It seems sure that, despite the end of communism in Russia, the question of Stalin and Stalinism - how it happened and how history changed because of it - will continue to be debated, and not only by historians. In the wake of the events of 1989 and 1991, however, the question has become less complex: the fall of communism has had the effect of deflating, at least temporarily, the persistent notion that made the glasnost discussion of the Stalin question so gripping, the possibility that Stalin could be seen as an aberration in the Russian Revolution, and that reform, "cleansing and reshaping" communism, was still possible. Now that chapter is over, and whatever is said about Stalin in the future will in effect be said about the entire Soviet experiment, "seventy years on the road to nowhere," as a placard at a 1990 Moscow demonstration expressed it.
Intimate indentification of Stalin with the fate of the Revolution became a staple of Soviet historiography in the thirties, in the works of party historian Emel'ian Iaroslavskii, and in the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course of 1938. In the West, the sharpest counterpoint to this view at the time was in the Stalin biographies of Boils Souvarine and Trotsky, the latter's much influenced by Souvarine's account. Western scholarly opinion began to fall into line after the war, oddly enough, with the Stalin biography of Isaac Deutscher. His much criticized refashioning of the story stressed the ironic historical necessity of Stalin, despite everything. Deutscher had abandoned the idea of the "Revolution Betrayed." The Carr-Deutscher correspondence in the Deutscher archives shows the considerable influence Deutscher had over the thinking of E. H. Carr, while the first volumes of Carr's history of Russian Bolshevism were being written. Yet the irony of Stalin assuming the mantle of Lenin disappeared in Carr's interpretation, and the Great Georgian emerged as the natural personification of Soviet realpolitik, which for Carr also presupposed the imperatives of industrialization. Identification of Stalin as the only logical heir to Lenin seemed to satisfy painstaking Western historians of the rise of Stalin, such as Robert V. Daniels, who used the materials in the Trotsky Archives. And those who professed a broader theory of totalitarian dictatorship found that the historical literature, with only a few wanderings, generally backed them up. A natural reluctance to compare Stalin's actions with the revolutionism of either Hitler or Lenin was overcome by the attractions of the theory of an autonomous state and its interface with Russian conceptions such as Berdiaev's "hypertrophy" of the Russian autocracy and Miliukov's "critical state."
By the midfifties the model also had to deal with Khrushchev who, in his secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, not only criticized Stalin's "mistakes," but produced a great deal of hitherto unknown information about the purges of the thirties, alongside other important documents. New material on Lenin's fight against Stalin would subsequently be published in the fifth edition of the Lenin Sochineniia. Hannah Arendt herself spoke of a "detotalitarization" process gathering momentum in the USSR. Souvarine and Boris Nikolaevskii were quick to insist that there had been no fundamental break with Stalin, that Khrushchev had maintained that Stalin had been right against all his political opponents, but had only quarrelled with the Stalinist manner of disposing of them, a position that Khrushchev seemed to attribute to Kirov. Khrushchev's views lent credence to the tale of a Kirov-Stalin rivalry that had already appeared in Nikolaevskii's "Letter of an Old Bolshevik," published in 1936 in the Menshevik journal Sotsialisticheskii vestnik. Much of the picture of party struggles of the thirties came into view. After Khrushchev's ouster in 1964, the "Kirovist" line was dropped in the Soviet Union without, however, a full rehabilitation of the Stalinist orthodoxy of the thirties. Stephen Cohen's biography of Bukharin, unpublished but not unknown in the Soviet Union, argued passionately that its own subject, and not Trotsky or Trotskyism, had been the only real alternative to Stalin. Richard B. Day, Michael Reiman, and others clarified different aspects of the Stalin's rise to power. As Gorbachev rose to power the keenest controversy among Anglo-American historians concerned a Revisionist literature on Stalin's purges, aimed at casting doubt on the existing consensus about the scope and central direction of the purges.
Thus matters stood in January 1987 when Gorbachev abandoned the slogan of uskorenie (acceleration - of the perfection of the existing Soviet system) and, seeking to stir revolt against his Politburo opponents, reopened the Stalin question. Historian and archivist Iurii Afanas'ev called for Soviet historians to provide a fresh analysis of two key periods: the twenties, when Stalin emerged from the other leadership alternatives, and the fifties, when Khrushchev made the first attempt to cast off Stalin's heritage. The period that then most exercised the minds of Western historians, that of Stalin's great terror in 1936-38, was judged to be less important. But a number of Stalinist historians, led by F. M. Vaganov, thought Afanas'ev had already gone too far. They especially objected to the possible rehabilitation of Trotsky, and stood in effect on the old line of the Short Course. Afanas'ev, who was not a specialist in the Soviet period, was powerless to refute them. The result of this skirmish in summer 1987 was that Gorbachev's speech on the 70th anniversary of the Revolution, delivered in October, made only timid corrections of the old history, and on the crucial point, the succession struggle after Lenin's death, held that "the party's leading nucleus, led by Stalin, defended Leninism in the ideological struggle." It was the same as Anatolii Rybakov's fictional Kirov in Children of the Arbat, who laments: "That was the tragedy of it all. [Stalin's] line was correct, but his methods were unacceptable."
