Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review

History with the Politics Left Out-Again?

Author(s): Geoff Eley
Source: The Russian Review, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Oct., 1986), pp. 385-394
Published by: Wiley on behalf of Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review
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The Russian Review,vol. 45, 1986, pp. 385-394

History Withthe Politics Left Out-Again?

GEOFFELEY

The situationin Soviet social history today seems not too dissimilarfrom
the situationin Germansocial history a decade ago. In both instances, for com-
plicated national-historicaland professional reasons, the breakthroughto social
history came later than for the British, French, and American fields; powerful
structures of intellectual and institutional conservatism circumscribed the
chances for the kind of experimentationwith new methods and approachesthat
proved so exciting elsewhere. On the one hand, the power of an established
problematic(a particularapproachto the origins of Nazism in the one case, the
totalitarianmodel in the other) tended to block social-historical work; on the
other hand, the professionalpower structure(the West GermanhistoricalZunft,
the American Sovietological establishment) limited access to resources and
deprived innovation of its necessary material base in the shape of research
centers, funding, and a supportiveenvironmentof collective discussion.
In the Germancase, this situationwas dramaticallyturnedaroundbetween
the late 1960s and mid-1970s in a process initiatedby the famous Fischer Con-
troversy, which also coincided with a more general fracturingof postwar intel-
lectual orthodoxies in the Federal Republic. Those developments resonated
powerfully in the English-speaking world, and while the so-called Tendenz-
wende of the late 1970s has produced a depressingly successful conservative
restoration in Germany itself, the new departureshave fortunately been sus-
tained by an internationalcommunity of discourse linking West German scho-
lars to those in Britainand the United States. During the last ten years German
historical studies have been radically transformed,with a continuing prolifera-
tion of monographicresearchon the late nineteenthcentury and first half of the
twentieth,the growth of cohesive national and internationalnetworks, and often
bitterlycontested disputes over methodology, concepts, and long-runinterpreta-
tion. This notable vitality has been impartedin large part under the banner of
social history.1

1 For excellent introductions,see Hans-UlrichWehler,

"Historiographyin GermanyToday," in
JurgenHabermas,ed., Observationson "The Spiritual Situation of the Age": ContemporaryGer-
man Perspectives, Cambridge,MA, 1984, pp. 221-259; Georg Iggers, "Introduction,"in Iggers, ed.,
The Social History of Politics: Critical Perspectives in West GermanHistorical Writingsince 1945,
New York, 1985, pp. 1-48. For my own thoughts, see Geoff Eley, "Memories of Under-
Development: Social History in Germany,"Social History, vol. 2, 1977, pp. 785-792.

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 386 TheRussianReview

As I understandit, somethingof the same orderhas been happeningin the

Russian and Soviet fields, too, beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s on a
smaller scale (if only because work inside the Soviet Union could not have the
same energizing function as work in West Germany), encouragedby develop-
ments in other national fields, and entering a period of sustainedgrowth by the
early 1980s. The field has mobilized large numbers of groups and individuals
and is held togetherby an enviable level of collective discussion and exchange.2
Moreover, carriedforwardby the intellectualmomentumaccumulatedfrom the
1970s, the field has recently attractedan impressive level of graduate student
interest,stimulatedin partby the prominenceof Soviet studies since the onset of
the new cold war. In this sense (and by contrastwith the situationin West Ger-
many) the right turn of the 1980s has had the opposite of a conservative effect,
and social history continues to grow as the potential source of renovationwithin
Russian and Soviet studies as a whole. The primaryprogressionhas been from
the revolutionaryto the early-Soviet periods, a movement that is entirely under-
standableboth intellectuallybut also practically,given the earlier difficulties of
access to primarysources for more recent periods. Finally, this new social his-
tory also seems to be following the familiar pattern of proliferationin other
national fields, from the history of the working class to the social history of
other social groups, to studies of mass institutions such as schooling and con-
scriptionand the professions, and embracingthe establishedrepertoireof social
history sub-fields: leisure, recreation and sport; medicine and public health;
housing; deviance, criminalityand the law; family and demographichistory;and
(in many ways most importantof all) sex, gender, and the historyof women.3
In this sense, the decade of the 1930s is especially fraughtwith difficulty
and poses all the problems that have previously bedeviled Soviet history in the
most aggravated way-paucity of sources, absence of an adequate secondary
literature,the salience of entrenchedand widely diffused preconceptionsabout
the nature of the legitimate questions and about most of the answers, and a
minefield of ideological partisanship. The time is more than ripe for an
appraisalof the field and its problems. Moreover,as one of the earliest special-
ists in the field and the authorof two impressive monographs,who has labored
prodigiously in the empirical materials and has moved increasingly into the

