Bolshevism And Stalinism: New Reflections on an Old Problem
Cohen, Stephen F.
Every great revolution puts forth, for debate by future scholars and partisans alike, a quintessential historical and interpretative question. Of all the historical questions raised by the...
...it reflected, among other things, the sharp decline in Lenin's official standing...
...that his acts were "pure, unadulterated Leninism," and that "Lenin was the mentor and Stalin the pupil who carried his master's legacy to its logical conclusion...
...This was a ramifying change from an oligarchical party regime to an autocratic "Fuhrerist" regime, "reflected in a whole system of changes in the political process, the ideological pattern, the organization of supreme power, and official patterns of behavior...
...E. H. Carr, Studies in Revolution (New York: Universal Library, 1964), p. 214...
...Nor do I wish to devalue the many important scholarly works that adhere to the continuity thesis...
...This makes no sense...
...In short, the party's "organizational principles" did not produce Stalinism before 1929, nor have they since 1953...
...On balance, however, because the nationalized foundations of socialism were preserved, because Stalin's regime had carried out the revolutionary goal of modernizing Russia, and because the Bolshevik alternative (Trotskyism for Deutscher) seemed hopeless in the existing circumstances of the 1920s, Deutscher believed that Stalinism "continued in the Leninist tradition...
...Or to give a fuller 13 Merle Fainsod in Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought, p. 176...
...Yet precisely this critical distinction is often missing, as illustrated by the familiar explanation of Stalinism: "Authoritarianism in prerevolutionary Leninism naturally and perhaps inevitably gave birth to Soviet authoritarianism...
...For this we doubtless must return to older values and customs, to "unwritten mandates borne by the wind...
...Willets, who confirms that non-Soviet scholars regard Stalinism "as a logical and probably inevitable state in the organic development of the Communist Party...
...But the great majority of specialists, including the new generation, still believe that "Stalin epitomized the Communist mind...
...Abraham Rothberg, The Heirs of Stalin (Ithaca, N.Y Cornell University Press, 1972), pp...
...On this issue at least, the only dispute seemed to be whether the inexorable march of Stalinism should be dated from 1902 and the writing of Lenin's What Is to Be Done?, from October 1917 and the subsequent abolition of the Constituent Assembly, from 1921 and the ban on party factions, or from 1923 and Trotsky's first defeat...
...How these two interpretations converge into a single thesis of programmatic continuity between Bolshevism and Stalin's revolution from above is illustrated by one of our best general histories...
...Cultural approaches can contribute to an understanding of many things, from Stalin's personal outlook and political autocracy, as Tucker has shown, to the social basis of Stalinism as a system...
...But it has been a pivotal interpretation in academic Soviet studies for many years, as illustrated by a few representative statements...
...377-78...
...Even during the crisis of 1928-29, NEP was for the Bukharinists a viable developmental (not static) model, predicated on civil peace, that could reconcile Bolshevik aspirations and Russian social reality...
...The historical development of Stalinism must be traced and analyzed through its several stages, from the truly revolutionary events of the early 1930s to the rigidly conservative sociopolitical order of 1946-53...
...In addition to the availability of new materials and longer perspectives, the same questions are now being discussed in the Soviet Union, though for the moment largely by samizdat writers...
...No Bolshevik leader or faction had ever advocated anything akin to imposed collectivization, the "liquidation" of the kulaks, breakneck heavy industrialization, and a "plan" that was, of course, no plan at all...
...And it is vulnerable logically...
...it consists mostly of regime studies...
...Not only were the official economic policies of 1921-28 distinctly unlike Stalin's in 1929-33, but the social-political order of NEP, with its officially tolerated social pluralism in economic, culturalintellectual, and even (in local soviets and high state agencies) in political life, represents a historical model of Soviet Communist rule radically unlike Stalinism...
...To quote one of many examples, Ulam writes: "after its October victory, the Communist Party began to grope its way toward totalitarianism...
...Its ideology, policies, and politics were also shaped by other forceful leaders, lesser members and committees, nonparty constituents, and great social events, including World War 1, the Revolution, and the Civil War...
...Revolution from above was an imposed upheaval, but it required and obtained enthusiastic agents below, even if only a small minority, from the cultural to the industrial and rural fronts...
...Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), p. 156...
...First, odd as it may seem for a party so often described as "doctrinaire," the Bolsheviks had no well-defined economic policies upon coming to office in October 1917...
...communism and its legacy in connection with Stalinism require careful study (though the similarities should not be exaggerated...
...200 controversy over Comintern policy or the party bureaucracy) in terms of Trotsky and Stalin bears no relationship to the actual discussions of 1923-27...
...With only slight exaggeration, one can say to the historian of these years: Tell me your interpretation of the relationship between Bolshevism and Stalinism, and I will tell you how you interpret almost all of significance that happened between...
...But they, too, interpreted the Stalinist 1930s—the victorious period of the new class (or bureaucracy)—as the "continuation" and "lawful...
...consensus on Bolshevism and Stalinism...
...Russia Ater Stalin (London: Hamilton, 1969), pp...
...The point here is not to explain the fateful events of 1928-29 but to illustrate that Stalin's new policies of 1929-33, the "great change," were a radical departure from Bolshevik programmatic thinking...
...Whatever the partial truths of the first argument, it suffers from the implicit ahistorical conception of a basically unchanging party after 1917, an assumption easily refuted by evidence already in our literature...
...the authority of personal experience (though often far from Russia) and conversion, lapsed Communists testified to the "straight line" in assorted ways...
...9 In short, for all their other disagreements, a consensus on an unbroken continuity from 1917 to Stalin's death joined the mainstream scholarship and the counter-tradition represented by Carr and Deutscher...
...A significant role in its development was played by the plethora of intellectual ex-Communists (Solzhenitsyn being among the more recent), whose intellectual odyssey carried them first away from Stalinism, then from Bolshevism-Leninism, and finally away from Marxism...
...21 "Class, State and Ideology in the Piatiletka," in Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1933, Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed...
...The self-professed raison d'être of the "totalitarianism" school was to distinguish and analyze a wholly new kind of authoritarianism...
...But now less ecumenical ones were coined to characterize the building of Soviet socialism as "the great Stalinist cause," and Stalin alone now was named as "the genius-architect of Communism," and Soviet history as the "epoch of Stalin...
...very likely to the Tartar yoke...
...Not only is the question large and complex, but similar ones about other revolutions—the relationship of Bonapartism to 1789 being an obvious example—have provoked enduring controversies...
...Most of them apparently share the view that Soviet reformers who call upon a non-Stalinist tradition in earlier Soviet political history will find there only "a cancerous social and political organism gnawed by spreading malignancy...
