New Perspectives On Stalinism Author(s) - Sheila Fitzpatrick

The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review
New Perspectives on Stalinism

Author(s): Sheila Fitzpatrick
Source: Russian Review, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Oct., 1986), pp. 357-373
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The Russian Review, vol. 45, 1986, pp. 357-373
DISCUSSION
New Perspectives on Stalinism

SHEILAFITZPATRICK*
The nature of Stalinisml has always been a highly contentious question,

charged with political significance for almost all disputants. In the early Cold
War period, when the political charge was most explosive, Soviet and Western
commentatorssharedthe assumptionthat what had emerged in the Soviet Union
in the 1930s was both the historically inevitable outcome of the Bolshevik
Revolution and a basically permanent and immutable new "Soviet system,"
though they disagreedvehemently about its nature. From the Soviet standpoint,
the revolutionhad producedsocialism. From the western standpoint(excluding
a small group of Soviet sympathizers),the productwas totalitariandictatorship.
From both, the system was the antithesis of Western democracy and was its
majorideological competitoron the internationalscene.
In the decades after Stalin's death, changes in the Soviet Union led both
sides to reassess theirjudgments, particularlyon the immutabilityof the Soviet
system. Some features of Stalin's regime were repudiatedor criticized in the
Soviet Union, and there were Soviet attemptsto separatethe legitimate "Lenin-
ist" outcome of the Revolution from the temporary "excesses" of the Stalin
period. In the West, revision of Cold War premises in other areas finally
prompted Sovietologists to reexamine the totalitarianmodel, which now came
undercriticism for inherentpolitical bias as well as for inappropriatenessto con-
temporarySoviet reality.2 At the Bellagio conference organized by Robert C.
Tucker in 1975, the term "Stalinism" was preferred to "totalitarianism,"
although the most vigorous objections to the totalitarianmodel related to the
pre-Stalin period.3 Since then, political scientists have tended to move away
from a totalitarianimage of the Soviet Union before and after Stalin, while
tacitly accepting its applicabilityto the Stalinistsystem.
*
An earlier version of this article was presentedat the ThirdWorld Congress of Slavic Studies
in Washington,DC, November2, 1985.
1 I use "Stalinism" here as a convenient term for the new political, economic, and social struc-
tures that emerged in the Soviet Union after the great break associated with collectivization and the
First Five-YearPlan.
2 For an excellent discussion of this reexamination,see Abbott Gleason, "'Totalitarianism' in
1984," Russian Review, vol. 43, 1984, pp. 145-159.
3 See Robert C. Tucker, ed., Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation,New York, 1977,
especially the articleby StephenF. Cohen, "Bolshevism and Stalinism," pp. 3-29.
358 The Russian Review
Apart from the argumentabout models, however, there have been other
developments affecting the direction of Western Soviet scholarship in recent
years. The most relevant, for our purposes, is the entry of historiansinto a field
long dominated by political scientists, the study of the Soviet Union from the
Revolution of 1917 to the end of the Stalin period. Of course, there were always
some historiansin the field, including some very good ones. But the new cohort
is larger,with more sense of itself as a group and, in particular,a much stronger
desire to assert an identity as historians. That assertion of professional identity
is a way of making two points. First, the new cohort is telling other historians
that Soviet history is a legitimate field (earliera controversialissue among Rus-
sian historians),drawing attentionto the recent improvementin access to Soviet
archives and other primary sources, and emphasizing its own professional
qualifications. Second, it is distinguishing itself from the older generation of
Sovietologists, dominatedby political scientists' main interpretativeframework,
the totalitarianmodel.
Social history is a majorfocus of interestfor the new cohort of historians.
This choice also involves assertion of separateidentity and implicit criticism of
the earlier Sovietological preoccupation with politics and ideology. Without
going too deeply into the chicken-and-egg question, social historianshave par-
ticularly good reason (or a particularlygood excuse) for dissatisfactionwith the
totalitarianmodel: the model's assertion of the primacy of politics made social
history seem a backwater,remote from the real dynamics of post-revolutionary
Soviet development. In addition, the new cohort's identificationwith a broader
community of social historianshas the effect (intendedor otherwise) of provid-
ing external reinforcement to its struggle against the perceived "Cold War
bias" of earlier Sovietology. This particularbias is generally disliked by social
historiansin other fields, whose instincts are often more radical than that of the
historicalprofession as a whole.
My purpose in this essay is to investigate the likely impact of historians,
particularly social historians, on the study of the Stalin period. This is a
participant'sreport, as I am currentlyworking on a social history of the 1930s,
but it should not be read as a New Cohortmanifesto. It is both descriptive and
prescriptive, and the prescriptionsare largely addressed to other social histori-
ans, who may well disagree with them. The question of interest to the broader
audience of scholars in Soviet studies is what the new social historians may
have to say on one of the big traditionalissues of Sovietology-the natureand
dynamics of Stalinism.
General Interpretationsof StalinistState and Society

The overarchingtheme that Western historianshave commonly used for
interpretingthe Stalin period is state against society, nachal'stvo against narod.
This is a familiarframeworkin Russian historiography. According to this view,
the state acts on society, trying to change and mold it in ways that serve state
purposes; society acts primarilyby re-acting to state pressure, which it tries to
New Perspectives on Stalinism 359
resist, evade, or subvert by passive resistance. In scholarship on the Soviet

