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    The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review

    New Perspectives on StalinismAuthor(s): Sheila FitzpatrickSource: Russian Review, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Oct., 1986), pp. 357-373Published by: Blackwell Publishingon behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/130466.

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    The RussianReview,vol. 45, 1986, pp. 357-373

    DISCUSSION

    New Perspectiveson StalinismSHEILAFITZPATRICK*

    The nature of Stalinisml has always been a highly contentiousquestion,charged with political significancefor almost all disputants. In the early ColdWar period,when the political charge was most explosive, Soviet and Westerncommentators haredthe assumption hat whathademergedin the Soviet Unionin the 1930s was both the historically inevitable outcome of the BolshevikRevolution and a basically permanentand immutablenew Soviet system,thoughthey disagreedvehementlyabout its nature. From the Soviet standpoint,the revolution hadproducedsocialism. From the westernstandpoint excludinga small groupof Soviet sympathizers), he productwas totalitariandictatorship.From both, the system was the antithesis of Western democracy and was itsmajor deological competitoron the international cene.In the decades afterStalin's death,changes in the Soviet Union led bothsides to reassess theirjudgments, particularlyon the immutabilityof the Sovietsystem. Some featuresof Stalin's regime were repudiatedor criticized in theSoviet Union, and therewere Soviet attempts o separate he legitimate Lenin-ist outcome of the Revolution from the temporary excesses of the Stalinperiod. In the West, revision of Cold War premises in other areas finallypromptedSovietologists to reexamine the totalitarianmodel, which now cameundercriticism for inherentpoliticalbias as well as for inappropriatenesso con-temporarySoviet reality.2At the Bellagio conference organized by RobertC.Tucker in 1975, the term Stalinism was preferred to totalitarianism,althoughthe most vigorous objections to the totalitarianmodel related to thepre-Stalin period.3Since then, political scientists have tended to move awayfrom a totalitarian mage of the Soviet Union before and after Stalin, whiletacitlyacceptingits applicability o the Stalinistsystem.

    * An earlierversion of this article was presentedat the Third WorldCongressof Slavic Studiesin Washington,DC, November2, 1985.1 I use Stalinism here as a convenient termfor the new political,economic, andsocial struc-tures thatemergedin the Soviet Union afterthe greatbreak associatedwith collectivization and theFirstFive-YearPlan.2 For an excellent discussion of this reexamination,see AbbottGleason, 'Totalitarianism' in1984, RussianReview,vol. 43, 1984, pp. 145-159.3 See Robert C. Tucker, ed., Stalinism:Essays in Historical Interpretation,New York, 1977,especiallythe articleby StephenF. Cohen, Bolshevism andStalinism, pp. 3-29.

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    The Russian ReviewApartfrom the argumentaboutmodels, however, there have been otherdevelopments affecting the direction of Western Soviet scholarshipin recent

    years. The most relevant,for ourpurposes,is the entryof historians nto a fieldlong dominatedby political scientists, the study of the Soviet Union from theRevolution of 1917 to the end of the Stalinperiod. Of course,there were alwayssome historians n the field, includingsome very good ones. But the new cohortis larger,with more sense of itself as a groupand,in particular,a much strongerdesire to assertan identityas historians. That assertion of professionalidentityis a way of makingtwo points. First,the new cohort is telling otherhistoriansthatSoviet historyis a legitimatefield (earliera controversial ssue amongRus-sian historians),drawingattention o the recentimprovementn access to Sovietarchives and other primary sources, and emphasizing its own professionalqualifications. Second, it is distinguishingitself from the older generationofSovietologists,dominatedby political scientists' main interpretativeramework,the totalitarianmodel.Social historyis a majorfocus of interest for the new cohort of historians.This choice also involves assertion of separate dentityand implicitcriticismofthe earlier Sovietological preoccupationwith politics and ideology. Withoutgoing too deeply into the chicken-and-eggquestion,social historianshave par-ticularly good reason(or a particularlygood excuse) for dissatisfactionwith thetotalitarianmodel: the model's assertionof the primacyof politics made socialhistoryseem a backwater,remotefrom the real dynamicsof post-revolutionarySoviet development. In addition,the new cohort's identificationwith a broadercommunityof social historianshas the effect (intendedor otherwise)of provid-ing external reinforcementto its struggle against the perceived Cold Warbias of earlierSovietology. This particularbias is generallydislikedby socialhistorians n other fields, whose instinctsare often more radicalthanthat of thehistoricalprofessionas a whole.My purpose in this essay is to investigatethe likely impactof historians,particularlysocial historians, on the study of the Stalin period. This is aparticipant'sreport,as I am currentlyworkingon a social historyof the 1930s,but it shouldnot be read as a New Cohortmanifesto. It is both descriptiveandprescriptive,and the prescriptionsare largely addressedto other social histori-ans, who may well disagreewith them. The questionof interestto the broaderaudience of scholars in Soviet studies is what the new social historiansmayhave to say on one of the big traditional ssues of Sovietology-the natureanddynamicsof Stalinism.GeneralInterpretationsof Stalinist State andSociety

    The overarchingtheme thatWestern historians have commonly used forinterpretinghe Stalinperiodis stateagainst society, nachal'stvo againstnarod.This is a familiar framework n Russianhistoriography.Accordingto this view,the state acts on society, tryingto change and mold it in ways that serve statepurposes;society acts primarilyby re-acting to state pressure,which it tries to

