Читать книгу Red Flag Unfurled - Ronald Grigor Suny - Страница 10

From its very beginnings, the historiography of Russia in the twentieth century has been much more than an object of coolly detached scholarly contemplation.¹ Many observers saw the USSR as the major enemy of Western civilization, the principal threat to the stability of nations and empires, a scourge that sought to undermine the fundamental values of decent human societies. For others, the Soviet Union promised an alternative to the degradations of capitalism and the fraudulent claims of bourgeois democracy, represented the bulwark of Enlightenment values against the menace of fascism, and preserved the last best hope of colonized peoples. In the Western academy, the Soviet Union was most often imagined to be an aberration in the normal course of modern history, an unfortunate detour from the rise of liberalism that bred its own evil opposite, traveling its very own Sonderweg that led eventually (or inevitably) to collapse and ruin. The very endeavor of writing a balanced narrative required a commitment to standards of scholarship suspect to those either militantly opposed to or supportive of the Soviet enterprise. At times, as in the years just after the revolution or during the Cold War, scholarship too often served other masters than itself. While much worthy analysis came from people deeply committed to or critical of the Soviet project, a studied neutrality was difficult (though possible) in an environment in which one’s work was always subject to political judgment.

With the opening of the Soviet Union and its archives to researchers from abroad, beginning in the Gorbachev years, professional historians and social scientists produced empirically grounded and theoretically informed works that avoided the worst polemical excesses of earlier years. Yet, even those who claimed to be unaffected by the battles of former generations were themselves the product of what went before. The educator still had to be educated. While the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union permitted a greater degree of detachment than had been possible before, the Soviet story—itself so important an ingredient in the self-construction of the modern “West”—remains one of deep contestation.

The Prehistory of Soviet History

“At the beginning of [the twentieth century],” wrote Christopher Lasch in his study of American liberals and the Russian Revolution,

people in the West took it as a matter of course that they lived in a civilization surpassing any which history had been able to record. They assumed that their own particular customs, institutions and ideas had universal validity; that having showered their blessings upon the countries of western Europe and North America, those institutions were destined to be carried to the furthest reaches of the earth, and bring light to those living in darkness.²

Those sentences retain their relevance at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Western, particularly American, attitudes to and understandings of Russia and the Soviet Union unfolded in the last hundred years within a broad discourse of optimism about human progress, that relied on the comforting thought that capitalist democracy represented the best possible solution to human society, if not the “end of history.” Within that universe of ideas, Russians were constructed as people fundamentally different from Westerners, with deep, largely immutable national characteristics. Ideas of a “Russian soul” or an essentially spiritual or collectivist nature guided the interpretations and policy prescriptions of foreign observers. This tradition dates back to the very first travelers to Muscovy. In his Notes Upon Russia (1517–1549), Sigismund von Herberstein wrote, “The people enjoy slavery more than freedom,” an observation echoed by Adam Olearius in the seventeenth century, who saw Russians as “comfortable in slavery” and requiring “cudgels and whips” to make them work. Montesquieu and others believed that national character was determined by climate and geography, and the harsh environment in which Russians lived had produced a barbarous and uncivilized people, ungovernable, lacking discipline, lazy, superstitious, subject to despotism, yet collective, passionate, poetical and musical. The adjectives differed from writer to writer, yet they clustered around the instinctual and emotional pole of human behavior rather than the cognitive and rational. Race and blood, more than culture and choice, decided what Russians were able to do. In order to make them civilized and modern, it was often asserted, force and rule from above was unavoidable. Ironically, the spokesmen of civilization justified the use of violence and terror on the backward and passive people of Russia as the necessary means to modernity.

The most influential works on Russia in the early twentieth century were the great classics of nineteenth-century travelers and scholars, like the Marquis de Custine, Baron August von Haxthausen, Donald Mackenzie Wallace, Alfred Rambaud, Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, and George Kennan, the best-selling author of Siberia and the Exile System.³ France offered the most professional academic study of Russia, and the influential Leroy-Beaulieu’s eloquent descriptions of the patience, submissiveness, lack of individuality, and fatalism of the Russians contributed to the ubiquitous sense of a Slavic character that contrasted with the Gallic, Anglo-Saxon, or Teutonic. American writers, like Kennan and Eugene Schuyler, subscribed equally to such ideas of nationality, but rather than climate or geography as causative, they emphasized the role of institutions, like tsarism, in generating a national character that in some ways was mutable.⁴ Kennan first went to Russia in 1865, became an amateur ethnographer, and grew to admire the courageous revolutionaries (“educated, reasonable, self-controlled gentlemen, not different in any essential respect from one’s self”) that he encountered in Siberian exile.⁵ For his sympathies, the tsarist government banned him from Russia, placing him in a long line of interpreters whose exposures of Russian life and politics would be so punished.⁶

Russia as an autocracy remained the political “other” of Western democracy and republicanism, and it was with great joy and relief that liberals, including President Woodrow Wilson, greeted the February Revolution of 1917 as “the impossible dream” realized. Now the new Russian government could be enlisted in the Great War to make “the world safe for democracy.”⁷ But the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd turned the liberal world upside down. For Wilson’s Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, Bolshevism was “the worst form of anarchism,” “the madness of famished men.”⁸ In the years immediately following the October Revolution, the first accounts of the new regime reaching the West were by journalists and diplomats. The radical freelance journalist John Reed, his wife and fellow radical Louise Bryant, Bessie Beatty of the San Francisco Bulletin, the British journalist Arthur Ransome, and Congregational minister Albert Rhys Williams all witnessed events in 1917 and conveyed the immediacy and excitement of the revolutionary days to an eager public back home.⁹ After several trips to Russia, the progressive writer Lincoln Steffens told his friends, “I have seen the future and it works.” Enthusiasm for the revolution propelled liberals and socialists further to the left, and small Communist parties emerged from the radical wing of Social Democracy. From the right came sensationalist accounts of atrocities, debauchery, and tyranny, leavened with the repeated assurance that the days of the Bolsheviks were numbered. L’Echo de Paris and the London Morning Post, as well as papers throughout Western Europe and the United States, wrote that the Bolsheviks were “servants of Germany” or “Russian Jews of German extraction.”¹⁰ The New York Times so frequently predicted the fall of the Communists that two young journalists, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, exposed their misreadings in a long piece in The New Republic.¹¹

The Western reaction to the Bolsheviks approached panic. Officials and advisors to the Wilson administration spoke of Russia as drunk, the country as mad, taken over by a mob, the people victims of an “outburst of elemental forces,” “sheep without a shepherd,” a terrible fate for a country in which “there were simply too few brains per square mile.”¹² Slightly more generously, the American ambassador David Francis told the State Department that the Bolsheviks might be just what Russia needed: strong men for a people that do not value human life and “will obey strength … and nothing else.”¹³ To allay fears of domestic revolution the American government deported over 200 political radicals in December 1919 to the land of the Soviets on the Buford, an old ship dubbed “the Red Ark.” The virus of Bolshevism seemed pervasive, and powerful voices raised fears of international subversion. The arsenal of the Right included the familiar weapon of anti-Semitism. In early 1920, Winston Churchill told demonstrators that the Bolsheviks “believe in the international Soviet of the Russian and Polish Jews.”¹⁴ Baron N. Wrangel opened his account of the Bolshevik revolution with the words “The sons of Israel had carried out their mission; and Germany’s agents, having become the representatives of Russia, signed peace with their patron at Brest-Litovsk.”¹⁵

Western reading publics, hungry for news and analyses of the enigmatic social experiment underway in Soviet Russia, turned to journalists and scholars for information. The philosopher Bertrand Russell, who had accompanied a delegation of the British Labour Party to Russia in 1919, rejected Bolshevism for two reasons: “the price mankind must pay to achieve communism by Bolshevik methods is too terrible; and secondly, … even after paying the price I do not believe the result would be what the Bolsheviks profess to desire.”¹⁶ Other radical dissenters included the anarchist Emma Goldman, who spent nearly two years in Bolshevik Russia only to break decisively with the Soviets after the repression of the Kronstadt mutiny in March 1921.¹⁷

