Suny R.G. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century

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that ‘national and ethnic membership constitutes a basis for loyalties and

identiﬁcations which cut across the lines of class, political afﬁliation, and gen-

eration’.

173

In the wake of the dismantling of the totalitarian model, more

empirical and historical studies focused on non-Russians. Zvi Gitelman, like

Gregory J. Massell, told a story of Communist failure ‘to combine modern-

ization and ethnic maintenance’, largely because of the poor ﬁt between the

developmental plans of the party and the reservoir of traditions and interests

of the ethnic population. Secularised Jewish Communists set out to destroy

the old order among the Jews, Bolshevise Jewish workers and reconstruct

Jewish life on a ‘socialist’ basis, but as successful as they were in eliminating

Zionism and Hebrew culture and encouraging Yiddish culture, they failed

to ‘eradicate religion, so ﬁrmly rooted in Jewish life’.

174

In Central Asia the

failure to mobilise women as a ‘surrogate proletariat’ with which to overturn

the patriarchal social regime led to a curious accommodation with traditional

society.

175

Much sovietological work on nationalities and nationalism accepted uncriti-

cally a commonsensical view of nationality as a relatively observable, objective

phenomenon based on a community of language, culture, shared myths of ori-

gin or kinship, perhaps territory. Nationalism was seen as the release of denied

desires and authentic, perhaps primordial, aspirations. This ‘Sleeping Beauty’

view of nationality and nationalism contrasted with a more historicised view

that gravitated towards a post-modernist understanding of nationality as a

constructed category, an ‘imagined community’. A ‘Bride of Frankenstein’

view of nationality and nationalism asserted that, far from being a natural

component of human relations, something like kinship or family, nationality

and the nation are created (or invented) in a complex political process in which

intellectuals and activists play a formative role. Rather than the nation giving

rise to nationalism, it is nationalism that gives rise to the nation. Rather than

primordial, the nation is a modern socio-political construct. By the 1990s this

‘modernist’ view of the construction of nations within the Soviet empire began

to appear in a number of studies in the Soviet ﬁeld.

176

173 Inkeles and Bauer, The Soviet Citizen,p.339.

174 Zvi Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics: The Jewish Sections of the CPSU, 1917–

1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 3–4, 6–7, 491–2.

175 Gregory J. Massell, The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies

in Soviet Central Asia, 1919–1929 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974).

176 Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of

the Soviet Union (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993); Yuri Slezkine, ‘The

Soviet Union as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic

Particularism’, Slavic Review 53, 2 (Summer 1994): 414–52; Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Reading Russia and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century

Soviet studies in the post-Soviet world

By the 1990s the former Soviet Union had become a historical object, an impe-

rial relic to be studied in the archives, rather than an actual enemy standing deﬁ-

antly against the West. At the same time the dominance of social history gave

way to greater acceptance of new cultural approaches. Instead of British Marx-

ists or the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, the principal inﬂuences now

came from French social and cultural theorists, such as Michel Foucault and

Pierre Bourdieu; the German political theorist J

urgenHabermas;theAmerican

cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz; and the Russian literary theorist

Mikhail Bakhtin. Scholars gravitated to investigating cultural phenomena, like

rituals and festivals, popular and ethnic culture and the daily life of ordinary

people, topics that increasingly became possible to investigate with the open-

ing of Soviet archives at the end of the 1980s. Fitzpatrick’s own work turned in

an ethnographic direction, as she scoured the archives to reconstruct the lost

lives of ordinary workers and peasants.

177

Historians moved on from the 1930s

to ‘late’ Stalinism and into the post-Stalin period. The ‘cultural turn’ led to an

interest in the mentalities and subjectivities of ordinary Soviet citizens.

As a popular consensus developed that nothing less than history itself has

decisively proven the Soviet experience a dismal failure, historians of Com-

munist anciens regimes turned to summing up the history of the recent past.

178

Among the more inspired post-mortems was Martin Malia’s The Soviet Tragedy,

which turned the positive progress of modernisation into a darker view of

modernity. Launching a sustained, ferocious attack on Western sovietology,

which, in his view, contributed to a fundamental misconception and misunder-

standing of the Soviet system by consistently elevating the centrality of society

and reducing ideology and politics to reﬂections of the socio-economic base,

Malia put ideology back at the centre of causation with the claim that the

Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994); Terry Martin, The

Afﬁrmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca,

N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 2001).