period, particularlythe Stalin era, the state-school approachestablishedby Rus-
sian historians in the nineteenth century has been reinforced by a compatible
concept of twentieth-century American political scientists, the totalitarian
model. In this model, the Soviet totalitarianstate seeks to transform society
according to Marxist-Leninistideology, using the CommunistParty as an agent
of mobilizationand reinforcingits dictates with police coercion and terror. The
society is reduced to an object, inert and featureless, which is shaped and mani-
pulatedby the energetic action of the totalitarianregime.
This view of state/society relations obviously encourages scholars to
investigate state mechanismsratherthan social processes. Soviet studies, conse-
quently, have focussed strongly on state and party, dealing with society almost
exclusively in a context of state and party intervention. The scholarly literature
on the Stalin period is full of studies of such intervention: forced collectiviza-
tion, subordinationof tradeunions, labor discipline laws, the developmentof the
Stakhanovitemovement under party sponsorship,harassmentof the old intelli-
gentsia, the establishmentof partycontrols over cultureand scholarship,censor-
ship, the Great Purge (seen as Stalin's "war against the nation," in Ulam's
phrase),4 and so on. Some of these studies also deal with resentful social
responses to state intervention,as in the case of peasants and collectivization or
the intelligentsia and cultural controls. But this is the only kind of social
response that is generally discussed, and social processes unrelated to state
interventionare virtuallyabsentfrom the literature.
In the interventionistepisodes, society is seen as a victim of state action,
and its reaction is a mixture of covert hostility and passive acceptance of force
majeure. Scholars have explained the lack of more effective societal resistance
(both to the tsarist and Soviet state) in terms of the traditional"underdevelop-
ment" of social classes and social organizationin Russia, and the state's ruth-
less use of coercion and terror. In addition, some theorists like HannahArendt
have argued that totalitarianregimes "atomize" society, destroying or subordi-
nating all the institutionsand associational forms that might lend themselves to
active social resistance.
"Society" is often an undifferentiatedwhole in Sovietological writing,
since internalsocial relationshipsand processes have little relevance to the total-
itarian model. For practical expository purposes, however, it is necessary on
occasion to identify partsof the whole to which specific state interventionistacts
are addressed. The terminology used usually corresponds to Soviet usage,
namely, "workers," "peasants," and "intelligentsia." These are the two
"non-antagonisticclasses" and the "stratum" identified as the basic groupings
of Soviet society in the Stalin Constitutionof 1936. An earlier Soviet usage,
more rigorously Marxist, subdivided the peasantry into class groups ranging
from "kulak" to "poor peasant," and also distinguished between an old
4 Adam B. Ulam, Stalin, New York, 1973, title of ch. 8.
360 The RussianReview
"bourgeois" and new "proletarian" intelligentsia. Although Sovietologists

generally dislike these classifications and put the terms in quotationmarks, it is
virtually impossible to avoid using them when describing state policies:
"kulaks," for example, may be an ambiguoussocial group, but what other label
can be used for the targetsof the "dekulakization"policy? Thus, perhapsironi-
cally, Sovietologists have fallen into the habit of dealing with Soviet society in
terms of Marxist-and even Stalinist-Marxist--classcategories.
At times, readingWestern scholarshipon the Stalin period, one might also
conclude that Sovietologists have accepted Stalinist premises about the disap-
pearance of class antagonismsin Soviet society. Inter- and intra-classconflicts
and tensions are as rare in the Western "totalitarian"model as they are in the
Soviet "socialist" one. However, there is one notable exception to this rule. In
following Trotsky (The Revolution Betrayed) and Djilas (The New Class),
Sovietologists sometimes refer to an antagonistic relationship between an
oppressedsociety and an exploiting, privileged bureaucraticelite. This is essen-
tially a Marxist version of the old state-against-societyimage (from which, in
fact, Trotsky probably derived it).5 Its appeal to Sovietologists is no doubt
related to its congenial political implications,since both Trotskyand Djilas were
indicting the Stalinist system as well as analyzing it. All the same, its place in
the conventional wisdom of Sovietology is somewhat anomalous. This may be
the point of origin of another curious Sovietological habit in writing about
Soviet society, which is to attachnegative connotationsto the term "bourgeois"
and generally positive ones to "proletarian." Marxist prejudice, as well as
Marxist and Stalinist-Marxistanalysis, have found a modest place in the inter-
stices of Sovietology's totalitarianmodel.
Social HistoryApproaches
a) Problems of structureand social interaction
It is too early to reporton currentwork in progressin this field, since such
work on the Stalin period is only just beginning. Nevertheless, it is importantto
consider these problems, as the sketchy existing analytical frameworkoutlined
above is clearly inadequate,being the productof casual borrowingfrom Soviet
and other Marxist sources by Sovietologists whose main attention was else-
where, and its revision may have significance for our understandingof the
natureof Stalinism. I have drawn to some extent on my own experience of the
problems of structurein planning a book on the social history of the 1930s,6and
5
Earlier, in his analysis of the 1905 Revolution, Trotsky had portrayedthe tsarist state as an
essentially free-standing entity, not representativeof any class in the society but opposed to the
society as a whole. In a review of the last volume of Trotsky's 1905 (Krasnaia nov', 1922, no. 3),
Pokrovskyaccused him of borrowingthis non-Marxistconcept from one of the historiansof the state
school, the liberalP. N. Miliukov.
6 The working title of this book, which should be finished in 1986, is Stalin's Russia: A Social
History of the 1930s.
on relevant discussions at recent meetings of Soviet social historians in the