...For many years, however, it remained largely only a concern of the political left, especially anti-Stalinist Communists and most notably Trotsky...
...22 And there can be little question that the wartime patriotism of 1941-45 translated itself into considerable new support for the increasingly nationalistic, and victorious, Stalinist system...
...They were the formative period of Stalinism as a system, which presaged and gave rise to much that followed...
...21-22, 28-29, 33-34...
...During the Khrushchev years, Western scholars frequently spoke of a "Stalinism without the excesses," or "Stalinism without the arrests...
...Finally, there was the unique contribution of Arthur Koestler, whose novel Darkness at Noon presented Stalin's annihilation of the original Bolsheviks as the logical triumph of Bolshevism itself...
...Both he and Trotsky, and the Bolshevik left generally, thought in terms of peasant farming for the foreseeable future...
...Nonetheless, the debate was ME interesting and has been unduly ignored by scholars...
...Stalin is then said to have stolen, or adapted, Trotsky's economic policies in 1929...
...and 2Dwight MacDonald in Partisan Review, Winter 1945, p. 186...
...216-18...
...Even after defeating the Bukharin group in April 1929, as NEP crumbled under Stalin's radical policies, his editorials continued to insist that "NEP is the only correct policy of socialist construction," a fiction that was still officially maintained in 1931...
...But unlike the international and political issues that most embittered the factional struggle, these disagreements were limited, falling within the parameters of "nepism," which both sides accepted, though with different levels of enthusiasm...
...N EP had originated as an ignoble retreat in 1921, and resentment at NEP economics, politics, and culture continued throughout the 1920s...
...If "ism" is to be affixed, there was no Stalinism, only Bukharinism and Trotskyism...
...In this sense Stalin continued and fulfilled Leninism...
...Above all, official ideology changed radically under Stalin...
...Finally, this view has strongly influenced our understanding of contemporary Soviet affairs...
...But his extended treatment of 1917-29, and of the alternatives to Stalinism, is consistent with his early judgment that, without Stalin's revolution from above, "Lenin's revolution would have run out in the sand...
...Mendel, ed., Essential Works of Marxism (New York: Bantam, 1965), p. 199...
...Arthur P. Mendel: "With few exceptions, these attributes of Stalinist Russia ultimately derive from the Leninist heritage...
...A single essay cannot explore fully all the dimensions of this long-standing interpretation...
...14 As our scholarship stands, however, it appears that special approaches are reserved for interpreting Soviet history...
...The years 1929-33, obscured in both Western and official Soviet theories of 202 Stalinism, are especially important...
...The apparent continuities regularly itemized—leader, the party, terror, class war, censorship, Marxism/ Leninism, purge, etc.—were synthetic and illusory...
...Even in the 1920s, after the bureaucratization and militarization fostered by the Civil War, the high party was not (nor had it ever been) the disciplined vanguard fantasized in What Is to Be Done...
...Some of this sentiment probably demands no special explanation, though it must be taken into account...
...McNeal, The Bolshevik Tradition (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp...
...It is the view, widespread in Soviet-studies literature, that Stalin's wholesale collectivization and heavy industrialization drive of 192933, the paroxysmic upheaval he later properly called "a revolution from above," represented the continuation and fulfillment of Bolshevik thinking about modernizing, or building socialism in, Russia...
...Second, the initial program of the Bolshevik government, in the sense of officially defined policy, was not war communism but what Lenin called in April-May 1918 "state capitalism," a mixture of socialist measures and concessions to the existing capitalist structure and control of the economy...
...not merely police repression, or even civil war-style terror, but a holocaust by terror that victimized tens of millions of people for 25 years...
...This was understood at the time...
...Other aspects of Stalinism usually regarded as only imposed from above and without social roots also need to be reconsidered in this light and in longer perspective...
...48, 49...
...Accordingly, official Bolshevik policy during the eight years of NEP—and NEP itself as a socialpolitical order—are interpreted in the literature as being "merely a breathing spell," "a holding operation," or "a strategic retreat, during which the forces of socialism in Russia would retrench, recuperate, and then resume their march...
...A reader unfamiliar with Western scholarly literature on Soviet history would therefore reasonably expect to find it full of rival schools and intense debate on this central issue...
...As the opposition of 1925 complained: "Comrade Stalin has become the total prisoner of this political line, the creator and genuine representative of which is Comrade Bukharin...
...31, 37, and passim...
...I omit here a large number of footnotes referring to the literature on the subject and documenting my own arguments...
...It abounds with the language of teleological determinism: "inner logic," "inexorably totalitarian features," "inevitable process," "inescapable consequences," "logical completion," "inevitable stage," and more...
...Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 59...
...Inasmuch as scholars made an effort to distinguish between the two (which was neither frequent nor systematic, since the terms Bolshevik, Leninist, Stalinist were used interchangeably), it was said to be only a matter of degree resulting from changing circumstances and necessary adaptation...
...As the cult of the infallible leader (which, it should be said, was very different from the earlier Bolshevik cult of a historically necessary, but not infallible, party) grew into literal deification after 1938, the adjective "Stalinist" was attached increasingly to people, institutions, orthodox ideas, events, and even history...
...Nevertheless, there were important linkages between these two great upheavals, and they require careful study...
...Variants of this proposition explain that Stalinism continued the illiberal, nondemocratic, repressive traditions of Bolshevism...
...If nothing else, there is the problem of interpreting Stalin's revolution from above of the 1930s, an extraordinary decade that begins with the abrupt reversal of official policy and the brutal collectivization of 125 million peasants, witnesses farreaching revisions of official tenets and sentiments, and ends with the official destruction of the original Bolsheviks and their historical reputations...
...Moreover, the argument is, in effect, an adaptation of Michel's "iron law of oligarchy," which was intended to be a generalization about all large political organizations and their tendency toward oligarchical rather than democratic politics...
...Instead of viewing tradition as contextual, they treated it as virtually autonomous and deterministic...
...Bolshevism was in important respects—depending on the period—a strongly authoritarian movement...
...The few authentic attempts to analyze Stalinism as a social-political system over the years were made mostly by Marxists who offer "new class" or "ruling bureaucracy" theories of the subject...
...and 1919, while minimizing the Lenin of State and Revolution and 192223...
...Generally, apart from Western devotees of the official historiography in Moscow, the less empathy a historian has felt for the Revolution and Bolshevism, the less he has seen This is a slightly abridged version of an essay that appears in Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, edited by Robert C. locker (New York: W.W...
...But the outcome is not predetermined...
...Historiographically, their conception differed chiefly in terminology: an unbroken continuity from a half-blown to a full-blown new class or ruling bureaucracy...