177 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after

Collectivization(NewYork and Oxford: Oxford University Press,1994); EverydayStalinism:

Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York and Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1999).

178 Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1 991 (New York:

Free Press, 1994); Franc¸ois Furet. The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism

in the Twentieth Century, trans. Deborah Furet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1999); St

ephane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Pann

e, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel

Barto

sek, Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression,

trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

Press, 1999); John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, In Denial: Historians, Communism, and

Espionage (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003).

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ronald grigor suny

Soviet leadership worked consistently to implement integral socialism, that

is, full non-capitalism. In one of his most redolent phrases, he concluded, ‘In

sum, there is no such thing as socialism, and the Soviet Union built it.’

179

Because the moral idea of socialism is utopian and unrealisable, the only way

it could be ‘realised’ on the ground was through the terroristic means that

Lenin and Stalin used. The collapse of the Soviet system was inevitable; the

regime was illegitimate and doomed from the beginning; its end was inscribed

in its ‘genetic code’.

Malia placed the Soviet project in the larger problematic of modernity from

the Enlightenment on. Socialism, the logical extension of the idea of democ-

racy, was the highest form of this modernist illusion. In a similar vein Stephen

Kotkin offered a seminal study of the building of the industrial monument,

Magnitogorsk, in which he borrowed insights from Foucault to show how

Stalin’s subjects learned to ‘speak Bolshevik’ as they built ‘a new civilisation’.

180

Kotkin dismissed the idea of ‘the Russian Revolution as the embodiment of

a lost social democracy, or, conversely, as a legitimation of Western society

through negative example’. Instead, he likened ‘the Russian Revolution to a

mirror in which various elements of the modernity found outside the USSR are

displayed in alternately undeveloped, exaggerated, and familiar forms’.

181

Malia, Kotkin saw ideology as having ‘a structure derived from the bedrock

proposition that, whatever socialism might be, it could not be capitalism. The

use of capitalism as an anti-world helps explain why, despite the near total

improvisation, the socialism built under Stalin coalesced into a “system” that

could be readily explained within the framework of October.’

182

Positioning

himself apart from both Fitzpatrick, who argued that Stalinism was the con-

servative triumph of a new post-revolutionary elite, and Lewin, who saw that

triumph as a betrayal of the initial promise of the revolution (preserved by

Lenin) and a backward form of modernisation, Kotkin argued that what Stalin

built was socialism, the only real fully non-capitalist socialism the world has

ever seen.

183

If a political dedication to socialism was rendered ‘academic’ for most West-

ern scholars after 1991, particularly in the United States, interest in the internal

workings of the Soviet system, the USSR as a distinct culture, the construction

of subjects and subjectivity and the ofﬁcially ascribed and self-generated iden-

tiﬁcations of Soviet citizens remained high. Neither the notion of atomised,

179 Ibid., p. 496.

180 Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain:Stalinism as aCivilization (Berkeleyand Los Angeles:

University of California Press, 1995).

181 Ibid., p. 387. 182 Ibid., p. 400. 183 Ibid., pp. 5, 379 n. 21.

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Reading Russia and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century

cowed ‘little screws’ or crypto-liberals acting as if they were believers ade-

quately captured the full, complex range of Soviet subjectivity. Different peo-

ple, and sometimes the same individual, could both resist and genuinely con-

form, support the regime performatively or with real enthusiasm. Even dissent

was most often articulated within ‘the larger frame of the Soviet Revolution’,

appropriating the language of the regime itself.

184

That frame was extraordi-

narily powerful, as are hegemonic discursive formations in any society, but it

also was never without contradictions, anomalies or imprecise meanings that

allowed for different readings and spaces for action. Soviet power, Foucault

would have told us, had its creative side as well as its repressive aspects and

constituted a landscape of categories and identiﬁcations that may have pre-

cluded ‘any broad, organised resistance challenging the Soviet state’, but also

permitted much small-scale subversion of the system, from evasion of duties,

slowdowns at the workplace and evasion of orders from above.

185

As historians

as different as Lewin, Fitzpatrick and Malia have contended, ordinary citizens

agreed with the regime that together they were building socialism, even as

they incessantly complained about the failure of the authorities ‘to deliver the

goods’.

