BEER 2005 - Origins - Modernity - and - Resistance - in - The Historiography of Stalinism PDF

Journal of Contemporary History
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Book Review: Origins, Modernity and Resistance in the Historiography of

Stalinism
Daniel Beer
Journal of Contemporary History 2005; 40; 363
DOI: 10.1177/0022009405051564
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Journal of Contemporary History Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and
New Delhi, Vol 40(2), 363–379. ISSN 0022–0094.
DOI: 10.1177/0022009405051564
Daniel Beer
Review Article
Origins, Modernity and Resistance in the
Historiography of Stalinism
Alexander Chubarov, Russia’s Bitter Path to Modernity. A History of the

Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras, London, Continuum, 2001; pp. 318; ISBN 0
8264 1350 1
E. Thomas Ewing, The Teachers of Stalinism. Policy, Practice and Power in
Soviet Schools of the 1930s, New York, Peter Lang, 2002; pp. 333; ISBN 0
8204 5233 5
Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism. Labour and the
Restoration of the Stalinist System after World War II, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2002; pp. 276; ISBN 0 521 81503 7
John Gooding, Socialism in Russia. Lenin and his Legacy, 1890–1991,
London, Palgrave, 2002; pp. 287; ISBN 0 333 97235 X
John Haynes, New Soviet Man. Gender and Masculinity in Stalinist Soviet
Cinema, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2003; pp. 207; ISBN 0
7190 6238 1
David L. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values. The Cultural Norms of Soviet
Modernity, 1917–1941, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2003; pp. 247;
ISBN 0 8014 4089 0
Barry McLoughlin and Kevin McDermott (eds), Stalin’s Terror. High Politics
and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003;
pp. 255; ISBN 1 4039 0119 8
Steven Merritt Miner, Stalin’s Holy War. Religion, Nationalism, and Alliance
Politics, 1941–1945, Chapel Hill and London, The University of North
Carolina Press, 2003; pp. 407; ISBN 0 8078 2736 3
Donald J. Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War. Politics, Society and
Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917–1922, Princeton, NJ, Princeton
University Press, 2002; pp. 438; ISBN 0 691 11320 3
Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, New Myth, New World. From Nietzsche to
Stalinism, Pennsylvania, PA, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002; pp. 464;
ISBN 0 271 02218 3
Lynne Viola (ed.), Contending with Stalinism. Soviet Power and Popular
Resistance in the 1930s, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2002; pp. 235;
ISBN 0 8014 8774 9
364 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 40 No 2
Historical study of the Soviet Union, and particularly Stalinism, has experi-
enced more than a decade of methodological innovation and empirical dis-
covery, a period variously characterized as one of ‘creative disorder’ and the
‘sex of historiography’.1 The opening-up of the Soviet archives combined with
the rapid expansion of cultural history in the discipline has prompted many
scholars to reconceptualize central features of the Stalinist system and to open
up new fields of study. Attention has returned to the genesis of the regime
during the years 1914–22 with particular focus on the values and technologies
of governance which emerged from it; a more comparative analytical frame-
work has sought to re-insert Stalinist Russia into a pan-European perspective.
Meanwhile, resistance remains an important concept in studies of the Stalin
years and one which has generated vigorous theoretical debates. Studies of
identity-formation in the first two decades of Soviet power have also produced
some innovative and provocative challenges to the traditional understandings
of dissent and opposition. The volumes here under review are representative of
the diversity of the field in terms of both chronology and methodology but this
article seeks to identify and explore a number of important themes which
currently dominate much of the research into Stalinism.
A number of recent publications have stressed hitherto overlooked continuities

across 1917 in Russian thought, popular culture, religious culture, under-
standing of the social world and the relationship between science and politics.2
Such an excavation of the deep layers of Russian culture has often involved a
relegation of Marxism as the primary intellectual and cultural force in early
Soviet Russia in favour of others, such as religion.3 Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal’s
study of Nietzsche is the culmination of two decades of publications exploring
the influence of the German philosopher on Russia.4 New Myth, New World.
From Nietzsche to Stalinism begins with an examination of the manifest
influence of Nietzsche’s writings on a range of intellectual movements in the
1 David Shearer, ‘From Divided Consensus to Creative Disorder. Soviet History in Britain and
North America’, Cahiers du monde russe, 39, 4 (October–December 1998), 559–91; Michael
David-Fox, Peter Holquist and Marshall Poe, ‘From the Editors. A Remarkable Decade’, Kritika.
Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 2, 2 (Spring 2001), 229.
2 Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia. The Regulation of Sexual and
Gender Dissent (Chicago, IL 2001); Torsten Rüting, Pavlov und der Neue Mensch. Diskurse über
Disziplinierung in Sowjetrussland (Munich 2002); Eric Naiman, Sex in Public. The Incarnation of
Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, NJ 1997).
3 Aleksandr Etkind, Khlyst. Sekty, literatura i revoliutsiia (Moscow 1998); Oleg Kharkhordin,
The Collective and the Individual in Russia. A Study of Practices (Berkeley, CA 1999); Daniel
Beer, ‘The Medicalisation of Religious Deviance in the Russian Orthodox Church, 1880–1905’,
Kritika (forthcoming). A notable recent exception to this trend has been Igal Halfin’s From
Darkness to Light. Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, PA
2000).
4 Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (ed.), Nietzsche in Russia (Princeton, NJ 1986); idem (ed.),
Nietzsche and Soviet Culture. Ally and Adversary (Cambridge 1994).
Beer: Origins, Modernity and Resistance in the Historiography of Stalinism 365
twilight of the Romanov dynasty. ‘By 1917, Nietzsche had been russified
and absorbed into symbolism, religious philosophy, “left” Bolshevism, and
futurism.’ Each of these movements sought, in their own way, ‘to engage
the Dionysian elements in the human psyche and to create a new culture and
a new society imbued with their own values’ (112). This section of the analysis
is persuasive and Rosenthal succeeds admirably in excavating a clear
Nietzschean influence over important cultural figures and politicians in revo-
lutionary Russia, ranging from the Scythians to Trotsky and Bukharin.
Rosenthal’s study is ambitious in scope and argumentation, contending that
Nietzschean thought forged the ideological and cultural tools which the
Bolsheviks both wittingly and unwittingly appropriated in order to create
Soviet culture: ‘Nietzsche reinforced [the Bolsheviks’] “hard” interpretation of
Marxism, colored their political imagination and policy decisions, and fueled
their drive to create new political myths, new cult figures, and a new culture’
(24). The relatively unambiguous representation of Nietzschean thought as the
engine room of Stalinist culture does, however, present a number of logical
problems in Rosenthal’s analysis. Although careful not to downplay the
significance of Marxism as an organizing body of values and ideas in the
Revolution and the elaboration of Stalinism, Rosenthal mentions, only largely
to discount, the other dynamics, symbols and values in Russian culture which
pre-dated and anticipated Nietzsche’s own influence. Rosenthal acknow-
ledges, for example, that the radical critic Dmitrii Pisarev’s (1840–68) refer-
ences to man’s ‘Promethean’ and ‘Titanic nature’, his contempt for ‘bees’,
‘drones’ and the ‘herd’, and his visions of projects that would last thousands of
years anticipated Nietzsche, as did his dictum, ‘What can be smashed should
be smashed’ (21). Yet as the discussion turns towards the language and myth-
making of the Bolsheviks, Pisarev, the Orthodox Church and the other
pre-Nietzschean Russian influences evaporate from the narrative. The Soviet
idealization of the novyi chelovek (new wo/man) in constructivism, realism
and even eugenics is presented here primarily as an appropriation of
Nietzsche’s celebration of the Übermensch, its manifest debt to other sources
of inspiration, such as Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s (1828–89) totemic novel of
1863, What Is To Be Done?, notwithstanding. ‘Nietzschean ideas’ are held
similarly responsible for ‘the Bolsheviks’ brutal class-based morality’ while the
bloodthirsty utopianism of many pre-Nietzschean Russian revolutionaries
such as Petr Tkachev (1844–85) and P.G. Zaichnevskii (1842–96) is largely
ignored. The central question of whether Stalinist culture became
identifiably ‘Nietzschean’, in the sense that Nietzschean values, symbols and
ideas propelled it down substantially different paths from those it would
otherwise have taken, is left largely unexplored.
Alexander Chubarov’s study of Russia’s long twentieth century, Russia’s