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    New Perspectiveson Stalinismresist, evade, or subvert by passive resistance. In scholarshipon the Sovietperiod, particularly he Stalinera, the state-schoolapproachestablishedby Rus-sian historiansin the nineteenthcenturyhas been reinforcedby a compatibleconcept of twentieth-centuryAmerican political scientists, the totalitarianmodel. In this model, the Soviet totalitarianstate seeks to transformsocietyaccordingto Marxist-Leninistdeology, using the CommunistPartyas an agentof mobilizationandreinforcing ts dictates withpolice coercion and terror. Thesociety is reduced to an object, inert andfeatureless,which is shapedandmani-pulatedby the energeticaction of the totalitarian egime.This view of state/society relations obviously encourages scholars toinvestigatestate mechanismsrather han social processes. Soviet studies,conse-quently,have focussed stronglyon state andparty, dealing with society almostexclusively in a context of state andpartyintervention. The scholarlyliteratureon the Stalin periodis full of studies of such intervention: forced collectiviza-tion, subordination f tradeunions,labordisciplinelaws, the developmentof theStakhanovitemovementunderparty sponsorship,harassmentof the old intelli-gentsia,the establishmentof partycontrolsover culture andscholarship,censor-ship, the Great Purge (seen as Stalin's war against the nation, in Ulam'sphrase),4and so on. Some of these studies also deal with resentful socialresponsesto state intervention,as in the case of peasantsandcollectivization orthe intelligentsia and cultural controls. But this is the only kind of socialresponse that is generally discussed, and social processes unrelated to stateinterventionarevirtuallyabsent from the literature.In the interventionistepisodes, society is seen as a victim of state action,and its reactionis a mixture of covert hostility and passive acceptanceof forcemajeure. Scholarshave explainedthe lack of more effective societal resistance(both to the tsaristand Soviet state) in termsof the traditional underdevelop-ment of social classes and social organization n Russia, and the state's ruth-less use of coercion and terror. In addition,some theoristslike HannahArendthave arguedthat totalitarian egimes atomize society, destroyingor subordi-natingall the institutionsand associational forms thatmight lend themselves toactive social resistance.

    Society is often an undifferentiatedwhole in Sovietological writing,since internalsocial relationshipsandprocesseshave little relevance to the total-itarianmodel. For practicalexpository purposes, however, it is necessary onoccasionto identify partsof the whole to which specific state interventionistactsare addressed. The terminology used usually corresponds to Soviet usage,namely, workers, peasants, and intelligentsia. These are the twonon-antagonisticclasses and the stratum identified as the basic groupingsof Soviet society in the Stalin Constitutionof 1936. An earlier Soviet usage,more rigorously Marxist, subdividedthe peasantryinto class groups rangingfrom kulak to poor peasant, and also distinguished between an old

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

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    The Russian Reviewbourgeois and new proletarian intelligentsia. Although Sovietologistsgenerally dislike these classifications andput the termsin quotationmarks,it is

    virtually impossible to avoid using them when describing state policies:kulaks, for example, may be an ambiguoussocial group,but whatother labelcan be used for the targetsof the dekulakization policy? Thus,perhaps roni-cally, Sovietologistshave fallen into the habit of dealing with Soviet society interms of Marxist-and even Stalinist-Marxist--classcategories.At times, readingWesternscholarshipon the Stalinperiod,one mightalsoconclude that Sovietologists have accepted Stalinistpremises about the disap-pearanceof class antagonisms n Soviet society. Inter- and intra-classconflictsand tensions are as rarein the Western totalitarian model as they are in theSoviet socialist one. However, there is one notableexceptionto this rule. Infollowing Trotsky (The Revolution Betrayed) and Djilas (The New Class),Sovietologists sometimes refer to an antagonistic relationship between anoppressedsociety and an exploiting,privilegedbureaucratic lite. This is essen-tially a Marxist version of the old state-against-society mage (from which, infact, Trotsky probably derived it).5 Its appeal to Sovietologists is no doubtrelatedto its congenial political implications,since bothTrotskyandDjilaswereindictingthe Stalinist system as well as analyzing it. All the same, its place inthe conventional wisdom of Sovietology is somewhat anomalous. This may bethe point of origin of another curious Sovietological habit in writing aboutSoviet society, which is to attachnegativeconnotations o the term bourgeoisand generally positive ones to proletarian. Marxist prejudice, as well asMarxist and Stalinist-Marxistanalysis, have found a modest place in the inter-stices of Sovietology's totalitarianmodel.Social History Approaches

    a) Problemsof structureand social interactionIt is too early to reporton currentwork in progress n this field, since such

    work on the Stalinperiodis only just beginning. Nevertheless,it is importantoconsider these problems,as the sketchy existing analyticalframeworkoutlinedabove is clearly inadequate,being the productof casual borrowingfrom Sovietand other Marxist sources by Sovietologists whose main attention was else-where, and its revision may have significance for our understandingof thenatureof Stalinism. I have drawn to some extent on my own experienceof theproblemsof structuren planninga book on the social historyof the 1930s,6and5 Earlier,in his analysis of the 1905 Revolution, Trotskyhad portrayed he tsarist state as an

    essentially free-standingentity, not representativeof any class in the society but opposed to thesociety as a whole. In a review of the last volume of Trotsky's1905 (Krasnaianov', 1922, no. 3),Pokrovskyaccusedhim of borrowing his non-Marxistconceptfromone of the historiansof the stateschool, the liberal P.N. Miliukov.6 The workingtitle of this book, which should be finishedin 1986, is Stalin's Russia:A SocialHistoryof the 1930s.

