Soviet and communist studies
Soviet and communist studies, or simply Soviet studies, is the field of regional and historical studies on the Soviet Union and other communist states, as well as the history of communism and of the communist parties that existed or still exist in some form in many countries, both inside and outside the former Eastern Bloc, such as the Communist Party USA.[1] Aspects of its historiography have attracted debates between historians on several topics, including totalitarianism and Cold War espionage.[2][3]
Soviet and Eastern European studies was also a form of
Historiography
The academic field after
Some critics of the totalitarian model, such as
According to
In Communist studies, post-Soviet access to archives, including
Notable debates
Totalitarianism, revisionism, and the Holodomor
Hannah Arendt, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Conquest, and Carl Joachim Friedrich were prominent advocates of applying the totalitarian concept to a comparison of Nazism and Stalinism. It was considered to be outdated by the 1980s and for the post-Stalinist era,[8] and is seen as a useful word, but the old 1950s theory about it is defunct among scholars.[26] Fitzpatrick and Michael Geyer criticize the concept and highlight the differences between Nazism and Stalinism.[27] Henry Rousso defends the work of Friedrich et al. while noting the concept is both useful and descriptive rather than analytical, with the conclusion the regimes described as totalitarian do not have a common origin and did not arise in similar ways. Philippe Burrin and Nicholas Werth take a middle position between one making Stalin seem all-powerful and the other making him seem like a weak dictator.[28] Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin take a longer historical perspective and regard Nazism and Stalinism not so much as examples of a new type of society like Arendt, Brzezinski and Friedrich did, but more as historical "anomalies" or unusual deviations from the typical path of development that most industrial societies are expected to follow.[29]
During the debates in the 1980s, the use of
As summarized by David R. Marples, Conquest's thesis that the famine constituted genocide and was deliberately inflicted is controversial and remains part of the ongoing debates on the Holodomor genocide question.[36] Vladimir N. Brovkin describes it as a challenge to the "revisionist school" of historians, while Alexander Nove states "Conquest seems prone to accept the Ukrainian nationalist myth."[36] Hiroaki writes that "those who examine the famine from a general Soviet perspective downplay any specific Ukrainian factor, while specialists on Ukraine generally support the concept of a genocidal famine."[36] The most notable work in the field that maintains the famine was not genocide is by R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, both of whom cite a letter from Conquest stating "he does not believe that Stalin deliberately inflicted the 1933 famine."[36]
Sarah Davies and James Harris write that with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the release of the Soviet archives, some of the heat has gone out of the debate.[37] A 1993 study of archival data by Getty et al. showed that a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934 to 1953.[38] Getty and Wheatcroft write that the opening of the Soviet archives has vindicated the lower estimates put forth by the "revisionist school" scholars.[39][40]
Another major part of the debate involved Soviet nationality policy and Stalin's deportations. Historian Jon Chang argued that many self-declared "
Victims of Stalinism
According to J. Arch Getty, over half of the 100 million deaths which are commonly attributed to communism were due to famines. Getty writes that the "overwhelming weight of opinion among scholars working in the new archives is that the terrible famine of the 1930s was the result of Stalinist bungling and rigidity rather than some genocidal plan."[43] As the majority of excess deaths under Joseph Stalin were not direct killings, the exact number of victims of Stalinism is difficult to calculate due to lack of consensus among scholars on which deaths can be attributed to the regime.[44]
Stephen G. Wheatcroft posits that "[t]he Stalinist regime was consequently responsible for about a million purposive killings, and through its criminal neglect and irresponsibility it was probably responsible for the premature deaths of about another two million more victims amongst the repressed population, i.e. in the camps, colonies, prisons, exile, in transit and in the POW camps for Germans. These are clearly much lower figures than those for whom Hitler's regime was responsible." Wheatcroft states that Stalin's "purposive killings" fit more closely into the category of "execution" than "murder", given he thought the accused were indeed guilty of crimes against the state and insisted on documentation. Hitler simply wanted to kill Jews and communists because of who they were, insisted on no documentation and was indifferent at even a pretence of legality for these actions.[45]
Ellman, Getty, and Wheatcroft in particular, among others, criticized Robert Conquest (Wheatcroft said that Conquest's victim totals for Stalinist repressions are still too high, even in his reassessments)[46] and other historians for relying on hearsay and rumour as evidence, and cautioned that historians should instead utilize archive material.[40] During the debates, Ellman distinguished between historians who based their research on archive materials, and those like Conquest whose estimates were based on witnesses evidence and other unreliable data.[44] Wheatcroft stated that historians relied on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to support their estimates of deaths under Stalin in the tens of millions but research in the state archives vindicated the lower estimates, while adding that the popular press has continued to include serious errors that should not be cited, or relied on, in academia.[40]
Academic journals
While this area is now seldom offered as a field of study in itself, in which one might become a specialist, there are related fields emerging, as may be judged by the titles of
The
See also
- Bibliography of Stalinism and the Soviet Union
- Bibliography of the post-Stalinist Soviet Union
- Communist nostalgia
- Historiography of the Cold War
- Russian studies
- Post-communism
- Post-Soviet studies
Notes
References
- ^ a b c Dresen, F. Joseph. "Looking Back at the Origins of Soviet Studies". Wilson Center. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Retrieved 8 December 2021.
