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.”
Конец