2 Sheila Fitzpatrickrefers in passing to this largercontext of activity. There is no equivalentin

West European fields of this constant round of meetings, seminars, workshops, conferences, etc.
These activities are clearly facilitatedby the resourcesof area centers and the availabilityof federal
funding and foundationsupport,but the ability to use such opportunitiesalso presupposesthe intel-
lectual vitality I am describing.
3 This
expansion is necessarily proceedingin a preliminaryand piecemeal way and will depend
on the cumulativecontributionof dissertationsin progress. The conferenceon public healthrecently
sponsored by the Russian Centers of the Universities of Michigan and Toronto in Toronto in May
1986 is a good example of new work under way but still very much in the process of defining its
sub-disciplinarycredentials.

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 History Withthe Politics Left Out 387

1930s, armed with a knowledge of the archives for that period second to none,
Sheila Fitzpatrickis excellently fittedfor thattask.
The uneven developmentof social history internationallyplaces the Soviet
field at a distinct advantage, which the German field has already reaped ten
years before. For key methodological and conceptual debates have already
taken place among British, French, and American historians,whether concern-
ing highly technical mattersof method and procedure(quantitativeor otherwise)
or concerning more theoretical matters of how to integrate social history with
other regions of analysis;historiansof the Soviet Union ought to be able to enter
such discussions at a higher level, much more rapidly and much betterprepared
than their colleagues, who necessarily encounteredthe problems as they went
along.4
How successfully does Sheila Fitzpatrickmeet this challenge? Keeping
within my limits as an interestedoutsider,I have four points to make about the
terms in which Fitzpatrickseems to be constructingthe field. Two are historio-
graphical and concern the extent to which she is both accurately representing
and utilizing the existing historiographicalresources in the Soviet and cognate
fields. Two are substantiveand concern questions of theory-one general, and
one relatingmore specifically to the study of Stalinismas such.
To a historianof Germany,currentdebates concerningthe Stalinistsystem
in the 1930s bear an uncanny resemblance to controversies surroundingthe
natureof the Nazi state. These began in the 1960s with the pioneering work of
Hans Mommsen and MartinBroszat and have continued ever since, reaching a
notable climax in the late 1970s. Basically, the debate has been between
"intentionalists" and "structuralists," as the two camps have come to be
known. The former proceeded from what seemed to be the imposing centrality
of Hitler's directive personality,which both held together the confusing multi-
plicity of state and party governing agencies and supplied the coherent vision
behind the racialist,anti-Semitic,and imperialistdrive for a Nazi new order. In
this view, the main featuresof Nazi policy unfolded logically and consistentlyin
accordance with the intentions clearly expressed by Hitler's ideological state-
ments in Mein Kampfand elsewhere. This ideological drive was also linked to a
repressive monopoly of control exercised by the Nazi state at home. Moreover,
neitherthe sway of ideology nor Hitler's personalsupremacywere hamperedby
the ruthless rivalries within the Nazi leadershipduringthe ThirdReich; indeed,
these were deliberatelymanipulatedby Hitler to solidify his control. During the
1950s this approachbecame hitched to the theory of totalitarianism,whose for-
mulae were increasinglyused to encapsulatethe essence of Nazi domination.

4 In effect, German social historians have

already enjoyed such benefits of their "latecomer"
status, nicely replicating the nineteenth-centuryGerman developmental syndrome. Coming later,
from a startingpoint of greaterbackwardness,social historiansof Russia should also reap the same
advantages,thoughpresumablywithoutthe explosive consequencesthatbefell tsaristsociety.

