With thanks to Lynne Viola, Arch Getty, and Jerry Hough for their helpful comments and criticisms.

1. The boxed critiques are, in fact, not fully representative because there is a disproportionate emphasis on those from the last fifteen to twenty years, reflecting deficiencies in my personal record-keeping. My memory is that the (unrepresented) late 1970s was a particularly bad time for attacks on and rumors about revisionists, but also that not all of these were published. The boxed comments by Daniel Field and Tom Gleason from the 1980s seem to confirm this.

2. Bruce, S. M. (Sheila Fitzpatrick), “The Commissariat of Education under Lunacharsky“ (PhD diss., Oxford University, 1969)Google Scholar.

3. Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921-1934 (Cambridge, Eng., 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Fitzpatrick, Sheila, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917-1921 (Cambridge, Eng., 1970)Google Scholar.

5. E-mail from Cohen to the author dated 17 March 2008. As I was still quite ignorant of American politics and had been too focused on the Soviet Union to have taken much notice of the 1960s counterculture and student revolution, I certainly do not vouch for the accuracy of my perceptions of political and ideological affiliation. Accurate or not, however, they were important in my intellectual biography, which is why I include them.

6. Cohen, Stephen F., Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888- 1938 (New York, 1973)Google Scholar.

7. Bukharin was still proscribed in the Soviet Union, despite de-Stalinization and the efforts undertaken by his widow and others to have him rehabilitated, but there was considerable interest among Soviet economists in the “NEP alternative” associated wiui his name: see Lewin, Moshe, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates: From Bukharin to the Modern Reformers (Princeton, 1974)Google Scholar.

8. Medvedev, Roy A., Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, trans. Taylor, Colleen (New York, 1971)Google Scholar. In die west, the main “Leninist revival” work was Moshe Lewin's Lenin's Last Struggle, presenting an interpretation of the late Lenin as a convert to democratic gradualism and pluralism. Lewin, , Lenin's Last Struggle, ed. Joravsky, David and Haupt, Georges, trans. Smith, A. M. Sheridan (New York, 1968)Google Scholar.

9. We married in 1975 and divorced in 1984. The marriage and the controversy over Jerry's “revisionist” revision of Fainsod's classic How Russia Is Ruled, a year before my also controversial Education and Social Mobility, was one of the reasons for my quick rise to notoriety as a revisionist. See Hough, Jerry F. and Fainsod, Merle, How the Soviet Union Is Governed (Cambridge, Mass., 1979)Google Scholar. It worked the other way, too, as the boxed quotation from Martin Peretz suggests, with Hough being tarred by association with me.

10. Hough, Jerry F., “The Soviet Experience and the Measurement of Power,” Journal of Politics 37, no. 3 (August 1975): 685–710 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, republished in Jerry F. Hough, The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 203-21.

11. I came on a one-year appointment in the Slavic Department at the University of Texas at Austin: it was a last-minute fill-in invitation that I accepted out of curiosity, with no firm intention to stay in the United States. I went on to a fellowship at the (then) Russian Institute at Columbia and remained in New York in untenured positions at St. John's University and Columbia for about six years before getting my first tenured position (by coincidence, at the University of Texas again, this time in the history department) in 1980.

12. This was the argument I made in my AAASS paper, “The ‘Soft’ Line on Culture and Its Enemies: Soviet Cultural Policy, 1922-1927,” Slavic Review 33, no. 2 (June 1974): 267-87CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted as “The Soft Line on Culture and Its Enemies,” in Fitzpatrick, Sheila, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, 1992)Google Scholar.

13. See Cohen, Stephen F., “Bolshevism and Stalinism,” in Tucker, Robert C., ed., Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York, 1977), 3–29 Google Scholar.

14. “New York Times: Editorial of May 8, 1975: A Variation Imagined by Leszek Kolakowski,“ Survey (London) 21, no. 4 (Autumn 1975): 87-89. The spoof “editorial” welcomes the new reassessment of the “brighter and more positive sides” of Nazism thirty years after the German victory in World War II, noting inter alia, how “the Europeans gained enormously in mobility…. Who can deny that demographic mobility is one of the best-tested signs of social progress?… As for Mr Hitler himself, what a simplified image of him we are left with after years of cold-war propaganda!“

15. A slightly revised version of my paper first appeared as “Culture and Politics under Stalin: A Reappraisal,” Slavic Review 35, no. 2 (June 1976): 211-31, and then as “Cultural Orthodoxies under Stalin,” in Fitzpatrick, Cultural Front.