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    New Perspectiveson Stalinismon relevant discussions at recent meetings of Soviet social historians in theUnited States.7But it is also possible to make deductionsaboutlikely directionsof futureworkon the basis of social history'sown logic.Social historiansare in the business of analyzing society, which amongotherthingsmeansbreaking t down into constituentparts. They areunlikelytobe satisfiedwith hypotheses involving an undifferentiated society, as in thestate-against-societydichotomy discussed earlier. They will probablywant tomake finer distinctions than those of Stalinist-Marxistanalysis, with its threecategories of working class, peasantry, and intelligentsia ; they arebound to object in particularto the last, hybrid category, which puts lowlyoffice-workers n the same groupas professionalsandadministrators.They willsuretyfind it difficultto accept the idea of a society withoutsignificant nternaltensionsand conflicts (as in the non-antagonistic class relationshipsof Stalin-ist Marxism),or of a society so inert thatall the dynamicsare external(as in thetotalitarianmodel).The first challenge for social historians of the Stalin period will be todecide what kind of social breakdown is most appropriate. The Stalinist-Marxist breakdownis clearly simplistic, especially when compared with thecomplex class analysisusedby Soviet Marxists n the 1920s. On the otherhand,it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Soviet society actuallyunderwenta GreatSimplification n the course of Stalin's revolution from above at the begin-ning of the 1930s. Kulaks, nepman, and small tradersdisappearedfrom theroster,groupslike artisansandpeasantcraftsmenwere dispersed,and collectivi-zation levelled old distinctionswithin the peasantry. Perhapsthe result of thiswas to producea very simple social structure,as well as a damagedone. But itis also reasonableto assumethat,as the society recovered from the blows of theFirstFive-Year Planperiod,it became morecomplex.

    Trotskyand other Marxist critics have drawn our attentionto the emer-gence of a new social hierarchy n the 1930s. At the top of the hierarchy,inTrotsky's view, was the bureaucracy, a quasi-rulingclass by virtue of itscontrol (thoughnot ownership)of the means of production,possessing materialprivileges that set it apartfrom the rest of society. This idea has been quiteinfluentialamong Westernsocial historians.8However, some of scholars havealreadynotedthat the bureaucracytself was hierarchical, o that the social posi-tion andclass interests of those at the bottom were quite different from those at

    7 I have in mindparticularlyhe last two meetingsof the NationalSeminaron the Social Historyof 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 theAdvanced Study of the Soviet Union, Columbia University, in the spring of 1985, and the thirdworkshop n this series,held in Austinin March1986 under hejoint sponsorshipof the InternationalStudiesProgram,Universityof Texas atAustin,and the Harriman nstitute.8 See, for example, Moshe Lewin, The Social Backgroundof Stalinism, in Tucker, ed.,Stalinism,pp. 111-136.

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    The Russian Reviewthe top, perhapsat times directly opposed to them.9Trotsky,to be sure, had inmind the higherlevel of bureaucracywhen he talkedof a new rulingclass. Buthow high, and on whatbasis can a cut-off point be drawn? Soviet statisticiansin the Stalin periodsometimes used a category of leading cadresand special-ists, 10 based on nomenklatura distinctions, which might coincide withTrotsky's group (though state/partynomenklatura s an unsatisfactorycriterionfor class membershipin Marxist terms). But there is also the problemof theprofessional and technical intelligentsia, whose members were often but notnecessarily employed by state institutions, sometimes in a bureaucratic(administrative)role and sometimes simply as specialists. This whole groupsharedthe materialprivilegesof the higherstratumof the bureaucracyandhad ahigh level of education and other elite characteristics. When social historianscome to grips with the problem of social hierarchy, they will have to decidewhat kind of elite they are looking for-a Marxist rulingclass, or simply thegroupwith highest status and economic advantages n the society. The answerhas greatsignificancefor ourunderstanding f the social dynamicsof Stalinism.There are other forms of emerginghierarchicalstratification hatcall forclose investigation. The positionof Stakhanoviteswithinthe workingclass is aparticularly nterestingissue, but there are also a multiplicityof distinctions tobe made between unskilled and skilled labor, new workers(fresh from thevillages) and old ones, andworkers n differentoccupationsandbranchesofindustry,not to mention the distinctionsamong convict,11 semi-free, and freelaborto be found on the new constructionsites. The collectivized peasantsandruralsociety in general presentan even morepromisingfield of investigationforthose interested in emerging social hierarchies. The kolkhoz itself was ahierarchicalstructure,with a top stratumof white-collar workers (chairman,accountant,and so on), a middle stratumof skilledblue-collar workers ike trac-tor driversandmechanics, and, at the bottom,the rank-and-filekolkhoznikiwhodid the actual field workand hadonly traditionalpeasantskills. Ruralsociety ina broader sense underwent significant changes after collectivization, as thenumbersand proportionalweight of white-collar and administrativepersonneland blue-collarworkersincreased,while those of peasants(kolkhozniki nd edi-nolichniki) diminished. Class differentiation, that favorite subject of theagrarianMarxistsin the 1920s, is really a muchmore appropriateheme for the

    9 This point was stronglymadeby ArchGettyat the firstand thirdworkshopson Social Historyof the StalinPeriod(see above,note 7). The approachs employedin Getty'spublicationsandin theworkof GaborRitterspom.10 Fordefinitionanddataon this category,see Sostav rukovodiashchikhabotnikov spetsialistovSoiuzaSSR,Moscow, 1936.1 In his comment on this paperas presentedat the Third World Congress of Slavic Studies,StephenF. Cohen suggested that convict laborers should be considered the bottomstratum n thegeneralhierarchyof Soviet society in the Stalinperiod. I am inclinedto agreewith him and with theimpliedcriticism of social historians or disregardinghis group.