Bitter Path to Modernity. A History of the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras, also
emphasizes lines of continuity between the late Imperial and Soviet eras.
Arguing that the Soviets continued the modernization begun by their tsarist
predecessors, Chubarov insists that ‘the Soviet period was an organic part of
Russian history’ (17). Such broad brushstrokes tend, however, to gloss over
the significant differences between the forms of modernization pursued first by
the tsarist regime in the post-Emancipation era and subsequently by the
Bolsheviks under Stalin. In fact, the Bolsheviks did much more than simply
‘pick up the torch of modernization’ bequeathed by tsarism; they redefined
the terms on which modernity was to be understood and the means by which
it was to be pursued. Chubarov acknowledges that ‘the singularity of the
Communist regime was that it pledged to carry out this vast transformation of
society on the basis of Marxist ideology, that is, without the private ownership
that bred excessive exploitation of wage labor and other predatory capitalist
practices’, yet offers little discussion of the ways in which this original strategy
of modernization generated forms of modernity that were distinctively Soviet
(9). Chubarov treats ‘modernity’ and ‘modernisation’ as synonyms, arguing
that they comprised ‘industrialisation, urbanisation and secularisation of
popular mentality’, but fails to elaborate what was distinctive about each of
these phenomena in the Soviet Union.5
Indeed, there is no conceptual engagement with the meaning of the term
Soviet ‘modernity’ anywhere in the book. Chubarov simply ignores the
contrasting analyses of what Sheila Fitzpatrick has recently termed ‘the
“modernity” group’, and ‘the neotraditionalists’. The former ‘points up statist
phenomena such as planning, scientific organizational principles, welfare-
statism and techniques of popular surveillance, on the one hand, and disciplines
of the self and collective on the other’; the latter the ‘“archaizing” phenomena
that were also a part of Stalinism: petitioning, patron–client networks, the
ubiquity of other kinds of personalistic ties like blat, ascribed status categories,
“court” politics in the Kremlin, the mystification of power and its projection
through display and so on’.6
Some scholars, however, continue to insist on Stalinism as Russian back-
wardness triumphant. John Gooding’s Socialism in Russia. Lenin and his
5 For a helpful differentiation of these terms see Stephen Kotkin, ‘Modern Times. The Soviet
Union and the Interwar Conjuncture’, Kritika 2, 1 (2001), 156–61.
6 Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Introduction’ in idem (ed.), Stalinism. New Directions (London 2000), 11.
Researchers belonging to the ‘modernity’ group include Kotkin, Jochen Hellbeck, David
Hoffmann, Peter Holquist and Amir Weiner, all of whose work is mentioned here; works of ‘neo-
traditionalism’ include Ken Jowitt, ‘Neotraditionalism’ in idem, New World Disorder. The
Leninist Extinction (Berkeley, CA 1992), 121–58; Sheila Fitzpatrick’s recent work on denuncia-
tions and petitions: ‘Signals from Below. Soviet Letters of Denunciation of the 1930s’, The Journal
of Modern History, 68, 4 (December 1996), 747–67; ‘Supplicants and Citizens — Public Letter
Writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s’, Slavic Review, 55, 1 (Spring 1996), 78–105; ‘Petition and
Denunciation in Russian and Soviet History’ and ‘Readers’ Letters to Krest’ianskaia gazeta’,
Russian History, 24, 2–4 (Spring–Summer 1997), 1–9, 149–70; Golfo Alexopoulos, ‘The Ritual
Lament. A Narrative of Appeal in the 1920s and 1930s’, Russian History, 24, 2–4
(Spring–Summer 1997), 117–29; Terry Martin, ‘Modernization or Neo-Traditionalism? Ascribed
Nationality and Soviet Primordialism’ in Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism, op. cit., 348–67.
Legacy 1890–1991, argues that a representation of Lenin as a Marxist idealist