16. Cohen, Stephen F., Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History since 1917 (New York, 1985), 33 Google Scholar. The accompanying note (170) identifies me as the main offender, along widi George Yaney, Arch Getty, and Hough.

17. See Fitzpatrick, Sheila, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931 (Bloomington, 1978)Google Scholar, particularly my introduction and the article “Cultural Revolution as Class War.” On the genesis of diis idea, see Fitzpatrick, , “Cultural Revolution Revisited,” Russian Review, no. 2 (April 1999): 202-9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18. Fitzpatrick, , Education and Social Mobility, and “Stalin and the Making of a New Elite, 1928-1939,” Slavic Review 38, no. 3 (September 1979): 377-402Google Scholar, reprinted in Fitzpatrick, Cultural Front.

19. In this connection, I have to apologize belatedly to Richard Pipes, to whom I was jokingly introduced in London in the 1970s as an “activist of the New Left,” for not correcting this piece of disinformation.

20. Reprinted in Fitzpatrick, Cultural Front. The original publication of the article, with comments from Suny and Daniel Orlovsky and a response from me, appeared in Slavic Review 47, no. 4 (Winter 1988): 599-626 (Suny's quoted comment on 614, mine on 624).

21. Viola, Lynne, Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization (New York, 1987)Google Scholar; Viola, “The Campaign to Eliminate die Kulak as a Class, Winter, 1929-30: A Reevaluation of the Legislation,” Slavic Review 45, no. 3 (Fall 1987): 503-24; and Viola, ‘“L'ivresse de succès': Les cadres russes et le pouvoir soviétique durant les campagnes de collectivization de l'agriculture,” Revue des études slaves 64, no. 1 (1992): 75-101.

22. This was puzzling, as there certainly were peasants who identified with Soviet power in die 1920s. After pondering this for many years, I finally came up with die paradoxical solution that, once collectivization was underway, young “Soviet-minded” peasants tended to leave the village because of die new job opportunities opening up in the towns: see Fitzpatrick, “Vopros sotsial'noi podderzhki kollektivizatsii” (from the early 1990s), published in Pivovar, Efim, ed., Otechestvennaia istoriia XX veka, ekonomicheskaia, politicheskaia sotsial'naiazhizri: Vpamiati V. Z. Drobizheva (Moscow, 2004)Google Scholar (an English version is currently in preparation for Russian History/Historie russe).

23. See Getty, J. Arch, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938 (Cambridge, Eng., 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Manning, Roberta T., Government in the Soviet Countryside in the Stalinist Thirties: The Case of Belyi Raion in 1937 (Pittsburgh, 1984)Google Scholar. My own research was producing evidence of some positive popular response (in the form of Schadenfreude) to the downfall of bosses in the purges, but I did not see this as a causal factor. Fitzpatrick, , “Workers against Bosses: The Impact of the Great Purges on Labor- Management Relations,” in Suny, Ronald G. and Siegelbaum, Lewis, eds., Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class and Identity (Ithaca, 1994)Google Scholar; Fitzpatrick, , “How the Mice Buried the Cat: Scenes from the Great Purges of 1937 in the Russian Provinces,” Russian Review 52, no. 3 (July 1993): 299–320 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fitzpatrick, , “Vengeance and Ressentiment in the Russian Revolution,” French Historical Studies 24, no. 4 (Fall 2001): 579-88CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I had not yet become interested in denunciation, which was later the subject of Fitzpatrick, and Gellately, Robert, eds., Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789-1989 (Chicago, 1997)Google Scholar, a “from below” input that certainly magnified the impact of “from above” terror and influenced the selection of victims and definition of targets.

24. Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “New Perspectives on Stalinism,” Russian Review 45, no. 4 (October 1986): 357-73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25. Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “Afterword: Revisionism Revisited,” Russian Review 45, no. 4 (October 1986): 412 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26. Eleven more responses (from Daniel Brower, Bill Chase, Robert Conquest, Arch Getty, Jerry Hough, Hiroaki Kuromiya, Roberta Manning, Alec Nove, Gabor Rittersporn, Robert C. Tucker, and Lynne Viola), almost all more or less sharply critical of my original article from left or right, were published in Russian Review 46, no. 4 (October 1987).

