Historiography of Stalinism. Virtual club

1. Historiography In feudal society, much stimulated interest in the past. In religion, historical books were sacred books; her feasts were remembrances of certain events, in her most popular forms she was nourished by legends of ancient saints; finally,

In A little about revisionism

P. 13: Numerous documents completely refute various assumptions about the spontaneity of terror, about the loss of control over the course of mass repressions by the center, about the special role of regional leaders and some mythical groups of bureaucracy in initiating terror, etc. These theories were started by the so-called "revisionists" in the West back in the 1980s, when the Soviet archives were completely closed, and the strongly ideological postulates of the "official" Western historiography caused rejection among the young "rebels" prone to outrageousness from the university environment. . Under the influence of newly discovered facts, these Western historians corrected their positions to some extent. permitted": Mass Terror and Stalinist Governance in the Late 1930s // The Russian Review. Vol. 61 (January 2002). R. 113-138]. However, old delusions and inventions in a caricature-exaggerated form are reproduced in modern Russia, however, without mentioning their predecessors - "revisionists" [Zhukov Yu.N. Another Stalin. Political reforms in the USSR in 1933-1937. M., 2003]. Fantastic pictures of terror as a result of the confrontation between Stalin the reformer, who sought to give the country democracy, and the self-serving orthodox party bureaucrats who oppressed the leader in every possible way, are based on numerous mistakes, excessive handling of sources, as well as ignoring real facts that do not fit into the invented scheme.

Additional reading:

About one lecture at IRI RAS (more interesting links in the comments)

Original taken from afanarizm in About one lecture at IRI RAS

Last Thursday, the famous historian Oleg Khlevnyuk spoke in Iran with a report on the modern historiography of Stalinism. I came to listen - it turned out to be extremely interesting. Let me summarize what it was about:

The term "Stalinism" is accepted and established in historical science;

Historians have learned how to work with archives, the admiration for archives has passed, it has become clear what is and what is not in them, and now the situation in this regard is much more definite. however, the study of some plots is hampered by the inaccessibility of archives (for example, criminality - the closeness of the NKVD-MVD storage facilities);

The concept of totalitarianism cannot explain the nature of Soviet society. Soviet history is not monolithic; there are stages in it with their own characteristics. a fundamental difference was established between the Stalinist and Hitlerite regimes;

Stalinism is a flexible system capable of adapting to prevailing conditions. this largely explains the ease of dismantling Stalinism after Stalin's death;

It was unequivocally established that Stalin was the center of the political system, all the principal and most other decisions came from him. his leading role in organizing repressions was also established, as well as in determining the economic course - which was based not on economic, but on political and ideological considerations. the first five-year plan is purely political, there was no reason to carry it out, especially with such high tasks and such barbarous methods, as a result - a complete failure. the second is the most successful of the five-year plans of the 30s, because it was based on economic considerations;

In connection with the previous point, the concepts of Western revisionist authors of the 1970s and 80s were completely broken: about the “accident” or “spontaneity” of terror, the leading role of local leaders, the NKVD that got out of control, and so on. however, these theories are taken up by modern Stalinists, who, however, do not indicate the sources of their inspiration. modern attempts to justify Stalin are untenable, largely because Stalinist authors are not historians, do not work with archives and act on ideological grounds. Khlevniuk expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that the shelves were full of pro-Stalinist literature of the lowest kind, suggested that the publishing houses that publish it were created specially and receive special funding - however, this fad will pass, be forgotten, although historians need to be more active;

Now in the study of the Soviet period, the leading role belongs to the history of everyday life. this is a positive phenomenon, but it should not be absolutized, so as not to come to wrong conclusions (for example, it would be a mistake to draw conclusions about the life of the whole country based on the diaries of citizens - because the society of the Stalin years was highly segregated and within each stratum there were their own views and ideas) ;

The study of the Stalinist period is very intensive and fruitful, but uneven in chronology and topics - the 30s are better studied, as well as topics that traditionally enjoyed attention: politics, agriculture. there are fewer works on the post-war period, they mainly concentrate on politics, economics and agriculture are less studied;