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    New Perspectiveson Stalinism1930s. Indeed, it is arguablethat Russia's long-awaited ruralbourgeoisiefinallymaterializedn the 1930s, albeitnot in the expectedform.

    Of course the discovery that Stalinist society was hierarchicallystratifiedis scarcely unexpected(what society is not?) and in itself is unlikely to changeanyone's thinkingaboutthe natureof Stalinism. But on whatprincipleswas thestratificationbased? Whatkind of relations existed between different strataandclasses? How could individuals improve their social and economic status, orprotect themselves from the sudden reversals of fortune that often overtookthose who were successful in this society? The answers to such questions, ifsocial historians can find them, may well be highly relevant to our generalunderstanding f Stalinism.We alreadyhave certaingeneral notions about statusin Stalinistsociety:that the kolkhoz peasantry ranked lowest, both for economic reasons andbecause the kolkhoznikiwere not issued internal passports, which impliedsecond-classcitizenship;that rural n general ranked ower thanurban;and thatthe white-collar professional and administrativegroup was accorded higheststatus,which is often held to indicate the embourgeoisement of the Stalinistregime. The last premise,of course,begs a questionthatis relevant to all statusissues, namely, whetherthe regime was imposing its values on the society orvice versa.

    Privileged access to material goods and services was a concomitantofelite statusin Stalinistsociety.12This point may be carried urther. It is possiblethat, in this society where scarcityand privationwere the norm, the degree ofpreferentialaccess to deficit commoditieswas the major determinantof statusdistinctions,or rather,of those statusdistinctionsthat were peculiarly Stalin-ist, being productsof the revolutionfrom above and its aftermathratherthan reflecting Bolshevik-revolutionaryor traditional Russian values. Whilesome aspects of this questionare difficult to investigatebecause various formsof elite privilege were concealed from the public eye (in contrast to the highlypublicizedprivileges of Stakhanoviteworkers and peasants),the task of deter-mining degrees of preferentialaccess for different social and occupationalgroupsis greatlyfacilitatedby the existence of formalrationingsystemsthathadexactly this function. Urbanrationingwas in force for approximatelyhalf theStalin period-from 1929 to 1935, and again from 1941 to 1947-as well asearlier, during World War I and the Civil War years. A comparisonof thechanging ration prioritiesof social and occupationalgroups over this periodshould contributea great deal to our understandingof the regime's changingsense of statushierarchies.Moreover,the 1929-35 rationingsystemwas a pecu-liar hybridof industrialworking-classand white-collarelite priorityaccess via

    closed distributionpoints (zakrytyeraspredeliteli)servingspecific groupsoffactory workers, engineers, government officials, and so on; here social12 See MervynMatthews,Privilege in the Soviet Union: A Studyof Elite Life-Stylesunder Com-munism,London,1978.

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    The Russian Reviewhistorianswill find much to illuminatethe genesis andevolving organizingprin-ciples of Stalinist social structureandprivilege.Of course, formalpriorityof access cannotbe equatedwith actual access.In practice,everyone working in state and cooperative trade,or in the supply-and-procurementsdepartmentsof industrialenterprisesand other state institu-tions, had informalprivileges of access to goods that exceeded those of theircounterpartsworking outside the commercial sphere. This fact points up theimportanceof making vertical as well as horizontal distinctions in our socialanalysis. So far, scholars have notedonly a few significantverticaldistinctions,for example,between administrators nd technicalspecialistsin the white-collarelite. But the vertical distinctions between commercial and non-commercialoccupationsat all levels are of great interest,not only because the commercialsector was largebut also because it hadmanyunusualcharacteristics.Because of its second economy (black market)connections and resi-dual NEP spirit, employmentin the commercial sector carried low prestigedespite its material advantages; it constituted an exception to our generalhypothesislinking social status with preferentialaccess to goods. Low prestigewas most noticeable at the bottomof the commercialhierarchy,with jobs likesales clerk. At the top, managersof large department tores,commercial direc-tors of enterprisesand the like clearly had entree to the broadersocial elite,thoughthis advantagewas partlyrelated to the services they could render otherelite members. Advancement n the commercialsector was evidentlymuchlessdependenton education and party membership-the two standardcriteriaforupwardmobility in the Stalin period-than was the case in other spheres. Allthis suggests more than an interestingspecial case, understandably eglected bySoviet historians,for study by Westernsocial historians. It raises the possibilitythatwe are still greatlyunderestimatinghe diversityandcomplexity of Stalinistsociety, partlybecause we have implicitly acceptedsome of the limitations andprejudicesof Stalinist-Marxist nalysisof it.

    b) Implicationsof High Social MobilityUntil recently, social mobility was a neglected theme in Soviet studies.WesternSovietologistsoften assumedthat the process was irrelevant n a totali-tariansociety, or for thatmattera society that claimed to be buildingsocialism.MarxistsanalyzingSoviet society were equally uninterested, ince social mobil-ity is not a traditionalMarxist concept. My discussion of regime-sponsoredupwardmobilityinto the elite in Educationand Social Mobilityandelsewhere13drew attentionto the subject,but some scholarswere uneasy about the positivevalue-loadingof the termin Americanusage (where upwardmobilityis closelylinked with ideas of democracy and opportunity),and others were more struckby the aspectof regimesponsorship han the processitself.