...It also contains valuable material on the sociology of Stalinism, a topic habitually ignored in academic studies, and reminds us that the new administrative strata created in the 1930s strongly influenced the 203 nature of mature Stalinism, particularly its antiegalitarianism, rigid stratification, and cultural and social conservatism...
...War communism is presented as "an attempt, which proved premature, to realize the Party's stated ideological goals," and NEP, in Bolshevik thinking, as "a tactical maneuver to be pursued only until the inevitable change of conditions which would make victory possible...
...For James Burnham, see The Managerial Revolution (New York: Day, 1941), pp...
...what had existed under Lenin was carried by Stalin to such extremes that its very nature changed...
...These frenzied policies collapsed in 1921 because of the population's opposition, and the party was forced to retreat to the new economic policy of concessions to private enterprise in the countryside and the cities...
...12Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938 (New York: Knopf, 1973...
...Much has been written in recent years critical of the "totalitarianism" approach in terms of political science...
...Did not the literature, or the state nationalism, of 193653, for example, also have authentic social roots in this newly risen and still insecure officialdom, whose values, self-perceptions, and cultural babittry it so often seemed to reflect...
...Elsewhere Ulam says of Lenin: "his own psychology made inevitable the future and brutal development under Stalin...
...During these years, there were no "Stalinist" ideas, apart from "socialism in one country," which was also Bukharin's...
...13 If this sensible admonition were to be applied to Soviet history, it would be difficult not to conclude, at the very least, that "differences in degree grew into differences of kind...
...offspring of Lenin and the revolution...
...the repeal of ideas and legislation favoring workers, women, schoolchildren, minority cultures, and egalitarianism, as well as a host of revolutionary and Bolshevik symbols...
...If symbols can tell us anything about political reality, we do best to heed Leonid Petrovsky's commentary on the statue of Dolgoruky, which Stalin built on the spot where Lenin had once unveiled a monument to the first Soviet constitution...
...Most historians would agree that it requires careful empirical study of historical similarities and dissimilarities, and that the question of degree, of whether quantitative changes become qualitative, is critical...
...Second, the continuity thesis has largely obscured the need to study Stalinism as a distinct phenomenon with its own history, political dynamics, and social consequences...
...This literature is fairly diverse and features wide-ranging disputes over whether the Stalinist bureaucracy can be viewed as a class or only as a stratum, and of what kind...
...and, throughout, to interpret the party ahistorically, as though it acted above society and outside history itself...
...It is not wholly indefensible...
...In other words, even if it is conceded that the events of 1936-39 were discontinuous, what about those of 1929-33...
...They are, loosely defined, of two sorts: first, a set of formulations, historical approaches, and conceptual explanations of how and why there was a political "straight line" between Bolshevism and Stalinism...
...Stalin was no prisoner, but a willing adherent...
...18, 179...
...Catchphrases such as "the teachings of Lenin and Stalin" remained in use...
...The other contribution of the approach, with its deterministic language of "inner totalitarian logic," was to make the process seem not merely continuous but inevitable...
...And it relies upon a selfserving definition of Bolshevik ideology as being concerned mainly with the "concentration of total social power...
...Despite Stalinism's repudiation of cardinal Bolshevik ideas (chiefly internationalism and proletarian democracy, according to Deutscher) and its grotesque bureaucratic abuse of the Bolshevik legacy, the "Bolshevik idea and tradition remained, through all successive pragmatic and ecclesiastical reformulations, the ruling idea and the dominant tradition of the Soviet Union...
...Dec...
...they are too fully related in our literature to be reiterated 1°Adam B. Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era (New York: Viking, 1973), p. 362...
...Willets, "Death and Damnation of a Hero," Survey, April 1963, p. 9. 192 NONE OF THIS is wholly explicable apart from the "paradigm" that dominated Soviet studies for so many years...
...his leadership, ideas, and personality shaped the movement in fundamental ways...
...From this first great discontinuity, others would follow...
...John S. Reshetar: "Lenin provided the basic assumptions which—applied by Stalin and developed to their logical conclusion—culminated in the great purges...
...Two disclaimers are in order...
...Michael Karpovich: "Great as the changes have been from 1917 to the present, in its fundamentals Stalin's policy is a further development of Leninism...
...6 The continuity thesis was not the work of university scholars alone...
...Russia in Transition (New York: Grove Press, 1960), pp...
...Armed with 5 How Russia Is Ruled (rev...
...Even though forcible wholesale collectivization had not originated as a party, or even collective leadership, policy—the entire party elite, and probably the whole party, were implicated in the criminal and economic calamities of Stalin's measures, which culminated in the terrible famine of 1932-33...
...The recitation could continue...
...By 1937, Trotsky could add: "The present purge draws between Bolshevism and Stalinism...
...but Trotsky's remedies were moderate, marketoriented, or, as the expression went, "nepist...
...The continuity thesis was fulsome, the consensus complete...
...It is the linchpin of a broader consensus, also in need of critical reexamination, about what happened, and why, between 1917 and 1939...
...Just how complete this consensus was is indicated by the two major historians whose work otherwise fell well outside the academic mainstream—E...
...Arguably, there is today a Soviet ruling class or bureaucracy that has emancipated itself...
...165, 199, 258...
...Authentic interaction between party-state and society is ignored...
...Bolshevism's organizational character evolved over the years, often in response to external events, from the unruly, loosely organized party that participated successfully in democratic politics in 1917, to the centralized bureaucratic party of the 1920s, to the terrorized party of the 1930s, many of whose executive committees and bureaus had been destroyed...
...it anticipated several arguments, favoring both discontinuity and continuity, that were later to appear in academic literature on Bolshevism and Stalinism...
...One reason that Westerninspired theories apply so poorly to the Stalinist administrative elites created in the 1930s is that the latter were more akin to the traditional Czarist soslovie, an official privileged class that served the state (in this case a resurgent Russian state) more than it ruled the state...
...Indeed, Stalin's repeated campaigns to radicalize and spur on officialdom in 1929-30, and after, suggest a fearful, recalcitrant party-state bureaucracy, not an event-making one...
...218-19...
...The debates between Bukharinists and Trotskyists in the 1920s represented the spectrum of high Bolshevik programmatic thinking, right to left...
...Adam B. Ulam: Bolshevik Marxism "determined the character of postrevolutionary Leninism as well as the main traits of what we call Stalinism...
...The Bolshevism of 1917-28 did contain important "seeds" of Stalinism...
...From afar, the exiled Trotsky leveled his own accusations against Stalin's regime, but his economic proposals in the early 1930s were, as they had been in the 1920s, far closer to, and now "entirely indistinguishable from," Bukharin's...
