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7/23/2019 Robert V Daniels, Revisionism Avant la Lettre
1/7
Comment: Revisionism Avant la LettreAuthor(s): Robert V. DanielsSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 67, No. 3 (Fall, 2008), pp. 705-710Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27652946.
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Comment:
Revisionism
Avant
la
Lettre
Robert
V.
Daniels
I
guess
I
was
a
revisionist
before
anyone
had
ever
heard
the
term
used
in
its
contemporary
sense.
When
I
embarked
on
Soviet
studies,
revision
ism
meant
the
democratic and
gradualist
revision
of
Marxism
by
Eduard
Bernstein
and
his
followers.
That,
of
course,
was
heresy
in
the
eyes
of
Marxist-Leninists,
and
"revisionism"
became
a
familiar
swearword
in
the
Soviet
lexicon.
My
own
unwitting
revisionism
in
the
new sense
of
deviation
from
the
Soviet
studies
mainstream
really
began
with
my
participation
in
Michael
Karpovich's
seminar
in
Russian
history
in
1947.
In
my paper,
"The Russian
Proletariat
as
a
Revolutionary
Force
in
1917,"
I
highlighted
the
Bolsheviks
and the
fabzavkomy,
because
that
was
where
the
published
sources
were.1
Nothing,
clearly,
could
have
been
more
"1917-revisionist,"
as a
departure
from
the
view of
a
Bolshevik
conspiracy?nothing, perhaps,
save
the
book
and article
I
wrote
twenty
years
later
to
debunk the
roles
of both
Vladimir
Lenin
and Lev Trotskii
in
the
October
revolution and
to
show
that the
Bolshevik
victory
was a
historical
accident.2
But
that work
reflected
my
shift from social-economic into political history?history from the top
down,
I
confess.
It
was a
revision
of
revisionism,
for
which
I
was
faulted
for
underestimating
the
role of
the
masses 3
More
central
to
my
work
has
been
the
question
of
Marxist-Leninist
ideology
and its
historical
role,
about
which
I
was
again
a
revisionist
before
I
knew its
new
meaning.
My
position
has been clear
in
my
mind
ever
since
it dawned
on
me
in the
course
of
my
dissertation
research
on
the
com
munist
opposition
in
the
1920s.
I hold that in the
course
of
Iosif Stalin's
rise
to
power,
Marxism-Leninism,
though
incessantly
inculcated,
became
instrumentalized
in the
hands
of
the
leadership
and
lost
both
its
fixity
of
meaning
and its
power
to
guide
action.4 This is
my
answer to the
ideologi
cal
interpretation
of
Soviet
history.
1.
E.g.,
V. L. Meiler and A. M.
Pankratova, eds.,
Rabochee dvizhenie
v
1917
godu
(Mos
cow
and
Leningrad,
1926).
Contrary
to
legend, Karpovich
did
not
refuse
to
teach
about
the
revolution and the Soviet
period.
2.
Robert
V.
Daniels,
Red
October: The Bolshevik
Revolution
of
1917
(New
York,
1967);
Daniels,
"The
Bolshevik
Gamble,"
Russian
Review
26,
no.
4
(October
1967):
331-40,
reworked
in
Daniels,
The Rise and
Fall
of
Communism
in
Russia
(New
Haven,
2007),
chap.
8.
3.
By
Ronald
Grigor
Suny,
in
"Toward
a
Social
History
of
the October
Revolution,"
American
Historical Review
88,
no.
1
(February
1983):
40-41. Cf. 1.1.
Mints,
"Neveroiatnye
shansy
Roberta
Deniel'sa," Kommunist,
no.
8
(April
1970).
4.
See Robert
V
Daniels,
The Conscience
of
the Revolution: Communist
Opposition
in
Soviet
Russia
(Cambridge,
Mass.,
1960);
also
Daniels,
The Nature
of
Communism
(New
York,
1962),
chap.
9,
sec.
6
("The
Transformation of the Movement and the Function of
Doctrine").
For
a
later
reflection,
see
Daniels,
"Stalinist
Ideology
as
False
Consciousness,"
in Marcello
Flores
and
Francesca
Gori,
eds.,
II
mito
delTURSS:
La cultura occidentale
e
TUnione
Sovi?tica
(Milan,
1990),
condensed
version
in
Daniels,
Rise and
Fall
of
Communism,
chap.
22.
Slavic
Review
67,
no.
3
(Fall
2008)
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706
Slavic
Review
Revisionism in
Soviet
history
is
commonly equated
with
social
his
tory,
an
endeavor
illustriously
exemplified
by
Sheila
Fitzpatrick.