Separately, it is necessary to study the mechanisms of the functioning of the regime, decision-making, especially at the grassroots level (although one should not forget about the peculiarities of decision-making - in personal conversations, on the phone, etc., that is, not recorded anywhere - a feature of the period), as well as the military economy and post-war periods (also at the grassroots level - individual enterprises, regions, etc.), Soviet national policy (primarily the problem of combining traditions and Soviet innovations)

Negative moments in the modern study of Stalinism: a small share of criticism, the prevalence of complimentary reviews, a wave of meaningless studies, especially in the provinces, the absence of a purely peer-reviewed publication that would consider publications on the topic. in addition, some trends that appeared at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s have died out.

Historians are isolated in their community, although they must fight for authority in society. numerous discussions on the Internet are very useful - the level is frankly primitive, but still stimulates additional study of topics and plots, in this sense they seized the initiative from historians.

There was something else, but I forgot the notebook and drove it into my mobile phone, and there the place is limited, plus some notes were lost - but in general it is. After the presentation there were questions:

One question about the publication "At Stalin's Reception", how authentic it is, are there any falsifications, because the original was not even sewn together. According to Khlevniuk, everything is in order, the publication is verifiable, besides, if there were falsifications, they would have been sewn together, and all the seals that were needed would have stood. Moreover, if the mentions of visits to Stalin in someone's memoirs do not "fight" with the book, then these testimonies can be safely discarded (as, for example, with the memoirs of the Ministry of Navy Afanasyev). Although, of course, Stalin received visitors not only in the Kremlin office, but also at an apartment in the Kremlin, in the building of the secretariat of the Central Committee, as well as at dachas (primarily Kuntsevskaya) - these visits are not reflected;

Another question - on the so-called. Stalin's "Russian patriotism". one should not overestimate this trend, which is purely situational and did not have the character of a targeted policy. moreover, numerous facts of oppression of Russians in the national republics and autonomies, crimes on ethnic grounds;

The question of a personal attitude towards Stalin is negative as a person and a leader (not always adequate to the conditions, many erroneous decisions), "a villain cannot be great." in addition, Khlevnyuk is convinced that Stalinism was not uncontested and inevitable - it established itself during the internal party struggle, in which Stalin used, among other things, blackmail methods (for example, Rudzutak and Kalinin), as well as the Civil War of the late 1920s - X. to understand the alternatives, it is necessary to study not the ideologist Bukharin, but the practice of Rykov, what decisions he made in a difficult economic situation;

Finally, the inevitable question of repressions is about the number of victims during the Stalin period: about 18 million - camps and colonies (and prisons), 6 million special settlers (including repressed peoples), about 30 million - "ukazniks" (without imprisonment). in terms of the number of executed, the period 1937-38 is unprecedented in the history of the country, it is on a par with the PRC, Cambodia and the art of the Nazis outside Germany. how the execution of more than 600 thousand people (and mostly workers and peasants of the most productive ages) could help the country's economy is a mystery. a kind of discussion flared up about the number of criminal convicts, the consensus was that it was impossible to unequivocally single out who was a criminal convict and who was a political one, political ones were condemned under criminal articles and vice versa. for Khlevnyuk, the political ones are those who suffered under the law on spikelets and other similar acts, because their adoption was dictated by political considerations. E.Yu. Zubkova added that until 1947, convicts were not differentiated by criminal or political cases. I.A. Khristoforov pointed out that when determining the reason for the conviction, one should look at the results of rehabilitation - if they were rehabilitated under a political article (article 58 in its entirety), then the essence of the arrest does not matter.

The topic of repression, of course, aroused the greatest interest, it was decided to hold a special report in the near future. About him, if there is interest, I will inform you too. For now, that's all.

Estimates of Stalin's personality are controversial and there is a huge range of opinions about Stalin, and often they describe Stalin with opposite characteristics. On the one hand, many who spoke with Stalin spoke of him as a broadly and versatilely educated and extremely intelligent person. On the other hand, researchers of Stalin's biography often describe his negative character traits.