    13 SheilaFitzpatrick,Education and Social Mobilityin the Soviet Union,1921-1934, Cambridge,1979, and Stalin and the Makingof a New Elite, 1929-1938, SlavicReview,vol. 38, 1979.

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    New Perspectiveson StalinismHowever, it is the process itself and its remarkabledimensions that are

    likely to preoccupysocial historiansof the Stalinperiod. This society is impos-sible to analyze adequatelyin purely static terms because of the exceptionalsocial andgeographicalmobilityof the population. Tens of millions of peasantsmoved to towns and became workersin the 1930s. A large segment of the oldworking class moved into white-collar and managerial occupations. Privatetradersandbusinessmenwere forced out of their old occupationsand had to findnew ones; kulaks were deportedfrom the villages and resettled in distantregions, where many became workers in the new industrialenterprises. TheWorldWar II andpostwardemobilizationof the armyled to further arge-scalemobility. But war and specific regime policies encouragingvarious types ofmobility explainonly partof the generalphenomenon. More thananythingelse,it was a necessary by-productof the Soviet Union's rapid industrialization,which createdmorewhite-collar,professional,andmanagerial obs, at the sametimeexpandingthe blue-collar abor force anddrawingpeasants nto the towns.For this reason, the general trend of mobility in the Stalin period wasupward, despite the occurrence of downward mobility from the privilegedclasses afterthe Revolution anddramaticepisodes of elite purgingin the 1930s.As I have arguedelsewhere, the phenomenonof large-scale upward mobilityneeds to be incorporatednto our interpretation f Stalinism,because the Stalin-ist regime claimed andalmostcertainlyreceived credit for enablingmembers ofthe lower classes to improvetheir social position.14But this is not the only wayin which recognition of high social mobility may affect our generalizationsaboutStalinism.One familiargeneralizationconcerns the weakness of social classes andassociationalbonds,andthe consequentinabilityof society to resist statepoweror curb its expansion. Many scholars have regardedthis atomization orsocial fragmentationas partof the dynamics of totalitarianism. But it can belinked equally-and not necessarily incompatibly-with the enormous socialmobilityof the early Stalinperiod,which inevitablyweakened traditionalasso-ciational bonds and reduced class consciousness and the capacity for socialorganization.To take an obvious example,a workingclass consisting largelyofyesterday'speasants(as was the case of the Soviet workingclass in the 1930s)is unlikely to generateassertive labor unions. A peasantrywhose young menare leaving to workin the towns may offer comparatively ittle aggressive resis-tance to stateinitiatives,even when the policy is as unpopularas collectivizationappearsto have been in the countryside. A new elite, such as thatemerging inthe Soviet Union in the 1930s, will not have the same espritde corps, indepen-dence and,habitsof collective self-assertionas one that is long established andfirmlyentrenched.

    14 In Educationand Social Mobility,pp. 16-17 and254, andin Stalin andthe Makingof a NewElite, pp. 401-402.

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    The Russian ReviewThe high level of state coercion characteristicof the Stalin period isanotherbasic Sovietological theme that deserves reconsideration n the context

    of high social mobility. These two phenomenaclearly had a complex inter-dependentrelationship,and neither can be adequatelytreated without referenceto the other. The casual connections worked bothways. On the one hand,statecoercion producedinvoluntarysocial mobility, as in the deportationof kulaks,the expropriationof nepmen, the Great Purge and the deportationof classenemies from the newly acquiredwestern territoriesin the 1940s. On theother hand, spontaneoussocial mobility on the scale of the early '30s createdorganizationaland controlproblemsfor the statethatprompted urthercoerciveactions,as in the case of the labordisciplinemeasures andthe 1932 passport aw(originally introducedto preventmass exodus from village to town as faminegripped argeareasof the countryside).While the totalitarian view of Stalinist rule correctly emphasizes theregime's transformationalist spirations n explainingcoercion and terror,it issurely misleadingto imply that,in the absence of effective societal resistance tothe state, the coercion was gratuitousand unrelatedto any social problem. Itwas relatedto an acute social problembut thatproblemwas excessive mobilityrather han resistance. Moreover,the mobilityof the populationwas as much animpedimentto the regime's efforts at social engineeringas a consequence ofthem. For all its totalitarian ambitions and repressive policies, the actualcontrol exercised by the Stalinistregime was often limited, as social historianslooking from the bottom up have begun to point out.15One of the limitationswas that controls were difficult to apply to rootless and unpredictablymobilesegmentsof the population. Another was thatthe same rootlessness and mobil-ity were characteristicof the Communists and bureaucraticcadres who weresupposedto implementthe regime's policies andcontrols.16A related theme in the literatureon totalitarianism, he importanceofindoctrination n the Stalinistsystem, may also be seen from a new perspec-tive by social historians. The regime was undoubtedlydisposedto indoctrinateits citizens, not just in the sense of teaching Marxist-Leninistdogma but alsoand more significantlyin the broader sense of inculcatingnew social and cul-tural norms. However, this disposition need not be regarded solely as totali-tarian imperative: the stress on indoctrinationand education had a practicalsocial justificationas well, and could even be interpretedas a responseto socie-tal demands, n addition o meetinga perceivedstateinterest.In Stalinist society, large numbersof citizens needed to learnnew skillsand masternew social roles because they hadrecentlychangedtheirsocial posi-tion throughupwardmobility. These needs were a responsibility or the regime,on the one hand, and a burdenon 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.