The historian Bernard Pares (1867–1949) had begun visiting Russia regularly from 1898, and reported on the beginnings of parliamentarianism in Russia after 1905. As British military observer to the Russian army he remained in the country from the outbreak of World War I until the early days of the Soviet government. After service as British commissioner to Admiral Kolchak’s anti-Bolshevik White government, Pares taught Russian history at the University of London, where he founded The Slavonic Review in 1922 and directed the new School of Slavonic Studies. A friend of the liberal leader Pavl Miliukov and supporter of constitutional monarchy in Russia, by the 1930s Pares had become more sympathetic to the Soviets and an advocate of Anglo-Russian rapprochement. Like most of his contemporaries, Pares believed that climate and environment shaped the Russians. “The happy instinctive character of clever children,” he wrote, “so open, so kindly and so attractive, still remains; but the interludes of depression or idleness are longer than is normal.”¹⁸ In part because of his reliance on the concept of “national character,” widely accepted among scholars, journalists, and diplomats, Pares’s influence remained strong, particularly during the years of the Anglo-American-Soviet alliance. But with the coming of the Cold War, he, like others “soft on communism,” was denounced as an apologist for Stalin.¹⁹

In the United States the most important of the few scholars studying Russia were Archibald Cary Coolidge (1866–1928) at Harvard and Samuel Northrup Harper (1882–1943) of the University of Chicago. For Coolidge, the variety of “head types” found among Slavs was evidence that they were a mixture of many different races, and while autocracy might be repugnant to the “Anglo-Saxon,” it appeared to be appropriate for Russians.²⁰ After working with Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration (ARA) during the famine of 1921–22, he concluded that the famine was largely the result of the peasants’ passivity, lethargy, and Oriental fatalism, not to mention the “stupidity, ignorance, inefficiency and above all meddlesomeness” of Russians more generally.²¹ The principal mentor of American experts on the Soviet Union in the interwar period, Coolidge trained the first generation of professional scholars and diplomats. One of his students, Frank Golder (1877–1927), also worked for Hoover’s ARA and was an early advocate of Russia’s reconstruction, a prerequisite, he felt, for ridding the country of the “Bolos.” Golder went on to work at the Hoover Institution of War, Peace, and Revolution at Stanford University, building up important collections of documents that make up the major archive for Soviet history in the West.²²

Samuel Harper, the son of William Rainey Harper, the President of the University of Chicago, shared the dominant notions of Russian national character, which for him included deep emotions, irregular work habits, apathy, lethargy, pessimism, and lack of “backbone.”²³ Harper was a witness to Bloody Sunday in 1905 and, like his friend Pares, a fervent defender of Russian liberals who eventually succumbed to the romance of communism. Russians may have been governed more by emotion and passion than reason, he argued, but they possessed an instinct for democracy. In 1926, he accepted an assignment from his colleague, chairman of the political science department at Chicago, Charles E. Merriam (1874–1953), arguably the most influential figure in American political science between the wars, to study methods of indoctrinating children with the love of the state. Russia, along with fascist Italy, was to be the principal laboratory for this research. Merriam was fascinated with the successes of civic education in Mussolini’s Italy, while other political scientists saw virtues in Hitler’s Germany.²⁴ For Merriam, creating patriotic loyalty to the state was a technical problem, not a matter of culture, and the Soviet Union, which had rejected nationalism and the traditional ties to old Russia, was a “striking experiment” to create “de novo a type of political loyalty to, and interest in a new order of things.”²⁵ In The Making of Citizens (1931), he concluded that the revolution had employed the emotions generated by festivals, the Red Flag, the Internationale, and mass meetings and demonstrations effectively to establish “a form of democratic nationalism.”²⁶

To study what they called “civic education,” something akin to what later would be known as “nation-building,” Harper and Merriam traveled to Russia together in 1926. Guided by Maurice Hindus, an influential journalist sympathetic to the Soviet experiment, Harper visited villages where he became enthusiastic about the Bolshevik educational program. Impressed by Soviet efforts to modernize the peasantry, he supported their industrialization drive.²⁷ This led eventually to estrangement from the State Department specialists on Russia with whom Harper had worked for over a decade. In the mid-1930s, he wrote positively about constitutional developments in the USSR, and his 1937 book, The Government of the Soviet Union, made the case for democratic, participatory institutions in the Soviet system. His book appeared the very same year that Stalin’s show trials reached their zenith, carrying away the Communist elite whom the dictator saw as potential political threats. Harper rationalized the Moscow trials and never publicly criticized Stalin. When Harper defended the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939 as a shrewd maneuver, students abandoned his classes and faculty colleagues shunned him. Only after the Soviets became allies of the United States in 1941 did he enjoy a few twilight years of public recognition, even appearing with Charlie Chaplin and the poet Carl Sandburg at a mass “Salute to our Russian Ally.”²⁸

Seeing the Future Work

Through the interwar years, the Soviet Union offered many intellectuals a vision of a preferred future outside and beyond capitalism. Contained within the hope and faith in the USSR and communism, however, were the seeds of disillusionment and despair. Writers made ritualistic visits to Moscow and formed friendships with other political pilgrims. In November 1927, novelist Theodore Dreiser accepted an invitation to tour the USSR, and his secretary remembered an evening at the Grand Hotel with Dorothy Thomas, Sinclair Lewis, Scott Nearing, and Louis Fischer, followed by a visit to New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty.²⁹ By the early 1930s, many “Russianists” had moved decisively to the left. The sociologist Jerome Davis, who taught at Dartmouth and Yale, advocated recognition of the USSR and was ultimately fired from Yale for condemning capitalism.³⁰ Paul Douglas, a distinguished University of Chicago labor economist, enthusiastically but mistakenly predicted that Soviet trade unions would soon overtake the Communist Party as the most powerful institution in the country.³¹ Robert Kerner, a Russian historian at the University of Missouri, gave up what he had called “racial metaphysics” (he said he had studied the Slavs as the “largest white group in the world”) to investigate environmental and historical factors, work that culminated in his The Urge to the Sea (1942). The epitome of professional Russian history in the interwar period, Geroid Tanquary Robinson of Columbia University, was attracted to radical thought early in his life and dedicated his scholarship to a re-evaluation of the much-maligned Russian peasantry. His magnum opus, Rural Russia Under the Old Regime (1932), the first substantial historical work by an American scholar that was based on extensive work in the Soviet archives, challenged the prevalent notion of peasant lethargy and passivity. Influenced by the “New Historians” who turned to the study of everyday life and borrowed insights from the other social sciences, he worked to distinguish professional historical writing, which looked to the past to explain the present (or other pasts), from journalism or punditry, which used the past and present to project into and predict the future.

“Collectively,” writes David C. Engerman, these new professional experts on Russia—Harper, Kerner, Davis, Douglas, Robinson, Vera Micheles Dean, and Leo Pasvolsky—“offered more reasons to support Soviet rule than to challenge it.”³² They played down ideology as they elevated national, geographic, or even racial characteristics. Russia, they believed, had affected communism much more than communism Russia. The small cohort of American diplomats (George Kennan, Charles “Chip” Bohlen, Loy Henderson, and the first ambassador to the USSR, William Bullitt) who manned the new US embassy in Moscow after recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933 shared similar attitudes. Kennan reported that in order to understand Russia he “had to weigh the effects of climate on character, the results of century-long conflict with the Asiatic hordes, the influence of medieval Byzantium, the national origins of the people, and the geographic characteristics of the country.”³³ Influenced by the German sociologist Klaus Mehnert’s study of Soviet youth, Kennan noted how young people were carried away by the “romance of economic development” to the point that they were relieved “to a large extent of the curses of egotism, romanticism, daydreaming, introspection, and perplexity which befall the young of bourgeois countries.”³⁴ To demonstrate the continuity and consistency of the Russian character of life, Kennan sent home an 1850 diplomatic dispatch, passing it off as if it were current!³⁵