United States.7But it is also possible to make deductions about likely directions
of futurework on the basis of social history's own logic.
Social historians are in the business of analyzing society, which among
other things means breakingit down into constituentparts. They are unlikely to
be satisfied with hypotheses involving an undifferentiated"society," as in the
state-against-societydichotomy discussed earlier. They will probably want to
make finer distinctions than those of Stalinist-Marxistanalysis, with its three
categories of "working class," "peasantry," and "intelligentsia"; they are
bound to object in particularto the last, hybrid category, which puts lowly
office-workersin the same group as professionals and administrators.They will
surety find it difficult to accept the idea of a society without significantinternal
tensions and conflicts (as in the "non-antagonistic"class relationshipsof Stalin-
ist Marxism),or of a society so inert that all the dynamics are external(as in the
totalitarianmodel).
The first challenge for social historians of the Stalin period will be to
decide what kind of social breakdown is most appropriate. The Stalinist-
Marxist breakdown is clearly simplistic, especially when compared with the
complex class analysis used by Soviet Marxistsin the 1920s. On the other hand,
it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Soviet society actually underwenta Great
Simplificationin the course of Stalin's "revolution from above" at the begin-
ning of the 1930s. Kulaks, nepman, and small traders disappearedfrom the
roster,groups like artisansand peasantcraftsmenwere dispersed,and collectivi-
zation levelled old distinctions within the peasantry. Perhaps the result of this
was to produce a very simple social structure,as well as a damaged one. But it
is also reasonableto assume that, as the society recovered from the blows of the
FirstFive-Year Plan period, it became more complex.
Trotsky and other Marxist critics have drawn our attention to the emer-
gence of a new social hierarchyin the 1930s. At the top of the hierarchy, in
Trotsky's view, was the "bureaucracy," a quasi-ruling class by virtue of its
control (though not ownership) of the means of production,possessing material
privileges that set it apart from the rest of society. This idea has been quite
influential among Western social historians.8However, some of scholars have
alreadynoted that the bureaucracyitself was hierarchical,so that the social posi-
tion and class interestsof those at the bottom were quite different from those at
7 I have in mind
particularlythe last two meetings of the National Seminaron the Social History
of Russia in the TwentiethCentury(Philadelphia,1983 and 1984), the two workshopson Social His-
tory of the Stalin period that I organized as a Senior Fellow at the HarrimanInstitute for the
Advanced Study of the Soviet Union, Columbia University, in the spring of 1985, and the third
workshopin this series, held in Austin in March 1986 underthe joint sponsorshipof the International
Studies Program,Universityof Texas at Austin, and the HarrimanInstitute.
8 See, for
example, Moshe Lewin, "The Social Background of Stalinism," in Tucker, ed.,
Stalinism,pp. 111-136.
362 TheRussian Review
the top, perhaps at times directly opposed to them.9Trotsky, to be sure, had in

mind the higher level of bureaucracywhen he talked of a new ruling class. But
how high, and on what basis can a cut-off point be drawn? Soviet statisticians
in the Stalin period sometimes used a category of "leading cadres and special-
ists,"10 based on nomenklatura distinctions, which might coincide with
Trotsky's group (though state/partynomenklaturais an unsatisfactorycriterion
for class membership in Marxist terms). But there is also the problem of the
professional and technical intelligentsia, whose members were often but not
necessarily employed by state institutions, sometimes in a "bureaucratic"
(administrative)role and sometimes simply as specialists. This whole group
sharedthe materialprivileges of the higher stratumof the bureaucracyand had a
high level of education and other elite characteristics. When social historians
come to grips with the problem of social hierarchy, they will have to decide
what kind of elite they are looking for-a Marxist "ruling class," or simply the
group with highest status and economic advantagesin the society. The answer
has great significancefor our understandingof the social dynamics of Stalinism.
There are other forms of emerging hierarchicalstratificationthat call for
close investigation. The position of Stakhanoviteswithin the working class is a
particularlyinteresting issue, but there are also a multiplicity of distinctions to
be made between unskilled and skilled labor, "new" workers (fresh from the
villages) and "old" ones, and workersin differentoccupations and branchesof
industry, not to mention the distinctions among convict,11semi-free, and free
labor to be found on the new constructionsites. The collectivized peasants and
ruralsociety in general present an even more promisingfield of investigationfor
those interested in emerging social hierarchies. The kolkhoz itself was a
hierarchical structure, with a top stratum of white-collar workers (chairman,
accountant,and so on), a middle stratumof skilled blue-collar workerslike trac-
tor driversand mechanics, and, at the bottom, the rank-and-filekolkhoznikiwho
did the actual field work and had only traditionalpeasant skills. Ruralsociety in
a broader sense underwent significant changes after collectivization, as the
numbers and proportionalweight of white-collar and administrativepersonnel
and blue-collar workers increased,while those of peasants (kolkhoznikiand edi-
nolichniki) diminished. Class differentiation, that favorite subject of the
agrarianMarxists in the 1920s, is really a much more appropriatetheme for the
9 This point was stronglymade by Arch Getty at the first and thirdworkshopson Social History
of the Stalin Period (see above, note 7). The approachis employed in Getty's publicationsand in the
work of GaborRitterspom.
10 For definitionand dataon this
category, see Sostav rukovodiashchikhrabotnikovi spetsialistov
Soiuza SSR, Moscow, 1936.
1 In his comment on this
paper as presented at the Third World Congress of Slavic Studies,
Stephen F. Cohen suggested that convict laborers should be considered the bottom stratumin the
generalhierarchyof Soviet society in the Stalin period. I am inclined to agree with him and with the
implied criticism of social historiansfor disregardingthis group.
1930s. Indeed, it is arguable that Russia's long-awaited "rural bourgeoisie"

