1. Revisionists: The term can't possibly embrace all of the great variety of work done in the 1970s and 1980s, but in general it implies “softer” attitudes about the USSR than found in mainstream sovietology until then, whether about the character of the Soviet regime or its origins. Spiritual godfathers of revisionism were Isaac Deutscher and E. H. Carr: the former in his insistence on the nobility of the Bolshevik revolution, and its corruption in the Russian backward environment, where barbarism had to be driven out by barbarous means (i.e., Stalinism), and where real socialism would triumph once that backwardness was overcome; the latter in his insistence on value-free explorations of Soviet society in which Stalinism becomes another chapter in the modern history of state-building and economic development. More immediate and influential revisionist antecedents may be found in the work of Leopold Haimson, whose articles, “The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905–1917,” Slavic Review 23 (1964):619–42, and 24 (1965): 1–22Google Scholar, were catalysts for restoring the social to descriptions of the revolutionary background (in place of purely political and ideological analyses); Moshe Lewin, who rehabilitated a kinder, gentler Lenin wrestling with the consequences of proletarian revolution in a sea of peasants, in his Lenin's Last Struggle (New York, 1968); Cohen, Stephen F., who rehabilitated Bukharin and suggested there was a Bukharinist alternative to the Stalinist course, in his Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938 (New York, 1973).Google ScholarCohen's, Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since 1917 (New York, 1985),Google Scholar is an attempt at a coherent revisionist manifesto. A huge amount of work was devoted to showing the social foundations of (and mass Bolshevik sympathies for) the October Revolution. Acton's, EdwardRethinking the Russian Revolution (London, 1990)Google Scholar surveys the revisionist challenge to the traditional historiography. One recent example of studying backgrounds to the Revolution from below is Heather Hogan, Metalworkers, Managers, and the State in St. Petersburg, 1890–1914 (Bloomington, Indiana, 1993)Google Scholar. Another phase of revisionist work was devoted to suggesting the social foundations of, or even popular enthusiasm for, Soviet ideals and the Soviet state, a project undertaken with the greatest skill by Sheila Fitzpatrick. Her major study is Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 (Bloomington, Indiana, 1978),Google Scholarwhile her overall views are succinctly synthesized in The Russian Revolution (New York, 1982, 1994).Google Scholar In this vein is Chase, William J., Workers, Society and the Soviet State: Labor and Life in Moscow, 1918–1929 (Urbana. Illinois, 1990).Google Scholar Debates on the Fitzpatrick argument appeared in Russian Review 45 (October 1986): 357–413 and 46 (October 1987): 379–431. Stalin's terror gets a revision-bureaucratic confusion and hysteria, not a smooth Party machine, was operative-in Arch, J.Getty's Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (Cambridge, 1985).Google Scholar

There have been some reconsiderations by some revisionists of their own work, but so far no major anti-antirevisionist self-defense matching the scale of Laqueur and Malia has appeared. Cohen's Rethinking has been scheduled for a new edition but it had not been published as of this writing. An interesting parallel to revisionist arguments may be found in recent scholarly studies of American communism. For a survey of this work and the critical response see Michael Kazin. “The Agony and Romance of the American Left,” American Historical Review 100 (December 1995): 1488–1512.

2. There was of course a Marxist minority among the Soviet dissidents whose views paralleled those of western revisionists, and who have stuck to their Marxism since the collapse. Medvedev, Roy, author of the massive anti-Stalinist study Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (New York. 1972), is the most prominent.Google ScholarSee his critical review of Volkogonov, in The Nation, 01 30, 1995.Google Scholar

3. Ronald Suny complains that “[w]hile historians turned from high politics and institutions to an obsessive interest in social history in the 1970s and 1980s, a number of political scientists and sociologists turned toward non-Russians to deal with problems generated from disciplinary concerns. Their story was one of Communist failure to combine modernization and ethnic maintenance.” “A Second Look at Sovietology and the National Question,” Newsletter of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies 33 (May 1993): 1.

4. Pipes, Richard, The Russian Revolution (New York. 1990)Google Scholarand Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (New York, 1994).Google ScholarPipes examines events from “above.” Two studies with antirevisionist conclusions that examine mass movements from “below” are Keep, John L. H., The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization (New York, 1976)Google Scholarand Brovkin, Vladimir N., Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918–1922 (Princeton, 1994).Google ScholarSee the critical review of the latter by Rosenberg, William G. (a revisionist) in American Historical Review 100 (June 1995):924–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Frederick, S. Starr notes that Alain Besançon wrote of Malia's earlier Comprendre la Revolution Russe (1980). “he practices philosophical history.” See “The Case for the Prosecution,” a review of Malia and Pipes in The National Interest (Summer 1994):88–95.Google Scholar

6. Fitzpatrick dropped the phrase about “terror, progress and social mobility” from the revised edition of The Russian Revolution and devoted considerably more space to the terror (although “the Great Purges could not have snowballed as they did without popular participation”). She retains her main theme, however, that the revolution ultimately provided channels of upward mobility for workers and proletarianized peasants. She also repeats her view that Bolshevik authoritarianism during the revolutionary and Civil War period was in part derived precisely from the party's worker and peasant members–they “were much less inclined than the Old Bolshevik intellectuals to worry about crushing opposition or imposing their authority by force rather than by tactful persuasion” (71). Again, if these conclusions are accurate, Malia's quarrel with them rests on moral, not historiographic, grounds.

7. See Katznelson, Ira and Zolberg, Aristide R., eds., Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton, 1986).Google Scholar

8. See note 6 above. Donald Filtzer examines the paradox—a new ruling stratum including upwardly mobile workers that exploits the working class in the workers' state–in his Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization: the Formation of Modern Production Relations, 1928–1941 (London, 1986). Lewin's, Moshe rich and sweeping views of the social dimensions of the Soviet landscape are collected in The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York, 1985).Google ScholarHis The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation (Berkeley. 1988) attempted to show how the social dimension—through advances in industrialization, education, and urbanization—had shifted, altering the balance among the rural, urban, and state components of the system. The shift accounted for “the Gorbachev phenomenon.” and Lewin's projected hope was for a mature communist system with a human face. Ephemeral phenomenon; ephemeral hope. Curiously.Google Scholar Lewin pretty much bypasses the collapse—there is no major analysis of it or any methodological or philosophical reconsiderations—in his most recent collection, Russia/USSR/Russia: The Drive and Drift of a Superstate (New York, 1994). He seems to have assimilated the collapse—just another development—into his large, panoramic view of the whole of Russian history. Besides, “Soviet socialism had no chance, not only because the conditions were not ripe for it in Russia but also because the system that was created there became, early on, adamant in refusing it” (3). Thus ideological victory is snatched from the jaws of defeat. See especially his first chapter, “USSR from A to Z: An Introduction.”

9. Gleason, Abbott, “Totalitarianism and the Cold War: A Personal View.” NewsNet: The Newsletter of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies 35 (09 1995):3.Google ScholarA good statement that speaks for many of us and why we rejected the totalitarianism argument. See also Gleason's, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York. 1995).Google Scholar