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    New Perspectiveson Stalinismassimilateand train new workers,but at the same time new workers fresh fromthe villages needed to learn the rules of urban and factory life in order to sur-vive. The same imperativesappliedat all levels of society startingwith the kol-khoz,where new conventionshad to be masteredby officials andpeasantsalike.At the top level of society, new elite members had to learn technical andmanagerialskills as well as acquiring he kul'turnost'appropriateo theirstatus.The term indoctrination s clearly too narrow for the process of socialand political vospitanie,not to mention basic educationand technical training,that absorbedso much of the regime's and society's attention n the 1930s. Butthe subject,however labelled, is important;and social historiansare unlikelytorestrict t to transmissionof ideology or acceptthe notionthatsociety's role waspurely passive. A morepromising approach s suggestedby VeraDunham,whodescribes the emerging middleclass values of the Stalinperiodas the resultof negotiation( the Big Deal ) between the regime and the society's elite.17Asimilarprocess of negotiation might be discernedin the developmentof normsfor the new kolkhozy, or the regime's originalintentions were clearly modifiedin response to village realities and the traditionalpatternsof peasant life. Insome cases-perhaps includingthat of the Stalinistelite-negotiation of valuesmight be seen as a three-way process, with the arrivistes (new workers,newelite members,and so on) learningfrom theirprecursors(old workers, bour-geois intelligentsia)underregime supervision,while addingtheir own contri-butionto the culturalmix.

    c) The View fromBelow : Social Initiatives andResponsesSocial historians are generally inclined to prefer the perspective frombelow -that is, from within the society, or even from the grass-rootsviewpoint of ordinary ower-class citizens-to the governmentaland elite per-spective from above. Those who are now working on the Soviet periodareno exception; indeed, their interest in history from below may be accentuated

    because of the reactionagainsttotalitarian-modelcholarship,whichimposedanextreme version of the perspective from above on Soviet studies. Revi-sionist social and political historians of the younger generation like ArchGetty, Roberta Manning,and Gabor Rittersporn18 counterposelocal pictures-from-life (often drawnfrom the SmolenskArchive, which is our majoraccessi-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 SovietFiction, 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, Government n the Soviet Countryside n theStalinistThirties: The Case of Belyi Raion in 1937, Carl BeckPapers in Russian and East Euro-

    pean Studies,no. 301, Pittsburgh,n.d.;GaborT. Rittersporn, The StateAgainst Itself: Social Ten-sions and Political Conflict in the U.S.S.R. 1936-1938, Telos, no. 41, 1979, and Societe etappareild'6tatsovietiques 1936-1938: Contradictions t interferences, AnnalsE.S.C.,no. 4, 1979.

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    The Russian Reviewgeneralizationsearlier derived from central policy pronouncementsand laws,andnote the vastdiscrepanciesbetweenthem.

    Of course, the perspective from below inevitably differs from that fromthe top; policies are never implementedexactly in the manner that policy-makers intend; local conditions vary, so that the experience of one region orlocality cannot be assumed to be typical. I think, however, there is little doubtthat the accumulationof local and specific case studieswill significantlychangesome of the conventional wisdom on the Stalinperiod. Stalinistpolicy-makers,like Western Sovietologists, were far removed from Soviet society, and prob-ably thereforeexceptionally proneto schematic error n theirperceptionof it.But the interesting question is how far revisionism based on the perspec-tive from below can takeus on the Stalinperiod. In the acceptedSovietolog-ical view, the great social changes of this era were productsof radicalpoliciesinitiated by Stalin's regime without significant social support and ruthlesslyimplementedwithoutregardto society's responses. The paradigm s revolu-tion from above, Stalin's own termfor forced-paceindustrialization,ollectiv-ization,and othersimilarlyambitiousandsocially disruptivepolicies of the FirstFive-Year Plan period. The same framework s appliedto the GreatPurgesofthe late 1930s. A perspective from below might suggest alterationsofgreateror less magnitudeor lead scholarsto abandon he frameworkaltogether.

    Three types of alternativeexplanationscan be distinguished n publishedrevisionist work and informaldiscussions. The firstemphasizesthat the regimehad less actual control over society than it claimed, that its actions were oftenimprovisedrather hanpartof a granddesign, thatimplementationof its radicalpolicies often divergedfrom the policy-makers'intentions,and that the policieshad many unplannedand unanticipated ocial consequences. The second, tak-ing revisionism a step further,sees the regime's policies as appealingto definitesocial constituencies,respondingto social pressuresand grievances,and liableto be modified in practice throughprocessesof informalsocial negotiation. Thethirdandmostchallenging approachwould describe suchpolicies as the productof initiative from below ratherthan attributing hem to the regime's initiativefrom above.The first approachis not necessarily incompatiblewith the concept ofrevolution from above or even the totalitarianmodel, if totalitarianismstakenas an ideal type rather han a literaldescriptionof historicalreality. It is,after all, impossible to imagine an actual historical situationin which politicalcontrol was absolute, laws were implementedto the letter and in completeaccordancewith the legislators'intentions,andthe political leaders had a granddesign detailed enough to cover every contingency. Such hypotheses (thoughnot absent from past Sovietological scholarship) fly in the face of commonsense.