profoundly disturbed by the ‘discrepancy between socialist ideals and Soviet
reality’ was revived by the reformers of the perestroika era in their bid ‘to
create a new socialism with its roots in Bolshevism’s pre-Stalinist traditions’
(15, 16). While such an argument may have been politically useful (if ulti-
mately self-destructive) in the context of the Soviet Union in the mid- to late
1980s, it unfortunately inflects too much of Gooding’s own analysis. Socialism
in Russia offers a very traditional reading of Stalinism as a ‘Great Retreat’
from the revolutionary utopianism of Leninist Russia.7 Gooding maintains, in
a statement which only betrays an apparent ignorance of the debates outlined
above, that ‘Stalinism put an end to Bolshevik rationalism and enlightenment’
and that by the mid-1930s socialism had ‘adopted the “socialist” values of
traditional village life’ (250–1). Offering an account of Stalinism as a resur-
gence of the dark traditions of the Russian village, Gooding affirms that
Stalinism was characterized by a ‘patriarchal and pseudo-religious autocracy
. . . accompanied by a strong reassertion of traditional collectivism and anti-
individualism’; meanwhile, the ‘mass of the population slipped back into
attitudes from which pre-revolutionary Russia had been beginning to climb
out’ (136).
Such arguments are not to be confused with the positions put forward by
the ‘neo-traditionalists’, for they ignore one of the crucial propositions of
that group. As Terry Martin has insisted, these political and socio-economic
phenomena were not a reinvigoration of tradition:
The neo-traditional model does not assert that Communist societies represent a return to
traditional society . . . rather . . . an alternative form of modernisation, one that includes the
most characteristic processes of market-driven modernisation (industrialisation, urbanisa-
tion, secularisation, universal education and literacy), but one which likewise produces a
variety of practices that bear a striking resemblance to characteristic features of traditional
pre-modern societies . . . . The primary cause of unintended neo-traditionalist outcomes was
not the persistence of traditional values in the Soviet era but rather . . . extreme Soviet
statism.8
Where Gooding identifies the persistence of tradition, the neo-traditionalists

see its (re-)invention.
The notion of the ‘Great Retreat’ continues to frame even methodologically
innovative studies of culture in the 1930s. John Haynes’s New Soviet Man.
Gender and Masculinity in Stalinist Soviet Cinema subjects a number of
iconic Stalinist films to close psychoanalytic analysis in order to explore the
representation of masculinity in film and its relationship with Stalinist culture
in general. Haynes contends that the ‘Cultural Revolution’ can be seen to
amount to a re-masculinization of culture after the relative liberalism of the
first decade of Soviet power. He argues that the period between the first Party
Conference in March 1928 and the 1935 All-Union Creative Conference of
7 Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (London 1937); Nicholas Timasheff, The Great
Retreat. The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York 1946).
8 Martin, ‘Modernization or Neo-Traditionalism?’, op. cit., 360.
Workers in Soviet Cinema witnessed ‘the re-emergence of overt patriarchal

values as the dominant mode of Soviet culture accompanying Stalin’s consoli-
dation of power’ (31).
By contrast, David L. Hoffmann’s Stalinist Values. The Cultural Norms of
Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941 firmly rejects the notion of the ‘Great Retreat’,
insisting that its promotion of traditional elements of Russian culture notwith-
standing, ‘at no time did the Stalinist leadership declare or effect a retreat from
socialism’ (3). On the contrary, he avers, ‘Stalinist propaganda relied on some
traditional institutions and appeals, but . . . it did so for distinctly modern
mobilisational purposes’ (4). Neither does Hoffmann see Soviet socialism as
the peculiar result of the premature ideological import of Marxism grafted on
to the backward body social of early twentieth-century Russia; he is anxious
to situate Stalinist culture in a pan-European perspective which stresses its
similarities with the practices and values of other contemporary European
states, some also authoritarian such as Italy and Germany but other sup-
posedly liberal regimes such as France.9 Soviet pro-natalism and the regime’s
energetic celebration of motherhood were not, Hoffmann argues, a return to
pre-revolutionary traditional values of patriarchy, but part of a pan-European
concern with demographic decline and a desire to boost the country’s birth
rate, following the devastation wrought by years of war, famine and disease.
Family values were thus trumpeted as part of each citizen’s obligation to the
state, not as something residing in a private sphere, separate from the concerns
of the state. Similarly, Hoffmann insists that this state violence employed by
Stalin and his fellow leaders, ‘far from being a medieval oprichnina, was based
on modern conceptions of the social sphere and modern technologies of social
cataloguing and excision’ (4).
The Terror of 1937–8 continues to enjoy pre-eminence in studies of state
violence under Stalin. Recent advances in methodology and a veritable deluge
of new archival materials, illuminating all levels of the state terror ranging
from Politburo instructions to individual denunciations, have resulted in
significant revisions in our understanding of events.10 Edited by Barry
McLoughlin and Kevin McDermott, Stalin’s Terror. High Politics and Mass
9 For examples of this welcome trend, see: Peter Holquist, ‘“Information is the Alpha and
Omega of our Work”. Bolshevik Surveillance in its Pan-European Context’, The Journal of
Modern History, 69 (September 1997), 415–50; idem, ‘New Terrains and New Chronologies. The
Interwar Period through the Lens of Population Politics’, Kritika, 4, 1 (Winter 2003), 163–76;
Kotkin, ‘Modern Times’, op. cit., 111–64. See also Hoffmann’s arguments in favour of the histo-
riographical reintegration of the Soviet Union into contemporary Europe in his ‘European
Modernity and Soviet Socialism’ in idem and Yanni Kotsonis (eds), Russian Modernity. Politics,
Knowledge, Practices (London 2000), 245–60. For an excellent overview of the interwar period
which radically subverts the distinction between ‘liberal’ and ‘authoritarian’ regimes on the
European continent see Mark Mazower, Dark Continent. Europe’s Twentieth Century (New
York 1999), 3–138.
10 See, for example, J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov’s excellent commentary on their edited
collection of documents, The Road to Terror. Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks,
1932–39 (New Haven, CT 1999).
Repression in the Soviet Union brings together a fascinating collection of