As
his
tory
"from
below,"
it
certainly
got
a
big
boost from
the
New
American
Revolution
of
the
1960s
that
was
echoed
throughout
the
historical
pro
fession,
not
just
in
the Soviet
field,
though
Nikita
Khrushchev's
easing
of
access to
nonsensitive
archives
contributed.
But
even
this
new
revisionism
was
not
all
that
new;
a
lot
of
the
questions
that
it
raised?totalitarianism,
modernization,
movements
from
below,
interest
groups
inside
the
power
structure,
the
cultural
revolution
under
Stalin?were
old
hat
to
people
who
had
embarked
on
Soviet
studies
before
the
1960s.
In
any
case,
by
sug
gesting
that
there
may
have been
an
autonomous
social
realm
beyond
the
effective reach
of
dictatorial
political control,
social
history directly
chal
lenged
the
prevailing
totalitarian
model,
tempting
devotees
of
the latter
to
impute
dire
political
agendas
to
the
revisionists
and
provoking
all
the
recriminations
that
Fitzpatrick
recounts.
At
the
time
these
controversies
largely
passed
me
by. My
own reserva
tions
about the
totalitarian
model
for
its
unhistorical
character and
its
ideological
simplemindedness
were
quite
independent
of
social-history
revisionism.
Not
that I would
deny
the
significance
of
social
history?
indeed,
I
have
used
some
of
its
statistical
and
demographic
methods
in
studying
neo-Stalinism.5
Still,
I
am
inclined
to
think
of
social
history
as
a
distinct discipline, a form of sociology in the time dimension, as it were,
whose
patterns
and
conclusions
then
become
data
for
history
as
such.
The
main
axis of
controversy
over
revisionism,
clearly,
is
the
totalitar
ian
model,
or
as
Fitzpatrick
puts
it,
the
question
of
power.
Can all
power
in
a
society
be
concentrated
at
the
top?
Belief in
this
proposition
has often
become
an
article
of
faith,
making
any
sort
of
revisionism
that
recognizes
constraints
from
below
a
kind of
connivance
in
the
evil of
the
totalitarian
system
itself.
The
notion
that
a
totalitarian
regime
can
be
subjected
to
the
same
standards
of
objective
historical and
social
science
explanation
then
takes on the
appearance
of
apology
for
such
regimes.6
For
this
orthodoxy
of
absolute
totalitarian
evil
there
were,
so
to
speak,
four
Gospels
by
Hannah
Arendt,
Merle
Fainsod,
Carl
Friedrich
with his
student
Zbigniew
Brzezinski,
and
Leonard
Schapiro
(though
none
of
them
were
quite
as
doctrinaire
as
their
disciples)
? Arendt
was
probably
5.
See
Robert
V
Daniels,
"Office
Holding
and
Elite
Status:
The
Central
Committee
of
the
CPSU,"
in
Paul
Cocks,
Robert
V.
Daniels,
and
Nancy
Whittier
Heer,
eds.,
The
Dynam
ics
of
Soviet
Politics
(Cambridge,
Mass.,
1976),
condensed
as
"The
Central
Committee
as
a
Bureaucratic
Elite,"
in
Daniels,
Rise
and
Fall
of
Communism,
chap.
27;
also
Daniels,
"Political
Processes and Generational Change," in Archie Brown, ed., Political
Leadership
in the Soviet
Union
(London,
1989),
condensed
as
"The
Generational
Revolution,"
in
Daniels,
Rise
and
Fall
of
Communism,
chap.
28.
6. I
recall
Conyers
Read's
scandalous
presidential
address
to
the
American
Histori
cal
Association
in
December
1949 when
the
Cold
War
was
pretty
hot,
to
the
effect
that
academic
judgments
should
be
subordinated
to
the
national
interest
in
prevailing
against
the
Soviet
Union.
Conyers
Read,
"The
Social
Responsibilities
of
the
Historian,"
American
Historical
Review
55,
no.
2
(January
1950):
275-85.
7.
Hannah
Arendt,
The
Origins
of
Totalitarianism
(New
York,
1951);
Merle
Fainsod,
How
Russia Is
Ruled
(Cambridge,
Mass.,
1953);
CarlJ.
Friedrich
and
ZbigniewK.
Brzezinski,
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4/7
Revisionism
Avant
la
Lettre
707
the
most
influential,
though
her
book
was
mainly
based
on
the
Nazi
case.
By
contrast,
Fainsod
was a
master
of
Sovietology,
with
a
strong
historical
sense.