finally materializedin the 1930s, albeit not in the expected form.
Of course the discovery that Stalinist society was hierarchicallystratified
is scarcely unexpected (what society is not?) and in itself is unlikely to change
anyone's thinkingabout the natureof Stalinism. But on what principleswas the
stratificationbased? What kind of relations existed between different strataand
classes? How could individuals improve their social and economic status, or
protect themselves from the sudden reversals of fortune that often overtook
those who were successful in this society? The answers to such questions, if
social historians can find them, may well be highly relevant to our general
understandingof Stalinism.
We already have certain general notions about status in Stalinist society:
that the kolkhoz peasantry ranked lowest, both for economic reasons and
because the kolkhozniki were not issued internal passports, which implied
second-class citizenship; that ruralin general rankedlower than urban;and that
the white-collar professional and administrativegroup was accorded highest
status, which is often held to indicate the "embourgeoisement" of the Stalinist
regime. The last premise, of course, begs a question that is relevantto all status
issues, namely, whether the regime was imposing its values on the society or
vice versa.
Privileged access to material goods and services was a concomitant of
elite status in Stalinist society.12This point may be carriedfurther. It is possible
that, in this society where scarcity and privation were the norm, the degree of
preferentialaccess to deficit commodities was the major determinantof status
distinctions, or rather,of those status distinctions that were peculiarly "Stalin-
ist," being products of the "revolution from above" and its aftermathrather
than reflecting Bolshevik-revolutionaryor traditional Russian values. While
some aspects of this question are difficult to investigate because various forms
of elite privilege were concealed from the public eye (in contrastto the highly
publicized privileges of Stakhanoviteworkers and peasants), the task of deter-
mining degrees of preferential access for different social and occupational
groups is greatly facilitatedby the existence of formal rationingsystems thathad
exactly this function. Urban rationing was in force for approximatelyhalf the
Stalin period-from 1929 to 1935, and again from 1941 to 1947-as well as
earlier, during World War I and the Civil War years. A comparison of the
changing ration priorities of social and occupational groups over this period
should contribute a great deal to our understandingof the regime's changing
sense of statushierarchies. Moreover,the 1929-35 rationingsystem was a pecu-
liar hybrid of industrialworking-class and white-collar elite priority access via
"closed distributionpoints" (zakrytyeraspredeliteli) serving specific groups of
factory workers, engineers, government officials, and so on; here social
12 See
Mervyn Matthews,Privilege in the Soviet Union: A Studyof Elite Life-Stylesunder Com-
munism,London, 1978.
historianswill find much to illuminatethe genesis and evolving organizingprin-

ciples of Stalinistsocial structureand privilege.
Of course, formal priorityof access cannot be equated with actual access.
In practice, everyone working in state and cooperative trade, or in the supply-
and-procurementsdepartmentsof industrialenterprises and other state institu-
tions, had informal privileges of access to goods that exceeded those of their
counterpartsworking outside the commercial sphere. This fact points up the
importance of making vertical as well as horizontal distinctions in our social
analysis. So far, scholars have noted only a few significantvertical distinctions,
for example, between administratorsand technical specialists in the white-collar
elite. But the vertical distinctions between commercial and non-commercial
occupations at all levels are of great interest, not only because the commercial
sector was large but also because it had many unusualcharacteristics.
Because of its "second economy" (black market) connections and resi-
dual "NEP spirit," employment in the commercial sector carried low prestige
despite its material advantages; it constituted an exception to our general
hypothesis linking social status with preferentialaccess to goods. Low prestige
was most noticeable at the bottom of the commercial hierarchy,with jobs like
sales clerk. At the top, managersof large departmentstores, commercial direc-
tors of enterprises and the like clearly had entree to the broader social elite,
though this advantagewas partlyrelated to the services they could renderother
elite members. Advancementin the commercial sector was evidently much less
dependent on education and party membership-the two standardcriteria for
upward mobility in the Stalin period-than was the case in other spheres. All
this suggests more than an interestingspecial case, understandablyneglected by
Soviet historians,for study by Western social historians. It raises the possibility
that we are still greatly underestimatingthe diversity and complexity of Stalinist
society, partly because we have implicitly accepted some of the limitationsand
prejudicesof Stalinist-Marxistanalysis of it.
b) Implicationsof High Social Mobility

Until recently, social mobility was a neglected theme in Soviet studies.
Western Sovietologists often assumed that the process was irrelevantin a totali-
tariansociety, or for that mattera society that claimed to be building socialism.
Marxistsanalyzing Soviet society were equally uninterested,since social mobil-
ity is not a traditionalMarxist concept. My discussion of regime-sponsored
upwardmobility into the elite in Educationand Social Mobility and elsewhere13
drew attentionto the subject, but some scholars were uneasy about the positive
value-loading of the term in American usage (where upwardmobility is closely
linked with ideas of democracy and opportunity),and others were more struck
by the aspect of regime sponsorshipthanthe process itself.
13 Sheila
Fitzpatrick,Educationand Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921-1934, Cambridge,
1979, and "Stalin and the Makingof a New Elite, 1929-1938," Slavic Review, vol. 38, 1979.
However, it is the process itself and its remarkabledimensions that are

likely to preoccupy social historiansof the Stalin period. This society is impos-
sible to analyze adequately in purely static terms because of the exceptional
social and geographicalmobility of the population. Tens of millions of peasants
moved to towns and became workers in the 1930s. A large segment of the old
working class moved into white-collar and managerial occupations. Private
tradersand businessmenwere forced out of their old occupationsand had to find
new ones; "kulaks" were deported from the villages and resettled in distant
regions, where many became workers in the new industrial enterprises. The
World War II and postwar demobilizationof the army led to furtherlarge-scale
mobility. But war and specific regime policies encouraging various types of
mobility explain only partof the general phenomenon. More than anythingelse,
it was a necessary by-product of the Soviet Union's rapid industrialization,
which createdmore white-collar,professional, and managerialjobs, at the same
time expandingthe blue-collarlaborforce and drawingpeasantsinto the towns.
For this reason, the general trend of mobility in the Stalin period was
upward, despite the occurrence of downward mobility from the privileged
classes after the Revolution and dramaticepisodes of elite purging in the 1930s.
As I have argued elsewhere, the phenomenon of large-scale upward mobility
needs to be incorporatedinto our interpretationof Stalinism,because the Stalin-
ist regime claimed and almost certainlyreceived credit for enabling membersof
the lower classes to improve their social position.14But this is not the only way
in which recognition of high social mobility may affect our generalizations
about Stalinism.
One familiar generalizationconcerns the weakness of social classes and
associationalbonds, and the consequent inability of society to resist state power
or curb its expansion. Many scholars have regarded this "atomization" or
social fragmentationas part of the dynamics of totalitarianism. But it can be
linked equally-and not necessarily incompatibly-with the enormous social
mobility of the early Stalin period, which inevitably weakened traditionalasso-
ciational bonds and reduced class consciousness and the capacity for social
organization. To take an obvious example, a working class consisting largely of
yesterday's peasants (as was the case of the Soviet working class in the 1930s)
is unlikely to generate assertive labor unions. A peasantry whose young men
are leaving to work in the towns may offer comparativelylittle aggressive resis-
tance to state initiatives,even when the policy is as unpopularas collectivization
appearsto have been in the countryside. A new elite, such as that emerging in
the Soviet Union in the 1930s, will not have the same esprit de corps, indepen-
dence and, habits of collective self-assertion as one that is long established and
firmlyentrenched.
14 In Educationand Social
Mobility,pp. 16-17 and 254, and in "Stalin and the Making of a New
Elite," pp. 401-402.
The high level of state coercion characteristic of the Stalin period is

