Soviet and communist studies, or simply Soviet studies, is the field of regional and historical studies on the Soviet Union and other communist states, as well as the history of communism and of the communist parties that existed or still exist in some form in many countries, both inside and outside the former Eastern Bloc, such as the Communist Party USA. Aspects of its historiography have attracted debates between historians on several topics, including totalitarianism and Cold War espionage.
Soviet and Eastern European studies was also a form of area studies that included the study of various aspects of Soviet society, including agriculture, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), trade relations in the Warsaw Pact, cultural and scientific achievements, nationality policies, Kremlinology, human rights, policies towards religions, imperialism, and collectivisation. The wider field included independent study in universities and academia, as well as some support from the military and intelligence agencies. Major contemporary journals included Soviet Studies (now Europe-Asia Studies), Communisme, Journal of Cold War Studies, Slavic Review, and The Russian Review, among others. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the field shifted towards historical studies and began to include comparisons to the post-Soviet years as well as new data from the Soviet archives.
Historiography
The academic field after World War II and during the Cold War was dominated by the "totalitarian model" of the Soviet Union, stressing the absolute nature of Joseph Stalin's power. The "totalitarian model" was first outlined in the 1950s by political scientist Carl Joachim Friedrich, who posited that the Soviet Union and other communist states were totalitarian systems, characterised by personality cult and the almost unlimited powers of the "great leader," such as Stalin.
The "revisionist school," beginning in the 1960s, focused on relatively autonomous institutions that might influence policy at the higher levels. Matt Lenoe describes the "revisionist school" as representing those who "insisted that the old image of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state bent on world domination was oversimplified or just plain wrong. They tended to be interested in social history and to argue that the Communist Party leadership had had to adjust to social forces." These "revisionist school" historians such as J. Arch Getty and Lynne Viola challenged the "totalitarian model", which was considered to be outdated, and were active in the former communist states' archives, especially the State Archive of the Russian Federation related to the Soviet Union.
Some critics of the totalitarian model, such as Robert C. Tucker, formulated an alternative that also focused on the personality cult of Stalin. Tucker, influenced by George F. Kennan's writings on how the Soviet Union had reverted to a tsarist autocracy, emphasised that the Soviet Union was not guided by socialism or ideology but by the ruling class. This perspective emerged significantly from ideas of neo-Freudian psychoanalysis, evaluating Stalin as a deeply paranoid tyrant and in the process creating a more tsarist-type government. Moshe Lewin cautioned historians not to "over-Stalinise" the whole of Soviet history, while stating that the Soviet Union developed a "propensity for authoritarianism" after Marxian principles had failed to be established. Lewin argued that the Soviet Union recapitulated a "bureaucratic absolutism" almost Prussian in nature, where the "monarch was dependent on his bureaucracy".
Some revisionists also focused on contradictions of the Soviet regime, such as the idea that Soviet elites had betrayed communist ideals by forming top-down apparatuses, as well as demonstrating national chauvinism in oppressive policies or becoming anti-leftist despite the state imagery. One example was David Brandenberger's concept of National Bolshevism, which describe the Stalinist regime's turn against internationalism, with Russian cultural hegemony and xenophobia becoming the main ideological currents from the 1930s. Nikolai Mitrokhin highlighted the ethnocentrism and antisemitism of the CPSU and Moscow administration of the Soviet era.
According to John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, the historiography is characterised by a split between traditionalists and revisionists. "Traditionalists" characterise themselves as objective reporters of what they see as a "totalitarian nature" of communism and communist states. They are criticised by their opponents as being anti-communist in their eagerness to continue to focus on the issues of the Cold War. Alternative characterizations for traditionalists include "anti-Communist", "conservative", "Draperite" (after Theodore Draper), "orthodox", and "right-wing";
Haynes and Klehr argue that "revisionists" categorize all "traditionalists" as conservative to undermine liberal forms of this study, despite the liberal or even left background of many of the founding members of this view on communism, such as Draper and the Cold War liberals. Norman Markowitz, a prominent "revisionist", referred to traditionalists as "reactionaries", "right-wing romantics", and "triumphalists" who belong to the "HUAC school of CPUSA scholarship." Haynes and Klehr criticise some "revisionists" for characterising "traditionalists" as "lowercase" ideological anticommunists (communism in general) rather than anti-Communists (the historically established Communist parties). In their view, "revisionists" such as Joel Kovel imply that "traditionalists" in Communist studies are foremost opposing the establishment of an "ideal" Marxist society, when in practice, traditionalists have criticised the form of "real socialism" that existed in the Soviet system at the time, a form also criticised by many revisionists.