While post-Soviet scholars rejected the concept of modernisation, with its

optimism about the universality and beneﬁcence of that process, a darker,

more critical view of modernity became the talisman for a distinct group of

younger historians who wished to contest the idea of Soviet exceptionalism.

186

An unusually protean term, modernity was used to explain everything from

human rights to the Holocaust. Following the lead of theorists like Zygmunt

Bauman and James Scott, the ‘modernity school’ noted how Bolsheviks, like

other modernisers, attempted to create a modern world by scientiﬁc study

of society, careful enumeration and categorisation of the population and the

184 Jochen Hellbeck, ‘Speaking Out: Languages of Afﬁrmation and Dissent in Stalinist

Russia’, Kritika 1, 1 (Winter 2000): 74.

185 Ibid., p. 80.

186 See e. g. David L. Hoffman and Yanni Kotsonis (eds.), Russian Modernity: Politics, Know-

ledge, Practices (New York: St Martin’sPress, 2000); Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The

Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 2001); Peter Holquist, ‘“Information is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work”:

Bolshevik Surveillance in its Pan-European Context’, Journal of Modern History 69, 3

(Sept. 1997): 415–50. While eclectic and inclusive in its selection of articles, the journal

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, which began publication in the

winter of 2000, has established itself as the mouthpiece of what its editors conceive of

as ‘post-revisionist’ scholarship, attempting to move beyond the debates of the Cold

War years. (See, particularly, the editorial introduction, ‘Really-existing Revisionism?’

in Kritika 2, 4 (Fall 2001): 707–11.)

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ronald grigor suny

application of planning and administration.

187

For Russianists the frame of

‘modernity’ presented an all-encompassing comparative syndrome in which

the Soviet experiment appeared to be a particularly misguided effort that led

to unprecedented violence and state-initiated bloodshed.

In reaction to the ‘modernity school’ some historians and political scientists,

attentive to the insights of Max Weber, considered the neo-traditionalist aspects

of the Soviet experience that denied or contradicted the move to a generalised

modernity.

188

Simply put, the modernity school emphasised what was similar

between the West and the Soviet Union, and the neo-traditionalists were fas-

cinated by what made the USSR distinct. Modernity was concerned with the

discursive universe in which ideas of progress and subjugation of nature led to

state policies that promoted the internalisation and naturalisation of Enlight-

enment values. Neo-traditionalism was more interested in social practices,

down to the everyday behaviours of ordinary people. Whereas modernity

talked about the ‘disenchantment of the world’, in Weber’s characterisation

of secularisation, neo-traditionalists were impressed by the persistence of reli-

gion, superstition and traditional beliefs, habits and customs. Their attention

was turned to status and rank consciousness, personalities and personal ties

(in Russia phenomena such as blat (pull, personal connections), family circles,

tolkachy (facilitators)), patron–client networks, petitioning and deference pat-

terns. Kenneth Jowitt saw neo-traditionalism as a corruption of the modernist

ideals of the revolutionary project, while sociologist Andrew Walder, in an

inﬂuential study of Chinese Neo-traditionalism (1986), argued that the more

the regime tried to implement its core principles, the more neo-traditional

elements came forth.

189

Abolishing the market and attempting to plan pro-

duction and distribution led to soft budgeting, shortages, distribution systems

based on rationing or privileged access. Petitioning was an effective substitute

for recourse to the law or the possibility of public action. The end of a free press

187 Bauman wrote, ‘In my view, the communist system was the extremely spectacular

dramatization of the Enlightenment message . . . I think that people who celebrate the

collapse of communism, as I do, celebrate more than that without always knowing it.

They celebrate the end of modernity actually, because what collapsed was the most

decisive attempt to make modernity work; and it failed. It failed as blatantly as the

attempt was blatant’ (Intimations of Postmodernity,pp.221–2).

188 Terry Martin, ‘Modernization or Neo-Traditionalism? Ascribed Nationality and Soviet

Primordialism’, in Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism, New Directions (New York and

London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 348–67; Kenneth Jowitt, ‘Neo-Traditionalism’ (1983),

reprinted in his New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of

California Press,1992), pp. 121–58; VictorZaslavsky, TheNeo-Stalinist State:Class,Ethnicity,

and Consensus in Soviet Society (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1982).