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 388 TheRussian Review

The structuralistcritique began with meticulous analysis of the Nazi

state's institutional structures and decision-making processes; this analysis
quickly underminedthe simplicities of the totalitarianmodel. The argument
then became extended to state-society relations, indicating that there were real
limitations on the Nazis' ability to control and recast German society. This
claim proceeded partly along a center-peripheryaxis (existing social relations
and political structureswere often left unmolestedat the grass roots, particularly
in the countryside and particularlyin Catholic regions), partly in relation to
specific issues (for example, successful opposition to some aspects of Nazi reli-
gious and educational policies, or the reaction of popular opinion against the
euthanasiaprogram)and partly in relation to the resilience of the existing class
structure(throughthe accommodationsquickly reached between the Nazis and
the dominant classes, both in the economy and the key institutions). By now,
three key points have emerged from this revisionist research. One concerns the
"polycratic" as opposed to monolithic characterof Nazi rule, "a multidimen-
sional power-structure,in which Hitler's own authoritywas only one element (if
a very importantone)."5 In the most radical version, revisionists see Hitler's
role as that of a "weak dictator," who was essentially uninvolved in the main
business of governing and intervened in policy matters only very sporadically.
Secondly, the revisionist approachstresses the symbiosis of the Nazis' relation-
ship with the old elites and institutions,which was crucial to the regime's stabil-
ity, given the polycratic disorder of the inner-governmentrelations. Thirdly,
there is an argumentthat the decision-making process in the Third Reich was
driven along by ad hoc and improvised responses to new situationsratherthan
by the inexorableunfoldingof a consistent ideological commitment,in a process
best describedas "cumulativeradicalization."6
Now, the terms in which Fitzpatrick's new historians are constructing
their project are unmistakably reminiscent of this earlier revisionism in the
literature on Nazism. At one level, we would expect the terms of the two
revisionisms to be similar. Both groups of revisionists attempt to define the

5 Ian Kershaw, The Nazi

Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation,London,
1985, pp. 65ff.
6 The
concepts of the "weak dictator" and "cumulative radicalization" both originate with
Hans Mommsen. The following are key texts: MartinBroszat,The Hitler State, London, 1981; orig.
pub. 1969; Martin Broszat, "Soziale Motivation und Fiihrerbindungdes Nationalsozialismus," in
Vierteljahresheftefir Zeitgeschichte,vol. 18, 1970, pp. 392-409; Peter Huttenberger,"Nationalsozi-
alistische Polykratie," in Geschichte und Gesellschaft, vol. 2, 1976, pp. 417-442; Hans Mommsen,
"National Socialism: Continuityand Change," in WalterLaqueur,ed., Fascism: A Reader's Guide,
Harmondsworth, 1979, pp. 151-192; Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar Kettenacher, eds., Der
"Fiihrerstaat": Mythos und Realitdt, Stuttgart, 1981, esp., Hans Mommsen, "Hitlers Stellung im
NationalsozialistischenHerrschaftssystem"(pp. 43-72), Ian Kershaw,"The FuhrerImage and Polit-
ical Integration: The Popular Conception of Hitler in Bavaria during the Third Reich" (pp. 133-
163), Peter Huttenberger,"Interessenvertretungund Lobbyismus im Dritten Reich" (pp. 429-456).
The "center-periphery"argumentwas first put extensively in the Nazi context by EdwardN. Peter-
son in TheLimits of Hitler's Power, Princeton,1969.

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 History Withthe Politics Left Out 389

impact of state policies on society by exploring the complexities of the

decision-makingprocess and the disjunctions,inconsistencies, and accommoda-
tions between conception and execution or by differentiatingthe experience of
particularsocial groups and regions; these are the necessary terms of any social
analysis. Similarly, it is entirely proper to evaluate the Stalinist experience in
terms of the global societal indicatorsof change, concerning demography,fam-
ily structure, standard of living, geographical and social mobility, access to
social goods, and so on (a form of analysis with which Fitzpatrickhas become
especially identified),althoughsuch objective effects can only be a partialmeas-
ure of the process; here, too, there are interesting parallels with the German
literature.7Careful analyses of the social composition of the party and the new
bureaucraciesand of the effectiveness of the state apparatusesin relation to the
different social categories of Soviet citizenry are in themselves an unqualified
advance over the older literature. But it is by no means clear that an analysis
developed for Hitler's position in the Nazi state can sensibly be transposedto
addressthe place of Stalin in the Soviet Union. The NSDAP and the Bolsheviks
were very different parties, differently positioned within the ensemble of state
apparatuses, and engaged in different modes of societal incorporation and
socio-political mobilization; unless this political specificity is kept firmly in
view the limitationsof the totalitarianmodel will be incompletely transcended.
Indeed, if the terms of the discussion of Germanyare uncriticallyappropriated,
the new historians run the risk of reproducing one of that model's worst
features, namely the conflation of the Soviet and Nazi cases.8 More seriously,
there is no evidence that the new historians are fully aware of the debate on
Nazism in the first place. A more explicit awareness of this historiographical
convergence could only clarify the new revisionism's potential.
This brings me to my second point. I have no desire to rehabilitatethe
totalitarian model, and agree wholeheartedly with the general drift of