...It also assumes, mistakenly, I think, that some kind of democratic order— liberal or proletarian—was a Russian possibility in 1917 or after...
...4See, respectively, Karpovich in Partisan Review, July 1949, pp...
...Early studies of Stalinism in historical-cultural terms tended to become monocausal interpretations of a revolution (or of Communism) inevitably undone or fatally transformed by history...
...But, for reasons beyond our concern here, by 1924 NEP had acquired a general legitimacy among Bolshevik leaders...
...Lenin was plainly the singular Bolshevik...
...But what about Trotsky and the left...
...Its elite (massacred virtually as a whole), general membership (by 1939, 70 percent had joined since 1929 or after), ethos, and role were no longer those of the old party, or even the party of 1934...
...Norton, copyright © 1977 by W. W. Norton, Inc...
...More telling, there is plain evidence that the purges were not, as some scholars have imagined, somehow rational in terms of modernization, a terrorist Geritol that accelerated the process, weeding out obsolete functionaries, etc...
...193 Deutscher's views on the subject were more complicated and interesting, partly because he, almost alone, made it a central concern in his historical essays and biographies of Stalin and Trotsky...
...In addition, the standard treatment of Bolshevik thinking about NEP is more complicated because all scholars are aware of the intense policy debates of the 1920s, a circumstance not easily reconciled with a simplistic interpretation of NEP as merely a programmatic bivouac, or the antechamber of Stalinism...
...He urged greater attention to heavy industry and planning earlier than Bukharin, and he worried more about the village "kulak...
...This is among the most difficult problems of historical analysis...
...Though his political rhetoric was often that of revolutionary heroism, Trotsky's actual economic proposals in the 1920s were also based on NEP and its continuation...
...but during its formation and agony in the Stalin years, for all its high position and great power over those below, it did not ultimately rule...
...But failure to distinguish between Soviet authoritarianism before and after 1929 means to obscure the very nature of Stalinism...
...In recent years a few books have challenged the continuity thesis and the academic 9"Russia in Transition," Dissent, Winter 1955, p. 24...
...S. H.C...
...This may suggest a good deal about the evolution of the Bolshevik leadership's IM relations with the party-at-large between 1917 and 1929, as it does about modern parties generally...
...The other insists that changes in the Soviet political system under Bolshevism and Stalinism were superficial or secondary to continuities that were fundamental and observable...
...For one thing, our language betrays a rigid determinism, which is not unlike the one that once prevailed in official Stalinist historiography and was properly derided by Western scholars...
...Trotsky's charge that Stalinism represented a counterrevolutionary bureaucratic regime that was "diametrically opposed" to Bolshevism—unequivocal, though somewhat ambiguous in its reasoning—became the focus of an intense debate among Western radicals, and among Trotskyists (and lapsed Trotskyists) themselves...
...and a switch in emphasis from ordinary people to leaders and official bosses as the creators of history...
...Stalinism, according to the consensus, was the logical, rightful, triumphant, and even inevitable continuation, or outcome, of Bolshevism...
...Thus a major proponent of the continuity thesis warns against equating the Czarist and Soviet regimes: "it is important to stress that there is a deep gulf dividing authoritarianism and totalitarianism, and if we treat the two as identical political formations, we end by revealing our inability to distinguish between continuity and change...
...As the Civil War deepened into a great social conflict, official measures grew more extreme, and the meaning and the "defense of the revolution" became inseparable, Bolsheviks naturally infused these improvised policies with high theoretical and programmatic significance beyond military victory...
...Not surprisingly, the literature of academic Soviet studies contains little social history or real social studies...
...Not even Stalin dared challenge that legitimacy in his final contest with the Bukharinists in 1928-29...
...The main carriers of cultural tradition are, of course, social groups and classes...
...The two sides disagreed on important economic issues, from price policy and rural taxation to the prospects for comprehensive planning...
...2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), p. 38...
...The theory of a "straight line" between Bolshevism (or Leninism, as it is regularly mislabeled) and major Stalinist policies has been recently popularized anew by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn...
...The present would seem to be a good time to begin this kind of innovative research...
...but finally H.T...
...Developing the themes of Lenin's last writings, which constituted both a defense and further elaboration of NEP as a road to socialism, and adding some of his own, Bukharin became the party's main theorist of NEP...
...1967, pp...
...To argue that these developments predetermined Stalinism is another matter...
...Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), p. 102...
...5 Here serious questions about the historical approach are involved...
...Accompanying the teleological determinism, there is a tendency, projecting outcome backward upon the past, to Stalinize early Soviet history and politics...
...In its essentials, the argument runs as follows: War communism was mainly a product of the party's original ideological-programmatic ideas (sometimes called "blueprints"), an eager crash program for socialism...
...Not surprisingly, these popular sentiments have outlived Stalin himself...
...The terror wrecked or retarded many of the real achievements of 1929-36...
...In fact, the revised Bukharinist program, adopted as the first Five Year Plan at the 15th Party Congress in December 1927 and calling for more ambitious industrial investment as 201 well as partial voluntary collectivization, represented a kind of amalgam of Bukharinist-Trotskyist thinking as it had evolved in the debates of the 1920s...
...Surviving various methodologies and approaches, the consensus posited an uncomplicated conclusion: no meaningful difference or discontinuity was seen between Bolshevism and Stalinism, which were viewed as being fundamentally the same, politically and ideologically...
...The term "Stalinism" was prohibited from official usage...
...Unfortunately, this is to say very little, indeed only the obvious...
...Here was an instance of revived tradition, but also of contemporary policy and crisis, since the retrogression came about in direct response to the social chaos, particularly wandering peasant masses in search of food, of 1929-33...
...see footnote I7...
...2 The other is that early academic works were "too often written in the atmosphere of an intense hatred of the present Russian regime...
...It is also a question that necessarily impinges upon and shapes the historian's perspective on a host of smaller but critical issues between 1917 and 1939...
...Stalin would tap these real sentiments for his Civil War reenactment of 1929-33...
...ed.: New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), pp...
...6 Adam B. Ulam, The New Face of Soviet Totalitarianism (New York: Praeger, 1965), pp...
...The 1930s themselves must be divided into periods, including at least the social upheaval of 192933, the interregnum of 1934-35, when future policy was being contested in the high leadership, and 1936-39, which witnessed the final triumph of Stalinism over the Bolshevik tradition and the political completion of revolution from above...
...and, second, a series of interlocking historical interpretations said to demonstrate Bolshevik programmatic continuity between 1917 and Stalin's upheaval of 1929-33...