189 Andrew G. Walder, Neo-traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1986).

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Reading Russia and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century

elevated the importance of gossip and rumour, and the efforts of a modernising

state to construct nationality eventually led to embedding peoples in a story

of primordialist ethnogenesis. The reintroduction of ascribed identities, res-

urrecting the idea if not the actual categories of soslovnost’ (legally ascribed

categories), was characteristic of the inter-war period, in the way the Soviets

dealt with both class and nationality.

190

After 1991 sovietological political scientists had lost their subject and turned

to a cluster of new questions: how did a great state self-destruct; why did the

Cold War end; will the ‘transition’ from command to market economy, from

dictatorship to democracy, be successful; are post-Soviet transitions compara-

ble to democratisation in capitalist states?

191

Several explained the Gorbachev

‘revolution’ as largely emanating from the very top of the Soviet political struc-

ture and emphasised the agency of the General Secretary, his chief opponent,

Boris Yeltsin, and other actors over structural factors. Others focused on insti-

tutions, the actual ‘Soviet constitution’ of power and the loss of conﬁdence

and eventual defection of Soviet apparatchiki to the side of the marketeers

and self-styled democrats. Still others argued that Leninist nationality poli-

cies had created a structure of national polities within the USSR that fostered

potent nationalist constituencies and proved to be a ‘time bomb’ that with

the weakening of central power tore the union apart. Rather than national-

ism as the chief catalyst of state collapse, they found that state weakness and

disintegration precipitated nationalist movements.

192

‘Transitologists’ who had studied the fall of Latin American and Iberian dic-

tatorships had developed a model of democratisation that largely eschewed

the cultural, social and economic prerequisites for successful democratisa-

tion that modernisation theorists had proposed. Instead, they argued that

getting the process right – namely negotiating a ‘pact’ between the old rulers

and the emerging opposition – was the best guarantee for effective demo-

cratic transition.

193

Post-sovietologists disputed the universal applicability of

190 Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia’,

in Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism, New Directions,pp.20–46; Martin, The Afﬁrmative Action

Empire.

191 For an analytical and critical review of post-sovietology, see David D. Laitin, ‘Post-Soviet

Politics’, Annual Review of Political Science, 2000, 3: 117–48.

192 Suny, The Revenge of the Past;RogersBrubaker,Nationalism Reframed (Cambridge, Mass.:

Cambridge University Press, 1996).

193 Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule:

Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

Press, 1986); Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms

in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991);

and Adam Przeworksi et al., Sustainable Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1995).

ronald grigor suny

the transitological model by specifying the differences between non-market

economies and capitalist societies and authoritarian dictatorships in the West

and ‘totalitarian’ states in the East.

194

Michael McFaul showed how the tran-

sition in Russia was revolutionary, occurred without pacting, and involved

mass participation – all of which were excluded from the original model.

195

But as the new century began and Vladimir Putin solidiﬁed his power in the

Kremlin, the jury remained out on how consolidated, liberal or effectively

representative Russian (or, for that matter, Ukrainian, Armenian or any other)

democracy was.

Even as it claimed to break with the old sovietology, Western scholarship

reproduced many of its older concerns a decade and a half after the dissolution

of the Soviet Union and remained true to fundamental assumptions deriving

from Western liberalism. The T-model had counterposed the indoctrinated,

believing ‘SovietMan’ against an imagined, free,liberal individualin the West, a

person self-directed and capable of independent thought.

196

Cold War scholars

were dismayed by the destruction of the individual in Sovietised societies

and the inability of citizens to resist the regime effectively. They found it

hard to believe in the authentic commitment of people to such an illiberal

project as Stalinism or to accept the legitimacy of such political deviance from

a Whig trajectory. Images of Koestler’s Rubashov confessing to crimes he

had not committed or Orwell’s Winston Smith capitulating to Big Brother

powerfully conveyed Soviet socialism’s threat to liberal individuality. Yet, as

social historians had demonstrated, Soviet subjects were neither atomised nor

completely terrorised and propagandised victims of the system; they managed

to adapt to and even shape the contours imposed from above.