anotherbasic Sovietological theme that deserves reconsiderationin the context
of high social mobility. These two phenomena clearly had a complex inter-
dependentrelationship,and neither can be adequatelytreatedwithout reference
to the other. The casual connections worked both ways. On the one hand, state
coercion produced involuntarysocial mobility, as in the deportationof kulaks,
the expropriationof nepmen, the Great Purge and the deportationof "class
enemies" from the newly acquired western territoriesin the 1940s. On the
other hand, spontaneous social mobility on the scale of the early '30s created
organizationaland control problems for the state that promptedfurthercoercive
actions, as in the case of the labor discipline measuresand the 1932 passportlaw
(originally introducedto prevent mass exodus from village to town as famine
grippedlarge areas of the countryside).
While the "totalitarian" view of Stalinist rule correctly emphasizes the
regime's transformationalistaspirationsin explaining coercion and terror,it is
surely misleading to imply that, in the absence of effective societal resistance to
the state, the coercion was gratuitousand unrelatedto any social problem. It
was related to an acute social problem but that problem was excessive mobility
ratherthan resistance. Moreover,the mobility of the populationwas as much an
impediment to the regime's efforts at social engineering as a consequence of
them. For all its "totalitarian" ambitions and repressive policies, the actual
control exercised by the Stalinist regime was often limited, as social historians
looking from the bottom up have begun to point out.15One of the limitations
was that controls were difficult to apply to rootless and unpredictablymobile
segments of the population. Another was that the same rootlessness and mobil-
ity were characteristicof the Communists and bureaucraticcadres who were
supposedto implementthe regime's policies and controls.16
A related theme in the literature on totalitarianism,the importance of
"indoctrination"in the Stalinist system, may also be seen from a new perspec-
tive by social historians. The regime was undoubtedlydisposed to indoctrinate
its citizens, not just in the sense of teaching Marxist-Leninistdogma but also
and more significantly in the broader sense of inculcating new social and cul-
tural norms. However, this disposition need not be regarded solely as totali-
tarian imperative: the stress on indoctrinationand education had a practical
social justificationas well, and could even be interpretedas a response to socie-
tal demands,in additionto meeting a perceived state interest.
In Stalinist society, large numbers of citizens needed to learn new skills
and master new social roles because they had recently changed their social posi-
tion throughupwardmobility. These needs were a responsibilityfor the regime,
on the one hand, and a burden on individuals, on the other. Factories had to
15 See below,
pp. 367-372.
16 J. Arch
Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet CommunistParty Reconsidered,
1933-1938, Cambridge,1985, especially pp. 34, 61.
assimilate and train new workers, but at the same time new workers fresh from
the villages needed to learn the rules of urban and factory life in order to sur-
vive. The same imperativesapplied at all levels of society startingwith the kol-
khoz, where new conventions had to be masteredby officials and peasantsalike.
At the top level of society, new elite members had to learn technical and
managerialskills as well as acquiringthe kul'turnost'appropriateto their status.
The term "indoctrination"is clearly too narrowfor the process of social
and political vospitanie, not to mention basic education and technical training,
that absorbedso much of the regime's and society's attentionin the 1930s. But
the subject, however labelled, is important;and social historiansare unlikely to
restrictit to transmissionof ideology or accept the notion that society's role was
purely passive. A more promisingapproachis suggested by Vera Dunham,who
describes the emerging "middleclass values" of the Stalin period as the result
of negotiation ("the Big Deal") between the regime and the society's elite.17A
similar process of negotiation might be discerned in the development of norms
for the new kolkhozy,for the regime's original intentions were clearly modified
in response to village realities and the traditionalpatterns of peasant life. In
some cases-perhaps including that of the Stalinist elite-negotiation of values
might be seen as a three-way process, with the arrivistes (new workers, new
elite members, and so on) learning from their precursors(old workers, "bour-
geois" intelligentsia) under regime supervision, while adding their own contri-
bution to the culturalmix.
c) The View "fromBelow": Social Initiativesand Responses

Social historians are generally inclined to prefer the perspective "from
below"-that is, from within the society, or even from the grass-roots
viewpoint of ordinarylower-class citizens-to the governmentaland elite per-
spective "from above." Those who are now working on the Soviet period are
no exception; indeed, their interest in history from below may be accentuated
because of the reactionagainsttotalitarian-modelscholarship,which imposed an
extreme version of the perspective "from above" on Soviet studies. "Revi-
sionist" social and political historians of the younger generation like Arch
Getty, Roberta Manning, and Gabor Rittersporn18 counterpose local pictures-
from-life (often drawn from the Smolensk Archive, which is our major accessi-
ble source of primarydata on conditions outside the center in the 1930s) to the
17 Vera S. Dunham,In Stalin's Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction,