In the years of the First Five-Year Plan, Western writing reached a crescendo of praise for the Soviets’ energy and sacrifice, their idealism and attendant suffering endured in the drive for modernization. The post–World War I cultural critique of unbridled capitalism developed by American thinkers like John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen encouraged many intellectuals to consider the lessons that capitalist democracies might learn from the Soviets. Western leftists and liberals hoped that engineers, planners, and technocrats would be inspired by Soviet planning to discipline the anarchy of capitalism. In “An Appeal to Progressives,” contrasting the economic breakdown in the West with the successes of Soviet planned development, the critic Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) proclaimed that American radicals and progressives “must take Communism away from the Communists … asserting emphatically that their ultimate goal is the ownership of the means of production by the government and an industrial rather than a regional representation.”³⁶ The educator George Counts (1889–1974) waxed rhapsodic about the brave experiment in the USSR and its challenge to America, though within a few years he turned into a leading anti-Communist. As economist Stuart Chase put it in 1932, “Why should the Russians have all the fun of remaking the world?”³⁷ John Dewey expressed the mood of many when he wrote that the Soviet Union was “the most interesting [experiment] going on upon our globe—though I am quite frank to say that for selfish reasons I prefer seeing it tried out in Russia rather than in my own country.”³⁸

Even the evident negative aspects of a huge country in turmoil did not dampen the enthusiasm for Stalin’s revolution from above. Popular historian Will Durant (1885–1981) traveled to Russia in 1932, witnessed starvation, but was still able to write, “The challenge of the Five-Year Plan is moral as well as economic. It is a direct challenge to the smugness and complacency which characterize American thinking on our own chaotic system.” Future historians, he predicted, would look upon “planned social control as the most significant single achievement of our day.”³⁹ That same year the Black writer Langston Hughes (1902–1967), already interested in socialism, visited the USSR with other writers to produce a documentary. Inspired by what he saw—a land of poverty and hope, with much struggle but no racism or economic stratification—he wrote a poem, “One More ‘S’ in the U. S. A,” for his comrades. Decades later the anti-Communist Senator Joseph McCarthy brought him before his committee to discuss publicly his political involvement with Communists.⁴⁰

Journalism occupied the ideological frontline. With the introduction of by-lines and a new emphasis on conceptualization and interpretation instead of simple reportage, newspapermen (and they were almost all men) evaluated and made judgments. Reporters became familiar figures in popular culture, and as celebrities back home, those posted in Russia gradually became identified with one political position or another. Of the handful of American correspondents in Moscow, Maurice Hindus (1891–1969) stood out as a sympathetic observer of the country about which he wrote. Unlike those who relied on Soviet ideological pronouncements or a reading of the Marxist classics as a guide to understanding what was going on in Russia, Hindus chose to “be in the country, wander around, observe and listen, ask questions and digest answers to obtain some comprehension of the sweep and meaning of these events.”⁴¹ He befriended Western men and women of letters, like John Dewey and George Bernard Shaw (whom he guided through the USSR on a celebrated trip), and once was prevailed upon by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s psychiatrist to allay the novelist’s fears of a coming Communist revolution in America. To his critics, Hindus was naïve, apologetic, and even duplicitous. One of his fellow correspondents, the disillusioned Eugene Lyons (1898–1985), considered Hindus to be one of the most industrious of Stalin’s apologists.⁴² Whatever his faults or insights, Hindus developed and popularized a particular form of reporting on the Soviet Union—one emulated later with enormous success by Alexander Werth, Hedrick Smith, Robert Kaiser, David Shipler, Andrea Lee, Martin Walker, David Remnick, and others—that combined personal observations, telling anecdotes and revealing detail to provide a textured picture of the USSR that supplemented and undercut more partisan portraits.⁴³

The Christian Science Monitor’s William Henry Chamberlin (1897–1969) came as a socialist in 1922, and left in 1934 as an opponent of Soviet communism. In those twelve years, he researched and wrote a classic two-volume history of the Russian Revolution that, along with Trotsky’s account, remained for nearly a quarter of a century the principal narrative of 1917 and the civil war.⁴⁴ The Nation’s Louis Fischer (1890–1977) was an early Zionist, who became disillusioned when he served in the Jewish Legion in Palestine and came to Russia in 1922 to find “a brighter future” in the “kingdom of the underdog.” His two-volume study of Soviet foreign policy, The Soviets in World Affairs (1930), was a careful rebuttal to the polemics about Soviet international ambitions. Lyons was very friendly to the Soviets when he arrived in Moscow at the end of 1927 and wrote positively about Stalin in a 1931 interview, before he turned bitterly against them with his Assignment in Utopia (1937). Duranty, the acknowledged dean of the Moscow press corps, stayed for a decade and a half, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932, refused to recognize the great famine in Ukraine of that year, and often justified what he observed with the phrase, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”⁴⁵

Several European journalists were more critical earlier than the Americans. Malcolm Muggeridge of the Manchester Guardian reported on the famine months before his American counterparts; and Paul Scheffer of the Berliner Tageblatt was refused re-entry after he wrote about the violence of mass collectivization. One of the most dramatic defections was by Max Eastman, a leftist celebrity, formerly the bohemian editor of the radical journal Masses, who had enjoyed notoriety as the representative of the Left Opposition in America and promoted Trotsky’s line in Since Lenin Died (1925) and Leon Trotsky: Portrait of a Youth (1926). The translator of Trotsky’s extraordinary History of the Russian Revolution (1932), he attacked Stalin’s cultural policies in Artists in Uniform (1934). By the mid-1930s his doubts about Marxism led him to conclude that Stalinism was the logical outcome of Leninism, a position that Trotsky rejected.⁴⁶ In time, Eastman became a leading anti-Communist, even defending the necessity of “exposing” Communists during the McCarthy years.⁴⁷

The great ideological and political struggles that pitted liberals against conservatives, socialists against communists, the left and center against fascists intensified with the coming of the Great Depression. Like a litmus test of one’s political loyalties, one’s attitude toward the Soviet Union separated people who otherwise might have been allies. Communists by the 1930s were unquestioning supporters of Stalinism and the General Line. Their democratic critics included liberals and Europe’s Social Democrats, among whom the exiled Mensheviks used their contacts within the country to contribute knowledgeable analyses in their journals and newspapers, most importantly Sotsialisticheskii vestnik (Socialist Herald). To their left were varieties of Trotskyists, most agreeing with Trotsky that the Soviet Union had suffered a Thermidorian reaction and become a degenerated workers’ state.⁴⁸ For Trotsky the USSR was ruled, not by a dictatorship of the proletariat, but by “a hitherto unheard-of apparatus of compulsion,” an uncontrolled bureaucracy dominating the masses.⁴⁹ Stalin’s personal triumph was that of the bureaucracy, which perfectly reflected his own “petty bourgeois outlook,” and his state had “acquired a totalitarian-bureaucratic character.”⁵⁰ Impeccably Marxist, Trotsky provided an impressive structuralist alternative to the more common accounts based on national character or rationalization of the Soviet system as an effective model of statist developmentalism.

Along with Menshevik and Trotskyist critics of Stalinism, and Communist enthusiasts for Stalinism, an array of intellectuals, often referred to as “fellow-travelers,” were swept along by the exciting transformations taking place in the USSR. Frightened by the virulent anti-Communism and violence of the fascists and Nazis, they buried their doubts about the evident poverty and brutality in the Soviet Union, at least for a while, and lauded the achievements (dostizheniia as the Russians exalted every success) of the Soviet system. The popular French writer Romain Rolland (1866–1944), author of the multivolume Jean Christophe, praised the Stalinist “revolution-from-above” of the First Five-Year Plan and accepted the invitation of his friend, Maxim Gorky, to visit the USSR in 1935. He was “fascinated with Stalin as an intellectual man of action, a kind of philosopher-king who bridged the old divide between thought and action.”⁵¹ Even when he was plagued by doubts about the state terror of the late 1930s and the Nazi–Soviet Pact, Rolland kept his personal pledge to Stalin, whom he addressed as “dear comrade,” that it was his duty to defend the heroic victories of the Soviet Union.⁵² On the French Left, however, Rolland was outflanked in his sympathy for the Soviets by the French Communist biographer of Stalin, Henri Barbusse (1873–1935), whose “authorized biography” dueled with the critical account by ex-Communist Boris Souvarine (1895–1984).⁵³