When post-Soviet scholars or journalists looked back at the seventy-four

years of the Soviet experience, they most often turned to the Stalinist horrors

as the emblem of Leninist hubris. In 1999 a team of scholars produced a massive

194 Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the

State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Michael McFaul, Russia’s Unﬁn-

ished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University

Press, 2001); Philippe C. Schmitter with Terry Lynn Karl, ‘The Conceptual Travels of

Transitologists and Consolidologists: How Far to the East Should They Attempt to

Go?’ Slavic Review 53, 1 (Spring 1994): 173–85; Valerie Bunce, ‘Should Transitologists Be

Grounded?’ Slavic Review 54, 1 (Spring 1995): 111–27; Terry Lynn Karl and Philippe C.

Schmitter, ‘From an Iron Curtain to a Paper Curtain: Grounding Transitologists or

Students of Postcommunism?’ Slavic Review 54, 4 (Winter 1995): 965–978; and Valerie

Bunce, ‘Paper Curtains and Paper Tigers’, ibid., pp. 979–87.

195 McFaul, Russia’s Unﬁnished Revolution.

196 For development of this theme, to which this paragraph is indebted, see the insightful

discussion in Anna Krylova, ‘The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies’, Kritika

1, 1 (Winter 2000): 119–46.

Reading Russia and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century

catalogue of crimes, terror and repression by Soviet-style communisms. The

Black Book of Communism contended that ‘Communist regimes did not just

commit criminal acts (all states do so on occasion); they were criminal enter-

prises in their very essence: on principle, so to speak, they all ruled lawlessly,

by violence and without regard for human life.’

197

Given this foundational

claim, it followed that ‘there never was a benign, initial phase of communism

before some mythical “wrong turn” threw it off track’.

198

Its violence was a

deliberative, not a reactive, policy of the revolutionary regimes and was based

in Marxist ‘science’ that elevated the class struggle to the central driving force

of history. The aim of The Black Book was not only to show that the very essence

of communism was terror as a form of rule, but even more ambitiously to

demonstrate that communism was not just comparable to fascism but was

actually worse than Nazism. The Black Book lay the burden of guilt on intellec-

tuals, those who thought up, spread and justiﬁed the idea that liberation and

secular salvation ought to be purchased at any price.

Yet in its attempt to judge Soviet killing by the standard of Nazi crimes, The

Black Book actually de-historicised Soviet violence. Context and causation were

less important than the equation with the colossal, seemingly inexplicable evil

that led to the Holocaust. These claims led to an intense international debate

around The Black Book that recapitulated arguments that had divided historians

of the Soviet Union for decades: is explanation to be sought in the social

or the ideological? Is there an essential connection between all communist

movements that stems from communism’s roots in Leninism that produces

the violence that has accompanied them in all parts of the world? Or are these

movements, while related, more particularly the products of their own social,

political and cultural environments?

For all the claims that the old controversies of the Cold War had ended with

the end of the Soviet Union, the problematical meaning of the Soviet Union

remains an open question among scholars and in the public sphere. While

some continue to look for some deep essence that determined the nature of the

USSR, others search for the contradictions and anomalies that disrupt any easy

model. Neutrality remains a worthy if elusive stance, complete objectivity an

unattainable ideal. While conservative scholars celebrate what they see as the

victory of their views over ‘left-wing’ sovietology, and the pursuit of modernity

appears dubious to many scholars, Russian and Soviet studies, ironically, hold

ﬁrm to the broad liberal values that marked Western attitudes towards the

East a century ago. Without a ‘socialist’ alternative with which to contend,

197 Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism,p.xvii. 198 Ibid., p. xviii.

ronald grigor suny

pundits proclaim that the expectations of the modernisationists have been

realised – a single world gravitating towards capitalist democracy. The West

continues to regard itself as superior in what is now called the globalising

world, and its most zealous advocates are prepared to export its political and

economic forms, even if it requires military force, against the resistance of

those who reject Western modernity and its liberal values. The states of the

former Soviet Union exist in a twilight of a failed socialism but without the

full light of the anticipated democratic capitalist dawn. As those who had

insisted that capitalist economics and democratic politics would wipe away

the East’s deviant past confront the persistence of Soviet institutions, practices

and attitudes long after the collapse, they must humbly reconsider the power

of that past. Whether one thinks of this as the ‘Leninist legacy’ or Soviet path

dependency or the continuities of a relatively ﬁxed Russian (or Georgian or

Uzbek) political culture, looking backwards in order to understand the present

and future has become ever more imperative for social science.

part one

RUSSIA AND THE SOVIET

UNION: THE STORY

THROUGH TIME