Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review

The Stalin Period as an Historical Problem

Author(s): Robert C. Tucker
Source: The Russian Review, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Oct., 1987), pp. 424-427
Published by: Wiley on behalf of Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review
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 The Russian Review, vol. 46, 1987, pp. 424-427

The Stalin Period as an Historical Problem

ROBERTC. TUCKER

Since I was a discussant of Sheila Fitzpatrick'sspiritedbrief for a newer

social history when she first presented it in 1985, and since I read the revised
version and the comments upon it publishedin the Russian Review with interest,
I am pleased to offer my own comments here. They derive from my long trek
through the Stalinist 1930s while writing Stalin's Revolutionfrom Above: An
InterpretiveHistory, which, I am glad to say, is nearingcompletion.
First, somethingon the history of the field. As some of Fitzpatrick'scom-
mentatorsnoted, the totalitarianparadigmwas in decline well before the latter-
day social historians made their appearance. Its early critics were political
scientists.1By the mid 1960s, the need for new ways in the field was so evident
that in 1967 the AmericanCouncil of LearnedSocieties set up a PlanningGroup
on ComparativeCommunistStudies to explore new approaches.
One of the group's projects was based on the idea that Russian Bolshev-
ism and the Communist movements that arose under its tutelage have been
culture-transformingmovements and that the sociopolitical systems they esta-
blished on taking power are a new form of culture, or "political culture,"
which in time assimilates elements of the given country's prerevolutionarycul-
ture into an amalgam of old and new. This approachhistoricizes Soviet and
Communist studies. One result is breaking down the artificial barrierthat the
totalitarianparadigminterposedbetween Russian and Soviet history, as though
Russia ended on November 6, 1917,2and a wholly new entity, the Soviet Union,
spranginto being on November 7. The culturalapproachalso carrieson implicit
warning against an overly hard and fast dichotomy between "from above" and
"from below." Leaders of Communist-ruledcountries are not immune to
prerevolutionaryinfluences within themselves and, further,may find it in their
own or in their regime's interestto revive old culturalways-as Lenin's succes-
sors did, for example, by establishing an elaborate cult of Lenin in a country
whose political culturehad long featureda rulercult.

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

In 1975 the Planning Group sponsored a conference on Stalinism and

Communist Political Culture. The resulting volume was, in part, an effort to
analyze phenomenaof the Stalin period in terms of political culture.3Since then
a streamof new scholarshiphas appeared.4Consideringthe relevance of the cul-
tural approachto both the social and the political history of Soviet Russia under
Stalin, I am surprisedthat Fitzpatrickand her commentatorsignored this "post-
totalitarian"current. Ironically, it was a Germanist,Geoff Eley, who protested
in passing againstneglect of the political cultureof Stalinism.
To illustratethe uses of the cultural approach,consider Fitzpatrick'sand
her commentators'willingness to use "Stalinism" to denote the subject of their
discussion. Since I was among those who brought the term into wider use in
academic Soviet studies in the 1950s and 1960s, I should be the last to protest
this usage now, and do not protest. But years of work on the Stalin era have
taught me to use the term sparingly, because its referent is unclear. Unlike
Lenin, Stalin did not produce an "ism" in the sense of a substantialbody of
theory. What, then, does "Stalinism" signify? The sum of Stalin's deeds while
in power? The events of his time in power?
A political-culturalapproachcan clarify the matter. The effort to rethink
Soviet history in cultural terms led me to inquire what Stalin stood for in the
post-Lenin 1920s, when Leninist political culturebroke down in the Party's fac-
tional fights. The answer: a radical version of "Russian national Bolshevism,"
by which I mean a mix of Bolshevik revolutionism in Stalin's special under-
standingof it and the Great Russian chauvinismthat Lenin belatedly perceived
in him in 1922. Without seeing the problem of Stalinism in this perspective, it
now seems to me, one cannot easily puzzle out much that happenedafter Stalin
acquiredascendancy and, in 1928-29, began acting on the peculiarly Russocen-
tric idea of "socialist construction" that took shape in his mind during the
1920s. Nor can one understandthe dialectic of "from above" and "from
below" in the subsequenthistory of the 1930s.
Moreover, the history of Stalin's time cannot be understoodwithoutrefer-
ence to his character. To take that into proper account is not to psychologize
history-writing unduly, but rather to illuminate the man's drive for despotic
power, the ways he went about obtainingit, and the uses he made of it. To omit
Stalin's characteris not simply to delete Stalin from Stalinism, it is a sure for-
mula for blunderingin the forest of facts of the 1930s and after, including the
Cold War and postwar foreign relations. It should not be necessary for us to
watch Varlamin Repentance, the Soviet film-fantasyabout Stalin's terrorof the
1930s, to understandthat personalityplayed a large and deadly part in Varlam-

3 RobertC. Tucker,ed., Stalinism:Essays in Historical Interpretation(New York, 1977).

4 Including Stephen White's Political Culture and Soviet Politics (1979); Archie Brown, ed.,
Political Culture and CommunistStudies (New York, 1985); Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez and
RichardStites, eds., Bolshevik Culture:Experimentand Order in the Russian Revolution(Blooming-
ton, IN, 1985); and my Political Cultureand Leadershipin Soviet Russia: From Lenin to Gorbachev
(New York, 1987).

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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

"orthodoxy." Human nature being what it is, no branch of human studies is

ever likely to free itself from revisionism in this combative sense, but it would
be good if it could. If the distinction I have made is what Fitzpatrickmeant
when she identified herself as an "iconoclastic" revisionist, not an "ideologi-
cal" one, then I take pleasure in concluding that, whatever our continuing
differences of interest and conceptual approachin scholarship,we have a basic
outlook in common.

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