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STALIN AND HIS ERA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 August 2007

HIROAKI KUROMIYA
HIROAKI KUROMIYA*
Affiliation:
Indiana University
*
Department of History, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405, USA[email protected]
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Abstract

The partial opening up of the formerly closed Soviet archives has had an enormous impact on the amount of new historical material available for research. Recent developments in research on Stalin and the Soviet Union are remarkable. The present article examines these developments with respect to three particular topics: ‘Stalin and Terror’, ‘Stalin and ideology’, and ‘Stalin and society’. It argues that whereas in certain areas new information has led to a greater consensus among historians, in others, such as Stalin's Great Terror, it has led to heated controversy. The article asks why, and suggests that the problem lies both in conceptualization and in the use of historical sources. More generally, the article discusses the present state of knowledge in the field. Because the study of Stalinism is often assessed in the light of the study of Nazism, it includes brief comparisons of Stalin and Hitler and Stalinism and Nazism where appropriate.

Type
Historiographical Reviews
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , September 2007 , pp. 711 - 724
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

1 R. W. Davies, Soviet history in the Gorbachev revolution (Bloomington IN, 1989).

2 R. W. Davies, Soviet history in the Yeltsin era (Basingstoke, 1997).

3 For a more comprehensive survey of literature, see Alter Litvin and John Keep, Stalinism: Russian and Western views at the turn of the millennium (New York, 2005).

4 For an attempt to assess the more diverse aspects of Stalin, see Sarah Davies and James Harris, eds., Stalin: a new history (Cambridge, 2005).

5 The latest attempt is this regard is Henry Rousso, ed., Stalinism and Nazism: history and memory compared (Lincoln NE, 2004); the original French edition was published in 1999.

6 ‘Dve vstrechi s L. M. Kaganovichem’, Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, 2 (1999), pp. 101–22 at p. 110.

7 Roy Medvedev and Zhores Medvedev, The unknown Stalin: his life, death, and legacy (Woodstock, NY, 2004), especially ch. 3.

8 A copy has, however, been preserved. See Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich. 1957. Stenogramma iiun'skogo plenuma TsK KPSS i drugie dokumenty (Moscow, 1998), pp. 121–2. See also Mikhailov, Oleg, ‘Limit na rasstrel’, Sovershenno sekretno, 7 (1993), p. 5Google Scholar.

9 Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: triumph and tragedy (London, 1991), pp. 308, 323, 338–9, 422.

10 As discussed in R. W. Davies Oleg V. Khlevniuk, and E. A. Rees, eds., The Stalin–Kaganovich correspondence, 1931–1936 (New Haven, CT, 2003). See also Reabilitatsiia. Politicheskie protsessy 30–50-kh godov (Moscow, 1991) and J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The road to Terror: Stalin and the self-destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939 (New Haven, CT, 1999).

11 As argued by Binner, Rolf and Jung, Marc, ‘Wie der Terror “Gross” Wurde: Massenmord und Lagerhaft nach Befehl 00447’, Cahiers du monde russe, 42 (2001), pp. 557–614Google Scholar.

12 As discussed by Terry Martin, The affirmative action empire: nations and nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY, 2001).

13 Robert Thurston, Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia (New Haven, CT, 1996).

14 Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov, Stalin's loyal executioner: People's Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895–1940 (Stanford CA, 2002).

15 See, for example, Ellman, Michael, ‘Soviet repression statistics: some comments’, Europe-Asia Studies, 54 (2002), pp. 1151–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ilic, Melanie, ‘The Great Terror in Leningrad: a quantitative analysis’, Europe-Asia Studies, 52 (2000), pp. 1515–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 See Maier, Charles, ‘Heiß und kaltes Gedächtnis: Über die politische Halbwertszeit von Nazismus und Kommunismus’, Transit, 22 (2002), pp. 153–65Google Scholar; and Getty, J. Arch, ‘“Excesses are not permitted”: mass Terror and Stalinist governance in the late 1930s’, Russian Review, 61 (2002), pp. 113–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Popov, V. P., ‘Gosudarstvennyi Terror v sovetskoi Rossii. 1923–1953 gg. (istochniki i ikh interpretatsiia)’, Otechestvennyi arkhiv, 2 (1992), pp. 20–31Google Scholar at p. 28.