...He replied: "We stand, and we shall stand, for Bukharin...
...It is all the more astonishing, then, that the question has produced very little dispute in our scholarship...
...The programmatic debates of the 1920s are treated largely as an extension, and in terms of, the TrotskyStalin rivalry (or, perpetuating the factional misnomers of the period, "permanent revolution" and "socialism in one country...
...None of this is to say that war communism had no ideological component...
...More generally, as Moshe Lewin has shown in a social history of 1929-33, many administrative, legislative, class, and ideological features of the mature Stalinist state took shape as makeshift solutions to the social chaos, the "quicksand society," generated by the destruction of NEP institutions and processes during the initial wave of revolution from above...
...The traditional treatment of the economic debates (we are not concerned here with the 20Alfred G. Meyer...
...Indeed, during the great expansion of academic Soviet studies (I speak here mainly of the Anglo-American school) between the late 1940s and 1960s, a remarkable consensus of interpretation formed on the subject of Bolshevism and Stalinism...
...He carefully distinguished between original Bolshevism and Stalinism...
...If nothing more, it implicated them in the cult of Stalin's infallibility, which grew greater as disasters grew worse, and which became an integral part of the Stalinist system...
...But their origins will not be found in a Bolshevik program of October...
...After 1936 and Stalin's great purge, despite an outward "continuity of organizational forms and official nomenclature," the "one-party system had given way to a one-person system, the ruling party to a ruling personage...
...0 II The voluminous scholarship devoted to the continuity thesis observes certain tenacious conventions...
...For example, several characteristic ideres fixe of full Stalinism, including the murderous notion of an inevitable "intensification of the class struggle," first appeared in Stalin's campaign to discredit all Bukharinist and NEP ideas in 192830...
...Not surprisingly, perhaps, this venerable approach plays a central role in our thinking about differences between Czarist and Soviet political history, and almost none in our thinking about Bolshevism and Stalinism...
...Both presented very different perspectives on many aspects of Soviet history...
...Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964), p. 40...
...4 What is being explained and argued in this thesis of "a fundamental continuity from Lenin to Stalin" should be clear...
...Several of these changes have been noted by Western and Soviet scholars: the revival of nationalism, statism, antiSemitism...
...In customary usage, these terms obscure more than they define...
...If the rival policies can be dichotomized and personified, they were Trotskyist and Bukharinist...
...Instead, Stalinism was excess, extraor"Thomas H. Hammond in Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought, Ernest J. Simmons, ed...
...The vocabulary used to posit a direct causal relationship between the "political dynamics" of Bolshevism and Stalinism, especially collectivization and the great terror, may be unique in modern-day political and historical studies...
...Bukharin's economic proposals for modernizing and building socialism in Soviet Russia in the 1920s are clear enough...
...16 Implicit in all this is, I think, a Sovietological version of what Herbert Butterfield called the Whig interpretation of history...
...Approaches that take into account historical-cultural tradition are therefore essential, though they, too, have sometimes been abused in Western scholarship...
...He wanted to "exploit" peasant agriculture through market relations by artificially fixing state industrial prices higher than agricultural prices...
...IV ' n treating Stalinism as "full-blown" Bolshevism, and the Soviet 1930s as a function and extension of 1917, the main scholarly disservice of the continuity thesis has been to discourage close examination of Stalinism as a specific system with its own history...
...Such a critique is long overdue for several reasons...
...not merely a Thermidorian revival of nationalist tradition, but an almost fascistlike chauvinism...
...After 1929 and the end of NEP, the Bolshevik programmatic alternative to Stalinism, in fact and as perceived inside the party, remained basically Bukharinist...
...I am not suggesting that Leninism, rather than Bolshevism, was nascently Stalinist...
...Looking at the "efficient" or inner reality, Robert C. Tucker came to a very different conclusion several years ago: "What we carelessly call `the Soviet political system' is best seen and analyzed as an historical succession of political systems within a broadly continuous institutional framework...
...Deutscher was a partisan of the Russian revolution, and Carr viewed it with considerable empathy...
...The horse of the feudal prince has its back turned to the Central Party Archives, where the immortal works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin are preserved and where a beautiful statue of Lenin stands...
...Two familiar, and equally questionable, lines of analysis are among the corollaries of our Whig historiography...
...Characteristic of our writing about Soviet history generally, social and political development after 1917 is explained almost exclusively by the nature of the party regime and its aggression upon a passive, victimized society...
...Thus Merle Fainsod's classic summary: "Out of the totalitarian embryo would come totalitarianism full-blown...
...20 They are, however, factually incorrect...
...The monument to the bloody feudal prince has become a kind of personification of the grim epoch of the personality cult...
...Ulam, The Unfinished Revolution (New York: Random House, 1960), p. 198, and The Bolsheviks (New York: Macmillan, 1965), p. 477...
...a whole river of blood...
...The deterministic quality of this argument is striking, as is its emphasis on a single causal factor...
...As I have discussed these questions at some length elsewhere, I shall be concise...
...And, third, the actual policies of war communism did not begin until June 1918, in response to the threat of prolonged civil war and diminishing supplies, a situation that immediately outdated Lenin's conciliatory "state capitalism...
...Christianity having contributed to both compassion and inquisition, socialism to both social justice and tyranny...
...198 It is sometimes pointed out, as a final defense of the continuity thesis, that "Stalinism" was never acknowledged officially during Stalin's reign, only "MarxismLeninism...
...Its deliberate bodies— the Party Congress, the Central Committee, and eventually even the Politburo—rarely convened...
...For another, while claiming to explain so much, this sort of teleological interpretation actually explains very little...
...Indeed, it is testimony to their enduring value that many contain rich materials refuting it...
...Among its most familiar assertions is that Bolshevism contained the "seeds," "roots," or "germs" of Stalinism...
...759-60...
...The party's growing centralization, bureaucratization, and administrative intolerance after 1917 certainly promoted authoritarianism in the one-party system and abetted Stalin's rise...
...12 But another convention of the continuity thesis should also be protested: the equating of Bolshevism and Leninism...
...This theory, too, is onedimensional and ahistorical...
...Even the purges, Medvedev suggests, elicited the support of workers, who saw in the downfall of bosses and bureaucrats "the underdog's dream of retribution with the aid of a higher justice...
...In addition to obscuring the subject by using "totalitarianism" as a synonym for Stalinism, the approach contributed to the continuity thesis in two important ways...
...The case made by Western scholars for fundamental continuities in the Soviet political system has rested on what Bagehot called "dignified," merely apparent, or fictitious parts...