In the second half of the 1930s, the threat posed by fascism intensified the personal, political, and psychological struggles of the politically minded and politically active. While some continued to embrace Stalinism, even as it devoured millions of its own people, as the best defense against the radical Right, others denounced the great experiment as a grand deception. The show trials of 1936–38 swept away loyal Bolsheviks, many of whom had been close comrades of Lenin, for their alleged links to an “anti-Soviet Trotskyite” conspiracy. John Dewey, novelist James T. Farrell, and other intellectuals formed the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, and the “Dewey Commission” traveled to Coyoacan, Mexico, to interrogate Trotsky. It concluded that none of the charges leveled against Trotsky and his son was true.⁵⁴ But equally eminent intellectuals—among them Dreiser, Fischer, playwright Lillian Hellman, artist Rockwell Kent, author Nathaniel West, and journalist Heywood Broun—denounced the Commission’s findings and urged American liberals not to support enemies of the USSR, “a country recognized as engaged in improving conditions for all its people” that should “be permitted to decide for itself what measures of protection are necessary against treasonable plots to assassinate and overthrow its leadership and involve it in war with foreign powers.”⁵⁵ Confusion and self-delusion about the USSR affected even the American ambassador to Moscow, the political appointee Joseph E. Davies. The ambassador attended the trial of the prominent Communist Nikolai Bukharin, who was innocent of all charges of treachery, and left convinced that Old Bolsheviks had committed terrible, treasonous crimes.⁵⁶

Stalin himself delivered the body blow to the faithful with the August 1939 non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. Fellow travelers found it hard to travel down this road, and Communist parties around the world hemorrhaged members. The New Republic, which had supported the Soviet Union for decades, reversed itself when Stalin attacked Finland. Many who had resisted the concept of “totalitarianism,” which collapsed Stalinism and Nazism into a single analytical category, suddenly saw merit in this formulation. In 1940 Edmund Wilson published To the Finland Station, an excursion through the prehistory and history of Marxism in thought and in power.⁵⁷ Once a Communist, later an admirer of Trotsky, Wilson questioned the sureties of his earlier faith and ended up with praise for Marxism’s moral and social vision, while rejecting the authoritarianism and statism of the Soviet model.⁵⁸ Arthur Koestler (1905–1983), the son of Hungarian Jews, explored his loss of faith in the Communist movement in his novel Darkness at Noon (1940). Basing his hero on Bukharin, Koestler told the story of an idealistic Soviet leader, Rubashov, who agrees to confess to imaginary crimes as his last contribution to the revolutionary cause. Along with George Orwell’s dystopian novels, Koestler’s exploration into the mind of a Bolshevik would become one of the defining literary portraits in the anti-Communist arsenal in the post-war years.

With the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941, attitudes shifted once again, spawning an outpouring of writing on Russia and the Soviet Union. Some 200 books were published in the United States in 1943–45 alone. Ambassador Davies’s memoir, Mission to Moscow (December 1941), sold 700,000 copies and was memorialized in a splashy Hollywood film that lauded Soviet achievements, “convicted” those charged at the Moscow trials, justified the Soviet attack on Finland, and portrayed Stalin as a benignly avuncular patriarch. A grotesque piece of war propaganda, playing fast and loose with historical fact, the film was widely panned in the press, and leading “progressive” intellectuals, including Dewey, Dwight Macdonald, Wilson, Eastman, Sidney Hook, Farrell, and the leader of the Socialist Party of America, Norman Thomas, signed public protests against it. Four years after the film’s opening in 1943, Warner Brothers reacted to the onset of the Cold War by ordering all release prints destroyed.⁵⁹

One of the most important and influential scholarly works of the period was by the Russian-born émigré sociologist Nicholas S. Timasheff (1886–1970), whose The Great Retreat showed in detail how the Soviet state had abandoned its original revolutionary program and internationalist agenda in the mid-1930s and turned into a traditional Great Power.⁶⁰ Instead of the radical leveling of social classes of the early 1930s, Stalinism introduced new hierarchies based on wage differentials, education, party affiliation and loyalty to the state. This Great Retreat represented the triumph of the “national structure,” Russian history, and the needs and desires of the people over “an anonymous body of international workers.”⁶¹ Rather than betraying the revolution, the Retreat signaled its nationalization and domestication, the victory of reality and “objective facts” over utopianism and radical experimentation. The book appeared in 1946, just after the highpoint of Soviet–American cooperation, clearly a reflection of the Yalta spirit of the immediate pre–Cold War years. Timasheff predicted that the revolutionary years were over; faith in the Marxist doctrine had faded, and a future development toward democracy was possible. Here he echoed his collaborator, fellow Russian-born sociologist Pitirim Sorokin (1889–1968) of Harvard, who in his Russia and the United States (1944) proposed that Russia and the United States were meant to be allies, not enemies, and that the two societies were indeed converging along the lines of all other highly industrialized societies. This “convergence thesis” would eventually become standard in the modernization literature of the 1950s, and both in its introduction and its elaboration formed part of a general political recommendation for understanding, tolerance, patience, and entente between the Soviet Union and the Western powers.

The Cold War and Professional Sovietology

In late 1945, American public opinion was generally positive about the Soviet Union. A Fortune poll in September showed that only a quarter of the population believed that the USSR would attempt to spread communism into Eastern Europe. By July 1946, more than half of those polled felt that Moscow aimed to dominate as much of the world as possible.⁶² Within government and in the public sphere, opposing formulations of the Soviet Union contended with one another. Vice-president and later Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace used the Russian character to explain why a “get tough with Russia” policy would only result in tougher Russians. Others like Walter Lippmann warned that not recognizing Soviet interests in Eastern Europe would lead to a “cold war.” But far more influential, and eventually hegemonic, were the views of a number of State Department specialists, most importantly George Kennan, who did not trust the Soviet leadership.

In 1946, Kennan sent his famous “Long Telegram” from Moscow, reiterating that Russian behavior was best explained by national characteristics. The inherent, intractable, immutable traits of the Russians as “Asiatics” required the use of countervailing force to contain the Soviets’ aggressive tendencies. When he published his views in Foreign Affairs, famously signing the article “X,” Kennan abruptly shifted his position from considering Marxism largely irrelevant to emphasizing the importance of Marxist doctrine. “The political personality of Soviet power as we know it today,” he wrote, “is the product of ideology and circumstances: ideology inherited by the present Soviet leaders from the movement in which they had their political origin, and circumstances of the power which they now have exercised for nearly three decades in Russia.”⁶³ Soviet ideology included the idea of the innate antagonism between capitalism and socialism and the infallibility of the Kremlin as the sole repository of truth. Though his explanation had changed from national character to ideology, Kennan’s prescription for US foreign policy remained the same: the USSR was a rival, not a partner, and the United States had no other course but containment of Russian expansive tendencies.⁶⁴

Under the imperatives of the American government’s apprehension about Soviet expansionism, a profession of “Sovietologists” began to form, primarily in the United States. In 1946, the first American center of Russian studies, the Russian Institute, was founded at Columbia University, soon to be followed by the Russian Research Centre at Harvard (1948). The first “area studies” centers in the United States became prototypes for a new direction in social science research, bringing together various disciplines to look intensively at a particular society and culture. A generation of scholars, many of whom had had wartime experience in the military or in intelligence, worked closely with governmental agencies and on official projects sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency or the military. Most importantly, the Air Force funded the Harvard Interview Project, questioning thousands of Soviet émigrés and producing valuable information on daily life and thought in the USSR, as well as guides for target selection and psychological warfare. In 1950, the Institute for the Study of the USSR was founded in Munich. Secretly funded by the CIA until it was closed in 1971, the Institute produced numerous volumes and journals by émigré writers that confirmed the worst expectations of Western readers. More interesting to scholars was the American government-sponsored journal Problems of Communism, edited from 1952 to 1970 by a skeptical scion of the Polish Jewish Bund, Abraham Brumberg, which managed to condemn the Soviet Union as a totalitarian tyranny while avoiding the worst excesses of anti-Communist hysteria.