Some historians believe that Stalin established a personal dictatorship; others believe that until the mid-1930s the dictatorship was collective. The political system implemented by Stalin is usually referred to as "totalitarianism".

According to the conclusions of historians, the Stalinist dictatorship was an extremely centralized regime that relied primarily on powerful party-state structures, terror and violence, as well as on the mechanisms of ideological manipulation of society, the selection of privileged groups and the formation of pragmatic strategies.

According to Oxford University professor R. Hingley, for a quarter of a century before his death, Stalin had more political power than any other figure in history. He was not just a symbol of the regime, but a leader who made fundamental decisions and was the initiator of all significant state measures. Each member of the Politburo had to confirm his agreement with the decisions made by Stalin, while Stalin shifted responsibility for their implementation to persons accountable to him.

Of those adopted in 1930-1941. less than 4,000 were public, more than 28,000 were secret, of which 5,000 were so secret that only a narrow circle knew about them. A large part of the rulings dealt with minor issues, such as the location of monuments or the price of vegetables in Moscow. Decisions on complex issues were often made in the absence of information, especially of realistic cost estimates, which was accompanied by a desire by assigned project executors to inflate these estimates.

In addition to Georgian and Russian, Stalin read German relatively fluently, knew Latin, well-known ancient Greek, Church Slavonic, understood Farsi (Persian), and understood Armenian. In the mid-1920s, he also studied French.

The researchers note that Stalin was a very readable, erudite person and was interested in culture, including poetry. He spent a lot of time reading books, and after his death, his personal library remained, consisting of thousands of books, on the margins of which his notes remained. Stalin, in particular, read the books of Guy de Maupassant, Oscar Wilde, N.V. Gogol, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, L.D. Trotsky, L.B. Kamenev. Among the authors admired by Stalin are Emile Zola and F.M. Dostoevsky. He quoted long passages from the Bible, the works of Bismarck, the works of Chekhov. Stalin himself told some visitors, pointing to a stack of books on his desk: "This is my daily norm - 500 pages." Up to a thousand books were produced this way a year.

Historian R.A. Medvedev, speaking out against "often extremely exaggerated assessments of the level of his education and intellect", at the same time warns against underestimation. He notes that Stalin read a lot, and diversified, from fiction to popular science. In the pre-war period, Stalin paid most of his attention to historical and military-technical books, after the war he switched to reading works of a political direction, such as the History of Diplomacy, Talleyrand's biography.

Medvedev notes that Stalin, being responsible for the death of a large number of writers and the destruction of their books, at the same time patronized M. Sholokhov, A. Tolstoy and others, returns E. V. Tarle from exile, whose biography of Napoleon he treated with great interest and personally oversaw its publication, suppressing tendentious attacks on the book. Medvedev emphasizes Stalin's knowledge of the national Georgian culture; in 1940, Stalin himself makes changes to the new translation of The Knight in the Panther's Skin.

The English writer and statesman Charles Snow also characterized Stalin's educational level as quite high:

One of the many curious circumstances related to Stalin: he was much more educated in the literary sense than any of his contemporary statesmen. Compared to him, Lloyd George and Churchill are remarkably ill-read people. As did Roosevelt.

There is evidence that back in the 1920s, Stalin visited the play “Days of the Turbins” by the then little-known writer M. A. Bulgakov eighteen times. At the same time, despite the difficult situation, he walked without personal protection and transport. Stalin also maintained personal contacts with other cultural figures: musicians, film actors, directors. Stalin personally entered into polemics with the composer D.D. Shostakovich.

Stalin also loved cinema and was willingly interested in directing. One of the directors with whom Stalin was personally acquainted was A.P. Dovzhenko. Stalin liked such films by this director as "Arsenal", "Aerograd". Stalin also personally edited the script for the film Shchors. Contemporary researchers of Stalin do not know if Stalin liked films about himself, but in 16 years (from 1937 to 1953) 18 films were made with Stalin.