7 See the debates initiatedin the 1960s by David Schoenbaum(Hitler's Social Revolution,Lon-
don, 1966) and Ralf Dahrendorf(Society and Democracy in Germany,London, 1968), who argued
that objectively speakingNazism clearedthe way for modernizationby destroyingGermansociety's
historic encumbrancesagainst "modernity," from the social power of the Junkersto the persistence
of traditionalauthoritarianmentalities.
8 See, for instance, J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet CommunistParty
Reconsidered, 1933-1938, Cambridge, 1985, pp. 222f. (note 18), where the literatureon Nazism is
invoked in a question-beggingway. For a suggestive comparisonfrom within the totalitarianframe-
work, counterposing charismatic and ideological forms of legitimation, see Joseph Nyomarky,
Charisma and Factionalism within the Nazi Party, Minneapolis, 1967. The following should be
requiredreading for the new Soviet social historians: Kershaw, Nazi Dictatorship; Tim Mason,
"Intentionand Explanation: A CurrentControversyaboutthe Interpretationof National Socialism,"
in Hirshfeldand Kettenacker,eds., Der "Fiihrerstaat",pp. 23-42; Jane Caplan, "Politics and Polyo-
cracy: Notes on a Debate," in Charles S. Maier, Stanley Hoffmann, and Andrew Gould, eds., The
Rise of the Nazi Regime: Historical Reassessments,Boulder, 1986, pp. 51-55.

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 390 TheRussianReview

Fitzpatrick'sand other recent critiques of its deficiencies.9 But aside from the
rhetorical trap of the turn to social history (the substitutionof "society" for
"state" as the exclusive object of study, of which more below, togetherwith the
poorly thought-outappropriationof the German discussion mentioned above),
endless hammeringon the model's inadequacythreatensto obliteratethe basic
phenomenonit was devised to define. The more thoughtfuluses of the concept
(and the work of the 1950s and 1960s is by no means as uniformly bankrupta
body of writing as Fitzpatrickand Cohen would have us accept) pivoted on a
contrast between "open" and "closed" understandingsof politics; while this
contrast was usually politically loaded with formalistic and highly restrictive
notions of liberal democracy, it retains great potential value. Differently
deployed, and grounded in a more finely articulateddistinction between state
and civil society and in the developmentalprocesses that distinction connotes,
the contrast remains an excellent starting-point for conceptualizing the
specificity of the Soviet Union under Stalin. "Totalitarianism"did capture a
definite aspect of Stalinistreality, namely, the "total claim" of the regime on its
population,sanctionedby coercive forms of rule and accompaniedby a distinc-
tive repertoireof political demands. It amountedto an

attemptedcomprehensiveness of controland manipulation,in methods... of

dynamicplebiscitarymobilization..., and a radicalintoleranceof any focus of
coexistingalternative loyaltiesor anyformof institutional
"livingspace"except
undertheregime'sownterms,corresponding thereforeto theattemptedpoliticiza-
tionof all facetsof socialexperience.10

Obviously, putting this claim into practice was a different story, and the revi-
sionists are to be applaudedfor insisting on the complexity of the Soviet social
arena,althoughit is still remarkablethatit has taken so long for such elementary
points to be pursued. But the aspiration was in itself fundamentallyimportant,
because it decisively ordered the public and private environment by certain
repressive principles of conformity and mobilized "consent." To neglect this
overall context-not just the coercive state, but the political culture of
Stalinism-is to discardthe baby of analysis with the bathwaterof the model.1
In other words, the desire of the revisionists to drive a polemical wedge
between themselves and the older literaturethreatens to close their access to
some basic insights. In fact, they exhibit a distinct lack of generosity towards
earlier work, which badly obscures the importance of various contributions.
They slight E. H. Carr's History, although given the willingness of even left-
inclined commentatorsto disregard its centrality to Soviet history we should

9 See par excellence Stephen F. Cohen, "Scholarly Missions: Sovietology as a Vocation," in

Rethinkingthe Soviet Experience:Politics and History since 1917, New York, 1985, pp. 3-37.
10 Kershaw,Nazi
Dictatorship,p. 34.
1l Kershaw'sdiscussion is admirablyjudicious on this score. See his Nazi Dictatorship, pp. 20-
23, 32-35, 40f.