    However, a number of recent scholarly works emphasizing improvisa-tion, accident, inefficiency, and practical failures of regime planning and

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    The Russian ReviewThe second revisionist approach puts regime policy in a social context,and assumes that the social context (grievances,pressures,sources of support,

    responses)must to some degree shape, constrain and modify the actions of thepartyleadership. The pioneeringwork was Vera Dunham's thesis of the BigDeal between the new elite and the regime as a source of Stalinistmiddleclass values. 26 This was followed by work on the CulturalRevolu-tion27and upwardmobility into the elite via the educationpolicies of the FirstFive-Year Plan, which, I argued,were both an appeal to one of the regime'sbasic social constituencies and a sourceof future social support.28 he regime'srelationshipwith the working class duringthe First Five-Year Plan has sincebeen investigated n several studies,29 nd there is workin progresson the socialcontextof collectivization.30Ritterspor andGettyhave suggestednew perspec-tives on the GreatPurges, linking them in differentways with tensions withinthebureaucracyandwithpopulargrievances againstthe new Soviet bosses.31This approachchallenges the totalitarian-model ssumption hatsociety isirrelevant to an understandingof Stalinistpolitical processes. It also tends toreduce the role of terror and coercion, if only by suggesting that other factorsare relevantas well, and this has been one of the most controversialaspects ofthe revisionist argument. Critics have asserted that any reduction of the tradi-tionalemphasison terroramountsto white-washingof the Stalinistregime, or atleast unacceptableabdicationof moraljudgment.32This is a complicatedissue,since historiansusuallydo 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 judgment33and

    26 Dunham,In Stalin's Time,ch. 1. For adiscussion of the technicalintelligentsiaand the regimethat also touchesquestionsof values,see KendallE. Bailes, Technologyand SocietyunderLenin andStalin: Originsof the SovietTechnicalIntelligentsia,1917-1941, Princeton,1978.27 SheilaFitzpatrick, d., CulturalRevolution n Russia 1928-1931, Bloomington,IN, 1978.28 Fitzpatrick,Educationand Social Mobility.29 Forexample, LynneViola, The Campaignof the 25,000ers: A Studyof the Collectivizationof Soviet Agriculture,1929-1931, Ph.D. dissertation,Princeton, 1984;HiroakiKuromiya, Politicsand Social Change in Soviet Industry during the 'Revolution from Above,' 1928-1931, Ph.D.dissertation,Princeton,1985.30 RobertaManning s interested n thequestionof social supportandantagonismswithin the vil-lage communityat the end of the 1920s. In a paperon Peasants AfterCollectivization presentedat the second workshopon Social Historyof the Stalin Period(ColumbiaUniversity, April 1985), Isuggestedthat the modifications n kolkhozpolicy in 1930-35 werethe outcomeof informal socialnegotiation between theregimeand the peasantry.31 Getty, Originsof the GreatPurges;Rittersporn, The StateAgainstItself.32 See, for example,L. Kolakowski's note on Sovietologicalrevisionistsin Survey,vol. 21, no. 4,1975, pp. 87-89, or LeonardSchapiro'sreview of my Russian Revolution n TimesLiterarySupple-ment,March18, 1983, p. 269.33 A good deal of criticismon avoidanceof explicit moraljudgmenthas been directed at me-andcorrectly, n a sense, since I have anidiosyncraticpositionon this issue that is no morecongenialto most otherrevisioniststhanit is to our critics. My original,and somewhatnaive, notion was thathistoriansand social scientists were boundby a kind of Hippocraticoathto be as objectiveand non-partisanas was humanly possible. I retreated rom this position after being deluged by counter-

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    New Perspectives on Stalinismpoliticalbias, there is a real problemhere for social historians,namely, how todeal with state coercion and terror n the Stalinperiod. The first reactionprob-ably was (as the critics suspected) to steer clear of the subjecton the groundsthat it had been sufficiently or even excessively emphasized by the previousgeneration. But the more recent trend34 has been toward reworking thesubject-this time, it is hoped, without some of the earlier polemicalexcesses-in the context of social history.The controversies surroundingthe second revisionist approachtend toobscurethe fact that it is relativelycautiousin its revisionism and leaves muchof the traditionalstructureof Sovietological interpretationntact. Virtually allthe work is compatible with the idea of Stalinist revolution from above,although t addsthe new andvery important onceptof supportingorresponsivesocial constituencies. A frequent image is that of the regime unleashingsocial forces35 o accomplishits purposes. It is generally not arguedthat socialpressureswere strongenoughtoforce the regime into radicalactionor that sub-sequent policy modificationsor concessions to aggrieved social groupswereregimeresponsesto assertive social resistance. The new scholarshipaddssocialvoices and intereststo the pictureand it portrays he bureaucracyas a complexsocial entity,not a mere transmissionbelt, but at least some of the older Sovieto-logical interpretationsould assimilatethese changeswithouttoo much trouble.The thirdrevisionistapproach, ubstitutingnitiativefrom below for initia-tive from the regimeat the great turningpointsof the Stalinera,wouldbe muchmore difficult for otherschools to incorporate.This makes it very attractive nprincipleto Young Turks,but in practice there are not many examples in thepublishedor unpublished iterature.The idea comes, I think,frommy introduc-tion to Cultural Revolution in Russia,36where I suggested revolution frombelow as an alternativehypothesisto revolution from above. The argumentin my article in that volume was more cautious,suggesting participation frombelow rather hanany decisive revolutionary nitiative from thatquarter.Noneof the other contributorsactually excluded regime initiative or asserted that