L. D. Trotsky called Stalin "an outstanding mediocrity" who does not forgive anyone "spiritual superiority."

Russian historian L.M. Batkin, acknowledging Stalin's love of reading, believes that he was an "aesthetically dense" reader, and at the same time remained a "practical politician." Batkin believes that Stalin had no idea "of the existence of such a 'subject' as art", of a "special artistic world" and the structure of this world. On the example of Stalin's statements on literary and cultural topics, cited in the memoirs of Konstantin Simonov, Batkin concludes that "everything that Stalin says, everything that he thinks about literature, cinema and other things, is utterly ignorant," and that the hero of the memoirs - " rather primitive and vulgar type. For comparison with the words of Stalin, Batkin cites marginals - the heroes of Mikhail Zoshchenko; in his opinion, they hardly differ from Stalin's statements. In general, according to Batkin's conclusion, Stalin brought "certain energy" of a semi-educated and average layer of people to a "pure, strong-willed, outstanding form." Batkin fundamentally refused to consider Stalin as a diplomat, military leader, and economist.

During Stalin's lifetime, Soviet propaganda created an aura of "great leader and teacher" around his name. Cities, enterprises, equipment were named after Stalin and the names of his closest associates. His name was mentioned in the same row with Marx, Engels and Lenin. He was often mentioned in songs, films, books.

During Stalin's lifetime, attitudes towards him ranged from benevolent and enthusiastic to negative. As the creator of an interesting social experiment, Stalin was treated, in particular, by Bernard Shaw, Lion Feuchtwanger, Herbert Wells, Henri Barbusse. Anti-Stalinist positions were occupied by a number of communist leaders who accused Stalin of destroying the party, of departing from the ideals of Lenin and Marx. This approach originated in the environment of the so-called. "Leninist guard" (F.F. Raskolnikov, L.D. Trotsky, N.I. Bukharin, M.N. Ryutin), was supported by separate youth groups.

According to the position of the former President of the USSR M. S. Gorbachev, "Stalin is a man covered in blood." The attitude of representatives of society adhering to liberal-democratic values, in particular, is reflected in their assessment of the repressions carried out during the Stalin era against a number of nationalities of the USSR: in the Law of the RSFSR of April 26, 1991 No. 1107-I “On the rehabilitation of repressed peoples”, signed by the president RSFSR B. N. Yeltsin, it is argued that in relation to a number of peoples of the USSR at the state level, on the grounds of national or other affiliation, "a policy of slander and genocide was carried out."

According to Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed: What is the USSR and where is it going? view of the Stalinist Soviet Union as a deformed workers' state. The categorical rejection of Stalin's authoritarianism, which perverted the principles of Marxist theory, is characteristic of the dialectical-humanistic tradition in Western Marxism, represented, in particular, by the Frankfurt School. One of the first studies of the USSR as a totalitarian state belongs to Hannah Arendt (“The Origins of Totalitarianism”), who also identified herself (with some reservations) as a leftist.

Thus, a number of historians and publicists generally approve of Stalin's policy and consider him a worthy successor to Lenin's work. In particular, within the framework of this direction, a book about Stalin by the Hero of the Soviet Union M.S. Dokuchaev "History remembers". Other representatives of the direction admit that Stalin had some mistakes with a generally correct policy (R.I. Kosolapov’s book “The Word to Comrade Stalin”), which is close to the Soviet interpretation of Stalin’s role in the country’s history. So, in the index of names to the Complete Works of Lenin, the following is written about Stalin: “In addition to the positive side, there was also a negative side in Stalin's activities. While holding the most important party and state posts, Stalin committed gross violations of the Leninist principles of collective leadership and the norms of party life, violation of socialist legality, unjustified mass repressions against prominent state, political and military figures of the Soviet Union and other honest Soviet people. The Party resolutely condemned and put an end to the cult of personality of Stalin and its consequences, alien to Marxism-Leninism, approved the work of the Central Committee to restore and develop the Leninist principles of leadership and norms of party life in all areas of party, state and ideological work, took measures to prevent such errors and distortions in the future." Other historians consider Stalin to be the undertaker of the "Russophobic" Bolsheviks, who restored Russian statehood. The initial period of Stalin's rule, during which many actions of an "anti-systemic" nature were undertaken, is considered by them only as a preparation for the main action, which did not determine the main direction of Stalin's activity. One can cite as an example the articles by I. S. Shishkin “The Internal Enemy”, and V. A. Michurin “The Twentieth Century in Russia through the L. N. Gumilyov’s Theory of Ethnogenesis” and the works of V. V. Kozhinov. Kozhinov considers repressions to be largely necessary, collectivization and industrialization to be economically justified, and Stalinism itself to be the result of a world historical process in which Stalin only found a good niche. From this follows the main thesis of Kozhinov: history made Stalin, not Stalin made history.