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 History With the Politics Left Out 391

perhaps not be surprised.12Likewise, they bypass Rudolf Schlesinger's legacy,

Alec Nove and the varied contributionof the Glasgow Soviet studies center,
and, for that matter,British scholarshipin general, which has taken a very dif-
ferent cast from the Sovietological tradition in the United States. Glaringly,
Fitzpatrickignores the researchemerging from the BirminghamCentrefor Rus-
sian and East EuropeanStudies, where Moshe Lewin, R. W. Davies, and their
colleagues have made an enormouscontributionto the social and economic his-
tory of precisely the Stalin period duringthe last two decades.13To go through
an entire survey of the prospects for a social history of Stalinism without once
mentioning the work of Lewin, except to lump it misleadingly with Trotskyist
discussions of bureaucracy,is rathershocking.14 I mentionthese authorsnot just
to do them justice, but because much of their work bears conceptually on the
termsFitzpatrickuses to constructthe field.15
What, then, can be said about the theoretical terms of her discussion, to
move on to the thirdof my points? Fitzpatrick'sarticle is clearly intended as a
manifesto of social history and should be judged accordingly,by the established
protocols of social history in general. For Fitzpatrick, doing social history
seems to involve two things: "breaking things down," by isolating particular
social groups, processes (like mobility), localities, and segments of society for
manageableand discrete study, in the belief that the accumulationof "case stu-
dies" will eventually recompose a picture of the whole; and the study of
"society" as opposed to "the state," by which she means government,
administration,and high politics in the narrowersense. Now, some aspects of
this program are unexceptionable-for example, the desire to place Stalinism

12 See, for example, Cohen's outrageousdismissal of Carr's scholarship(Rethinkingthe Soviet

Experience,pp. 34 and 171, n. 107, where to his discredithe also endorsesthe scurrilousand trivial-
izing attack by Norman Stone in London Review of Books, 20 January1983, pp. 3-8). Despite its
formal conclusion in 1929, Carr'sHistory provides an essential starting-pointfor understandingthe
dynamics of Stalinism, particularlywhen consideredin conjunctionwith his other writings. Serious
evaluation of his overall contributionis long overdue, particularlyin the United States where some
of the old Sovietological prejudices(it seems) have still to be overcome.
13 Detailed referencesare probablyunnecessary. But aside from the seminal researchof Davies
himself, the work of Nicholas Lampert,Stephen Wheatcroft,Vlad Andrle, John Barber,and others
should be mentioned. Much of this researchconverges on problems of managerialismand the for-
mation of the new working class in the context of the Five-Year Plans, i.e., questions not exactly
peripheralto the concerns of Fitzpatrick'sessay. In this connection the researchof Lewis Siegel-
baum on Stakhanovitesshould also be noted. For a fascinating insight into the British context of
Soviet studies, see R. W. Davies, "'Drop the Glass Industry': Collaboratingwith E. H. Carr," in
New LeftReview, no. 145, May-June,1984, pp. 56-70.
14 In the meantime,of course, Lewin has moved base from Birminghamto Philadelphia. See his
freshly collected essays, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar
Russia, New York, 1985. In its range and acuity the Introductionto this volume provides the most
challenging definition of the agenda for social historians of Stalinism yet, and it is remarkablethat
Fitzpatrickdecided to omit Lewin's work from her survey.
15 Individualreferencescould be multiplied. To take one small but significant example, it is a
complete mystery to me why neitherFitzpatricknor Getty mention A. L. Unger's note on the Great
Purges, "Stalin's Removal of the Leading Stratum,"in Soviet Studies,vol. 20, 1969, pp. 321-330.