- ^ ISBN 1-893554-72-4.
- ISBN 978-1-139-44663-1.
- ISBN 978-1-139-44663-1.
Academic Sovietology, a child of the early Cold War, was dominated by the 'totalitarian model' of Soviet politics. Until the 1960s it was almost impossible to advance any other interpretation, in the USA at least.
- ISBN 978-1-139-44663-1.
In 1953, Carl Friedrich characterised totalitarian systems in terms of five points: an official ideology, control of weapons and of media, use of terror, and a single mass party, 'usually under a single leader.' There was of course an assumption that the leader was critical to the workings of totalitarianism: at the apex of a monolithic, centralised, and hierarchical system, it was he who issued the orders which were fulfilled unquestioningly by his subordinates.
- ^ ISBN 978-1-139-44663-1.
Tucker's work stressed the absolute nature of Stalin's power, an assumption which was increasingly challenged by later revisionist historians. In his Origins of the Great Purges, Arch Getty argued that the Soviet political system was chaotic, that institutions often escaped the control of the centre, and that Stalin's leadership consisted to a considerable extent in responding, on an ad hoc basis, to political crises as they arose. Getty's work was influenced by political science of the 1960s onwards, which, in a critique of the totalitarian model, began to consider the possibility that relatively autonomous bureaucratic institutions might have had some influence on policy-making at the highest level.
- ^ S2CID 142829949.
- ^ JSTOR 2497167.
In the intervening quarter-century, the Soviet Union has changed substantially. Our knowledge of the Soviet Union has changed as well. We all know that the traditional paradigm no longer satisfies, despite several efforts, primarily in the early 1960s (the directed society, totalitarianism without terror, the mobilization system) to articulate an acceptable variant. We have come to realize that models which were, in effect, offshoots of totalitarian models do not provide good approximations of post-Stalinist reality.
- ^ ISSN 1468-2303.
... the Western scholars who in the 1990s and 2000s were most active in scouring the new archives for data on Soviet repression were revisionists (always 'archive rats') such as Arch Getty and Lynne Viola.
- ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 8 December 2021.
- S2CID 163943811.
- ^ Lewin, Moshe (2005). The Soviet Century. London: Verso. p. 383.
- ^ a b c "National Bolshevism (review): Was Stalinism nationalistic?". socialhistoryportal.org. 2005.
Analysts such as Tucker, Barghoorn and Agursky have, in one way or another, understood Soviet policies as being in fundamental conflict with the regime's own official ideology insofar as the Soviet leadership often pursued de facto non- or even antileftist policies, and, above all, russocentric aims. The scholarly documentation of such tendencies has markedly grown during the last fifteen years, including books written or edited by Shimon Redlich, Gennadii Kostyrchenko, Yitzhak Brudny, Hildegard Kochanek, Aleksandr Borshchagovskii, William Korey and others.
- ISBN 978-0-674-00906-6.
- ^ ISBN 1-893554-72-4.
- ISBN 1-893554-72-4.
- ISBN 1-893554-72-4.
- ISBN 1-59403-088-X.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-300-08079-7. Retrieved 8 December 2021 – via Internet Archive.
- ^ a b c Haynes, John Earl (February 2000). "Exchange with Arthur Herman and Venona book talk". John Earl Haynes. Retrieved 8 December 2021.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-199-32917-5.