27. Kotkin, Stephen, “1991 and the Russian Revolution: Sources, Conceptual Categories, Analytical Frameworks, ” Journal of Modern History 70, no. 2 (June 1998): 386 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28. In retrospect, I can see that this had intellectual as well as other costs. If I had not so stubbornly stood my ground on the argument of the Bellagio paper (later “Cultural Orthodoxies under Stalin“), resisting pressure to consider the impact of the purges on culture because my subject was input from the professions in the creation of orthodoxies, I might have noticed that the reason orthodoxies were necessary in the first place probably had something to do with terror.

29. It finally appeared as “The Impact of the Great Purges on Soviet Elites: A Case Study from Moscow and Leningrad Telephone Directories of the 1930s,” in J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning, eds., Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (New York, 1993). Soviet as well as American censorship practices were to blame: the Harvard audience had criticized the methodology of my random sampling, as well as the conclusions and the idea of doing such a study in die first place, but when I went back to Moscow and reordered the 1937 and 1939 Moscow telephone directories in order to redo the sampling, the Lenin Library (the only library that had these directories) refused to provide them. When, years later, the Lenin Library finally accepted my request and I was able to use the approved sampling technique, the count turned out almost exactly the same.

30. Perhaps in Europe the charge was a little less bizarre, given that a Paris-based Sovietological revisionist, Gabor Rittersporn, did, in fact, on the grounds of intellectual freedom, defend the right of Holocaust deniers to express their views, but I did not know that at the time.

31. Robert Conquest in New Republic, 17 January 1981, 32. Later, Martin Malia made the same comment about Getty, though in London, Robert Harris (see box) preferred the analogy with Le Pen. Malia, , “Blood Rites: Must Violence Always Be the Midwife of History?“ Los Angeles Times, 28 May 2000 Google Scholar.

32. For the programmatic statement on this, see Suny, Ronald Grigor, “Toward a Social History of the October Revolution,” American Historical Review 88, no. 1 (1983): 31–52 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33. Viola, Best Sons of the Fatherland.

34. I am paraphrasing his autobiography: Pipes, Richard, Vixi: Memoirs of a Non- Belonger (New Haven, 2003)Google Scholar.

35. Fitzpatrick, , “Everyday Life and ‘Middleclass Values’ in Stalin's Russia,” in Sheldon, Richard and Thompson, Terry, eds., Soviet Society and Culture: Essays in Honor of Vera S. Dunham (Boulder, Colo., 1988)Google Scholar; revised version under the title “Becoming Cultured” in Fitzpatrick, Cultural Front.

36. Three finished chapters of the social mobility book still sit in my files, exactly as they were when I left Columbia in 1980. The only tiling I published from this was an article summarizing the argument, “The Russian Revolution and Social Mobility: A Reexamination of the Question of Social Support for the Soviet Regime in the 1920s and 1930s,” Politics and Society 13 (January 1984): 119-41. On the politics of industrialization, see Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “Ordzhonikidze's Takeover of Vesenkha: A Case Study in Soviet Bureaucratic Politics,” Soviet Studies 37, no. 2 (April, 1985): 153-72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37. Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia,” Journal of Modern History 65, no. 4 (December 1993): 745-70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38. Slezkine, Yuri, The Jewish Century (Princeton, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I do not mean to suggest that this is a “revisionist” approach, as Slezkine has never so identified himself or been so perceived by others. But in the broader sense of challenging the conventional wisdom of the field, it was certainly revisionist.

39. Although Sarah Davies does not so interpret her Leningrad letter data, focusing instead on workers’ resentment of elite privilege, I think the same data can be read as confirmation that at least some workers continued to think of the Soviet regime as “ours,” even as they criticized it. Davies, Sarah, Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia: Terror, Propaganda andDissent, 1934-1941 (Cambridge, Eng., 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40. See Viola, Lynne, ed., Contending with Stalinism: Soviet Poxver and Popular Resistance in the 1930s (Ithaca, 2002)Google Scholar, as well as Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York, 1994); Viola, Lynne, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (New York, 1996)Google Scholar; Rossman, Jeffrey J., Worker Resistance under Stalin: Class and Revolution on the Shop Floor (Cambridge, Mass., 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davies, Popular Opinion.