essays, which both review our existing understanding of the subject and offer
some challenging new material and insights. The contributions range across
discussions of the relationship between the Party and the NKVD, the Show
Trials, and studies of the repression of foreign communists, workers and the
various ethnic minorities such as the Poles within the Soviet Union.11
The outstanding essay of the volume is ‘Social Disorder, Mass Repression
and the NKVD during the 1930s’, David Shearer’s examination of the rela-
tionship between the sustained but inconsistent efforts of the state security
services to control the eruption of social disorder in the wake of collectiviza-
tion and the first Five Year Plan, and the mass operations of 1937 and 1938.
Shearer argues that by the early 1930s the leadership believed that ‘criminality
and lack of social discipline . . . now posed the greatest single danger to the
construction of socialism in the USSR. . . . This new understanding . . . turned
the fight against crime and social deviancy — indeed any kind of disorder —
from a matter of social control into a political priority in defence of the state’
(92).12 In arguments strongly reminiscent of those of Hoffmann, Shearer points
out that the purge process — the laborious scrutiny of the documents and per-
sonal histories of party members and workers — differed significantly from
the mass operations: the strategic targeting of individuals ‘not because of any
specific criminal act they had supposedly committed, but because they
belonged to a suspect social category. In other words, the purge process
focused on individuals, the mass operations on social groups’ (107). In the
felicitous formulation of McLoughlin,
Can the Ezhovshchina not be seen as an attempt to remove those from society who did not
fit into the few formalised and ascribed class categories of a ‘homogenised’ Soviet state? . . .
the Great Terror was a drastic form of Bolshevik problem solving, an attempt to dispose of
the hostile human detritus left by the recurring tremors of the industrialisation and collec-
tivisation upheavals.13
Such a view is clearly consonant with the arguments recently put forward by
Holquist:
Modern concepts and practices allowed Soviet leaders to conceive of and implement
excisionary violence, and thus provided a necessary though not sufficient condition for
Stalinist terror. In this sense, Stalinism cannot be understood apart from the modern concep-
tion of society as an artefact to be sculpted through state intervention.14
11 The ethnic dimensions of The Terror have been the subject of a number of important studies
in recent years, especially Terry Martin, ‘The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing’, The Journal of
Modern History, 70 (December 1998), 813–61.
12 Paul Hagenloh has made similar arguments, insisting that ‘a twisted but identifiable line of
continuity in policing practices runs from the 1920s through the urban purges of “harmful” ele-
ments in the mid-1930s up to the mass operations of 1937–38’. ‘“Socially Harmful Elements” and
the Great Terror’ in Fitzpatrick (ed.), op. cit., 303.
13 Barry McLoughlin, ‘Mass Operations of the NKVD, 1937–8. A Survey’ in idem and
McDermott (eds), op. cit., 142.
14 Peter Holquist, ‘State Violence as Technique. The Logic of Violence in Soviet Totalitarian-
ism’ in David L. Hoffmann (ed.), Stalinism (Oxford 2003), 130.
Regarding Stalinism’s status within modernity, we are left with something

of a paradox. On the one hand, Stalinism should step forward to claim its
rightful, albeit very unpleasant, place in the pantheon of Western modernity,
pursuing policies that were firmly rooted in contemporary understandings of
the social; on the other, as Hoffmann notes, ‘the Stalinist system was distin-
guished from most modern states by its ambition to remake society completely
and to create the New Soviet Person in accordance with the collectivist values
of Marxian socialism. It was also distinguished by its virtually limitless inter-
ventionism and application of state violence’ (13). How should we account for
this dubious distinction? Part of the problem is implicit in the chronological
focus of the conceptual term ‘modernity’ when used to designate the trans-
formation of the Soviet Union in the first half of the twentieth century. His
subtitle’s periodization (1917–1941) notwithstanding, Hoffmann focuses
resolutely on the 1930s with little or no discussion of the genesis of ‘Stalinist’
(one wonders whether ‘Bolshevik’ might not be a more appropriate adjective)
values in the period from the revolution to the Great Breakthrough. Such an
approach has been endorsed by Martin Malia, who, in a recent broadside
against ‘the corpse’ of revisionism, affirmed that ‘Stalin’s Stalinism stubbornly
remained — and will always remain — the centrepiece of the Soviet story,
since it was indeed the culmination of the Socialist mission proclaimed in
October’.15 But others have voiced misgivings at the dominance of a ‘“Soviet
narrative” beginning in 1917 and with the 1930s as its hinge’.16
A number of important analytical consequences do indeed flow from this
historiographical telescoping of the entire Soviet experience from 1917 to
1941 into the experience of the 1930s. While scholars like Hoffmann, Stephen
Kotkin and Amir Weiner are refreshing in their insistence on the need to re-
insert Stalinism into a pan-European enlightment project, their explanation of
the manifest peculiarities of the Soviet experience rests all too often upon
the simple invocation of ideological drivers such as collectivism, Marxist
millenarianism, the rejection of the market, the insistence upon social and
moral purification, etc. What this amounts to is a repackaged (and admittedly
much more sophisticated) totalitarian view of Stalinism which identifies the
underlying reasons for the distinctiveness of Stalinism in the values and beliefs
of the Party (leadership). Hoffmann, for example, contends that ‘the Soviet
system offered a distinct solution to the problem of class stratification and
social alienation in modern industrial societies. Through violent proletarian
revolution and the elimination of “class enemies” and “enemies of the
people”, the Soviet regime was to create a completely unified, harmonious
society.’ Hoffmann does briefly acknowlege that the reasons for this violent
programme of social transformation are to be found in the circumstances of
the Party’s accession to power: ‘That it was a revolutionary regime formed at
15 Martin Malia, ‘To the Editors’, Kritika, 3, 3 (Summer 2002), 569.