The tenor of debate shifted again when the end of the Cold War made available new evidence from Soviet archives and U.S. intelligence sources such as the VENONA decrypts. That evidence indicated that scholars had underestimated the success of Soviet espionage in the United States as well as the extent of Soviet control over the American Communist Party.
- ^ "The Soviet-Chinese Spy Wars in the 1970s: What KGB Counterintelligence Knew, Part II". Wilson Center. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Retrieved 8 December 2021.
- ISBN 978-1-893554-72-6.
- JSTOR 130466.
- JSTOR 130471.
- S2CID 143510612.
The word is as functional now as it was 50 years ago. It means the kind of regime that existed in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Soviet satellites, Communist China, and maybe Fascist Italy, where the word originated. ... Who are we to tell Václav Havel or Adam Michnik that they were fooling themselves when they perceived their rulers as totalitarian? Or for that matter any of the millions of former subjects of Soviet-type rule who use the local equivalents of the Czech totalita to describe the systems they lived under before 1989? It is a useful word and everyone knows what it means as a general referent. Problems arise when people confuse the useful descriptive term with the old 'theory' from the 1950s.
- ISBN 978-0-521-72397-8.
- ISBN 978-0-803-29000-6.
- ISBN 978-0-521-56521-9.
- ^ Getty, J. Arch (22 January 1987). "Starving the Ukraine". The London Review of Books. 9 (2): 7–8. Retrieved 20 December 2020.
Conquest's hypothesis, sources and evidence are not new. Indeed, he himself first put forward his view two years ago in a work sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute. The intentional famine story, however, has been an article of faith for Ukrainian émigrés in the West since the Cold War. ... Conquest's book will thus give a certain academic credibility to a theory which has not been generally accepted by non-partisan scholars outside the circles of exiled nationalities. In today's conservative political climate, with its 'evil empire' discourse, I am sure that the book will be very popular.
- ^ Getty, J. Arch (22 January 1987). "Starving the Ukraine". The London Review of Books. 9 (2). Retrieved 20 December 2020.
Stalin gave his backing to radicals in the Party who saw the mixed economy of the Twenties as an unwarranted concession to capitalism. These leftists, for whom Stalin was spokesman and leader, argued that the free market in grain confronted the state with an unpredictable, inefficient and expensive food supply. ... These radical activists, who became the shock troops of the voluntarist 'Stalin Revolution' which swept the Soviet Union in the Thirties, were concentrated in working-class and youth groups. ... The collectivisation of agriculture from 1929 to about 1934 proceeded in several fitful campaigns characterised by confusion, lurches to left and right, and the substitution of enthusiasm, exhortation and violence for careful planning. Hard-line officials and volunteers forced reluctant peasants into improvised collective farms. Peasants resisted by slaughtering animals and refusing to plant, harvest or market grain. Neither side would give way. By 1934 the Stalinists had won, at least insofar as the collective farm system was permanently established, but they had paid a painful price: catastrophic livestock losses, social dislocation and, in some places, famine. Millions of people died from starvation, deportation and violence.
- ^ a b Coplon, Jeff (12 January 1988). "In Search of a Soviet Holocaust". Village Voice. Retrieved 30 November 2020 – via Montclair State University.
'There is no evidence it was intentionally directed against Ukrainians,' said Alexander Dallin of Stanford, the father of modern Sovietology. 'That would be totally out of keeping with what we know -- it makes no sense.' 'This is crap, rubbish,' said Moshe Lewin of the University of Pennsylvania, whose Russian Peasants and Soviet Power broke new ground in social history. 'I am an anti-Stalinist, but I don't see how this [genocide] campaign adds to our knowledge. It's adding horrors, adding horrors, until it becomes a pathology.' 'I absolutely reject it,' said Lynne Viola of SUNY-Binghamton, the first US historian to examine Moscow's Central State Archive on collectivization. 'Why in god's name would this paranoid government consciously produce a famine when they were terrified of war [with Germany]?' 'He's terrible at doing research,' said veteran Sovietologist Roberta Manning of Boston College. 'He misuses sources, he twists everything.'
- ^ Conquest, Robert (21 February 1988). "Letters to the Editors". The Ukrainian Weekly. Retrieved 14 September 2021.
- ^ S2CID 143876370.
- S2CID 53655536.