41. I mean by this that die field of Soviet history was now open to a much broader range of ideas, including revisionist ones—which is not to say that die same was true of the American public or even the intellectual and political weeklies, which, with the exception of the London Review of Books, remained strongly antirevisionist on both sides of the Atlantic, giving pride of place to critics like Pipes, Malia, and Conquest.

42. Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995)Google Scholar.

43. On my subject as homo oeconomicus, see Hellbeck, Jochen, “Speaking Out: Languages of Affirmation and Dissent in Stalinist Russia,” Kritika 1, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 77–78 Google Scholar. If one thinks of Hellbeck's implicit subject as young and mine as middle-aged it is not surprising that his people should turn out to be interested in ideology and the future while mine are preoccupied with strategies for coping with economic hardship in the present.

44. But not in terms of public discussion: see my article, “Revisionism in Soviet History,“ History and Theory 46, no. 4 (December 2007): 77-91.

45. Hough, , “The Soviet Experience and the Measurement of Power,” 204 Google Scholar.

46. Ibid., 215.

47. Ibid., 210.

48. I am thinking particularly of Viola's work, but one might also cite the work of Peter H. Solomon and Susan Gross Solomon, as well as that of James R. Harris from the younger generation. Solomon, Peter H., Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (Cambridge, Eng., 1996)Google Scholar; Solomon, Susan Gross, The Soviet Agrarian Debate: A Controversy in Social Science, 1923-1929 (Boulder, Colo., 1977)Google Scholar; and Harris, James R., The Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System (Ithaca, 1999)Google Scholar.

49. See Tucker, Robert C., “Culture, Political Culture, and Communist Society,” Political Science Quarterly 88, no. 2 (June 1973): 173-90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tucker, , Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia from Lenin to Gorbachev (New York, 1987)Google Scholar; White, Stephen, Political Culture and Soviet Politics (New York, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown, Archie, ed., Political Culture and Communist Studies (Armonk, N.Y., 1985)Google Scholar.

50. See, for example, Filtzer, Donald, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization, 1928-1941 (Armonk, N.Y., 1986)Google Scholar.

51. Lewin, Moshe, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization, trans, from the French by Nove, Irene (Evanston, 1968)Google Scholar; Shanin, Teodor, The Awkward Class; A Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society: Russia 1910-1925 (Oxford, 1972)Google Scholar.

52. Malia made a similar point in his extended critical essay on my work, complaining about my lack of consistency in furthering what he imagined to be my political agenda: Times Literary Supplement, 15 June 2001.

53. See, e.g., Fitzpatrick, Sheila and Viola, Lynne, eds., A Researcher's Guide to Sources on Soviet Social History in the 1930s (Armonk, N.Y., 1990)Google Scholar; and “Roundtable: What Is a School? Is There a Fitzpatrick School of Soviet History?” Acta Slavica Iaponica 24 (2007): 229-41.

54. See Carr, E. H., A History of Soviet Russia, 14 vols. (London, 1950-78)Google Scholar; Haslam, Jonathan, The Vices of Integrity: E. H Carr, 1892-1982 (London, 1999), 140, 145, 196-204Google Scholar.

55. Kotkin, , “1991 and the Russian Revolution,” 392 Google Scholar.

56. Hellbeck, , “Speaking Out,” 71 Google Scholar. There is an unexplained shift in referent from “archives” to “documentary editions,” by which he has in mind “martyrologies” like Vitalii Shentalinsky's Raby svobody v literaturnykh arkhivakh KGB (Moscow, 1995).

57. Which is not to deny that Hellbeck made a good point about the tendency of classified archives, especially NKVD svodki, to tell the anti-Soviet story, and that his warning about the need for caution in using them was sensible.

58. See Stalin's letter to the editors of Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, 1931, no. 6, published as “O nekotorykh voprosakh istorii bol'shevizma,” in Stalin, I. V, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1951), 13:96 Google Scholar.

59. What follows is partly based on papers and proceedings from the comparative conference on “Revisionisms” held at the European University Institute in Florence in November 2006, for which I wrote “Revisionism in Soviet History,” and was stimulated to write the present, more personal, essay.

60. For elaboration of this point, see Fitzpatrick, “Revisionism in Soviet History.“

61. Kuhn, Thomas s., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3d ed. (Chicago, 1996), 24 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62. Berlin, Isaiah, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History (New York, 1953)Google Scholar. The metaphor comes from the Greek poet Archilochus.