...was Stalin's Russia capitalist, state capitalist, Thermidorian, Fructidorian, Bonapartist, still socialist?— and it suffered, too, from some understandable reluctance, even on the part of antiStalinists, to tarnish the Soviet Union's legitimacy in the confrontation with Hitlerism...
...I can do so here only elliptically, with the purpose of raising critical questions rather than providing adequate answers...
...Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Development of the USSR, Donald W. Treadgold...
...Every semiinformed official must have known that collectivization was a disaster, wrecking agricultural production, savaging livestock herds, and killing millions of people...
...Excesses were the essence of historical Stalinism, and they are what really requires explanation...
...But its unfortunate impact on our historiography has gone relatively unnoticed...
...Academic commentary on the subject began in earnest only after World War II, with the expansion of professional Soviet studies...
...Tucker's conclusion that Stalin's terror "broke the back of the party, eliminated it as a ...ruling class," has been amply confirmed by more recent evidence...
...Like Bukharin, he was a "reformist" in economic policy, looking to the evolution of NEP Russia toward industrialism and socialism...
...Neither Bolshevik tradition, the once modest Lenin cult, nor Stalin's personal gratification can explain the popular dimensions it acquired...
...16 Let History Judge (New York: Knopf, 1971), p. 359...
...This bizarre discrepancy between official claims and social reality, uncharacteristic of original Bolshevism, was the first major step in the progressive fictionalization of Soviet ideology...
...The argument for programmatic continuity rests upon interlocking interpretations of the two previous periods in Bolshevik policy: war communism—the extreme nationalization, grain requisitioning, and monopolistic state intervention effected during the Civil War of 1918-20...
...The argument that a ruling bureaucracy-class was the animating force behind the events of 1929-33 makes no sense, logically or empirically...
...a historical justification of Stalinism, not a condemnation...
...One is the extraordinary determinism and monocausal explanations on which the continuity thesis so often depends...
...All this, it is argued, derived from the political—that is, the ideological, programmatic, and organizational—nature of original Bolshevism...
...and The Prophet Unarmed (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 463...
...This argument misses the essential comparative point...
...As Carr has said, however, "every successful revolution has its thermidor...
...Even in its new Stalinist form, the party's political importance fell well below that of the police, and its official esteem below that of the state...
...Stalin's personal role in unleashing imposed collectivization and escalating industrial targets in 1929, when he bypassed councils of party decision-making, augured his full autocracy of later years...
...Though the coercive aspects of the Stalinist system can scarcely be exaggerated, this seems no more adequate as a full explanation than would a similar interpretation of Hitler's Germany...
...But the Whig tradition in Soviet studies has given rise to unsatisfactory conventions on the subject of Bolshevism and Stalinism...
...The past is evaluated in terms of the present, antecedents in terms of outcome...
...The enormous expansion of police repression, security forces, and the archipelago of forced labor camps in 1929-33 were clearly part of the background and mechanism of 1936-39...
...In 1932-33, for example, the Stalinist regime reinstated the internal passport system, once thought to typify Czarism and despised by all Russian revolutionaries...
...It must have had a profoundly demoralizing effect on party officials, contributing to their apparently meager resistance to Stalin's terror in 1936-39...
...It remained oligarchical, in the words of one of its leaders, "a negotiated federation between groups, groupings, factions, and 'tendencies...
...Moreover, it is not entirely accurate...
...In Lewin's view from below, the first in our literature and rich testimony to the need for social history, the Stalinist system was less a product of Bolshevik programs or planning than of desperate attempts to cope with the social pandemonium and crises created by the Stalinist leadership itself in 1929-33...
...14 Boris Souvarine in Marxism in the Modern World, Milorad M. Drachkovitch, ed...
...It grew from an internal party celebration of the new leader in 1929 into a mass religion, a "peculiar Soviet form of worship...
...see also his "Beyond Dogma," Survey, Winter 1971, pp...
...What is meant by "the party" as a historical determinant when, for example, its membership, composition, organizational structure, internal political life, and outlook underwent far-reaching alterations between 1917 and 1921 alone...
...However inconsistent their ideas may have been, neither ever advocated imposed collectivization, much less wholesale collectivization as a system of requisitioning or a solution to industrial backwardness...
...Stalin's public policies on industry, agriculture, and planning were Bukharin's, that is, pro-NEP, moderate, evolutionary...
...The historian, as 15 Naum Jasny, Socialized Agriculture of the USSR (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1949), p. 18...
...meaningful distinctions between Bolshevism and Stalinism...
...More important, the nature of Bolshevik ideology was far less cohesive and fixed than the standard interpretation allows...
...and NEP—the moderate agricultural and industrial policies and mixed public-private economy of 1921-28...
...3 These perspectives undoubtedly contributed to the scholarly view that the evils of contemporary Stalinist Russia were predetermined by the uninterrupted "spreading malignancy" of Soviet political history since 1917...
...But Bolshevism was larger, and more diverse, than Lenin and Leninism...
...As a theory of Stalinism, however, this approach is deeply flawed...
...H. Carr and Isaac Deutscher...
...but the concept was ingrained, tacitly and officially...
...In addition, careful application of contemporary insights may illuminate the past...
...5 One result was a tendency to treat the whole of Bolshevik and Soviet history and policies before 1929 as merely the antechamber of Stalinism, as halfblown "totalitarianism...
...Neither shared the mainstream antipathy to Bolshevism...
...approached the "completion of the work that Lenin had started...
...This was a departure from even the early 1930s, when they were normally called Leninist, Bolshevik, or Soviet...
...The question is, however, not one of "seeds," or even of less significant continuities, but of fundamental continuities or discontinuities...
...It is not merely secondary features, but the most historic and murderous acts of Stalinism between 1929 and 1939, from forcible wholesale collectivization to the execution and brutal incarceration of tens of millions of people...
...The question of NEP is even more important...
...After the purges swept away at least a million of its members between 1935 and 1939, the primacy of the party—the "essence" of Bolshevism-Leninism in most scholarly definitions—was no more...
...The timing is significant, coinciding with the high tide of Stalinism as a developed system in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and with the onset (or resumption) of the Cold War...
...Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming...
...illustration, a standard work explains that Stalin's collectivization campaign of 1929-33 "was the inevitable consequence of the triumph of the Bolshevik Party on November 7, 1917...
...He described major discontinuities, even a "chasm between the Leninist and Stalinist phases of the Soviet regime," and he was an implacable critic of scholars who imagined a "straight continuation" between the two...
...Carr reminds us, is unavoidably influenced by the present and by established outcomes...
...Those who do so rely similarly upon an exclusionary selection of references, emphasizing, for example, the Lenin of What Is To Be Done...