Based on the results of Chapter II, we can conclude that the name of Stalin, even decades after his funeral, remains a factor in the ideological and political struggle. For some people, he is a symbol of the country's power, its accelerated industrial modernization, and its merciless fight against abuses. For others - a bloody dictator, a symbol of despotism, a madman and a criminal. Only at the end of the 20th century. in the scientific literature, this figure began to be considered more objectively. A.I. Solzhenitsyn, I.R. Shafarevich, V. Makhnach condemn Stalin as a Bolshevik - the destroyer of Orthodox Russian culture and traditional Russian society, guilty of mass repressions and crimes against the Russian people. An interesting fact is that on January 13, 2010, the Kyiv Court of Appeal found Stalin (Dzhugashvili) and other Soviet leaders guilty of the genocide of the Ukrainian people in 1932-1933 under Part 1 of Art. 442 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (genocide). It is alleged that as a result of this genocide in Ukraine, 3 million 941 thousand people died. However, this is more of a political decision than a legal one.

There is one notable scene in Mikhail Romm's film Lenin in October. Worker Vasily brings a whole pile of fresh newspapers to Lenin hiding in a safe house. However, Lenin remains dissatisfied with the fact that among the newspapers there is no Black Hundred newspaper. "You need to know the enemies! Bring tomorrow" - demands Lenin. It doesn't matter if this conversation is a creative invention of the screenwriter or some kind of apocrypha from the life of Lenin. It is important that information from the camp of the ideological adversary plays no secondary role in understanding the current situation.

Transferring this principle to historical ground, we must also be aware that in order to study the Stalinist period, we will somehow have to familiarize ourselves with and understand the provisions in Western historical science. It seems to me that the importance of such an approach lies not so much in the development of specific facts, but in the search for new shocks to comprehend the Stalin period or even confirm our view of the Soviet era. It would seem, how can Western historians share our views? In this case, I would like to give a specific example. Joerg Baberowski, head of the Department of East European History at the Humboldt University in Berlin, who stands out even among other Western historians for his extreme anti-Sovietism, writes: « Russian Communists Were Sophisticated Students of the Age of Reason and Enlightenment (hereinafter highlighted by me) : what nature missed must be replenished by human hands. And everything that did not meet the requirements of reason, as the Bolsheviks understood it, should have disappeared from the face of the earth. Socialism did not in the least refute the main idea of ​​modernism, on the contrary, it strove for its true implementation. . So, the German historian considers the Bolsheviks to be students of the Enlightenment, striving for genuine implementation of modernity. For Russian Svanidz And Pivovarovykh the recognition of the Bolsheviks as the successors of the cause of Voltaire, Leibniz, Montesquieu, would be an insurmountable ideological barrier. I note that in terms of modernity, this statement is fully consistent with the provisions of the Essence of Time (differences only in estimates).

Further, I will not dwell on the research and conclusions of individual Western historians. It seems to me much more important to outline the genesis of the development of the Western historiography of Stalinism on the example of two of the most striking scientific trends. As a country, I will take the United States, since it was the United States that had the strongest influence in the formation of historiography about the USSR in Western states.