Military historian Dmitri Volkogonov (who now advises Boris Yeltsin on national security matters) was commissioned with the weighty task of providing the party with a truthful Stalin biography, hopefully containing a historical conception alternative to Stalinism, one that might serve as a theoretical basis for the regeneration of Soviet communism. While the book's central argument - that there were alternatives to Stalinism - will now be ignored, and has already been discarded by the nimble author himself, this is still likely to be the authoritative biography for some time. The notes are studded with references to the party, state, army, foreign ministry, and Comintern archives, with the research centering on military affairs, particularly the Civil War and World War Two. Yet in the political history, Volkogonov never seems able to clinch any controversial point with his abundant citations. There is nothing much on Zinoviev's struggle against Trotsky in 1923-25 or with Bukharin after, or on the Stalin-Bukharin bloc of 1925-28, so there is also nothing much on Socialism in One Country. Volkogonov also admits that his search of the archives has turned up nothing new on the murder of Kirov. And, even while he tantalizes the reader with elaborate quotations of Kirov defending Riutin in 1932, no citations are given for these.
Thrashing through the chronology, Volkogonov pauses for confused and windy asides about character and morality: "Stalin's intellect in the moral sense has been all but nullified by being inextricably linked to manifestations of evil . . . any moral flaw in itself represents a huge gap in the intellect, creating a twilight zone in the mind, devoid of any scintilla of good" (p. 225). Judgments of character are decisive in this account, with a particulary withering condemnation of Trotsky, who is wrong even when he is right: wrong, for example, to judge Stalin a mediocrity (p. 66), while the author himself can refer to Stalin's "mediocre, primitive level of theoretical generalization" (p. 119). It is interesting that in the extended catalogue of Trotsky's sins, Volkogonov is most exercised by what he considers a lack of respect for the heritage of the Russian Tsardom, and by Trotsky's "slavophobic, chauvinistic []] utterances" (p. 144).
Volkogonov's Stalin is actually a brief for the glasnost line of the "Bukharin alternative," in which Stalin is considered an ultra-left deviation, like Trotsky the advocate of "barracks communism ." Nevertheless, Volkogonov curiously faults Stalin, not for carrying out the rapid collectivization of agriculture, but for using force to do it. Stalin's ultra-left contempt toward Western social democracy, already visible in 1924, is also responsible, Volkogonov thinks, not only for the advent of Hitler to power, but for weakening Comintern options in the thirties, which somehow connects for him to the weakening of Soviet ones. Viacheslav Dashichev and others went as far in 1989 as to blame Stalin for the failure of the Litvinov foreign policy of the thirties - they were trying to put more ideological foundation under the new effort at detente. This way is not for Volkogonov, at least not in this volume. Thus he does not criticize the Hitler-Stalin pact, but regards it as the only possible response to British and French perfidy. In fact, Gromyko on his deathbed was still denying the existence of the secret protocols of the pact that provided for the Soviet sphere in the Baltic states. Bitter commemorations of 1939 were to figure prominently in the revolt of the Baltic republics that proved fatal for the Union.
Despite the unique research on display in the volume, it is difficult to point to any important issue in the political history of the Soviet Union that receives an illumination beyond what one can find in Western works. In the end one has to judge this work in terms of what it revealed to the Soviet public at the time. Still, one hopes that future researchers will not use Soviet archives as they are used here, and that we will all be able to learn more from their work.
The Stalin who was a wretched excess, to whom there were alternatives, this Stalin was not the one who prevailed in the glasnost literature. In 1988-89, discussion of the twenties and the rise of Stalin gave way to discussion of the thirties and High Stalinism: no longer alternatives to Stalin but now crimes of Stalin. Here Robert Conquest became the most trusted authority for the Soviet publicists, who acted as if his Western Revisionist critics had never existed. As illustrated stories about Katyn and Kuropaty were published, and photo exhibits of the artifacts of the camps and the liquidations were held, the mood of the intelligentsia sank. Repentance before the rest of the civilized world gradually came to be seen as the only decent response to the Stalin question. Gorbachev himself became increasingly steeled in his resolve that things could no longer be done as in the past, which ultimately meant that Soviet communism could not survive.