...Accordingly, the previous and different history of the party could no longer be written about, even to distort: between 1938 and 1953, only one doctoral dissertation was written in the Soviet Union on this once hallowed subject...
...Still more, the evidence seems contradictory, even bewildering...
...Replying to similar arguments circulating in the Soviet Union, Roy Medvedev has pointed out that if Stalinism was predetermined by Bolshevism, if there were no alternatives after 1917, then 1917 and Bolshevism must have been predetermined by previous Russian history...
...The problem begins with the formulation of the continuity thesis...
...III Underlying all other arguments for the continuity thesis is, finally, that of a programmatic "straight line" starting with 1917...
...These phenomena have appeared in many societies and are rather easily explained...
...There remains, then, the argument that discontinuities were secondary to continuities in the workings of the Soviet political system under Bolshevism and Stalinism...
...Robert C. Fucker, in ibid...
...Reshetar, Concise History of the Communist Party (New York: Praeger, 1960), pp...
...It is essentially the question of whether the original Bolshevik movement that predominated politically for a decade after 1917 and the subsequent events and socialpolitical order that emerged under Stalin in the 1930s are to be interpreted in terms of fundamental continuity or discontinuity...
...The discussion, which continues even today, suffered from an excess of idiomatic Marxist labeling and ersatz analysis—was the Stalinist bureaucracy a new class...
...The importance of distinguishing between the official, or theatrical, facade and the inner (sometimes disguised) reality of politics has been evident at least since Bagehot demolished the prevailing theory of English politics in 1867 by dissecting the system in terms of its "dignified" and "efficient" parts...
...Richard Gregor's introduction to Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Park, o/ the Soviet Union, Vol...
...There is, in particular, the important question of Stalinism's popular support in Soviet society, a problem largely ignored and inconsistent with the imagery of a "totalitarian" regime dominating a hapless, "atomized" population through power techniques alone...
...Even less helpful are the three definitional components of the continuity thesis: Bolshevism, Stalinism, continuity...
...195 WHAT, THEN, of formulating continuities and discontinuities...
...While most Western theorists of Soviet "totalitarianism" saw Stalin's upheaval of 1929-33 as a turning point, they interpreted it not as discontinuity but as a continuation, culmination, or "breakthrough" in an ongoing process of creeping "totalitarianism...
...Impotence seeks the protection of supreme avenging power...
...not merely a leader cult, but deification of a despot...
...One is the dubious logic, noted by an early polemicist in the dispute, that "Russian communism had to turn out as it has because it now can be seen to have, in fact, turned out as it has...
...Nor is it clear how this theory explains the slaughter of Soviet officialdom in 1936-39, unless we conclude that the "ruling" bureaucracy-class committed suicide...
...I am persuaded by Tucker's argument that essential, even definitive, aspects of Stalinism, including critical turning points in its history and the "excesses," cannot be understood apart from Stalin as a political personality...
...The terms may still have been applicable, but their meaning was different...
...The Bolshevik system had been one of party dictatorship characterized by oligarchical leadership politics in the ruling party...
...There are three essential points to be made against locating the origins of war communism in an original Bolshevik program...
...181-88...
...He adds: "the only problem was what character and philosophy this totalitarianism was to take...
...to ignore, for the "straight line" to 1917, the actual period, 1929-33, when historical Stalinism first appeared...
...In itself, however, this demonstrates nothing about continuity, much less about causality or inevitability...
...Lev Davidovich Trotsky," Problems of Communism, Nov...
...Michael Karpovich, "The Russian Revolution of 1917," Journal of Modern History, June 1930, p. 258...
...Trotsky and the left opposition are said to have been anti-NEP and embryonically Stalinist, the progenitors of "almost every major item in the political program that Stalin later carried out...
...This may help explain two aspects of the continuity thesis that are not easily documented but seem inescapable...
...But it tells us nothing directly about Stalinism, which was not oligarchical but autocratic politics, unless we conclude that the "iron law of oligarchy" is actually an iron law of autocracy...
...A very different course was advocated by many party leaders, probably a majority, in 1934-35...
...This was the cement of the Stalin-Bukharin duumvirate that made official policy and led the party majority against the left oppositions until early 1928...
...Having portrayed a "basic affinity between Trotsky's plans and Stalin's actions," these secondary interpretations suggest at least a significant continuity between Stalinism and Bolshevik thinking in the 1920s, and underlie the general interpretation of NEP...
...Of all the historical questions raised by the Bolshevik revolution and its outcome, none is larger, more complex, or more important than that of the relationship between Bolshevism and Stalinism...
...In the mid-1930s, after an initial period of inconclusive and contradictory statements, the exiled oppositionist developed his celebrated argument that Stalinism was not the fulfillment of Bolshevism, as was officially proclaimed, but its "Thermidorian negation" and "betrayal...
...Some became scholarly historians of "totalitarianism...
...also his The Soyief Political Mind (rev...
...There were generally held Bolshevik goals and tenets— socialism, workers' control, nationalization, large-scale farming, planning, and the like— but these were vague and subject to the most varying interpretations inside the party...
...The policies became ideological...
...It is important, first of all, to shed the ahistorical habit of thinking of the Stalinist system as an unchanging phenomenon...
...Robert H. McNeal: "Stalin preserved the Bolshevik tradition...
...Both need to be reexamined fully, though I can do so here only very briefly and, again, elliptically...
...Stalin promoted it from above, but it found fertile soil, becoming (as many Soviet sources tell us) an authentic social phenomenon...
...In this context, is it sufficient to view Stalinist popular and political culture as merely artifices of censorship...
...The causal "dynamic" cited most often is, of course, the party's ideology...
...Stalinism was not simply nationalism, bureaucratization, absence of democracy, censorship, police repression, and the rest in any precedented sense...
...These were not simply amendments, but a new ideology...
...194 here...
...In addition, revolutions from above (a little studied category) are by definition a great expansion 204 of the state and its social functions, which means a great proliferation of official jobs and privileges...
...If this first Bolshevik program resembled anything that followed, it was NEP...
...The author can then marvel at Stalin's policies of 1929-33: "It is difficult to find a parallel for a regime or a party which held power for ten years, biding its time until 199 it felt strong enough to fulfill its original program...
...While many were victimized, many people also profited from Stalinism, and identified with it—not just the "whole system of smaller dictators" throughout Soviet administrative life, but the millions of petty officials who gained opportunity and elevation of status...
...In that case, "to explain Stalinism we have to return to earlier and earlier epochs...
...It is, as Hannah Arendt observed many years ago, more on the order of "axiomatic value judgment" than authentic historical analysis...