Kovel wrote that the "Soviet system, while nominally communist, was given its hierarchy, exploitation and lack of democracy, neither communist nor even authentically socialist." "Revisionists", characterised by Haynes and Klehr as historical revisionists, are more numerous and dominate academic institutions and learned journals. A suggested alternative formulation is "new historians of American communism", but that has not caught on because these historians would describe themselves as unbiased and scholarly, and contrast their work with that of anti-communist "traditionalists", whom they would term biased and unscholarly.
In Communist studies, post-Soviet access to archives, including Eastern Bloc archives and the Venona project's decrypts, also bolstered traditionalists' view on Cold War intelligence that the CPUSA was subsidised by the Soviet Union, and particularly before the 1950s aiding it in espionage, as well as the knowledge that extensive operations were conducted by atomic spies for the Soviet Union. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a United States Senator for the Democratic Party who led the Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy, played a major role in publicising the Venona evidence. Archives have also shed new light on inter-communist rivalries during the Cold War, such as the "Soviet Chinese spy wars" during the Sino–Soviet split.
Notable debates Totalitarianism, revisionism, and the Holodomor
J. Arch Getty's Origins of Great Purges, a book published in 1985 in which Getty posits that the Soviet political system was not completely controlled from the center and that Stalin only responded to political events as they arose, was a challenge to works by Robert Conquest and part of the debates between the "totalitarian model" and "revisionist school" of the Soviet Union. In an appendix to the book, Getty also questioned the previously published findings that Stalin organised the murder of Sergey Kirov to justify his campaign of Great Purge. The "totalitarian model" historians objected to the "revisionist school" of historians such as Getty as apologetics for Stalin and accused them of downplaying the Great Terror.
Lenoe responds that "Getty has not denied Stalin's ultimate responsibility for the Terror, nor is he an admirer of Stalin." As the leader of the second generation of the "revisionist school" or "revisionist historians", Sheila Fitzpatrick was the first to call the group of historians working on Soviet history in the 1980s "a new cohort of [revisionist school] historians." Most young "revisionist school" historians did not want to separate the social history of the Soviet Union from the evolution of the political system. Fitzpatrick explained in the 1980s, when the "totalitarian model" was still widely used, "it was very useful to show that the model had an inherent bias and it did not explain everything about Soviet society. Now, whereas a new generation of academics considers sometimes as self-evident that the totalitarian model was completely erroneous and harmful, it is perhaps more useful to show that there were certain things about the Soviet company that it explained very well."
Hannah Arendt, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Conquest, and Carl Joachim Friedrich were prominent advocates of applying the totalitarian concept to a comparison of Nazism and Stalinism. It was considered outdated by the 1980s and in the post-Stalinist era, and is seen as a useful term, but the old 1950s theory about it is defunct among scholars. Fitzpatrick and Michael Geyer criticise the concept and highlight the differences between Nazism and Stalinism. Henry Rousso defends the work of Friedrich et al., noting that the concept is both useful and descriptive rather than analytical, and concludes that the regimes described as totalitarian do not have a common origin and did not arise in similar ways.
Philippe Burrin and Nicholas Werth take a middle position between those who portray Stalin as all-powerful and those who portray him as a weak dictator. Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin take a longer historical perspective and regard Nazism and Stalinism not so much as examples of a new type of society, as Arendt, Brzezinski and Friedrich did, but more as historical "anomalies" or unusual deviations from the typical path of development that most industrial societies are expected to follow.
During the debates in the 1980s, the use of émigré sources and the insistence on Stalin's engineering of Kirov's murder became embedded in the two sides' position. In a review of Conquest's work on the Soviet famine of 1932–1933, especially The Harvest of Sorrow, Getty writes that Stalin and the Soviet Politburo played a major role, but "there is plenty of blame to go around. It must be shared by the tens of thousands of activists and officials who carried out the policy and by the peasants who chose to slaughter animals, burn fields, and boycott cultivation in protest."
In an analysis of scholarship surrounding the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, Jeff Coplon says that allegations by "mainstream academics", including Conquest, of genocide against the Soviet Union were historically dubious and politically motivated as part of a campaign by the Ukrainian nationalist community. In a letter to the editors, Conquest dismissed the article as "error and absurdity."
Michael Ellman states that in the end it all depends on the definition of genocide and that if Stalin was guilty of genocide in the Holodomor, then "[m]any other events of the 1917–53 era (e.g. the deportation of whole nationalities, and the 'national operations' of 1937–38) would also qualify as genocide, as would the acts of [many Western countries]", such as the Atlantic slave trade, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, among many others. Historian Hiroaki Kuromiya finds it persuasive.