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Glasnost and Stalin: new material, old questions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Catherine Merridale
Catherine Merridale
Affiliation:
King's College, Cambridge
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Type
Review Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , March 1993 , pp. 233 - 243
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

1 Suddeutsche zeitung, 11 June 1992.

2 The scandal of David Irving's ‘exclusive’ use of the Goebbels Diaries (see The Independent, 2–4 July 1992) illustrates many of the problems which may arise.

3 Tucker, R. C., Stalin as revolutionary, 1879–1929. A study in history and personality (New York, 1973)Google Scholar.

4 Tucker, , Stalin in power, pp. 2–9Google Scholar.

5 It is a feature which fascinates Tucker. Nikolai Yezhov, the organizer of the Great Purge in 1937, is also described as ‘diminutive in stature’ (p. 377). He was in fact four inches shorter than Stalin, though the historical significance of this is unclear.

6 Tucker, p. 4.

7 Medvedev, , Let history judge, pp. 542—3Google Scholar.

8 Medvedev, p. 585. The same phrase is repeated on p. 600.

9 Tucker, p. 162.

10 Tucker, p. 163.

11 Tucker, pp. 4–7.

12 Tucker, p. 6.

13 Medvedev, p. 551.

14 Medvedev, pp. 591–5.

15 Laqueur, pp. 147–61.

16 The parallel which Medvedev notes ‘only as a chance coincidence’ (p. 594) Laqueur threatens to dignify into a general point about twentieth-century dictators (pp. 157–61).

17 Alliuyeva, Svetlana, Twenty letters to a friend (london, 1967), pp. 88 and 148Google Scholar.

18 Medvedev, after all, had access to many survivors of the period, including highly–placed officials, when he prepared the original version of this book. For him, the major new development has been that he can now reveal more of their names and cite precise dates.

19 Medvedev, p. 853.

20 Medvedev, p. 846.

21 For a judicious appraisal of some of the recent literature, see Services, S., Lenin: a political life, vol. 2 (London, 1991)Google Scholar.

22 The example of East and West Germany suggests, moreover, that the hoped-for world revolution would have made little difference. The most successful economy in western Europe has so far failed to rescue the most successful in eastern Europe. In 1917, the after-effects of European war and the upheaval likely to have been involved in the German or British revolutions would have made the whole task more difficult still.

23 Medvedev, p. 859.

24 Preface to the revised and expanded edition, p. ii.

25 Tucker, p. 27.

26 Ibid.

27 Tucker, p. 28.

28 Medvedev, p. 855.

29 See his essay, ‘What time is it in Russia's history?’, in Merridale, Catherine and Ward, Chris (eds), Perestroika: the historical perspective (London, 1991)Google Scholar. My contribution on political pluralism was intended, at least in part, as a riposte to this line of argument.

30 Tucker, p. 22.

31 Gramsci, Antonio made the same point: ‘In Russia, the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous.’ Selections from the prison notebooks, eds Catherine, and Smith, G. Nowell (London, 1971), p. 238Google Scholar.

32 Tucker, p. 24.

33 Ibid. pp. 24–6.

34 See, for example, Volobuev, O. and Kuleshov, S. on Stalin's marginalia, Sotsialisticheskaya industriya, 25 06 1988Google Scholar.

35 Tucker, p. 61.

36 Ibid.

37 An informal talk at the Kremlin on 8 November 1937, the report of which was never published. Tucker's account is based on material obtained privately from the daughter of one of the people present. See also Pravda, 7 April 1989.

38 ‘He knew from his reading that it was Grozny's practice, when he turned against a boyar whom he perceived as a n enemy, to destroy along with him his whole extended family and retinue, his rod or clan. And so when a high Bolshevik fell in the terror, both his personal family and his official family of political clients went with him’. Tucker, pp. 485–6.

39 Machiavelli, we read, was another powerful influence. See, for example, Medvedev, p. 600.

40 This is Tucker's unsupported contention on p. 97.

41 Tucker, R. C., The soviet political mind, Stalinism and post–Stalin change (revised edn, London, 1972), p. 32Google Scholar. He uses almost exactly the same phrase again on p. 67.

42 Tucker, p. 279.

43 This point is made especially forcefully in Davies's, R. W. review of the present volume, Soviet Studies, XLIII, 6 (1991), 1143–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 The most famous example was Getty, J. Arch, Origins of the great purges (1985)Google Scholar. The work of Sheila Fitzpatrick on social mobility in the 1930s also suggested that ‘Stalin-centred’ accounts were not on their own sufficient. Latterly, scholars who have argued along these lines have come to belabelled ‘revisionists’, although very few of them, if any, would voluntarily adopt the title.

45 For figures (many of which are actually based on Khrushchev's ‘secret’ speech) see Tucker, PP. 444–5.

46 Laqueur, p. 234.

47 Tucker, chs 15–18.

48 Tucker, p. 373.

49 Tucker's phrase, p. 377.

50 Tucker, p. 471.

51 Medvedev, p. 512.

52 Laqueur, p. 24.

53 Laqueur, p. 143.

54 On this, see also Tucker, pp. 490–1.

55 See Medvedev, pp. 801–7.

56 Alan Wood, p. 29.

57 Ibid. p. 34.

58 Hughes, p. 210.

59 The best account of collectivization suggests a gradual evolution of the policy. Davies, R. W., The Socialist offensive, the collectivisation of Soviet agriculture, 1929–30 (London, 1980)Google Scholar.