Active study of the Stalin era began after the end of the Second World War within the disciplines Russian studies And Soviet and Communist studies, better known as Sovietology ( Sovietology). Sovietology was strongly sharpened to meet the needs of the Cold War, which determined its exceptional ideologization. Real knowledge about the history of the USSR was needed as much as it corresponded to the needs of the ongoing war in its propaganda and political directions. It was important for the American political elite to understand what kind of adversary they faced. What is its military and economic potential. How institutions function. What is the personnel policy, and how decisions are made in the highest echelons of power. What is the relationship between people and government. The study of Soviet history was supposed to help in understanding the Soviet present. However, politics iron curtain prevented the receipt of relevant and historical information, and there were few own sources for studying Soviet history. The main sources were: the Hoover archive, founded back in the time of the Volga famine of 1921, the Trotsky archive, various emigre archives and the official Soviet press. The main trump card for the study of Stalinism was the Smolensk party archive. He was captured by the Germans during the Great Patriotic War, and in 1945 he ended up in Bavaria, in the American zone of occupation. Actually, during the Cold War, most of the works on Stalinist topics were written on his materials. The narrow base of sources, on the one hand, severely limited American historians, on the other hand, gave freedom for a wide variety of interpretations and conjectures.

There was also a staffing problem. There were not so many people who studied the Soviet Union. Therefore, even historians were enrolled in the staff of political analysts. So the great American historian of Russian studies Richard Pipes got along quite well in the role of the head of the group of analysts of the so-called. Team B (Team B). The group was formed at the initiative of CIA Director George W. Bush (the same future US president) in 1976. Its task was to evaluate the latest military strategic developments of the USSR. Pipes was far from the only one who willingly went to serve his country. Many American historians have used their position as consultants and experts to the political establishment to increase their material status and influence in the scientific community. State, etc. public organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation provided them with adequate funding and prestigious jobs at Stanford, Yale, Harvard and Princeton. David Engerman defined the dual position of American historians as "serving both, Mars(implying belligerent states) and Minerva(implying science)". Service Mars inevitably affected the direction of scientific publications. Sometimes the knowledge of a historian was used in specific actions of the information war. Thus, in 1984, historian Robert Conquest published a practical guide for the Reagan campaign called “What to do when the Russians come?» In it, a doctor of historical sciences from Stanford University outlined the consequences of a possible Soviet occupation, with all of this (according to the author) ensuing consequences, such as: robbery of the population, murders, hunger and mass rape. In this vein, the skepticism of the Soviet side regarding people from elite US universities looks quite natural. Recalling this time, the American historian Lynn Viola wrote: It comes as no surprise to me…that the councils consistently treated exchange students as spies, especially if they were from Harvard…”

The dominant theory among American Sovietologists was the theory of totalitarianism. I think most people are familiar with this theory. I will confine myself to a brief enumeration of its central provisions. According to this concept, a totalitarian state means a system of personal power of a dictator based on a single party with mass social support. The control of power is carried out through a repressive and bureaucratic apparatus, censorship of the media and a ban on private property. In its early version, the theory was formulated by Hannah Arendt. On American soil, it was consistently developed by the employees of Harvard University Karl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski. The theory of totalitarianism helped to reduce under the same roof Nazism and Stalinism, while conveniently bracketing the discussion of liberalism (i.e. the US itself). The US authorities quickly appreciated the role that the totalitarian approach could play in the ideological confrontation with the USSR. By the sixties, representatives of the totalitarian direction were firmly dug in in almost all forges of personnel political elite. The language of the political establishment in the United States still carries the pronounced terminology of this theory to this day. Karl Deutsch, Peter Kenez, Adam Ulam, Martin Malia and the already mentioned Conquest and Brzezinski became the most famous representatives of this trend. Conquest's work "Great Terror" became a classic of totalitarian theory. It cannot be said that the domination of the totalitarian school was connected only with the support of the US authorities. Its successful promotion was also facilitated by the absence of other slender theories. The concept of totalitarianism bribed with ease of assimilation and ease of application. Adherents of the totalitarian theory often sinned with excessive universalism, trying to apply their principles up to antiquity. Nevertheless, the theory of totalitarianism did not always meet with positive responses in scientific circles. According to historian John Arch Getty, the imposition of a totalitarian concept sometimes resembled a church liturgy . Historians who have worked outside of this theory may have faced stiff opposition.. When the historian Manuel Sarkisyants tried to publish his articles on the British origins of Nazi ideology in the early 1950s , going against the theory of totalitarianism, he ran into the warnings of his colleagues and the ubiquitous lack of interest from scientific publishers.