- ^ S2CID 67783643.
- ISBN 978-1-139-44663-1.
- JSTOR 2166597. Retrieved 30 November 2020.
- JSTOR 2166597.
The long-awaited archival evidence on repression in the period of the Great Purges shows that levels of arrests, political prisoners, executions, and general camp populations tend to confirm the orders of magnitude indicated by those labeled as 'revisionists' and mocked by those proposing high estimates.
- ^ .
For decades, many historians counted Stalin' s victims in 'tens of millions', which was a figure supported by Solzhenitsyn. Since the collapse of the USSR, the lower estimates of the scale of the camps have been vindicated. The arguments about excess mortality are far more complex than normally believed. R. Conquest, The Great Terror: A Re-assessment (London, 1992) does not really get to grips with the new data and continues to present an exaggerated picture of the repression. The view of the 'revisionists' has been largely substantiated (J. Arch Getty & R. T. Manning (eds), Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (Cambridge, 1993)). The popular press, even TLS and The Independent, have contained erroneous journalistic articles that should not be cited in respectable academic articles.
- ^ S2CID 150711796.
- S2CID 156279881.
- .
- ^ JSTOR 826310.
- JSTOR 152781.
- S2CID 205667754. Retrieved 1 September 2021.
- S2CID 147472919. Retrieved 13 May 2017.
- JSTOR 150933.
- ^ Goshko, John M. (3 December 1991). "As Soviet Union dissolves, 'kremlinologists' shift gears". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on 31 January 2018. Retrieved 31 January 2018.
- JSTOR 2493285.
- JSTOR 40866482.
External links
Account required for online access
The following journals can only be accessed through participating institutions such as libraries or institutions of higher learning which have a subscription:
- Communist and Post-Communist Studies. 1–52 (1993–2019). University of California Press. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via Elsevier.
- Eastern European Politics. 28–36 (2012–2020). Taylor & Francis. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via Taylor & Francis Online. Previously known as Journal of Communist Studies. 1–9 (1985–1993). Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics. 10–27 (1994–2011).
- Europe-Asia Studies. 45–64 (1993–2012). Taylor & Francis. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via JSTOR.
- Journal of Cold War Studies. 1–16 (1999–2014). The MIT Press. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via JSTOR.
- Journal of Contemporary History. 1–51 (1966–2016). SAGE Publications. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via JSTOR.
- Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. 1–21 (2000–2020). Slavica Publishers. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via Project MUSE.
- Post-Soviet Affairs. 8–36 (1992–2020). Taylor & Francis. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via Taylor & Francis Online. Previously known as Soviet Economy. 1–8 (1985–1992).
- Problems of Post-Communism. 42–67 (1995–2020). Taylor & Francis. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via Taylor & Francis Online. Previously known as Problems of Communism. 1–41 (1954–1992). Taylor & Francis.
- The Russian Review. 1–73 (1941–2014). Wiley on behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via JSTOR.
- The Slavonic and East European Review. 6–98 (1928–2020). Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via JSTOR.
- The Slavonic Review. 1–6 (1922–1927). Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via JSTOR.
- Studies in East European Thought. 45–68 (1993–2016). Springer. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via JSTOR.
- Studies in Soviet Thought. 1–44 (1961–1992). Springer. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via JSTOR.
- Soviet Studies. 1–44 (1949–1992). Taylor & Francis. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via JSTOR.
Mostly free-online access
The following journals are by subscription but most of the back-issue articles can be accessed free of charge online:
- Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization. 1–14 (1992–2006).
Printed journals
- Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung (in German). Yearbook for Historical Communist Studies (1993–2020). ISSN 0944-629X. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via Bundesstiftung Aufarbeitung.
- Slavic Review. 20–76 (1961–2017). Cambridge University Press. ISSN 0037-6779. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via JSTOR. Previously known as The Slavonic Year-Book. 1 (1941). Cambridge University Press. The Slavonic and East European Review. American Series. 2–3 (1943–1944). Cambridge University Press. The American Slavic and East European Review. 4–20 (1945–1961). Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; Cambridge University Press.
Academic programs
- Berkeley Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies. Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. 2 September 2004. Archived 4 December 2004 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via Socrates and Berkeley Scholars.
- Publications. Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. 20 August 2004. Archived 9 October 2004 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via Socrates and Berkeley Scholars.