American scholars, particularly political scientists and sociologists, were caught in a schizophrenic tension between their disciplinary identity as detached scientists and their political commitment to (and often financial dependency on) the American state. The benefits of working in tandem with the interests of the state were enormous; the dangers of non-conformity were omnipresent. Two of the founders of Columbia’s Russian Institute, Soviet legal expert John N. Hazard and Soviet literature specialist Ernest J. Simmons, were named by Senator McCarthy in 1953 as members of the “Communist conspiracy.”⁶⁵ The intellectual historian H. Stuart Hughes was dismissed as associate director of Harvard’s Russian Research Center when a trustee of the Carnegie Corporation, a major funder of the Center, complained that Hughes supported the 1948 Henry Wallace presidential campaign.⁶⁶ In Britain, the most prominent historian of Russia, E. H. Carr, reported in 1950 that “it had become very difficult … to speak dispassionately about Russia except in a ‘very woolly Christian kind of way’ without endangering, if not your bread and butter, then your legitimate hopes of advancement,” and the Marxist historian Eric J. Hobsbawm affirmed that “there is no question that the principle of freedom of expression did not apply to communist and Marxist views, at least in the official media.”⁶⁷

The Totalitarian Model

With the collapse of the Grand Alliance, the more sympathetic renderings of Stalin’s USSR, popular during the war, gave way to the powerful image of “Red Fascism” that melded the practices of Nazi Germany with those of the Soviet Union.⁶⁸ In order to conceptualize these terror-based, one-party ideological regimes, political scientists elaborated the concept of “totalitarianism.” Carl Friedrich (1901–1984) and Zbigniew Brzezinski formulated the classic definition of totalitarianism, with its six systemic characteristics: a ruling ideology, a single party typically led by one man, a terroristic police, a communications monopoly, a weapons monopoly, and a centrally directed economy.⁶⁹ Such states, with their mass manipulation, suppression of voluntary associations, violence, and expansionism, were contrasted with liberal democratic, pluralistic societies. Because such systems were able so effectively to suppress internal dissension, many theorists concluded they would never change unless overthrown from outside.

The T-model dominated scholarship, particularly in political science, through the 1950s and well into the 1960s, a time when the academy was intimately involved in the global struggle that pitted the West against the Soviet Union, its “satellite” states, and anti-colonial nationalism. The model of a gargantuan prison state, “a huge reformatory in which the primary difference between the forced labor camps and the rest of the Soviet Union is that inside the camps the regimen is much more brutal and humiliating,” was compelling—both because high Stalinism matched much of the image of a degenerated autocracy, and because Soviet restrictions and censorship eliminated most other sources, like travelers, journalists, and scholars with in-country experience.⁷⁰ The image of an imperialist totalitarianism, spreading its red grip over the globe, was at one and the same time the product of Western anxieties and the producer of inflated fears. George Orwell (1903–1950), already well-known for his satire on Soviet politics, Animal Farm (1945), produced the most effective literary vision of totalitarianism in his popular novel 1984 (1949). Its hero, Winston Smith, tries valiantly to revolt against the totally administered society presided over by Big Brother, but by novel’s end he has been ground into submission and spouts the doublespeak slogans of the regime. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), a refugee from Nazism, provided the most sophisticated and subtle interpretation of The Origins of Totalitarianism, which she connected to anti-Semitism, nationalism, pan-national movements, imperialism, and the replacement of class politics by mass politics.⁷¹

Scholars explained the origins and spread of totalitarianism in various ways. Arendt linked totalitarianism with the coming of mass democracy; Waldemar Gurian saw the source in the utopian ambitions of leftist politicians; Stefan Possony tied it to the personality of Lenin; Robert C. Tucker to the personality of Stalin; and Nathan Leites employed psychoanalytic concepts to write about the psychopathology of the Bolshevik elite, distinguished primarily by paranoia. The anthropologists Geoffrey Gorer and Margaret Mead reverted to the ever-handy notion of national character, in this case patterns of inbred submissiveness to authority caused by the peasant practice of swaddling Russian infants.⁷² In 1947 Mead, then the most famous anthropologist in the United States,

secured funding from the Air Force’s new think tank, the Rand Corporation, to set up a Studies in Soviet Culture Project, recruiting Gorer [her lover at the time] to run it. Gorer had never been to Russia and didn’t speak the language, but ignorance only made his work easier. He quickly discovered the key that would unlock the Russian psyche: swaddling. Russian children, bound and swaddled in infancy, would naturally turn into paranoid and authoritarian adults, with repressed longings for warm-water harbors.⁷³

Russians, it was concluded in one study, were not quite like other human beings. “They endure physical suffering with great stoicism and are indifferent about the physical sufferings of others … [Therefore] No techniques are yet available for eradicating the all-pervasive suspicion which Great Russians, leaders and led alike, feel towards the rest of the world. This suspicion springs from unconscious and therefore irrational sources and will not be calmed, more than momentarily, by rational actions.”⁷⁴

The positive vision of “civic education” put forth in the 1920s gave way to the image of “brain-washing.” In 1949 George Counts (1907–1974), who eighteen years earlier had written The Soviet Challenge to America (1931), now co-authored with Nucia Lodge The Country of the Blind: The Soviet System of Mind Control (1949). The totalitarian approach turned an apt if not wholly accurate description into a model, complete with predictions of future trajectories. The concept exaggerated similarities and underestimated differences between quite distinct regimes, ignoring the contrast between an egalitarian, internationalist doctrine (Marxism) that the Soviet regime failed to realize and the inegalitarian, racist and imperialist ideology (fascism) that the Nazis implemented only too well. Little was said about the different dynamics in a state capitalist system with private ownership of property (Nazi Germany), and those operating in a completely state-dominated economy with almost no production for the market (Stalin’s USSR); or about how an advanced industrial economy geared essentially to war and territorial expansion (Nazi Germany) differed from a program for modernizing a backward, peasant society and transforming it into an industrial, urban one (Stalinist Soviet Union). The T-model led many political scientists and historians to deal almost exclusively with the state, the center and the top of the political pyramid, and make deductions from a supposedly fixed ideology, while largely ignoring social dynamics and the shifts and improvisations that characterized both Soviet and Nazi policies. Even more pernicious were the predictive parallels: since Nazi Germany had acted in an expansionist, aggressive way, it could be expected that another totalitarian regime would also be aggressive and expansionist. Indeed, during the Cold War, Western media and governments fostered the notion that the USSR was poised and ready to invade Western Europe. Any concessions to Soviet communism were labeled “appeasement,” a direct analogy to Western negotiations with the Nazis in the 1930s.

Ironically, not only changing reality but the findings of specific studies belied the model. The most influential text, Merle Fainsod’s How Russia Is Ruled, the key text in the field for over a decade, appeared within months of Stalin’s death and saw little evidence that the Soviet system would change. Yet later when Fainsod (1907–1972) used an extraordinary cache of Soviet archives captured by the German invaders to write a ground-breaking study, Smolensk Under Soviet Rule (1958), he exposed a level of complexity that made “generalizing processes” like “urbanisation, industrialisation, collectivisation, secularisation, bureaucratisation, and totalitarianisation … seem rather pallid and abstract.”⁷⁵ His younger colleague, Barrington Moore, Jr. (1913–2005), asked the important question regarding the relationship between Leninist ideology and the actual policies and products of the Soviet regime under Stalin, and concluded that the Bolshevik ideology of ends—greater equality, empowerment of working people, internationalism—had been trumped by the Bolshevik ideology of means—“the need for authority and discipline.” The “means have swallowed up and distorted the original ends.” Instead of “humane anarchism,” the very elasticity of Communist doctrine allowed for the entry of nationalism, pragmatism, and inequalities that ultimately used anti-authoritarian ideas to justify and support an authoritarian regime.⁷⁶ In a second book, Moore shifted from a language of authority to the then current vocabulary of totalitarianism and elaborated a set of possible scenarios for the USSR, ranging from a rationalist technocracy to a traditionalist despotism. The Soviet state would continue to require terror, however, if it meant to remain a dynamic regime.⁷⁷

As the Cold War consensus of the 1950s gave way to a growing discomfort with American policy, especially when containment of the Soviet threat turned into the military intervention in Vietnam, the Soviet Union itself was evolving away from Stalinism. Nikita Khrushchev ended the indiscriminate mass terror, loosened the state’s hold on the population, and opened small windows to the West. Increasingly, the regime attempted to govern through material satisfaction of popular needs and encouraged popular initiative. Persuasion and delivering material goods replaced the punishing terror of Stalinism. The monolithic Soviet empire in Eastern Europe showed signs of what was called “polycentrism,” a variety of “roads to socialism,” with somewhat increased autonomy, if not real independence, from the Kremlin. And, after nearly two decades of T-model dominance, the first serious critiques of totalitarianism appeared, first from political scientists and later from historians.