...I have tried to show elsewhere that Bolshevism was a far more diverse political movement—ideologically, programmatically, generationally, etc.—than is usually acknowledged in our scholarship...
...Carr's great History of Soviet Russia concludes before the Stalin years...
...Similar criticisms must be leveled against the other causal "dynamic" usually cited, the party's "organizational principles"—the implied theory that Stalinism originated with What Is to Be Done...
...Less noted, and the real point, is that Bolshevism also contained other important, non-Stalinist "seeds...
...To this proposition even the most ardent proponent of discontinuity must say—yes, of course...
...The Russian Civil War, to take an early instance, had a major impact on Bolshevik outlook, reviving the self-conscious theory of an embattled vanguard, which had been inoperative or inconsequential for at least a decade, and implanting in the once civilian-minded party what a leading Bolshevik called a "military soviet culture...
...He adds, on a political note, "that would be wrong...
...He campaigned and won, not as the abolitionist of NEP or the proponent of "revolution from above," but as a "calm and sober" leader who could make it work...
...and, equally, that the "seeds" of Stalinism are also to be found elsewhere—in Russian historical and cultural traditions, in such social events as the Civil War, in the international setting, etc...
...Finally, it is or it has been—a political question...
...Others, including James Burnham and Milovan Djilas, produced popular theories presenting Soviet Communism in a different light—as a new class or bureaucratic order...
...Several obvious objections can be raised against this explanation of social and political development...
...Nonetheless, the agenda of what remains to be studied by way of broader political, social, and historical context and factors is very large...
...Viewing the Bolshevik and Stalinist past as a single undifferentiated tradition, many specialists have minimized the system's capacity for reform in the postStalin years...
...Similar problems arise from the customary treatment of original Bolshevism, which defines it in so selectively narrow a fashion as to construe it as Stalinism, or "embryonic" Stalinism...
...It was perpetuated in the heroic Bolshevik tradition of October and the Civil War, and probably strongest among cadres formed by the warfare experience of 1918-20 and the younger party generation...
...I The history and substance of the continuity thesis warrant closer examination...
...For 20 years this historical interpretation was axiomatic in virtually all of our major scholarly works, and it prevails even today...
...Tensions inherent in the interpretation are related to secondary but significant conventions in our literature on NEP...
...and conservative, or reactionary, cultural and behavioral norms...
...Both the evolution of war ' 9Donald W. Treadgold, Twentieth Century Russia (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1959), pp...
...It was not, for example, merely coercive peasant policies, but a virtual civil war against the peasantry...
...These years of "revolution from above" were, historically and programmatically, the birth period of Stalinism...
...51, 53, 56, 57, 167-68...
...Or as one interpreter of continuity in Soviet political history has argued, "sometimes the past is better understood by examining the present and then defining the relationship of the present to the past...
...dinary extremism, in each...
...Even Preobrazhensky, the avatar of "superindustrialization" whose fearful arguments about the necessity of "primitive socialist accumulation" based on "exploiting" the peasant sector are often cited as Stalin's inspiration, accepted the hallmark of NEP economics...
...Every historical period—each political phenomenon—has antecedents, "seeds," in the preceding one: 1917 in Czarist history, the Third Reich in Weimar, and so forth...
...First, the view of an unbroken continuity between Bolshevism and Stalinism has shaped the thinking about all the major periods, events, causal factors, actors, and alternatives during the formative decades of Soviet history...
...There were also less obvious, but perhaps equally important, consequences...
...We are confronted here, as elsewhere, with the difficulty inherent in applying Western concepts, whether of the Marxist or modernization variety, to a Soviet political and social reality shaped by Russian historical and cultural tradition...
...Controversy over the origins and nature of Stalin's spectacular policies actually began in the West early in the 1930s...
...It is even more one-dimensional: it ignores the fact that a given ideology may influence events in different ways...
...And yet both, for other and more complex reasons, saw a fundamental continuity between Bolshevism and Stalinism...
...With Bagehot's method, of course, this tells us nothing...
...136-37...
...majority of Russia swarmed into the cities to become large segments of the new working class and lower officialdom, the Drozdovs of tomorrow...
...One argues that the inner "political dynamics" (or "nature") of the Bolshevik party predetermined Stalinism...
...In official ideology, however, it became obligatory to eulogize collectivization as a great accomplishment of the Stalinist leadership...
...7 The approach is modified here by "sometimes," but it is clear and widespread...
...21 As for subsequent events, it would be a mistake to interpret Stalin's terrorist assault on Soviet officialdom in 1936-39 as a "necessary" or "functional" byproduct of the imposed social revolution of 1929-33...
...Though this is ideally an empirical question, here, too, there seems to be a critical methodological lapse...
...220-21...
...Finally, a dramatic example of cultural tradition and popular support was the Stalin cult, in some ways the major institution of the autocracy...
...If ideology influenced events, it was also shaped, and changed, by them...
...8 7 Milovan Djilas, The New Class (New York: Praeger, 1957), pp...
...19 The problem with this interpretation is that it conflicts with much of the historical evidence...
...While its nature and extent certainly varied over time, it seems evident that there was substantial popular support for Stalinism, inside and outside officialdom, from the beginning and through the very worst...
...The purpose of this essay is to reexamine this scholarly axiom, to suggest that it rests upon a series of dubious formulations, concepts, and interpretations, and to argue that, whatever its insights, it obscures more than it illuminates...
...Bolsheviks had done little thinking about practical economic policies before October and, as it turned out, there were few on which they could agree...
...As their autobiographical thinking developed, onceimportant distinctions between the first two, and sometimes all three, faded...
...it is a problematic admixture of new and old patterns and values, and the nature of this outcome depends upon contemporary social and political circumstances as well...
...In the 1930s, as Lewin has shown, the "petty bourgeois" 22 Roy A. Medvedev, On Socialist Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1975), p. 346...
...When Stalin abandoned this program a year and a half later, he abandoned mainstream Bolshevik thinking about economic and social change...
...Though his policies evolved between 1924 and 1928 toward great emphasis on planning, heavy industrial investment, and efforts to promote a partial and voluntary collective farm sector, he remained committed to the NEP economic framework of a. state, or "socialist" sector (mainly large-scale industry, transportation, and banking) and a private sector (peasant farms and small manufacturing, trade, and service enterprises) interacting through market relations...
...p. 33...
...I leave the question of programmatic continuity to the next section and begin with conceptual matters...
...Quite apart from the demonstrable role of Stalin, who is reduced in these theories to a replaceable chief bureaucrat, it remains to be explained how a bureaucracy, which is defined as deeply conservative, would have decided and carried out policies so radical and dangerous as forcible collectivization...
Vol. 24 • April 1977 • No. 2