Cambridge,1976.
18 See Getty, Origins of the Great Purges, and "Party and Purges in Smolensk, 1933-1937,"
Slavic Review, vol. 42, 1983; RobertaT. Manning, "Governmentin the Soviet Countrysidein the
Stalinist Thirties: The Case of Belyi Raion in 1937," Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East Euro-
pean Studies, no. 301, Pittsburgh,n.d.; GaborT. Rittersporn,"The State Against Itself: Social Ten-
sions and Political Conflict in the U.S.S.R. 1936-1938," Telos, no. 41, 1979, and "Societe et
appareild'6tat sovietiques 1936-1938: Contradictionset interferences,"Annals E.S.C., no. 4, 1979.
generalizations earlier derived from central policy pronouncementsand laws,

and note the vast discrepanciesbetween them.
Of course, the perspective from below inevitably differs from that from
the top; policies are never implemented exactly in the manner that policy-
makers intend; local conditions vary, so that the experience of one region or
locality cannot be assumed to be typical. I think, however, there is little doubt
that the accumulationof local and specific case studies will significantlychange
some of the conventional wisdom on the Stalin period. Stalinist policy-makers,
like Western Sovietologists, were far removed from Soviet society, and prob-
ably thereforeexceptionally prone to schematicerrorin theirperceptionof it.
But the interestingquestion is how far revisionism based on the perspec-
tive "from below" can take us on the Stalin period. In the accepted Sovietolog-
ical view, the great social changes of this era were productsof radical policies
initiated by Stalin's regime without significant social support and ruthlessly
implemented without regard to society's responses. The paradigmis "revolu-
tion from above," Stalin's own term for forced-pace industrialization,collectiv-
ization, and other similarly ambitiousand socially disruptivepolicies of the First
Five-Year Plan period. The same frameworkis applied to the Great Purges of
the late 1930s. A perspective "from below" might suggest alterations of
greateror less magnitudeor lead scholarsto abandonthe frameworkaltogether.
Three types of alternativeexplanationscan be distinguishedin published
revisionist work and informal discussions. The first emphasizes that the regime
had less actual control over society than it claimed, that its actions were often
improvisedratherthan part of a granddesign, that implementationof its radical
policies often diverged from the policy-makers' intentions, and that the policies
had many unplannedand unanticipatedsocial consequences. The second, tak-
ing revisionism a step further,sees the regime's policies as appealingto definite
social constituencies, responding to social pressures and grievances, and liable
to be modified in practice throughprocesses of informalsocial negotiation. The
thirdand most challenging approachwould describe such policies as the product
of initiative from below ratherthan attributingthem to the regime's initiative
from above.
The first approach is not necessarily incompatible with the concept of
"revolution from above" or even the totalitarianmodel, if totalitarianismis
taken as an ideal type ratherthan a literal descriptionof historical reality. It is,
after all, impossible to imagine an actual historical situation in which political
control was absolute, laws were implemented to the letter and in complete
accordancewith the legislators' intentions,and the political leaders had a grand
design detailed enough to cover every contingency. Such hypotheses (though
not absent from past Sovietological scholarship) fly in the face of common
sense.
However, a number of recent scholarly works emphasizing improvisa-
tion, accident, inefficiency, and practical failures of regime planning and
control19conclude that the accumulationof such evidence underminesthe totali-

tarian model of the Stalinist system to the point where it is no longer worth
using. This is the import of Arch Getty's study of party organization, which
stresses the tenuousnessof central control over local organs and the party's ina-
bility to keep accurate membership files in the 1930s.20 Roberta Manning's
work on Belyi raion makes a similar point, noting that there were far too few
control personnel (including NKVD) in the Western Oblast, particularlythe
countryside, to perform the functions usually attributed to them.21 Peter
Solomon's research on local judicial and administrativeorgans points in the
same direction,22and his descriptionof the evolution of Soviet penal policy in
the early 1930s offers a strikingrefutationof any simple notion of GrandDesign
in a sphereof particularrelevance to totalitariantheory.23
The implicationsfor the "revolution from above" framework24are not so
clear. In principle, "revolution from above" can accommodatea fair amountof
improvisation,disorganization,and unanticipatedconsequences, even though it
has not always been seen in these terms in the past. It could be argued, indeed,
that the concept is essentially incompatiblewith notions of detailedplanningand
rigorous supervision by central authorities. An interestingrecent paper on the
collectivization campaignof the winter of 1929-30 makes a convincing case that
local improvisation of various kinds abounded, and radical initiatives often
came from lower-level officials before they were sanctionedby top-level party
decisions.25This finding may mean-as the authorseems to conclude-that the
process was not "revolution from above," or at least not revolution from the
very top. But such a conclusion sheds little light on the reasons why lower-level
officials took these apparentlyrisky initiatives. If they did so because they were
getting radical "signals" from above (as they certainly were in this case), we
are left with the old "revolution from above" framework,but perhaps gain a
new insight into the process by which it was carriedout. It may be that Stalinist
"revolution from above" not only permittedbut actually required lower-level
officials to respondto urgentbut imprecise "signals" by improvisingand taking
initiatives that, if unsuccessful, could always be disavowed by the leadership.
19 These themes are not

totally new in the literature. They are prominent,for example, in Merle
Fainsod's SmolenskunderSoviet Rule, Cambridge,MA, 1958.
20
Getty, Origins of the Great Purges, especially pp. 31-37.
21 RobertaT.
Manning, "The Collective FarmPeasantryand the Local Administration:Peasant
Lettersof Complaintin Belyi Raion in 1937," paperpresentedat the 1983 meeting of National Sem-
inarfor the Study of Russian Society in the TwentiethCentury,pp. 7-12, 15.
22 Peter H. Solomon, "Local Political Power and Soviet Criminal Justice 1922-1941," Soviet
Studies, vol. 37, no. 3, July 1985.
23 Peter H. Solomon, "Soviet Penal Policy, 1917-1934: A Reinterpretation,"Slavic Review, vol.
39, 1980.
24 The best statementon this is Robert C. Tucker, "Stalinism as Revolution From Above," in
Tucker,ed., Stalinism,pp. 77-108.
25 Lynne Viola, "The Campaignto Eliminatethe Kulak as a Class, Winter 1930: A Note on the
Legislation," paperpresentedat XVI National Conventionof AAASS, New York, 1984.
The second revisionist approachputs regime policy in a social context,