In 1965, Princeton political scientist and former diplomat Robert C. Tucker attempted to refine the concept of totalitarianism by analyzing the personalities of the dictators. He concluded that the system of totalitarianism was not the cause of the massive violence of the late 1930s, rather, terror was in large part an expression of the needs of the dictatorial personality of Stalin.⁷⁸ In a more radical vein, Herbert J. Spiro and Benjamin R. Barber claimed that the concept of totalitarianism was the foundation of “American Counter-Ideology” in the Cold War years. Totalitarianism theory had played an important role in the reorientation of American foreign policy by helping “to explain away German and Japanese behavior under the wartime regimes and thereby to justify the radical reversal of alliances after the war.” A purported “logic of totalitarianism” provided an all-encompassing explanation of Communist behavior, which led to suspicion of liberation movements in Third World, a sense that international law and organizations were insufficiently strong to thwart totalitarian movements, and a justification of “the consequent necessity of considering the use of force—even thermonuclear force—in the settlement of world issues.”⁷⁹ Totalitarian theory was a deployed ideological construction of the world that denied its own ideological nature, at a time when leading American thinkers proclaimed “the end of ideology.”⁸⁰

Scholars had to shift their views or jigger with the model. For Merle Fainsod in 1953, terror had been the “linchpin of modern totalitarianism,” but ten years after Stalin’s death he revised that sentence to read: “Every totalitarian regime makes some place for terror in its system of controls.” In 1956, Brzezinski wrote that terror is “the most universal characteristic of totalitarianism.”⁸¹ But, in 1962, he reconsidered: terror is no longer essential; the USSR is now a “voluntarist totalitarian system” in which “persuasion, indoctrination, and social control can work more effectively.”⁸² Yet, in that same year, Harvard political scientist Adam B. Ulam insisted that “the essence of the Soviet political system” lies not in “transient aberrations arising out of willful and illegal acts of individuals,” but is, rather, “imposed by the logic of totalitarianism.” Given the immutable laws that follow from that logic, “in a totalitarian state terror can never be abolished entirely.”⁸³ When the evidence of the waning of terror appeared to undermine that argument, Ulam spoke of a “sane pattern of totalitarianism, in contrast to the extreme of Stalin’s despotism” and “claimed that terror was “interfering with the objectives of totalitarianism itself.”⁸⁴ But since Stalinism itself had earlier been seen as the archetype of totalitarianism, and terror its essence, Ulam inadvertently laid bare the fundamental confusion and contradictions of the concept.

From the mid-1960s, a younger generation of historians, many of them excited by the possibilities of a “social history” that looked beyond the state to examine society, were traveling to the Soviet Union through expanded academic exchange programs. The luckiest among them were privileged to work in heavily restricted archives, but all of them saw firsthand the intricacies, complexities, and contradictions of everyday Soviet life that fit poorly with the totalitarian image of ubiquitous fear and rigid conformity. Stimulated by the idea of a “history from below,” social historians pointed out that by concentrating on the political elite and the repressive apparatus, the totalitarian approach neglected to note that in the actual experience of these societies the regime was unable to achieve the full expectation of the totalitarian model, that is, the absolute and total control over the whole of society and the atomization of the population. What was truly totalitarian in Stalinism or Nazism were the intentions and aspirations of rulers like Hitler or Stalin, who may have had ambitions to create a society in which the party and the people were one, and in which the interests of all were harmonized and all dissent destroyed. But the control of so-called totalitarian states was never so total as to turn the people into “little screws” (vintiki, Stalin’s word) to do the bidding of the state. Despite all the limitations of the model, scholars writing in this tradition illuminated anomalous aspects of the Stalinist and post-Stalinist regimes that contradicted the fundaments of the totalitarianism paradigm. At the same time, though less widely regarded, critics of liberalism and market society, from the Marxists of the Frankfurt School to post-modernist cultural theorists, took note of the “totalitarian” effects of modernity more generally—of technology, industrialism, commercialism, and capitalism—which were excluded from the original model.⁸⁵

The Modernization Paradigm

The Cold War American academy celebrated the achievements of American society and politics, which had reached an unprecedented level of stability and prosperity. Historians of the “consensus school” held that Americans were united by their shared fundamental values; political scientists compared the pluralistic, democratic norm of the United States to other societies, usually unfavorably. America was “the good society itself in operation,” “with the most developed set of political and class relations,” “the image of the European future,” a model for the rest of the globe.⁸⁶ Western social science worked from an assumed Western master narrative brought to bear on non-Western societies: they too were expected to evolve as had Western Europe from theocratic to secular values, from status to contract, from more restricted to freer capitalist economies, from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, in a word, from tradition to modernity.

Elaborating ideas from the classical social theorists Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, modernization theory proposed that societies would progressively assume greater control over nature and human suffering through developments in science, technology, mass education, economic growth, and urbanization. While Marxism may also be understood as a theory of modernization, complete with its own theory of history that reached beyond capitalism to socialism, what might be called “liberal modernization theory” was elaborated in opposition to Marxism and claimed that the best road to modernity lay through capitalism (though not necessarily through democracy as well), with no necessary transcendence to a post-capitalist socialism.⁸⁷ Since the modern was usually construed to be American liberal capitalist democracy, this powerful, evolving discourse of development and democracy legitimized a new post-colonial role for the developed world vis-à-vis the underdeveloped. The West would lead the less fortunate into prosperity and modernity, stability and progress, and the South (and later the East) would follow.

Modernizationists divided between optimists, who held that all people had the capacity to reach Western norms if they had the will or managed the transition properly, and pessimists, who believed that not all non-Western cultures were able to modernize and reach democracy. For an optimist like Gabriel Almond (1911–2002), one of the most prominent comparative politics scholars of his generation, human history was generally seen to be progressive, leading upward, inevitably, to something that looked like the developed West.⁸⁸ Classic works such as Seymour Martin Lipset’s Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (1960) and Almond and Sidney Verba’s The Civic Culture (1963) considered a democratic political culture with civic values of trust and tolerance, crucial prerequisites for democracy that would somehow have to be instilled in modernizing societies. Democracy, development, and anti-communism were values that went together. As in the years following World War I, so during the Cold War, poverty was not only undesirable but a positive danger, precisely because it enflamed minds and could potentially lead to communism.

The Soviet Union presented the modernizationists with an anomalous example of a perverse road to modernity that looked very seductive to anti-imperialist revolutionaries. With American scholarship intimately linked to the global struggle against Soviet communism, the modernization paradigm both provided an argument for the universal developmental pattern from traditional society to modern, a path that the Third World was fated to follow, and touted the superiority and more complete modernity of capitalist democracy American-style. A team of researchers and writers at MIT’s Center for International Studies (CENIS) worked in the modernization mode, developing analyses of the deviant Soviet road. CENIS, a conduit between the university community and the national government, had been established with CIA funding and was directed by Max Millikan, former assistant director of the intelligence agency. No specialist on the Soviet Union, the MIT economic historian Walt Whitman Rostow (1916–2003) published The Dynamics of Soviet Society (1952), in which he and his team argued that Soviet politics and society were driven by the “priority of power.” Where ideology came into conflict with the pursuit of power, ideology lost out.⁸⁹ After being turned over to the CIA and the State Department, and vetted by Philip E. Mosley (1905–1972) of Columbia’s Russian Institute and others before it was declassified and published, Rostow’s study was released to the public as a work of independent scholarship.⁹⁰

In his later and much more influential book, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960), Rostow proposed that peoples moved from traditional society through the preconditions for take-off, to take-off, on to the drive to maturity, and finally to the age of high mass-consumption. He trumpeted that Russia, “as a great nation, well endowed by nature and history to create a modern economy and a modern society,” was in fact developing parallel to the West.⁹¹ But traditional society gave way slowly in Russia, and its take-off came only in the mid-1890s, thirty years after the United States, and its drive to maturity in the first five-year plans. Its growth was remarkable, but there was no need for alarm in the West, for its growth was built on under-consumption. Communism, which for Rostow was “a disease of the transition,” “is likely to wither in the age of high mass-consumption.”⁹²

Most Sovietologists shared the general assumptions of modernization theory, and the most fervent adherents of the totalitarian concept made valiant attempts to preserve the T-model in the face of the challenge from the more dynamic modernization paradigm, or to reconcile the two. In a 1961 discussion, Brzezinski distinguished between the “totalitarian breakthrough” of Stalinism that destroyed the old order and created the framework for the new and the post-terror totalitarianism of the Khrushchev period.⁹³ The latter looked much more like the corporate system described by John Armstrong (1922–2010) in his study of Ukrainian bureaucrats, managed by the “Red Executives” analyzed by David Granick (1926–1990) and Joseph Berliner (1921–2001).⁹⁴ Brzezinski pointed out that Soviet ideology was no longer about revolution but the link that legitimized the rule of the party by tying it to the project of technical and economic modernization. Whereas Brzezinski argued that “indoctrination has replaced terror as the most distinctive feature of the system,” Alfred G. Meyer (1920–1998) went further: “acceptance and internalization of the central principles of the ideology have replaced both terror and frenetic indoctrination.” In what he called “spontaneous totalitarianism,” Meyer noted that “Soviet citizens have become more satisfied, loyal, and co-operative.”⁹⁵ The USSR was simply a giant “company town” in which all of life is organized by the company.