18 S. G. Wheatcroft, ‘Towards explaining the changing levels of Stalinist repression in the 1930s: mass killings’, in S. G. Wheatcroft, ed., Challenging traditional views of Russian history (New York, 2002), pp. 112–46.

19 Ellman, ‘Soviet repression statistics’.

20 Ilic, ‘The Great Terror’, p. 1518.

21 The original French version was published in 1997. A rejoinder volume by Michel Dreyfus et al., Le siècle des communismes appeared in Paris in 2000.

22 Ellman, ‘Soviet repression statistics’, p. 1170.

23 Oleg V. Khlevniuk, The history of the Gulag: from collectivization to the Great Terror (New Haven, CT, 2004), p. 328.

24 Ellman, ‘Soviet repression statistics’, p. 1164. The most comprehensive work on the Gulag is Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga. Konets 1920-kh – pervaia polovina 1950-kh godov (7 vols., Moscow, 2005).

25 Getty, ‘“Excesses are not permitted”’, p. 136.

26 ‘Vernichtung der orthodoxen Geistlichen in der Sowjetunion in den Massenoperationen des Großen Terrors 1937–1938’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 52 (2004), pp. 515–33 My rejoinder to Binner and Jung is ‘Why the destruction of Orthodox priests in the Soviet Union in 1937–1938?’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 55 (2007), pp. 86–93.

27 See Kuromiya, , ‘Accounting for the Great Terror’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 53 (2005), pp. 86–101Google Scholar.

28 See Kuromiya, ‘Accounting’; and Oleg Khlevniuk, ‘The objectives of the Great Terror, 1937–1938’, in J. Cooper, M. Perrie, and E. A. Rees, eds., Soviet history, 1917–1953: essays in honour of R. W. Davies (London, 1995).

29 See Getty, ‘“Excesses are not permitted”’; Binner and Jung, ‘Wie der Terror “Gross” Wurde’; and Ilich, ‘The Great Terror’.

30 Note the well-known book on this matter in French history: Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the archives: pardon tales and their tellers in sixteenth-century France (Stanford, CA, 1987).

31 Getty, ‘“Excesses are not permitted”’, pp. 130, 134, 136–7.

32 J. Arch Getty, ‘Afraid of their shadows: the Bolshevik recourse to Terror, 1932–1938’, in Manfred Hildermeier, ed., Stalinismus vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg: Neue Wege der Forschung (Munich, 1998), pp. 172 and 191.

33 Khlevniuk, ‘The objectives’; and Kuromiya, ‘Accounting’.

34 Pravo na repressii (Moscow, 2006), pp. 193–4.

35 Malia wrote a preface to the English edition of Courtois et al., The black book of communism, emphasizing this point.

36 Sto sorok besed s Molotvym (Moscow, 1991), pp. 439–40. There is an abridged English translation of this book: Molotov remembers: inside Kremlin politics (Chicago, IL, 1993).

37 Robert Service, Stalin: a biography (Cambridge, MA, 2005); Simone Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: the court of the Red Tsar (London, 2003); and Donald Rayfield, Stalin and his hangmen (London, 2004).

38 Svetlana Alliluyeva, Only one year (New York, 1969), p. 364.

39 For this point, see Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin: profiles in power (Harlow, 2005).

40 See ibid.

41 Service, Stalin. Regarding Stalin as editor, see also Naimark, Norman M., ‘Cold war studies and new archival materials on Stalin’, Russian Review, 61 (2002), pp. 1–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Sebag Montefiore, Stalin, p. 392. For Stalin's ‘secret life’, see also B. S. Ilizarov, Tainaia zhizn' Stalina (Moscow, 2002).

43 For Stalin's early life in Georgia, see Rayfield, Stalin and his hangmen, which utilizes sources in Georgian.

44 Sebag Montefiore, Stalin.

45 ‘“The people need a Tsar”: the emergence of national Bolshevism as Stalinist ideology, 1931–1941’, Europe–Asia Studies, 50 (1998), pp. 873–92.