Friedrich
and
Brzezinski
were
the
most
canonical,
supported
by
Schapiro;
they
described
the
Soviet Union
as an
unchanging
monolith
set
up
in
accordance
with Marxist
ideology.
The
Grand
Inquisitor,
in this
sce
nario,
was
Robert
Conquest,
a
great
scholar
and
a
mild-mannered
man
in
person,
but
a
fire-and-brimstone
type
in
public
controversy.
Guesses
about
the number
of
purge
victims
and
gulag
inmates
became
in
his
mind
a
lit
mus
test
for
academic virtue
or
depravity.8
Curiously,
both
the
revisionists
and
the
totalitarianists
(to
coin
a
term)
have
felt
like
oppressed
minorities.
Fitzpatrick
repeatedly
cites
Richard
Pipes
and
Martin
Malia
as
her
tormentors,
but
not
many
other academ
ics.
These
few,
however,
found
enduring
resonance
in
the American
mass
media,
since
they
told the
public
what
it
wanted
to
hear.
For their
part,
critics
of
the
totalitarian
model,
dismissing
it
as
an
ar
tifact
of
Cold War
propaganda,
have
often
thrown
the
baby
out
with
the
bath
water.
As
a
concept,
totalitarianism
long
antedates
the
Cold
War,
having
generally
been
used
to
describe
the
commonalities
among
both
right-
and
left-wing
dictatorships.
Mussolini
advanced
the
term in
a
posi
tive
sense to
describe
his
regime.9
To
be
sure,
totalitarianism
became
a
slogan
for emotional
mobilization
against
the
Soviet
Union
after
the
Cold
War set in, but in the abstract there is nothing wrong with the concept that
a
little
tinkering
could
not
remedy.
The
model
needs
historical
context
to
account for
the
advent
of totalitarianism
and its
possible
dissolution
apart
from defeat
in
war.
It
needs
to
recognize
the
practical
limits
to state
control
over
society.
And
it
needs
to
allow
for
differences
of
degree
among
various
regimes
(and
not
just
the
sharp
categorization
of "totalitarian"?
usually
Left?versus
"authoritarian"?always
Right.10
Paralleling
controversy
over
totalitarianism
is
interpretation
of
the
tu
multuous
events
in
the
Soviet
Union between
the late
1920s
and
the
mid
1980s,
the
period
I
call
(with
undisguised
bias toward the role of the indi
vidual
at
the
top)
the
"Stalin
Revolution."11
Was
Stalinism
a
new
departure
from,
even
a
betrayal
of,
Leninism,
or
was
it the
direct
implementation
of
the
process
Lenin
had
set
in
motion?
I
find that
the
more one
digs
into
detail,
the
clearer
is the
picture
of
a
sharp
break,
Stalin's
"velikii
perelom"
though
Lenin
pointed
the
re
Totalitarian
Dictatorship
and
Autocracy
(Cambridge,
Mass.,
1956);
Leonard
Schapiro,
The
Communist
Party of
the
Soviet
Union
(New
York,
1960).
8.
See,
e.g.,
Robert
Conquest,
"What
Is
Terror?"
Slavic
Review
45,
no.
2
(Summer
1986): 235-37.
9.
Abbott
Gleason,
Totalitarianism:
The
Inner
History of
the Cold
War
(New
York, 1995),
16-20.
Gleason
does
a
masterful
job
of
showing
how
the
concept
of
totalitarianism
arose
between
the
wars
and
how
it
subsequently
played
out
in
American
academic
life.
10.
Jeanne
Kirkpatrick,
"Dictatorships
and
Double
Standards,"
Commentary
68,
no.
5
(1979).
11.
Robert
V.
Daniels,
ed. and
introduction,
The
Stalin
Revolution:
Fulfillment
or
Be
trayal
of
Communism?
(Boston,
1965;
in
later
editions
the
subtitle
became
Foundations
of
Soviet
Totalitarianism).
I
included
selections
from
Sheila
Fitzpatrick
in
the
3d
(1990)
and
4th
(1997)
editions.
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Slavic
Review
gime
in
Stalin's
direction,
or
rather,
Stalin
adopted
Lenin's
heritage
as
the
basis for his
own
power.12
There is
a case
to
be
made,
following
Moshe
Lewin
and
Stephen
Cohen,
that
in
his
last months
Lenin
was
backing
away
from
revolutionary
violence and
that Nikolai Bukharin's
gradualist
(that
is,
revisionist )
approach
to
socialism
was
closer
to
Lenin's ultimate
think
ing.
