In this final contribution to the field, published shortly before his death in 2022, Larry Holmes again demonstrates the meticulous archival research skills which defined his previous work. A leading expert on Stalinism, particularly from the regional perspective, Holmes has done as much as anybody to illuminate the provincial history of the revolution in a series of important books and articles on topics including education, the experience of the Second World War and local governance.
As he explains in the preface, this book marks a coming full circle for Holmes, who began his career with a doctoral thesis in the early 1970s on ideological party history, then developed an interest in social history of the Stalin era (like many of his generation), which later evolved into a regional history focus on Viatka province (known as Kirov Oblast from 1934), which lies about 550 miles northeast of Moscow. A theme which has run through much of his work is the relationship between center and periphery and like his study of education under Stalin, this book examines how people on the ground accommodated and negotiated official Soviet decrees and regulations emanating from Moscow within their distinctive and complex local environment shaped by both personal rivalries and practical limits such as under-funding and staffing.
The book focuses on the contentious discussion in Moscow and in the province of Viatka, over maintaining professional standards of historical scholarship while expressing political partisanship in the interpretation of 1917 which was played out in Istpart. This organisation, the Commission for the Collection, Study and Publication of Materials on the October Revolution and History of the Communist Party, was created by Sovnarkom in 1920 and by 1924 there were over 50 regional branches. The book does not attempt a comprehensive history of the establishment and functioning of Istpart (on which literature already exists) but instead offers a close analysis of the heterogenous books and articles it sponsored in an initial period of pluralism and the changes the way its historians approached descriptions of the Bolshevik Party's activity in 1917.
Drawing upon (among other things) the 298 folders of Viatka's Ispart Section held in the Regional Archive of Kirov Oblast and Moscow's Ispart archive at RGASPI (Russian State Archive of Social-Political History), Holmes outlines the tense, complex relationship between the Moscow and Viatka Ispart sections. They disagreed over how best to write a historically factual yet also politically useful history of 1917. Viatka had its own “local historical narrative” to tell which did not complement the center's preferred version of events. For example, Istpart's work to commemorate the anniversaries of the 1905 and 1917 revolutions did not go smoothly in Viatka. Central Istpart intended that commemorations would follow the Communist Party's legitimizing narrative on how the revolution of 1917 developed in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Local Istpart sections were instructed to emphasize the activity of the Bolshevik Party, but in Viatka Social Democrats were moderate and weak in terms of influence, playing only a minor role in events, so its commemoration had to include the activities of other political parties that worked closely with the Bolsheviks, such as the Mensheviks and SRs, in order to offer credible content relevant to the province. At this stage the central Istpart was not able to curtail the local Istparts presenting “a heterogeneous mix of accounts” (53). Yet Holmes identifies an important turning point at the 1927 Istpart Conference that concluded that it must “in the future coordinate all of its research work with the party's current political struggle and use our revolutionary past for the revolutionary present” (109). By the end of the 1920s, due to the utility of “revising the revolution” to serve in the intra-party struggle after Lenin's death, careerist Istpart scholars began to echo the distorted “master narrative” that presented Stalin as a significant force in the October Revolution and after 1917 as Lenin's closest comrade (thus rightful successor), while undermining his political rivals by arguing they had not supported Lenin's plans faithfully.
The book sits within the broader debate on transition from the relative freedom of the first decade of Soviet power to the demise of pluralism in the Stalin period and suggests that the use of history as political propaganda was well underway before the onset of Stalin's revolution, thus presenting a level of continuity between the 1920s and 30s. In practical terms, this slim volume is mercifully concise at under 200 pages, including extensive footnotes, bibliography, glossary, and index. Yet the work is no synthesis and the argument is well-substantiated throughout. All in all, Holmes leaves an exemplary blueprint for successful Soviet provincial history which emphasizes the distinctive nature of the provinces and their importance to understanding the nation as a whole.