16 Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist and Marshall Poe, ‘From the Editors. “1930s Studies” ’,
Kritika, 4, 1 (Winter 2003), 2.
a moment of total war substantially lessened traditional constraints on state

power and greatly heightened the willingness of Party leaders to deploy
massive coercion in their bid to move history forward to communism’ (186).
Yet the processes by which these values and practices were initially elaborated
are not, in a monograph claiming to address the Soviet experience throughout
the violent years of the Revolution and Civil War, subject to any real analysis.
Consequently, Hoffmann effectively concludes that Stalinism’s ‘distinctively’
massive application of state violence in 1937 was born of a fateful conjunction
of ‘the fanaticism of the Stalinist leadership’s drive to eliminate enemies
but also the deployment of modern concepts and technologies of population
management’ (181).17 Given, as Laura Engelstein has recently noted, that some
‘Western powers managed to combine methods of technocratic management
with participatory political regimes’,18 what remains distinctive about the
Soviet Union is effectively reduced to ‘the fanaticism of the Stalinist leader-
ship’. Yet what was specific to Bolshevism was not simply its instrumental
morality and bloody utopianism. The Party’s governmental methods are more
than the expression of a conjunction of Bolshevik ideology and ‘modern’ tech-
nocratic methods of rule; they are firmly embedded in the specific context of
their initial elaboration: the violence and chaos of the years from 1917 to
1922.
Indeed, an alternative focus of the recent historiography has been the turbulent
years of the first world war, the Revolution and the Civil War, on the basis of
which a number of important studies have sought to reconceptualize the
genesis of the Soviet state and Empire.19 Peter Holquist has recently urged
scholars to move beyond the sterile and misleading dichotomy between those
explanations contending that the Bolsheviks seized power with a blueprint for
dictatorship and those arguing that the one-party state was unintentionally
forged in the crucible of the Civil War and economic collapse.20
17 Espousing an almost identical position, Amir Weiner has argued that ‘the Soviet purification
drive operated on a universal–particularistic axis, combining the modern European ethos of social
engineering with Bolshevik Marxist eschatology’. See his ‘Nature and Nurture in a Socialist
Utopia. Delineating the Soviet Socio-Ethnic Body in the Age of Socialism’, American Historical
Review, 104, 4 (October 1999), 1116.
18 Laura Engelstein, ‘Weapon of the Weak (Apologies to James Scott). Violence in Russian
History’, Kritika, 4, 3 (Summer 2003), 691.
19 Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution. Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921
(Cambridge, MA 2002); V.P. Buldakov, Krasnaia smutia: priroda i posledstviia revoliutsionnogo
nasiliia (Moscow 1997). See also on the issue of nation-building, Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry
Martin (eds), A State of Nations. Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin
(Oxford 2001), which devotes an entire section to what it terms ‘the revolutionary conjuncture’.
20 This false dichotomy has been long lamented but only recently effectively challenged. See
Reginald Zelnik, ‘Commentary. Circumstance and Will in the Russian Civil War’ in Diane
Koenker, William Rosenberg and Ronald Suny (eds), State and Society in the Russian Civil War
(Bloomington, IN 1989), 374–81.
While the period was one of ruin and slaughter, Bolshevism provided a particular explana-
tion to this devastation of war, revolution, and civil war. Bolshevism was distinct not so
much because it was ideological, or even utopian, but on account of its specifically
manichean and adversarial nature.21
Taking Saratov province in the period 1917–22 as a case study, Donald