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 392 The RussianReview

"in a social context." But her programis also accompaniedby the rhetoricof
"history from below" or history "from the bottom up," which in the meantime
has become far more problematic. In particular,if the turnto social history is to
be more than the spuriousradicalismof social history for social history's sake,
the new work needs to be explicitly linked to the largeranalysis of the structured
relationalfield between "below" and "above" in all its dimensions,ideological
and political as well as socio-economic. That linkage makes the difference, in
Eric Hobsbawm's words, between mere "social history" and the "history of
society."16 Unless this general issue is faced, the seemingly "more radical
instincts" of social historiansreferredto by Fitzpatrickwill remain more of a
posturethan a substantiveintellectualchallenge.
Of course, Fitzpatrickclaims to be attacking these general questions of
interpretation.But this attack is conceived in a serial ratherthan a holistic or
theorized way-first let's do the "real" social history and then worry about
defining the characterof the state or the social system; or, first let's get the state
out of the center stage and then (sometime in the future) worry about bringingit
back in. But the state is not something that can be removed or restoredby his-
torians at will, least of all (to invoke Antonio Gramsci) in a context where the
state-civil society relationshipwas so heavily weighted to the formerterm. One
of the lasting goods of the intellectualradicalismof the late 1960s (the founding
moment of contemporarysocial history) has been an expanded notion of "the
political" in social life-a radically de-institutionalizedunderstandingof poli-
tics, in which the questions of conformity and opposition, of the potential for
cohesion and stability in the social order, and of the strengthor fragility of the
dominantvalue-system were all displaced from the traditionalinstitutionalarena
for studyingthem (the state and public organizationsin the narrowersense) onto
a variety of settings previously regardedas "non-political," includingthe work-
place, the street, the criminal or deviant sub-culture,the recreationaldomain,
and above all the family and the home. With this displacement came an
expanded appreciation of the state's involvement in society, outgrowing the
boundariesof governmentin the conventional sense to embrace areas of social
adminstration,public health, the law, schooling, religious belief, the organiza-
tion of privatelife in families, sexuality, gender divisions, and the shifting boun-
darybetween the public and the private.
This redefinitionof "the political" has its pitfalls too. But it has funda-
mentally recast the social historian'sagenda and is intimatelyconnected to con-
tinuing discussions among Marxists, radical Weberians, and feminists in social

16 Eric J. Hobsbawm, "From Social

History to the History of Society," in Daedalus, no. 100,
1971, pp. 20-45. See also Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, "Why does Social History IgnorePolitics?"
in Social History, vol. 5, 1980, pp. 249-272, and for furtherreferences,Eley, "Some Recent Tenden-
cies of Social History," in Georg Iggers and Harold Parker,eds., InternationalHandbook of His-
toriography:ContemporaryResearch and Theory,Westport,CT, 1980, pp. 55-70.

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 History Withthe Politics Left Out 393

theory.17In other words, beyond the conventional business of governing, the

state is also involved in a largerprocess of social reproduction,of constructing
and reconstructingsocial relations on the broadestfront. In this sense-though
not, clearly, in the traditionalSovietological one"-politics and ideology" have
to be constitutivein the conceptualunderstandingof the new social history. By
constructinga mechanical distinctionbetween "society," on the one hand, and
state, ideology, and politics, on the other, Fitzpatrickbluntsthe potentialcutting
edge of this totalizing social-historical perspective. "Real" social history
belongs not on the one side of that dichotomy, but in the complex field of rela-
tions between the two. Otherwise, the new social history will not subvert,but
simply reinforce, the theoreticalassumptionsthat sustain the totalitarianmodel.
Rejecting the totalitarianmodel does not mean repudiatingall analysis of the
social totality.
This attenuatedunderstandingof social history reflects a larger deficit of
theory. If not the totalitarianmodel, then what? For Fitzpatrick,it is clearly not
to be Marxism,althoughher cursoryreference to theories of the bureaucracyis
hardly an adequate reckoning with the potential of Marxist analysis-another
indication, perhaps, of the circumscribedconceptual perspectives the Sovieto-
logical tradition so far permits. Indeed, considering the efforts fruitfully
expended by social historians in other fields, Fitzpatrick's prescriptions are
either disappointinglyuntheoreticalor else use a particulartheoreticalvocabu-
lary inappropriately.Whateverthe ultimate "modificationsin kolkhozpolicy,"
for instance, "informal 'social negotiation' between the regime and the peasan-
try" is hardlya suitable way of describingthe outcome of collectivization. The
minimal autonomies secured by a defenseless subordinategroup against a coer-
cive onslaught by the state are a far cry from the "negotiated" equilibriumof
contending socio-political forces in a liberal polity, whether conceptualizedby
some version of bargaining theory or a Gramscian framework of "hegem-
18
ony." It is precisely such provocativeuses of loaded concepts abstractedfrom

