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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
Sheila Fitzpatrick has provided a useful history of our field in recent times, and she has done so in a gracious and personally revealing way. She is perhaps the most prolific and influential member of the field, and her observations cannot help but be tasty food for thought, especially as they come to us without the bitterness and defensive spite to which she might be entitled.
Here I would like to reflect on some of the reasons why I think the controversy became so angry, why it went beyond the bounds of normal academic dispute. And bitter it was. In addition to vilification in print, our universities received unsolicited tenure letters suggesting that we were incompetent and dangerous. Editors published angry unsolicited book reviews submitted by our critics. One editor continued to solicit readers' reports on an article I submitted until he finally got a negative one. With five reports, four to one in favor of publishing, he nevertheless rejected the piece. Sometimes you just cannot win.
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2. Getty, J. Arch, Rittersporn, Gabor T., and Zemskov, V N., “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Prewar Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence,” American Historical Review 9%, no. 4 (October 1993): 1017–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3. Stormer, John A., None Dare Call It Treason (Florissant, Mo., 1964)Google Scholar.
4. Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995)Google Scholar.
5. Fainsod, Merle, How Russia Is Ruled (Cambridge, Mass., 1953)Google Scholar; Skilling, H. Gordon and Griffiths, Franklyn, eds., Interest Groups in Soviet Politics (Princeton, 1971)Google Scholar; Brzezinski, Zbigniew, The Permanent Purge: Politics in Soviet Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass., 1956)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Barrington, Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston, 1967)Google Scholar; Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1966)Google Scholar.
6. See Hough, Jerry F. and Fainsod, Merle, How the Soviet Union Is Governed (Cambridge, Mass., 1979)Google Scholar.
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