    examples,andam now half persuaded hat those who inclineto takethe role as detachedobserverdoso (like the alien, indifferent,and polemically-disposed Sukhanov)mainly because of quirksofpersonalityandtemperament.But I still thinkthe Sukhanovsmakegood historians.34 State Coercionand Social Responses was the subjectof the thirdworkshopon the SocialHistoryof the StalinPeriod,held in Austin,Texas, on March7-8, 1986.35 The image, borrowed from the Bolshevik literateurVoronsky, is used in Sheila Fitzpatrick,CulturalRevolutionin Russia, 1928-1932, Journal of ContemporaryHistory, 1974, no. 1, p. 35.See also Getty,Origins of the GreatPurges, p. 155, passim.36 Fitzpatrick,ed., CulturalRevolution,pp. 6-7. In this passage, which has been widely inter-pretedas a revisionistmanifesto,I contrasteda traditional revolution fromabove interpretationfCulturalRevolution with a new interpretationhat found important6lements of 'revolution frombelow.' Althoughmy own preference or the latterwas clearlyindicated,I had to concede initia-tive to the party eadershipeven while suggestingthat the processwas generatedby forces withinthe society. It will be noted thatI have since shifted towardTucker'spositionon the importanceofrevolutionfrom above.

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    The Russian Reviewsocial pressures for Cultural Revolution were irresistible.37 A scholar who maycome close to this position is Rittersporn on the Great Purges: he states that

    the struggles of 1936-1938 were unleashed by popular discontent [myemphasis] with the arbitrariness, corruption and inefficiency of the rulingstrata. 38 This statement seems to promise more than his subsequent argumentdelivers, since he concedes that the masses were passive and incapable oforganized 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 ofrevolutionary initiative from below in recent scholarship? One possibility isthat scholars are being prudent, having discovered that even modest social-support hypotheses arouse indignation and controversy. Another possibility isthat they are having trouble making this particular argument fit the data on suchmajor episodes as Cultural Revolution, collectivization, and the Great Purges. Itis always tempting to turn conventional wisdom on its head, but this approachmay actually do less than justice to the real revisionist contribution to under-standing of the Stalin period. What has emerged from the recent scholarship isan appreciation that no political regime, including Stalin's, functions in a socialvacuum. There were social pressures and constituencies influencing Stalinistpolicy formation, though these were comparatively weak during the revolutionfrom above phase. More importantly, there were social constraints, socialresponses and informal processes of negotiation between the regime and socialgroups that had a very significant impact on policy implementation-that is, onthe nature and outcome of Stalin's revolution from above in practice.

    Social historians have made their debut in studies of the Stalin period bychallenging the totalitarian model and arguing that it gives a one-sided andsimplistic picture of the interaction of state and society. The new data presentedappear to bear out this claim, although in my opinion they do not yetsignificantly change the old picture of the Stalinist regime as initiator of socialchange in the 1930s. They do show, however, that the regime had only limitedcontrol over the outcome of the radical policies it had initiated. The regime'sunusual capacity and inclination for generating revolution from above wassomething quite different from a capacity and an inclination for planned social

    37 In my article CulturalRevolution as Class War in Fitzpatrick,ed., CulturalRevolution,Iidentifieda numberof social constituenciesactivelyor passively supportingCulturalRevolution,butlocatedthe actual initiative-the signal that launchedthe movement-in theparty eadership.Ofthe other contributors,FrederickStarr and KaterinaClarkemphasizedthe radicalutopian spiritofarchitects and writers and the absence of day-to-daypartycontrol and direction of theiractivities.However,while they saw these groupsas takingthe initiativein their own professions, they also sawthem as respondingto opportunitiesand a favorable climate that were external to theirprofessionsandnot createdby theiractivity.38 The StateAgainstItself, p. 87.39 The StateAgainstItself, p. 103.

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    New Perspectiveson Stalinismengineering. It could set off explosions that destroyed or damaged certainfeatures of the social landscape, but its ability to rebuild according topreselectedblueprintsappearsmuchmore doubtful.It is perhaps surprising hat,despite its interestin social history, the newcohort of historians has concentrated so heavily on the old Sovietologicalquestions-framed by an earliergenerationof social scientists-about the politi-cal system. We have not yet discardedthe assumptionthatthe only significantsocial relationsin the Soviet Union are those in which society relates to govern-ment. This tendency may be understandable,given the Stalinist context, andeven legitimate,given the recenttrendin social historyto bringthe statebackin. But surely there is a special problemin the case of Soviet social history:we seem to be bringingthe state back in without ever having removed it fromcenterstage. We may risklosing an opportunity o formulatenew questionsanddevelop a real social-historyperspectiveon the Stalinperiod.It seems to me that social historianshave made theirpoint on the totali-tarianmodel andshould now tryturning heir attentionelsewhere. We are start-ing to investigatea society with, for example, a remarkablyhigh level of socialandgeographicalmobility, a new patternof social stratification,and (accordingto a rathersuspect piece of conventional wisdom) no internal class or socialconflicts worth discussing. We have a lot to work on. We might even find,beforebringingthe state backin, thatStalinism had some social as well as polit-ical dynamics-which would, after all, be both the most logical and the mostoriginalcontribution ocial historianscould maketo the field.

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