The two models, however, differed fundamentally. The T-model was based on sharp differences between communist and liberal societies, while the modernization paradigm proposed a universal and shared development. For many writing in the modernization mode, the Soviet Union appeared as less aberrant than in the earlier model, a somewhat rougher alternative program of social and economic development. While some writers expected that the outcome of modernization would be democratic, more conservative authors were willing to settle for stability and order rather than representation of the popular will. For Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008), a critic of liberal modernization theory, Communists were not only good at overthrowing governments but at making them. “They may not provide liberty, but they do provide authority; they do create governments that can govern.”⁹⁶

By the 1960s, it was evident to observers from the Right and Left that the Soviet Union had recovered from the practice of mass terror, was unlikely to return to it, and was slowly evolving into a modern, articulated urban society sharing many features with other developed countries. In the years when modernization theory, and its kissing cousin, convergence theory, held sway, the overall impression was that the Soviet Union could become a much more benign society and tolerable enemy than had been proposed by the totalitarian theorists.⁹⁷ Later conservative critics would read this rejection of exceptionalism as a failure to emphasize adequately the stark differences between the West and the Soviet Bloc, and to suggest a “moral equivalence” between them. Deploying the anodyne language of social science, modernization theory seemed to some to apologize for the worst excesses of Soviet socialism and excuse the violence and forceful use of state power as a necessary externality of development. Social disorder, violence, even genocide could be explained as part of the modernization process. If Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was acceptable as a modernizer, why not Lenin or Stalin?⁹⁸

Alternatives

Even though government and many scholars were deeply invested in an unmodulated condemnation of all Soviet policies and practices from the late 1940s through much of the 1960s, no single discourse ever dominated Russian/Soviet studies. A number of influential scholars—E. H. Carr (1892–1982), Isaac Deutscher (1907–1967), Theodore von Laue (1916–2000), Alec Nove (1915–1994), Moshe Lewin (1921–2010), Alexander Dallin (1924–2000), and Robert C. Tucker (1918–2010)—offered alternative pictures of the varieties of Bolshevism and possible trajectories. Edward Hallett Carr was a British diplomat, a journalist, a distinguished realist theorist of international relations, an advocate of appeasement in the 1930s, a philosopher of history, and the prolific author of a multi-volume history of the Soviet Union, 1917–29.⁹⁹ Even in the 1930s, when Carr had been sympathetic to the Soviet project, what he called “the Religion of the Kilowatt and the Machine,” he was critical of Western Communists and “fellow travelers,” like the British Marxist economist Maurice Dobb (1900–1976) and the Fabian socialists Beatrice and Sidney Webb, who ignored the “darker sides of the Soviet regime” and defended them “by transparent sophistry.”¹⁰⁰ During World War II, at the moment when the Soviet army and popular endurance halted the Nazi advance, Carr “revived [his] initial faith in the Russian revolution as a great achievement and a historical turning-point.” “Looking back on the 1930s,” he later wrote, “I came to feel that my preoccupation with the purges and brutalities of Stalinism had distorted my perspective. The black spots were real enough, but looking exclusively at them destroyed one’s vision of what was really happening.”¹⁰¹ For more than thirty years, Carr worked on his Soviet history as a story of a desperate and valiant attempt to go beyond bourgeois capitalism in a country where capitalism was weak, democracy absent, and the standard of living abysmally low. Politically, Carr was committed to democratic socialism, to a greater equality than was found in most capitalist societies. He believed in public control and planning of the economic process, and a stronger state exercising remedial and constructive functions.¹⁰² Shortly before his death, he glumly remarked to his collaborator Tamara Deutscher: “The left is foolish and the right is vicious.”¹⁰³

His volume on the Bolshevik revolution appeared in 1950 and challenged the dominant émigré historiography on the October revolution as a sinister coup d’état. Carr stood between the Mensheviks, who thought that bourgeois democracy could have been built in Russia, and the Bolsheviks, who took the risk of seizing power in a country ill-prepared for “a direct transition from the most backward to the most advanced forms of political and economic organization … without the long experience and training which bourgeois democracy, with all its faults, had afforded in the west.”¹⁰⁴ Turning later to the 1920s, Carr eschewed a struggle-for-power tale for a narrative that placed the feuding Bolsheviks within the larger economic and social setting. He tied Stalin’s victories over Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Bukharin to his ability to sense and manipulate opportunities that arose from the play of social forces. Still later, Carr argued that collectivization was unavoidable, given Russia’s limited resources for industrialization, and on this issue he differed from his collaborator, R. W. Davies (b. 1925), who had become convinced that industrialization at a modest pace had been possible within the framework of the New Economic Policy.¹⁰⁵ Carr’s work was criticized for its sense of inevitability that tended to justify what happened as necessary and to avoid alternative possibilities.¹⁰⁶ Yet in its extraordinary breadth and depth (a study of twelve momentous years in fourteen volumes), Carr’s history combined a sensitivity to political contingency, as in his analysis of Stalin’s rise, and an attention to personality and character, as in his different assessments of Lenin and Stalin, with attention to structural determinations, like the ever-present constraints of Russian backwardness.

Carr’s friend, Isaac Deutscher, was a life-long rebel: a Jew who broke with religious orthodoxy and wrote poetry in Polish; a bourgeois who joined the outlawed Communist Party of Poland; a Communist who in 1932 was expelled from the party for his anti-Stalinist opposition; a Trotskyist who remained independent and critical of the movement; and finally a historian who produced some of the most important works on Soviet history in his day, but was shunned by academia.¹⁰⁷ In exile in England, both from his native Poland and the Communist milieu in which he had matured, Deutscher turned first to journalism and then to a biography of Stalin, which appeared in 1949.¹⁰⁸ A “study [of] the politics rather than the private affairs of Stalin,” this monumental work by “an unrepentant Marxist” challenged the liberal and conservative orthodoxies of the Cold War years and sought to rescue socialism from its popular conflation into Stalinism.¹⁰⁹ Deutscher laid out a law of revolution in which “each great revolution begins with a phenomenal outburst of popular energy, impatience, anger, and hope. Each ends in the weariness, exhaustion, and disillusionment of the revolutionary people … The leaders are unable to keep their early promises … [The revolutionary government] now forfeits at least one of its honourable attributes—it ceases to be government by the people.”¹¹⁰ As in Trotsky’s treatment, so in Deutscher’s: Stalin had been hooked by history. He became “both the leader and the exploiter of a tragic, self-contradictory but creative revolution.”¹¹¹