Conquest's portrait of Stalin, the "breaker of nations," thus describes a final resting place for the spiritual search of the glasnost period. By spring 1988, Vasilii Seliunin was already criticizing Lenin's actions in the Civil War period, and by the end of the year Aleksandr Tsipko was arguing that Marxism and its contempt for markets was the source of all the sorrows of the past. The translation of Conquest's Great Terror had a pronounced impact. His Stalin biography is not so much a study of the mechanics of Stalin's struggle for power, the "recondite manipulations" and disputes over the meaning of the "Marxist runes," as of the character and exercise of that power (pp. 120, 123). My own view is that Stalinism was built up and equipped intellectually and materially by Zinoviev and Bukharin, and even by Trotsky, in the struggle for the succession, which in effect established the program alternance for all the turns that followed, down to the end of of Stalin's life, and even beyond. Thus the pattern of the struggle was repeated in the two waves of purges, in the thirties and the forties, as Stalin himself often noted. Conquest finds Stalin's planning and overseeing of the purges to be the political and spiritual centerpiece of the history of the Russian Revolution. His account of the period, with his own minor modifications, continues to be the fullest, and, like the writings of Souvarine and Trotsky, one that is fully up to the literary demands of the subject.
The debaters of the glasnost years provided support for Conquest's view of the Stalinist terror, as many had also supported Cohen for a good while on the Bukharin alternative. The temptation now is to consider the Soviets themselves as having rendered a final discriminating judgment on Western historical studies. The late Alec Nove tried to address this problem and to assess some of the glasnost literature alongside recent Revisionist writings in a symposium containing essays by R. W. Davies, Sheila Fitzpatrick, J. Arch Getty, and Sergo Mikoian, with particularly interesting comments by the contributors on the essays of the others. Nove was a sympathetic but trenchant critic of the glasnost press. Here he concludes that the writings of some who favored the Bukharin alternative reasoned from a demonization of Trotsky (apostle of War Communism against the NEP, inspiration for Stalin in 1928-30, responsible for the horrors of the collectivization). That, he says, is "really quite wrong" (p. 21). He might better have said "overstated"; nevertheless, Nove was right, I think, to perceive in these condemnations a tendency to regard Bukharin's as the last stand of the Great Russians, alongside "a trend to blame the Jews whenever possible" (p. 21).
Both Nove and Davies offer some reflections on the career of Revisionism and the perspectives it has offered since The Russian Review devoted two issues to the subject in 1986. One would think that both Nove and Davies would find more in Revisionism to their liking, in view of its critique of the totalitarian model of Stalinism. Davies in fact disputes Fitzpatrick on the dominating influence of the model by citing a countervailing "social forces" trend from the thirties, including "well-informed writers from Trotsky to Kautsky," Deutscher, Carr, and his former Glasgow colleague Rudolf Schlesinger, "the Arch Getty of 1946" (p. 66). Yet Getty's "source criticism" is too binding for Nove and Davies, and they are not prepared to throw out of court literary sources, memoirs of emigres, nor really anything else that might reasonably require weighing as evidence. They doubt that archives or other official documents can always be relied on. Must local officials be assumed to be reporting truthfully to their superiors, and must official sources be considered to be above statistical falsification? Nove goes so far as to question Getty's use of the Smolensk Archive in the latter's study of the purges. Getty had suggested that the real essence of Stalinism was to be found in the localities. Nove asks: "Is this not something of a worm's eye view?" (p. 31)
The Revisionist source criticism, with its stern strictures, may have stirred too much methodological debate about things that should be ABC, and served as a distraction from proper consideration of new scholarship with actual findings about facts and events. The "Letter of the Old Bolshevik" is full of holes, to be sure; and there is nothing like evidence from archives. Yet, on balance, the methods of the historian must be closer to those of the detective than to those of a high-priced team of defense lawyers. Revisionists and social historians continue to broaden our knowledge. Getty has in fact produced real archival evidence on the numbers of those shot by Stalin. And he has illuminated other questions as well, contributions that are too often obscured by extravagant claims about the inadequacy of the existing literature and sources. Social history also stands on its own merits and does not require justification by claims that political history is just a lot of prattle about "personalities."
Even if the Stalin question is no longer the centerpiece of the project of reforming Soviet communism, it continues to bear on Russian political life. There may be great peril in the fact that a new national-bolshevik Stalin survives as an icon of the "red-brown" movement. And it may be unfortunate that the reformed Communists no longer search his legacy for lessons and cautionary pointers. The facts of his life will nevertheless continue to stir the interest of historians. And the Russian people do not seem to have forgotten him. On a recent visit to the Kremlin wall, I could not help but note that, among all the worthies of Soviet and international Communist history there represented, his grave was the one with the most flowers, and they were kept fresh.