuminatemany things, and I
look forwardto the volume on which Fitzpatrickis working, but it cannot be a
general history if the state remains in the background. By the same token, a
political history of the 1930s that took no account of the intrusionof society, of
"from below," into processes of change initiated "from above," would be crit-
ically incomplete.
But how, the readermay wonder, could such an intrusionhave occurredif,
as I have just asserted,politics or the state was in commandduringthat decade?
One answer turns on divisions within the regime-something to which the old
totalitarianparadigmwas more or less oblivious because it tended to postulate a
regime unified by ideology. Society, specifically workersand peasants and their
concerns, took on a special significance in regime politics around 1934-35
because the regime was deeply divided between one element (the aspiringauto-
crat and his confederates)and elements of the ruling party that were resistantto
autocracy. Under these conditions, the formerelement found it very much to its
own advantage to reach out to the nizy, to non-Partypeople, in search of sup-
port. Such a development was not unprecedented,as readersof Ivan IV's biog-
raphy know; that analogy can help us comprehendwhy Stalin found one of his
favorite models in the groznyi tsar'.
Finally, I would like to distinguish two meanings of the term "revision-
ism." One is the process of appraising and revising older views and
approaches,and it characterizesall original scholarship. The other is the sec-
tarian revisionism that is usually out to overthrow the collective enemy,
5 MauriceMandelbaum,The
Anatomyof Historical Knowledge (Baltimoreand London, 1977),
p. 12.
6 Such as Alec Nove's An Economic
History of the USSR, Gleb Struve's Russian Literature
underLenin and Stalin, Peter Juviler's RevolutionaryLaw and Order, and Sheila Fitzpatrick'sEdu-
cation and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union.
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Stalin as Historical Problem 427
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