Raleigh’s Experiencing Russia’s Civil War. Politics, Society and Revolutionary
Culture in Saratov, 1917–1922 offers precisely the kind of subtle study of
the evolution of Stalinism as a system of values and practices. Arguing that
‘the Soviet 1920s contained no real alternatives to a Stalinist-like system’,
Raleigh identifies the reasons for this lack of alternatives in the ‘interplay of
ideology, circumstances, Russia’s backwardness, the country’s political tradi-
tions and culture, and other factors during a prolonged period of social and
political turmoil beginning with the Great War’ (409). An important con-
stituent part of this evolution of statecraft Raleigh identifies in the relationship
between the Bolsheviks’ ‘external and internal languages of power’ and the
creation of the one-party state. As the centralized bureaucracy began to exert
its dominance over local party organizations, ‘opposition within the party was
increasingly but not exclusively relegated to internal language’, memoranda
and communications that were never released into the public sphere. Stripped
of all and any hints of dissension, ‘the resulting “authoritative” external lan-
guage offered a means of understanding present changes through affirmation
only’ (71–2).
Yet even Raleigh’s study is open to objections concerning periodization. His
contention that ‘popular participation in public life became a casualty of the
civil war’ neglects to address just how viable the ‘democratic alternatives’ were
before the Civil War put paid to them in such emphatic fashion (411).
Holquist’s masterly Making War, Forging Revolution, which I have reviewed
elsewhere, contests the status of October 1917 and the ensuing Civil War as a
radical new departure in the evolution of Russian statecraft, arguing that
already during the first world war Russia’s political élites were anticipating
many of the anti-democratic policies of the Bolsheviks: social surveillance,
political violence and the repressive involvement of the state in the operation
of the market.22 Over the course of 1917, when the behaviour of the masses
began to deviate from the expectations of the country’s new leaders, Russia’s
new political class turned to the policies of wartime, ‘not for warfare, but for
reordering the political system and society’.23 In so doing, they anticipated
both the Bolsheviks’ distrust of ‘chaotic democracy’ and their reliance on
coercion in order to suppress it.
The second half of Raleigh’s study addresses the social effects of the period
1917–22 in Saratov and makes the explicit argument that the effects of total
21 Peter Holquist, ‘Violent Russia, Deadly Marxism? Russia in the Epoch of Violence,
1905–21’, Kritika 4, 3 (Summer 2003), 652.
22 ‘Politics, War and Revolution in Russia, 1880–1940’, The Historical Journal (under review).
23 Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution, op. cit., 110–11.
economic collapse were as important to the formation of the state as the actual
fighting of the Civil War itself. Paradoxically, critical failures in supply had
served to delegitimize the Party on the one hand, while its clumsy but domi-
nant control over what little foodstuffs did circulate ensured its survival on the
other.24 The result was a very particular and ultimately enduring relationship
between the vanguard Party and the constituency it purported to represent:
‘The new relations between workers and the party-state negotiated during the
Civil War based on adaptation, resistance, and forms of circumvention
reordered daily life by promoting workers’ strategies of evasion, avoidance,
selective participation, and even hostility’ (415). Raleigh suggests that popular
engagement in the emergence of Soviet Ritual was superficial and sullen; the
Party had failed to establish cultural hegemony while its ideology remained
contested.
The precise nature of the problem of ‘resistance’ under Stalin is one of the
ongoing preoccupations of the historiography and forms the subject of
Contending with Stalinism. Soviet Power and Popular Resistance in the 1930s.
One of the great benefits of the flood of archival materials to emerge from the
former Soviet Union over the last decade or so has been to allow scholars to
peer behind the idealized projections of Soviet culture and to examine the
nature of resistance to the regime from both its own officials and the popula-
tion at large. Often theoretically informed by the ideas of the anthropologist
James C. Scott, a growing number of scholars in the last few years have
explored ways in which Soviet citizens did ‘resist’ the policies of the regime.
They pursued a range of different responses, ranging from the maintenance of
a personal autonomous space such as a diary in which they recorded their
dissent, to obfuscation in dealings with officialdom, through circumvention of
official channels for the distribution of goods, to outright violent revolt.25
Contending with Stalinism is edited by Lynne Viola, whose own research into
peasant resistance to collectivization has powerfully shaped the field of ‘resist-
ance studies’.26 The volume brings together a number of impressive articles by
younger scholars which examine a broad range of different manifestations of
‘resistance’ to the Stalinist regime.
Viola’s introductory essay, ‘Popular Resistance in the Stalinist 1930s.
Soliloquy of a Devil’s Advocate’, is an excellent deconstruction of the concept
of ‘resistance’ in Stalinist Russia, drawing on, as its author freely acknow-
24 For another study of the impact of Soviet food procurement policies during the Civil War on
the regime’s legitimacy and turning away from democratic practice, see Erik-C. Landis, ‘Between
Village and Kremlin. Confronting State Food Procurement in Civil War Tambov, 1919–20’, The
Russian Review, 63, 1 (January 2004), 70–88.
25 Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia. Terror, Propaganda, and Dissent,
1934–1941 (Cambridge 1997).
26 Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin. Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resist-
ance (Oxford 1996).
ledges, the theoretical sophistication of the debate over the same term in
studies of the Third Reich:
Is there a place on the spectrum of resistance for crime, the black market, blat, and banditry,
or, for that matter, the alternative subcultures and identities expressed in religious sects, the
world of traditional healing, homosexuality, or non-Russian nationalities? . . . Does the very
existence of alternative social space . . . signify, within the Stalinist context, an inherent act of
resistance? (21–2)
Indeed, while the Stalinist state may have adhered to such notional definitions
— its systemic ‘toleration’ of certain forms of economic activity or expressions
of complaint and dissent suggests that resistance is too undifferentiated a
concept to characterize any form of activity, cultural, economic or sexual, of
which the regime disapproved. Anna Krylova has warned against the ‘liberal’
insistence on the resisting individual: ‘Refashioning manipulation and pursuit
of self-interest as resistance, contemporary scholars liberate the Stalinist sub-
ject from moral condemnation for complicity with Stalinism, imposing 1990s
notions of moral agency on the Stalinist transformation of the 1930s.’27
Acknowledging many of these conceptual traps, Viola turns instead to the
significance of ‘resistance’ as a semiotic concept in the language of the regime
itself rather than as an empirically verifiable fact. Yet having thus decon-
structed the term ‘resistance’, Viola reasserts it in a rather incongruent
manner, arguing for the suitability of the term to denote a very wide range of
responses to the regime and its policies: ‘Peasants made use of a customary
array of resistance tactics: rumor, flight, dissimulation, and other passive and
active forms of resistance’ (37).28 What remains is a lack of definitional clarity
which obscures the voice of the resisters themselves.
Kotkin has argued that what informed much ‘criticism’ of the regime was in
fact a broad subscription to the ideals of Soviet socialism; in arenas ranging
from diaries to public meetings, various groups voiced dissatisfaction with the
regime’s failure to live up to its own stated goals.29 Such a view is tacitly
endorsed (although not specifically discussed) by Elena Osokina’s examina-
tion of the black market, which argues not that Soviet citizens had a principled
attachment to private property, but rather that the manifest failures of the
regime to make adequate material provision for its citizens prompted them to
27 Anna Krylova, ‘The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies’, Kritika, 1, 1 (2000), 141.
See my similar objections to Dan Healey’s undifferentiated use of the term ‘dissent’ in his Homo-
sexual Desire, and his response to them, online at the website of the Institute for Historical
Research: http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/paper/beerD.html
28 For a stimulating discussion of apocalyptic rumours and chain letters circulating among the
peasant population on the eve of collectivization and the German invasion of the Soviet Union and
the problems attendant upon defining them as acts of ‘resistance’, see Steve Smith, ‘Heavenly
Letters and Tales of the Forest. “Superstition” against Bolshevism’ in Antropologicheskii forum
(forthcoming).
29 For trenchant criticisms of the unproblematic equation of dissatisfaction with ‘dissent’, see
Kotkin’s review of Sarah Davies’s Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia in Europe-Asia Studies, 50,
4 (June 1998), 739–42.
engage in illegal economic activity.30 Similarly, Jeffrey Rossman’s study of a