My
own
investigation
of
Stalin's
"left
turn" of
1928-29
persuaded
me
that,
far
from
the
official
image
of
a
long-planned
revolutionary
push,
both
intensive
industrialization
and
collectivization
started
as
a
series
of
improvisations
intended
to
embarrass Bukharin and
the
Right
Opposi
tion.
Russia's
misfortune
was
that
these
steps,
once
adopted,
became
ends
in
themselves.13
Was
there,
in
this
era,
a
"cultural revolution" driven by social elements
from
below?
I
stumbled
on
the
idea
of
the cultural
revolution
as
far back
as
the
early
1950s,
thanks
to
the
interdisciplinary
cross-fertilization
en
couraged
at
the
Russian Research
Center,
and
I
published
a
paper
on
it.14
Even
then
there
was a
copious
literature
documenting
the
push
in
one
cultural
field
after
another
by super-Marxist
though
anti-intellectual
(or
"quasi-intellectual"15)
upstarts
to
get
the
party's imprimatur,
which
was
forthcoming
across
the
board
in
1929
and the
years
immediately
af
ter.
What
Fitzpatrick
omits from
her
reflections
(though
it
is
clear in her
major publications)
is
the
cultural
counterrevolution
that
followed the
cultural revolution, as early as 1932 in literature and across the board
by
1936,
as
the
activists
who
helped
the
party
get
control
of
culture
were re
pudiated
as
"anti-Marxist" and
ultimately
purged.
Fitzpatrick
is
absolutely
right
about
the
vydvizhentsy,
those
able
and
ambitious
but
compliant young
men
whom
Stalin
plucked
from
the
work
ing
class
and
the
peasantry
to
staff
his
bureaucracy.
Criticism of
her
dis
covery
of
this
element of
social
mobility
is
baffling.
Even
a
tyrant,
after
all,
has
to
find
his
"willing
executioners"
to
carry
out
his
will.
The
concept
of
the
vydvizhentsy,
in
fact,
is
even
more
productive
than
Fitzpatrick
has
pro
posed:
After
this
youthful
cadre
of
men
like
Leonid
Brezhnev
and
Aleksei
Kosygin
had filled the shoes of
the
purge
victims
in
the
later
1930s,
they
12.
See,
in
particular,
Sheila
Fitzpatrick,
"The Civil
War
as
a
Formative
Experience,"
in
Abbott
Gleason,
Peter
Kenez,
and
Richard
Stites,
eds.,
Bolshevik
Culture:
Experiment
and
Order
in the
Russian
Revolution
(Bloomington,
1985).
13.
Daniels,
Conscience
of
the
Revolution,
chap.
13. In
a
personal
bit
of
post-Soviet
re
visionism,
I
see
an
analogous
chain
of
ad hoc
decisions
by
Boris
El'tsin
in
the
course
of
his
feud
with
Mikhail
Gorbachev,
a
"perelom"
in
the
opposite
direction
of
radically
antisocialist
economics:
Robert V
Daniels,
"Per
Mosca
vedo
un
rischio
cileno,"
UUnit?
(Rome),
28
October
1992,
translated
as
"Interdependence,
or
a
Russian
Pinochet?" in
Daniels,
Russia's
Transformation:
Snapshots
of
a
Crumbling
System
(Lanham,
Md.,
1998),
chap.
29.
14.
Robert
V.
Daniels,
"Soviet
Thought
in
the 1930s:
An
Interpretive
Sketch,"
Indiana
Slavic
Studies
1
(1956),
reprinted
in
Daniels,
Trotsky,
Stalin,
and
Socialism
(Boulder,
Colo.,
1991),
condensed
as
"Stalin's
Cultural
Counterrevolution,"
in
Daniels,
Rise and
Fall
of
Com
munism,
chap.
20.
I
had
planned
to
develop
the
thesis
into
a
book,
but that
project
never
came
to
fruition.
15.
Daniels,
"Intellectuals
and
the
Russian
Revolution,"
American
Slavic
and
East Eu
ropean
Review
20,
no.
2
(April
1961): 270-78,
condensed
version
in
Daniels,
Rise
and
Fall
of
Communism,
chap.
4.