46 For the most recent work, see Apor Balász et al., eds., The leader cult in communist dictatorships (New York, 2004).

47 Ivo Banac, ed., The diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933–1949 (New Haven, CT, 2003), p. 65.

48 See, for example, Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in power: the revolution from above, 1928–1941 (New York, 1990).

49 Maureen Perrie, The cult of Ivan the terrible in Stalin's Russia (Basingstoke, 2001).

50 Iu. A. Zhdanov, Vzgliad v proshloe: vospominaniia ochevidtsa (Rostov on the Don, 2004), p. 135.

51 David Brandenberger, National bolshevism: Stalinist mass culture and the formation of modern Russian national identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, MA, 2002).

52 Erik van Ree, The political thought of Joseph Stalin (London, 2002), particularly ch. 4.

53 See Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: a history of the Soviet zone of occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA, 1995); and Vladislav Zubok and Konstantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: from Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA, 1996).

54 Quoted in Molotov remembers, p. 63.

55 Regarding changes in Stalin's view of what constituted a socialist society, see R. W. Davies, ‘Stalin as an economic policy-maker’, in Davies and Harris, eds., Stalin, pp. 121–39.

56 Lukes, Leonid, ‘Zum Stalinschen Antisemitismus – Brüche und Widersprüche,’ Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung, 1 (1997), pp. 9–50Google Scholar.

57 Istochnik, 5 (1997), p. 128.

58 Kuromiya, Stalin, p. 160.

59 Sebag Montefiore, Stalin, p. 4.

60 Akakii Mgeladze, Stalin kakim ia ego znal (n.p., 2001), p. 198, quoted in Kuromiya, Stalin, p. 155.

61 Richard Pipes, ed., The unknown Lenin: from the secret archive (New Haven, CT, 1996), p. 124.

62 Kuromiya, Stalin.

63 Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk, Cold peace: Stalin and the Soviet ruling elite, 1945–1953 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 83, 168–89.

64 Derek Watson, Molotov: a biography (Basingstoke, 2005).

65 My earlier examination of this issue is Hiroaki Kuromiya, ‘How do we know what the people thought under Stalin?’, in Timo Vihavainen, ed., Sovetskaia vlast' – narodnaia vlast'? Ocherki istorii vospriiatiia sovetskoi vlasti v SSSR (Spb, 2003).

66 See Sarah Davies, Popular opinion in Stalin's Russia: Terror, propaganda and dissent, 1934–1941 (Cambridge, 1997); and, for a collective effort to conceptualize ‘resistance’, see Lynne Viola, ed., Contending with Stalinism: Soviet power and popular resistance in the 1930s (Ithaca, NY, 2002). For a critical analysis of the resistance paradigm, see Krylova, Anna, ‘The tenacious liberal subject in Soviet studies’, Kritika, 1 (2000), pp. 119–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Jochen Hellbeck, Tagebuch aus Moskau, 1931–1939 (Munich, 1996); idem, Revolution on my mind: writing a diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA, 2006); Igal Halfin, Terror in my soul: communist autobiographies on trial (Cambridge, MA, 2003); and Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic mountain: Stalinism as a civilization (Berkeley, CA, 1997), which has inspired some proponents of the ‘subjective school’, is a much more careful work.

68 Oleg Kharkhordin, The collective and the individual in Russia (Berkeley, CA, 1999).

69 See, for example, Rittersporn, Gábor T., ‘Le régime face au carnaval: folklore non conformiste en URSS dans les années 1930’, Annales, 58 (2003), pp. 417–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar, speaks of a ‘spirit of rebellion’ in the 1930s without specifying the time period (p. 496). There is much difference, however, between 1930 when the countryside witnessed numerous rebellions and 1937 when the Great Terror assaulted the country.

70 See the Sarah Davies and Hellbeck exchange in the journal Kritika, 1 (2000). For one attempt to overcome the two extreme schools, see Kuromiya, ‘How do we know?’. Sheila Fitzpatrick's Everyday Stalinism: ordinary life in extraordinary times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, 1999) does not engage in this debate but proposes a view of the Soviet people trying merely to survive.