17 For an excellent example of how such theoreticaldiscussions can be incorporatedinto histori-

cal analysis, see GregorMcLennan,David Held and StuartHall, eds., State and Society in Contem-
porary Britain. A Critical Introduction,Cambridge, 1984, and, for additional references, Geoff
Eley, "Reading Gramsci in English: Observations on the Reception of Antonio Gramsci in the
English-SpeakingWorld, 1957-1982," in EuropeanHistory Quarterly,vol. 14, 1984, esp. pp. 441-
446,456-464.
18 Of course, some form of "informal negotiation" occurs in even the most repressive and
exploitative environments,including prisons and labor camps, but to imply that this has anythingto
do with questions of legitimacy and consent, responsivenessof the authorities,or popularcomplicity
(which seems to be the implication of Fitzpatrick'sargumentfrom the "social context") is highly
misleading. A useful parallel might be Tim Mason's work on the German working class under
Nazism. He takes great pains to suggest how Nazi policies could be constrainedby anxieties con-
cerning possible populardisaffection, and in similar terms after the economic recovery of the mid-
1930s some sections of skilled workers did achieve a social accommodationwithin the regime of a
sort. But Mason never loses sight of the overall repressivecontext of the Nazi state, where indepen-
dent forms of labor representationhad been destroyed,and which contrastedfundamentallywith the
corporativeforms of social negotiationunderthe WeimarRepublic. For an introductionto his work,

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 394 The RussianReview

sensible context that have drawnthe fire of Fitzpatrick'scritics in the past, and
to complain that the latterare intruding"explicit moraljudgments" where they
don't belong is to miss the main point. The objection is not to the avoidance of
a moral-politicalstance, but to the skewing of the conceptualagenda. To exam-
ine the social context of Stalinism is one thing. To do so in isolation from the
overpowering political determinationsof the 1930s by confining them to an
artificiallydemarcated"state" sphere,and then to arguethat this "reduce(s) the
role of terrorand coercion," is quite another. It is hardto see how the "social"
and the "political" can be integratedin this sense without some explicit theory
of the state, and for this purpose somethingmore will be needed than the latent
concept of pluralismthat seems to underlymuch of Fitzpatrick'sargument(as in
the vocabularyof "grievances, pressures,sources of support,responses").19
In effect, the last of my four points has already been broached by the
above and concerns precisely the aspect of Stalinism Fitzpatrickis most con-
cerned to deny, namely, its "statism," or the degree to which the state not only
initiated the massive transformationsand convulsions of the 1930s throughthe
coercive revolution from above, but also became aggressively imbricatedin the
very texture of social and cultural life. There is certainly much in Sheila
Fitzpatrick'ssurvey to applaud,from the general insistence on social context to
the continuing discussion of her own findings on social mobility and the stress
on the complex disjunctionsbetween policy making and policy implementation
on the ground. My criticism has been that it is incomplete-historiographically,
because it fails to give an accuratepictureof the range and strengthsof existing
work and fails to capitalize on the achievementsof social historianselsewhere;
theoretically,because it lacks a sense of the social totality and fails to theorize
the state-society relationship;substantively,because it fails to combine the dis-
cussion of social context with an appraisalof the Staliniststate. Moshe Lewin's
essays have explored such matterswith a singularintelligence over a period of
two decades in ways that anticipatevirtuallyevery one of Fitzpatrick'sconstruc-
tive recommendations. As he argues, it is in the explosive conjunctionof cul-
tural archaism, societal transformation(via industrializationand the "breaking
of the old rural nexus"), and statist bureaucratizationthat the social history of
Stalinismproperlybegins. Unless Fitzpatrickand her revisionistscome to terms
with this conjunction,the idea that "Stalinism had some social as well as politi-
cal dynamics" will remaina banal discovery.

see Tim Mason, "The Workers' Opposition in Nazi Germany," in History WorkshopJournal, no.
11, Spring 1981, pp. 120-137.
19 There seems to be an incipientprojectionbackwardsinto the 1930s of the pluralistapproachto
Soviet political process developed by various scholarsfor the post-Stalinera and to some extent the
1940s, but in the absence of any openly theorized discussion it is hard to know. For a recent
appraisalof such approaches,see Archie Brown, "Political Power and the Soviet State:Westernand
Soviet Perspectives," in Neil Harding,ed., The State in Socialist Society, London, 1984, pp. 51-103.
As for the question of "state coercion and terror,"Fitzpatrickclaims that the revisionists are now
"reworkingthe subject," but no evidence of this effort has enteredher essay.

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