and assumes that the social context (grievances, pressures, sources of support,
responses) must to some degree shape, constrainand modify the actions of the
party leadership. The pioneering work was Vera Dunham's thesis of "the Big
Deal" between the new elite and the regime as a source of Stalinist
"middleclass values."26 This was followed by work on the CulturalRevolu-
tion27and upwardmobility into the elite via the education policies of the First
Five-Year Plan, which, I argued, were both an appeal to one of the regime's
basic social constituencies and a source of future social support.28The regime's
relationship with the working class during the First Five-Year Plan has since
been investigatedin several studies,29and there is work in progresson the social
context of collectivization.30Ritterspor and Getty have suggested new perspec-
tives on the Great Purges, linking them in different ways with tensions within
the bureaucracyand with populargrievances againstthe new Soviet bosses.31
This approachchallenges the totalitarian-modelassumptionthat society is
irrelevantto an understandingof Stalinist political processes. It also tends to
reduce the role of terrorand coercion, if only by suggesting that other factors
are relevant as well, and this has been one of the most controversialaspects of
the revisionist argument. Critics have asserted that any reduction of the tradi-
tional emphasis on terroramountsto white-washingof the Stalinistregime, or at
least unacceptableabdicationof moral judgment.32This is a complicated issue,
since historiansusually do not accept such a priori limitationson interpretation,
and in this case are likely to dismiss the criticisms as manifestationsof Cold-
War bias. However, leaving aside the question of moral judgment33 and
26 Dunham,In Stalin's Time, ch. 1. For a discussion of the technical intelligentsiaand the regime
that also touches questions of values, see KendallE. Bailes, Technologyand Society underLenin and
Stalin: Origins of the Soviet TechnicalIntelligentsia,1917-1941, Princeton,1978.
27 Sheila Fitzpatrick,ed., CulturalRevolutionin Russia 1928-1931, Bloomington, IN, 1978.
28
Fitzpatrick,Educationand Social Mobility.
29 For example, Lynne Viola, "The Campaignof the 25,000ers: A Study of the Collectivization
of Soviet Agriculture,1929-1931," Ph.D. dissertation,Princeton, 1984; HiroakiKuromiya,"Politics
and Social Change in Soviet Industry during the 'Revolution from Above,' 1928-1931," Ph.D.
dissertation,Princeton, 1985.
30 RobertaManningis interestedin the question of social supportand antagonismswithin the vil-
lage community at the end of the 1920s. In a paperon "Peasants After Collectivization" presented
at the second workshop on Social History of the Stalin Period (ColumbiaUniversity, April 1985), I
suggested that the modificationsin kolkhozpolicy in 1930-35 were the outcome of informal "social
negotiation" between the regime and the peasantry.
31 Getty, Origins of the Great Purges; Rittersporn,"The State Against Itself."
32 See, for example, L. Kolakowski's note on Sovietological revisionists in Survey,vol. 21, no. 4,
1975, pp. 87-89, or LeonardSchapiro's review of my Russian Revolutionin Times LiterarySupple-
ment,March 18, 1983, p. 269.
33 A good deal of criticism on avoidance of explicit moraljudgment has been directed at me-
and correctly,in a sense, since I have an idiosyncraticposition on this issue that is no more congenial
to most other revisionists than it is to our critics. My original, and somewhatnaive, notion was that
historiansand social scientists were bound by a kind of Hippocraticoath to be as objective and non-
partisan as was humanly possible. I retreatedfrom this position after being deluged by counter-
political bias, there is a real problem here for social historians,namely, how to
deal with state coercion and terrorin the Stalin period. The first reaction prob-
ably was (as the critics suspected) to steer clear of the subject on the grounds
that it had been sufficiently or even excessively emphasized by the previous
generation. But the more recent trend34 has been toward reworking the
subject-this time, it is hoped, without some of the earlier polemical
excesses-in the context of social history.
The controversies surroundingthe second revisionist approach tend to
obscure the fact that it is relatively cautious in its revisionism and leaves much
of the traditionalstructureof Sovietological interpretationintact. Virtually all
the work is compatible with the idea of Stalinist "revolution from above,"
althoughit adds the new and very importantconcept of supportingor responsive
social constituencies. A frequent image is that of the regime "unleashing"
social forces35to accomplish its purposes. It is generally not argued that social
pressureswere strongenough to force the regime into radical action or that sub-
sequent policy modificationsor "concessions" to aggrieved social groups were
regime responses to assertive social resistance. The new scholarshipadds social
voices and interests to the picture and it portraysthe bureaucracyas a complex
social entity, not a mere transmissionbelt, but at least some of the older Sovieto-
logical interpretationscould assimilatethese changes withouttoo much trouble.
The thirdrevisionist approach,substitutinginitiativefrom below for initia-
tive from the regime at the great turningpoints of the Stalin era, would be much
more difficult for other schools to incorporate. This makes it very attractivein
principle to Young Turks, but in practice there are not many examples in the
published or unpublishedliterature. The idea comes, I think, from my introduc-
tion to Cultural Revolution in Russia,36 where I suggested "revolution from
below" as an alternativehypothesis to "revolutionfrom above." The argument
in my article in that volume was more cautious, suggesting participation"from
below" ratherthan any decisive revolutionaryinitiativefrom that quarter. None
of the other contributorsactually excluded regime initiative or asserted that
examples, and am now half persuadedthat those who incline to take the role as detachedobserverdo
so (like the "alien, indifferent,and polemically-disposed" Sukhanov) mainly because of quirks of
personalityand temperament.But I still think the Sukhanovsmake good historians.
34 "State Coercion and Social Responses" was the subject of the third workshopon the Social
History of the Stalin Period, held in Austin, Texas, on March7-8, 1986.
35 The image, borrowed from the Bolshevik literateur Voronsky, is used in Sheila Fitzpatrick,
"CulturalRevolution in Russia, 1928-1932," Journal of ContemporaryHistory, 1974, no. 1, p. 35.
See also Getty, Origins of the Great Purges, p. 155, passim.
36 Fitzpatrick,ed., Cultural Revolution, pp. 6-7. In this passage, which has been widely inter-
pretedas a revisionist manifesto, I contrasteda traditional"revolutionfrom above" interpretationof
CulturalRevolution with a new interpretationthat found "important6lements of 'revolution from
below.' " Although my own preferencefor the latterwas clearly indicated,I had to concede "initia-
tive" to the partyleadershipeven while suggesting that the process was "generatedby forces within
the society." It will be noted that I have since shifted towardTucker'sposition on the importanceof
"revolutionfrom above."
social pressures for Cultural Revolution were irresistible.37 A scholar who may
come close to this position is Rittersporn on the Great Purges: he states that
"the struggles of 1936-1938 were unleashed by popular discontent [my
emphasis] with the arbitrariness, corruption and inefficiency of the ruling
strata."38 This statement seems to promise more than his subsequent argument
delivers, since he concedes that the masses were passive and "incapable of
organized resistance,"39 and does not show how or why, under these cir-
cumstances, their discontent should have acted so powerfully on the rulers.
How are we to account for the absence of specific, documented cases of
revolutionary "initiative from below" in recent scholarship? One possibility is
that scholars are being prudent, having discovered that even modest social-
support hypotheses arouse indignation and controversy. Another possibility is
that they are having trouble making this particular argument fit the data on such
major episodes as Cultural Revolution, collectivization, and the Great Purges. It
is always tempting to turn conventional wisdom on its head, but this approach
may actually do less than justice to the real revisionist contribution to under-
standing of the Stalin period. What has emerged from the recent scholarship is
an appreciation that no political regime, including Stalin's, functions in a social
vacuum. There were social pressures and constituencies influencing Stalinist
policy formation, though these were comparatively weak during the "revolution
from above" phase. More importantly, there were social constraints, social
responses and informal processes of negotiation between the regime and social
groups that had a very significant impact on policy implementation-that is, on
the nature and outcome of Stalin's "revolution from above" in practice.
Social historians have made their debut in studies of the Stalin period by
challenging the totalitarian model and arguing that it gives a one-sided and
simplistic picture of the interaction of state and society. The new data presented
appear to bear out this claim, although in my opinion they do not yet
significantly change the old picture of the Stalinist regime as initiator of social
change in the 1930s. They do show, however, that the regime had only limited
control over the outcome of the radical policies it had initiated. The regime's
unusual capacity and inclination for generating "revolution from above" was
something quite different from a capacity and an inclination for planned social
37 In my article "CulturalRevolution as Class War" in Fitzpatrick,ed., Cultural Revolution, I