worker uprising in 1932 details the workers’ appeals to the centre, noting that
‘the shop floor’s hostility was directed against those who implemented the
regime’s policies, and hopes for improvement were projected on those who
authored them, and had the power to change, them’.31 Osokina, Rossman,
and Tracy McDonald in her study of a peasant uprising in Riazan in 1930,
effectively hold to an essentialized view of resistance as the expression of
apparently immutable concerns such as shelter, nutrition, wages, freedom
from violence, etc.32 Yet resistance is never simply an expression; it is always
also actively constructed and represented by those engaged in it. The authors
mentioned neglect adequately to explore the ways in which those engaged in
‘resistance’ understood the moral or ideological imperatives that led them to
act as they did. This analytical blank spot may indeed be a symptom of sources
that frequently refract the motives of ‘resisters’ through the prism of party
reports. Yet it is perhaps also a function of a failure critically to engage with
the recent controversial research into Stalinist subjectivity pioneered by Jochen
Hellbeck and Igal Halfin.33
These scholars have criticized the body of ‘resistance’ literature, in which
‘individuals are accorded subjecthood only in so far as they express themselves
in ways which appear to be dissonant to the values and interests of the
regime’.34 On the contrary, they argue, Soviet citizens remained discursively
and emotionally locked into the state’s own narratives of authority, legitimacy
and empowerment. On the basis of a careful scrutiny of ‘dissent’ in auto-
biographical sources, Hellbeck contends that ‘Soviet subjects owed their
authority to speak out to their self-alignment with the revolutionary master-
narrative’. This was encouraged and over-determined by the programme,
endorsed by the Bolsheviks, of publicly becoming a Soviet subject. ‘Just as the
Revolution was a source of subjectivity and enormous power, a subjective
stance against the Revolution threatened to engender a loss of self and total
powerlessness.’35
30 Elena Osokina, ‘Economic Disobedience under Stalin’ in Viola (ed.), op. cit., 170–200.
31 Jeffrey Rossman, ‘A Workers’ Strike in Stalin’s Russia. The Vichuga Uprising of April 1932’
in ibid., 81 (emphasis in the original).
32 Tracy McDonald, ‘A Peasant Rebellion in Stalin’s Russia. The Pitelinskii Uprising, Riazan,
1930’ in ibid., 84–108.
33 In addition to their articles and monographs already cited, see: Igal Halfin, Terror in My
Soul. Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, MA 2003); Jochen Hellbeck, ‘Fashioning
the Stalinist Soul. The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi, 1931–1938’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte
Osteuropas, 44, 3 (1996), 344–73; idem, ‘Speaking Out. Languages of Affirmation and Dissent in
Stalinist Russia’, Kritika 1, 1 (2000), 71–96; idem, ‘Working, Struggling, Becoming. Stalin-Era
Autobiographical Texts’, The Russian Review, 60, 3 (July 2001), 340–59; Halfin and Hellbeck,
‘Rethinking the Stalinist Subject. Stephen Kotkin’s “Magnetic Mountain” and the State of Soviet
Historical Studies’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 44, 3 (1996), 456–63. For some inci-
sive criticisms of their work, see Eric Naiman, ‘On Soviet Subjects and the Scholars Who Make
Them’, Russian Review, 60, 3 (July 2001), 307–15.
34 Hellbeck, ‘Speaking Out’, op. cit., 74.
35 Ibid., 95.
An examination of the construction of Soviet selfhood is disappointingly

absent from Thomas Ewing’s The Teachers of Stalinism. Policy, Practice and
Power in Soviet Schools of the 1930s. State education in the 1930s constitutes
an essential part of what Vadim Volkov, following Norbert Elias, has termed
the Soviet ‘civilising process’, and Ewing sets out ‘to understand the relation-
ship between Stalinism and education’.36 Yet this ambition remains only
partially fulfilled. While Ewing presents a solid empirical examination of the
actual experiences of teachers in the violent and disorderly years of the 1930s,
his account remains firmly centred on the troubled relations between teachers
and Soviet officialdom, a narrative clearly informed by the tension between
repression and resistance, political interference of the centre and local profes-
sional autonomy (216). Yet he fails to explore the fascinating relationship
between the experiences of the teaching profession on the one hand and the
relationship between the actual incarnation of Soviet education and the
construction of modern Soviet citizens on the other. He makes little effort to
situate the normative practices of the classroom alongside other broader cul-
tural values and practices of Stalinism. Ewing considers, for example, ‘one
of the most remarkable aspects of Stalinist educational discourse’ to be ‘the
demand that teachers show an interest in the “inner world” of their pupils’
(217). Indeed, such findings very much accord with Halfin’s recent work
which has stressed the quite extraordinary lengths to which Party cells went in
forming judgments on the ‘souls’ of their members.37 Yet Ewing makes no
reference to this wider concern with individual moral health and so offers few
insights into the relationship between the classroom and the wider formation
of Stalinist subjectivity.
Resistance has long been an important theme in the work of the labour
historian Donald Filtzer, including his latest study, Soviet Workers and Late
Stalinism. Labour and the Restoration of the Stalinist System after World War
II. Filtzer argues that the regime pursued a policy of forced economic recovery,
which required the mobilization of millions of workers, many as slave labour-
ers (8). Economic reconstruction was inextricably bound up with the political
imperative to reassert the command economy and the Party’s domination of
all areas of life. Yet the suppression of consumption in the interests of accu-
mulation, especially during the harvest failure of 1946, and the dire shortages
which resulted, fostered a ‘psychology of circumvention’. In an argument that
bears more than a passing similarity to that of Osokina mentioned above,
Filtzer contends that such circumvention ‘was a condition of the system’s
survival and reproduction as a system’ (250, emphasis in the original).
36 Vadim Volkov, ‘The Concept of Kul’turnost’. Notes on the Stalinist Civilising Process’ in
Fitzpatrick (ed.), op. cit., 210–30.
37 Igal Halfin, ‘Looking into the Oppositionists’ Souls. Inquisition Communist Style’, The
Russian Review, 60 (July 2001), 316–39; idem, ‘The Demonisation of the Opposition. Stalinist
Memory and the “Communist Archive” at Leningrad Communist University’, Kritika.
Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 2, 1 (Winter 2001), 45–80.
Disappointingly, the experiential consequences of the war itself loom small