A year later, Deutscher reviewed a powerful collection of memoirs by six prominent former Communists, the widely-read The God That Failed, edited by the British socialist Richard Crossman. At that time, a parade of former Communists—among them André Malraux, Ruth Fischer, and Whittaker Chambers—had become public eyewitnesses of the nature of the movement and the USSR, all the more credible and authentic in the eyes of the public by virtue of their experience inside and break with the Party. Within a few years, those who stayed loyal to Communist parties would be regarded by much of the public, particularly in the United States, as spies for the Soviet Union. Deutscher was pained, not so much by the apostasies of the ex-Communists, as by their embrace of capitalism. While he saw the ex-Communist as an “inverted Stalinist,” who “ceases to oppose capitalism” but “continues to see the world in black and white, [though] now the colours are differently distributed,” Deutscher believed that the god was not bound to fail.¹¹² Himself a passionate opponent of Stalinism, Deutscher sought to distance what the Soviet Union had become from what the Bolsheviks had originally intended and from the possibility of a different socialism. His idealism and utopian aspiration distinguished him from Carr’s pragmatism and realism. His three-volume biography of Trotsky at once celebrated the intellectual and revolutionary, and soberly revealed his faults and frailties.¹¹³ Summing up his interpretation of the failure of socialism in the Soviet Union, he wrote: “In the whole experience of modern man there had been nothing as sublime and as repulsive as the first Workers’ State and the first essay in ‘building socialism.’”¹¹⁴ “There can be no greater tragedy than that of a great revolution’s succumbing to the mailed fist that was to defend it from its enemies. There can be no spectacle as disgusting as that of a post-revolutionary tyranny dressed up in the banners of liberty.”¹¹⁵

In the small world of British Sovietology, Carr, the Deutschers, R. W. Davies (b. 1925), and Rudolf Schlesinger (1901–1969), the Marxist founder of Glasgow’s Institute of Soviet and East European Studies and the journal Soviet Studies, stood on one side. On the other were the liberal Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997), London School of Economics historian Leonard Schapiro (1908–1983), Hugh Seton Watson (1916–1984), David Footman (1895–1983), and much of the academic establishment. Carr was extremely critical of Schapiro’s Origins of the Communist Autocracy (1955), and fought with Berlin over its publication.¹¹⁶ Never receiving the appointment he desired at Oxford, Carr ended up back at his own alma mater, Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of sixty-three. His collaborator, Davies, became a leading figure at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies of the University of Birmingham, established in 1963, and it was to Birmingham that Moshe Lewin came to teach Soviet history in 1968.

A socialist Zionist from his youth, Lewin escaped from his native Vilno ahead of the advancing Germans, thanks to peasant Red Army soldiers who disobeyed their officer and winked him aboard their retreating truck. In the wartime USSR, he worked on collective farms, in a mine and a factory before entering a Soviet officers’ school. He then returned to Poland and later emigrated to Israel. Upset with the direction that the Israeli state took during the 1950s, he began studying history, moving on to Paris where he worked with Roger Portal and was deeply influenced by the social-historical Annales school and by his friend, the sociologist Basile Kerblay. After teaching in Paris and Birmingham, he moved to the University of Pennsylvania in 1978, where he and Alfred Rieber organized a series of seminars that brought a generation of younger historians from the study of imperial Russia to the post-1917 period.

Lewin considered himself a “historian of society,” rather than simply of a regime. “It is not a state that has a society but a society that has a state.”¹¹⁷ His Russian Peasants and Soviet Power (1966) was the first empirical study of collectivization in the West, and it was followed by his influential study, Lenin’s Last Struggle (1967).¹¹⁸ In sprawling essays on Stalinism he enveloped great social processes in succinct and pungent phrases: “quicksand society,” “ruling class without tenure.”¹¹⁹ Lewin resurrected a Lenin who learned from his errors and tried at the end of his life to make serious readjustments in nationality policy and the nature of the bureaucratic state. Although he failed in his last struggle, Lenin’s testament remained a demonstration that there were alternatives to Stalinism within Bolshevism. Lewin’s reading of Leninism challenged the view of Bolshevism as a single consistent ideology that supplied ready formulae for the future. For Lewin, Bukharin offered another path to economic development; but once Stalin embarked on a war against the peasantry, the massive machinery of repression opened the way to a particularly ferocious, despotic autocracy and mass terror.¹²⁰

From Political Science to Social History

By the time Lewin arrived in the United States, in the late 1970s, the privileges of material resources, state support, and perceived national interest had made the American sovietological establishment the most prolific and influential purveyor of information on the Soviet Union and its allies outside the USSR. A veritable army of government employees, journalists, scholars, and private consultants were hard at work analyzing and pronouncing on the Soviet Union. In a real sense, the view of the other side forged in America not only shaped the policy of one great superpower, but determined the limits of the dialogue between “West” and “East.” While the interpretations produced by American journalists and professional Sovietologists were by no means uniform, the usual language used to describe the other great superpower was consistently negative—aggressive, expansionistic, paranoid, corrupt, brutal, monolithic, stagnant. Exchange students going to the USSR for a year of study routinely spoke of “going into” and “out of” the Soviet Union, as into and out of a prison, instead of the conventional “to” and “from” used for travel to other countries. Language itself reproduced the sense of Russia’s alien nature, its inaccessibility and opaqueness.

Before the 1960s few professional historians in American universities studied Russia; until the 1980s fewer still ventured past the years of revolution. The doyen of Russian imperial history at Harvard, Michael Karpovich (1888–1959), stopped at the fall of tsarism in February 1917, “announcing that with that event Russian history had come to an end.”¹²¹ He and his colleague, the economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron (1904–1978), celebrated the cultural and economic progress that the late tsarist regime had made but which had been derailed with the wrong turn taken by the Bolsheviks. Marc Raeff (1923–2008) at Columbia, the eloquent author of original studies of imperial Russian intellectuals and officials, was equally suspicious of the ability seriously to study history after the divide of 1917. George Vernadsky (1887–1973) at Yale focused primarily on early and medieval Russia, and emphasized Russia’s unique Eurasian character. Given that most archives in the Soviet Union were either closed or highly restricted to the few exchange students who ventured to Moscow or Leningrad beginning in the late 1950s, what history of the post-revolutionary period was written before the 1970s was left almost entirely to political scientists, rather than historians. Robert Vincent Daniels’s study of Communist oppositions in Soviet Russia in the 1920s, an exemplary case of historically informed political science, presented the full array of socialist alternatives imagined by the early revolutionaries and argued that the origins of Stalinist totalitarianism lay in the victory of the Leninist current within Bolshevism over the Leftist opposition, “the triumph of reality over program.” Stalin typified “practical power and the accommodation to circumstances” that won out over “the original revolutionary objectives,” which proved “to be chimerical.”¹²²

Russian studies in the United States ranged from more liberal, or what might be called “détentist,” views of the USSR to fervently anti-Communist interpretations that criticized mainstream Sovietology from the Right. With Karpovich’s retirement from the Harvard chair, the leading candidates were two of his students, Martin Malia (1924–2004) and Richard Pipes (b. 1923), who in the next generation would become, along with Robert Conquest (1917–2015) of the Hoover Institution, the leading representatives of conservative views in the profession. Harvard gave the nod to Pipes, whose first major work was an encyclopedic study of the non-Russian peoples during the revolution and civil war that portrayed the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet state as a fundamentally imperial arrangement, a colonial relationship between Russia and the borderlands.¹²³ Using the activities and proclamations of nationalist leaders or writers as indicators of the attitudes of whole peoples, he played down the widespread support for socialist programs, particularly in the early years of the revolution and Civil War, and touted the authenticity and legitimacy of the nationalists’ formulations in contrast to the artificiality of the Communists’ claims.

Robert Conquest, born in the year of the revolution, was a poet, novelist, political scientist, and historian. Educated at Oxford, he joined the British Communist Party in 1937 but left the party after the Nazi–Soviet Pact. While serving in the Information and Research Department (IRD) of the Foreign Office (1948 to 1956), a department known to the Soviets but kept secret from the Western public, he promoted and produced “research precisely into the areas of fact then denied, or lied about by Sovietophiles.”¹²⁴ Even George Orwell supplied the IRD with “a list of people he knew whose attitudes to Stalinism he distrusted,” among them E. H. Carr and Charlie Chaplin.¹²⁵ In the late 1960s, Conquest edited seven volumes of material from IRD on Soviet politics, without acknowledgement that the books’ source was a secret government agency or that the publisher, Frederick A. Praeger, was subsidized by the CIA. His first major book of scholarship (he was already known for his poetry and science fiction) was a carefully detailed study of the political power struggle from the late Stalin years to Khrushchev’s triumph.¹²⁶ But far more influential was his mammoth study of the Stalin terror in 1968, which, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago some years later, stunned its readers with gruesome details of the mass killings, torture, imprisonment, and exiling of millions of innocent victims.¹²⁷ No elaborate theories for the purges were advanced, only the simple argument that “Stalin’s personal drives were the motive force of the Purge.”