identifieda numberof social constituenciesactively or passively supportingCulturalRevolution, but
located the actual initiative-the "signal" that launchedthe movement-in the partyleadership. Of
the other contributors,FrederickStarr and KaterinaClark emphasized the radical utopian spirit of
architects and writers and the absence of day-to-day party control and direction of their activities.
However, while they saw these groups as taking the initiative in their own professions, they also saw
them as responding to opportunitiesand a favorable climate that were external to their professions
and not createdby their activity.
38 "The State Against Itself," p. 87.
39 "The State Against Itself," p. 103.
engineering. It could set off explosions that destroyed or damaged certain

features of the social landscape, but its ability to rebuild according to
preselectedblueprintsappearsmuch more doubtful.
It is perhaps surprisingthat, despite its interest in social history, the new
cohort of historians has concentrated so heavily on the old Sovietological
questions-framed by an earliergenerationof social scientists-about the politi-
cal system. We have not yet discarded the assumptionthat the only significant
social relations in the Soviet Union are those in which society relates to govern-
ment. This tendency may be understandable,given the Stalinist context, and
even legitimate, given the recent trend in social history to "bring the state back
in." But surely there is a special problem in the case of Soviet social history:
we seem to be bringing the state back in without ever having removed it from
center stage. We may risk losing an opportunityto formulatenew questions and
develop a real social-historyperspectiveon the Stalin period.
It seems to me that social historians have made their point on the totali-
tarianmodel and should now try turningtheir attentionelsewhere. We are start-
ing to investigate a society with, for example, a remarkablyhigh level of social
and geographicalmobility, a new patternof social stratification,and (according
to a rather suspect piece of conventional wisdom) no internal class or social
conflicts worth discussing. We have a lot to work on. We might even find,
before bringingthe state back in, that Stalinismhad some social as well as polit-
ical dynamics-which would, after all, be both the most logical and the most
original contributionsocial historianscould make to the field.

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The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review

New Perspectives on Stalinism

New Perspectives on Stalinism

The nature of Stalinisml has always been a highly contentious question,

General Interpretationsof StalinistState and Society

resist, evade, or subvert by passive resistance. In scholarship on the Soviet

4 Adam B. Ulam, Stalin, New York, 1973, title of ch. 8.

"bourgeois" and new "proletarian" intelligentsia. Although Sovietologists

on relevant discussions at recent meetings of Soviet social historians in the

the top, perhaps at times directly opposed to them.9Trotsky, to be sure, had in

1930s. Indeed, it is arguable that Russia's long-awaited "rural bourgeoisie"

historianswill find much to illuminatethe genesis and evolving organizingprin-

b) Implicationsof High Social Mobility

However, it is the process itself and its remarkabledimensions that are

The high level of state coercion characteristic of the Stalin period is

c) The View "fromBelow": Social Initiativesand Responses

17 Vera S. Dunham,In Stalin's Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction,

generalizations earlier derived from central policy pronouncementsand laws,

control19conclude that the accumulationof such evidence underminesthe totali-

19 These themes are not

The second revisionist approachputs regime policy in a social context,

37 In my article "CulturalRevolution as Class War" in Fitzpatrick,ed., Cultural Revolution, I

engineering. It could set off explosions that destroyed or damaged certain

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