in Filtzer’s account. He devotes little space to the returning frontoviki (front-
line soldiers), for example, although he acknowledges that they enjoyed in
some sense a corporate identity which set them apart from the rest of the
population. He acknowledges, more broadly, that ‘wars are great “social uni-
fiers”’ and that ‘in the Soviet Union during World War II . . . people — and
not just soldiers and not just men — became used to taking independent deci-
sions and to talking among themselves with less circumspection and fear than
had been possible in the 1930s’ (263).38 Yet this leaves a number of questions
largely unaddressed: how did this ‘unifying’ force make its presence felt in
the postwar period? To what extent did resistance of the regime’s impositions
signify an (intensified) rejection of the regime’s values? Did their collective
wartime experiences in fact embolden Soviet citizens and officials in their
dealings with the central authorities? In short, did Soviet men and women
understand their acts of resistance to have an ideological or merely pragmatic
significance? The notions of subjectivity and identity, whether ‘Stalinist’ or
‘specifically post-war’ are, once again, regrettably absent from the picture.
One of the regime’s overlooked strategies for coping with popular resistance
is the subject of Steven Merritt Miner’s study of the relationship between the
Soviet state and the Russian Orthodox Church during the second world war,
Stalin’s Holy War. Religion, Nationalism, and Alliance Politics, 1941–1945.
Miner challenges traditional views of the state’s sudden rehabilitation of the
Church in 1943 as a desperate bid to mobilize the Soviet population: ‘Whereas
the Russian people would not fight for Communism, they would go into battle
for Russia — the Holy Russia of Orthodox Christianity’ (7). As Miner points
out, ‘the first public hints of a religious thaw appeared only after the Soviet
victory in the Stalingrad campaign during the winter of 1942–43; and the
church only became publicly prominent following Moscow’s triumph in the
battle of Kursk in July 1943’ (9). Miner’s explanation for the paradox rests
upon an important distinction: ‘Contrary to many accounts, what took place
during the war was a mass revival of religion, not of the church’ (320).39 This
religious revival posed a threat to the regime because of its close links to local
nationalisms and partisan resistance to the Red Army. The Soviet regime made
the Moscow Patriarchate its agent, not to assuage the public’s thirst for
religion, but rather to control and defuse unwelcome popular religious and
national enthusiasms, especially the Greek Catholic Church and related
nationalism in Western Ukraine, rendering them politically manageable.
Yet the rehabilitation of the Orthodox Church, combined with the repres-
sion of other religious minorities, ‘unleashed furies that Moscow would find
difficult to tame’ (141). The role of Russian nationalism in the victorious war
38 Amir Weiner has also discussed the ‘newly discovered self-assertiveness’ of many returning
soldiers. ‘Saving Private Ivan. From What, Why, and How?’, Kritika, 1, 2 (Spring 2000), 318.
39 Daniel Peris has shown that this religious revival was not confined to the territories under
occupation: ‘“God is Now on Our Side”. The Religious Revival on Unoccupied Soviet Territory
during World War II’, Kritika 1, 1 (Winter 2000), 97–118.
effort made Soviet rule look to non-Russians ever more like traditional tsarist
imperialism, and the prominent role accorded to the Russian Orthodox
Church only reinforced this impression. As a result, the state’s seemingly
astute deployment of the Church during the conflict served to reinvigorate the
ultimately fatal bond between religious faith and anti-Soviet nationalism.
Geoffrey Hosking has recently argued along similar lines that the regime’s
vicious repression of national minorities at the end of the war robbed the
collective experience of suffering and victory of its potential for underpinning
a cohesive sense of national identity: ‘The Soviet regime gradually negated its
own greatest triumph and prepared the way for its own eventual downfall.’40
What can be gleaned from this brief survey of the recent historiography? Even
on the basis of a collection of works as eclectic as those reviewed above, it is
possible to identify a number of important conceptual issues with which most
studies of Stalinism must, at some level, engage. The first concerns Stalinism’s
debts to cultural and intellectual dynamics of the last decades of tsarism.
Secondly, there is the elaboration of values and practices of governance in the
violent and chaotic years of the first world war, the Revolution and the Civil
War and the ways in which Stalinism developed as a concrete system at the
conjuncture of pan-European modernity and Russian/Soviet specificities. A
related area is the periodization of ‘Stalinism’ itself, especially the persistence
of the 1930s as a centre of gravity, with the lack of explanatory coherence
that a neglect of the period 1914–30 tends to impose upon the study of that
decade.
A celebration of the demise of the antagonistic totalitarian and revisionist
schools of Cold War historiography has become an axiom of overviews of the
current state of the field, yet one one might well infer from the preceding dis-
cussion that their ghosts continue to haunt the profession. The analytical
impulses of each continue to echo in many of the studies discussed in this
review. Proponents of the view of Stalinism as a constituent of a pan-European
modernity (with associated technologies of statecraft, population control,
welfarism, etc.) need to be wary of hypostatizing these features into a totaliz-
ing vision of a system whose coherence and dominance recall the models of
their totalitarian forebears. Do we not risk, in the formulation of Eric Naiman,
‘reading totalitarianism the way totalitarianism itself would “want” to be
read?’.41 The normative production of the Stalinist regime, emphatic and all-
encompassing though it strove to be, serves as an unreliable guide to the ways
in which the system operated in reality. As a number of studies dealing
with various manifestations of resistance have highlighted, the ambitions of
Stalinist modernity often outstripped the power of the regime to implement
40 Geoffrey Hosking, ‘The Second World War and Russian National Consciousness’, Past and
Present, 175 (May 2002), 187.
41 Naiman, op. cit., 311.
them. The normative and coercive energies of the state were often distorted
and dissipated on contact with a population capable of circumventing the
Party’s strictures and subverting its precepts.
Yet frequently these studies of resistance themselves only raise as many
questions as they answer. Despite the cautionary arguments of Viola, many
continue to betray a lack of theoretical sophistication, content to demonstrate
the fact of acts of ‘opposition’ and ‘resistance’ without enquiring into their
meaning for contemporaries. While they clearly do not constitute a deus ex
machina, studies of Stalinist subjectivity and identity formation, still in their
relative infancy, might prove to be a fruitful way of combining the insights of
studies of both modernity and resistance. The more monologic claims of each
would do well to be tempered by the assertions of the other.
Daniel Beer
is currently a Research Fellow in History at Downing College,
Cambridge; in September 2005 he will take up a lectureship in
Modern European History at Royal Holloway College, University of
London. He is currently completing his first monograph, ‘“Diseases
of the Age”. Degeneration and Moral Contagion in Revolutionary
Russia’.

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