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6/7
Revisionism
Avant la
Lettre
709
proceeded
as a
generation
to
grow
old
in
office,
and that
explains
both
the
continuity
and
the
pigheadedness
of the
Soviet
leadership
from the
death of
Stalin all the
way
down
to
the
advent
of
perestroika.16
I
experienced
old-fashioned
Marxist
revisionism
in
Italy
in the
1980s,
at
meetings
and conferences
with
scholars
from the
Italian
Left
(on
which
I
reported
at
the
annual
meeting
of
the
American
Association
for
the
Ad
vancement
of Slavic Studies
and in this
journal).17
The
high
point
of this
movement
came
in
1981,
when
Soviet
pressure
prompted
martial law
in
Poland.
"The
propulsive
force
that
had
its
origin
in
the
October
revolu
tion has
been
exhausted,"
declared
Enrico
Berlinguer,
secretary-general
of the Italian Communist Party (PCI).18
All this foreshadowed
the
for
mal
conversion
of
the PCI
majority
into
the
Democratic
Party
of
the
Left
(PDS)
in 1991.
Leading
the
effort
to
figure
out
how
the
Soviet
Union
had
ceased
to
deserve
the
support
of
the
western
Left
was
the
long-time
Moscow
cor
respondent
of
the
Italian Communist
daily
UUnit?,
Giuseppe
Boffa,
presi
dent,
by
the
1980s,
of the
small
PCI
foreign
policy
think
tank
CeSPI
(Cen
tro
Studi
di
Pol?tica
Internazionale,
still
going
today
as
an
independent
entity).
Boffa had
been
a
fan
of
Khrushchev
back
in his
Moscow
days,19
and
it
was
Khrushchev's
overthrow
that
set
him
on
the
path
to
revision
ism.
Boffa's
book
on
the
diverse
explanations
of
Stalinism
was a model of
analytical
clarity,
while
his
magnum
opus,
a
history
of
the
whole
Soviet
ex
perience,
was
a
landmark
exposition
of
the
changing
nature
of
the
Soviet
system
as
the
revolution
degenerated
under
Stalin.20
Giulietto
Chiesa,
a
successor
to
Boffa
as
UUnit?
correspondent
in
Moscow,
told
me
when
I
first
met
him there
in 1984
that
his
entr?e
as
the
de
facto ambassador
of
the
PCI had
revealed
to him that
"This
country
is
run
just
as
if
it
were
run
by
the
Mafia."21
That
line
tells
you
all
you really
need
to
know
about
both
Italian
communism
and
the
latter-day
Soviet
Union.
Revisionism
is
not
just
one
point
of
view;
most
broadly,
it
is
the
readi
ness to
change
your
views.
Historical
interpretation
is
a
work
of
the
imagi
nation,
and
the
best
history
is
bound
to
be
revisionist.
Naturally,
concep
tions
of
history
must
reflect
new
information
about
the
past,
such
as
that
gleaned
from the
opening
of
old
Soviet
archives
that
fed
the social
history
revisionism
in
the
1960s.
New
events?1991
above
all?demand
expia
16.
See
Daniels,
Rise and
Fall
of
Communism,
320-22.
17.
Robert
V.
Daniels,
"Eurocommunist
Views
of
the
Development
of the
Soviet
Sys
tem:
The PCI and
Stalinism,"
Slavic
Review
49,
no.
1
(Spring
1990):
109-15.
I
presented
an
earlier
version at the November 1988
meeting
of the American Association for the
Advancement
of Slavic
Studies
in
Honolulu.
18.
Enrico
Berlinguer
on
Italian
television
(RAI),
13 December
1981.
19. Chronicled
in his
book,
La
grande
svolta,
translated
into
English
as
Giuseppe
Boffa,
Inside
the Khrushchev
Era
(New
York,
1959).
20.
Giuseppe
Boffa,
II
fen?meno
Stalin
nella
storia
del
XX
sec?lo:
Le
interpretazioni
dello
Stalinismo
(Rome,
1982),
translated
as
The
Stalin
Phenomenon
(Ithaca,
1992);
and
Boffa,
Storia
deirUnione
Sovi?tica,
2
vols.
(Milan,
1976-79).
21.
Giulietto
Chiesa,
conversation
with
the
author,
Moscow,
April
1984.
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7/7
710
Slavic
Review
nation and
put
the
past
in
a
new
light:
How does
the record
explain
the
breakdown
of
the
whole
Soviet
political,
economic,
and
imperial system
in
just
a
few
years?22
What is
now
left of old
notions
about
the life
history
of the
Soviet
regime?
Perforce,
we are
all revisionists
now.
22.
See
Daniels,
"Does the
Present
Change
the Past?"
Journal of
Modern
History
70,
no.
2
(June
1998):
431-35,
reworked
as
"Past
and
Present,"
in
Daniels,
Rise
and
Fall
of
Communism,
chap.
35.
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