Historians of the totalitarian school:

Robert Conquest	Adam Ulam	Zbigniew Brzezinski

The dominance of the totalitarian school continued until the end of the sixties. US defeat in Vietnam, civic and student movements spawned new cohort of historians. The new direction in American historiography was not recognized as such for a long time. Only in 1986 did Sheila Fitzpatrick's article become a kind of manifesto for a new direction, which is commonly called Revisionism. In the same place, Fitzpatrick drew front line between totalitarians and revisionists. According to Fitzpatrick, the main opposition was in the methodological area. Supporters of the totalitarian model preferred to view the Stalin period from the standpoint of the state and the political elite, i.e. from above, revisionists , on the contrary, they mainly considered Soviet society and its interactions with the authorities, i.e. from below. In this sense, the French historical tradition had a strong influence on the revisionists. schools of annals Block Mark. In the end, the revisionists were never able to work out something like a unified slender theories as representatives of totalitarianism. The only thing that connected the revisionists in one trend was the sociological methodology and the rejection of the model of totalitarianism.

Considering the main directions of revisionist research, the following points can be distinguished:
1. The revisionists pointed to high social mobility Soviet society. There were social groups beneficiaries) benefiting from Stalinist policies. Privileges could be expressed both in an increase in the material level and in public prestige: Stakhanovites, closed distributors for the nomenklatura, MTSs for collective farmers, etc. The revisionists also emphasized the mobilizing role of Soviet ideology in carrying out political and economic transformations. In her monograph, Lynn Viola showed the importance of the so-called . movement 25 000 for collectivization. Contrary to the then prevailing opinion about the idea of ​​collectivization being brutally imposed from above, Viola defended the position that the workers heading to the countryside fully shared the expediency of collectivization. In this way, the Stalinist state secured support among the population groups. In the totalitarian model, the people played a rather passive role. Any initiatives from above were coercive and repressive in nature. Supporters of totalitarianism did not consider mass support for Stalinism from below. By supplementing their research on groups supporting the Stalinist course with research on groups opposed to the state, the revisionists proved the heterogeneity of Soviet society.

2. Differences on the question of Stalinist repressions became especially sharp. From the point of view of totalitarianism, terror was a tool for strengthening the personal power of Stalin and the Communist Party. The source of terror was, of course, Stalin personally. The monograph of the historian John Arch Getty was a real provocation. In his monograph, Getty considered repression from the point of view of the struggle between the center and the inefficient bureaucratic apparatus of the periphery. Moreover, according to Getty, Stalin was not necessarily the instigator of repression. Getty believed that part of the regional party and state apparatus was no less interested in unleashing repression. Later, the Getty idea of ​​a center-periphery conflict was picked up in Russia by the historian Yu.N. Zhukov . Getty was also one of the first to question the millions of victims of the Stalinist terror, but due to the lack of access to the archives at that time, Getty fell into the other extreme and greatly downplayed them. Adherents of totalitarianism saw in Getty's conclusions the removal of Stalin's responsibility for the repressions. At the same time, the Getty concept provided for the presence of other powerful subjects in the form of regional party-bureaucratic groups. This provision put an end to the model of totalitarianism, since the presence of such groups actually meant that the USSR was not a totalitarian state.

Revisionist Historians:

The nature of the discussion that unfolded went far beyond the decency of ordinary academic disputes. Supporters of totalitarianism perceived the ideas of the revisionists not only as a criticism of their theory, but also as an attempt on sacred stones American mindset and world order. Accordingly, the rebuff to the revisionists was often given in a very harsh form. Assessing the level of discussion of those years, Lynn Viola wrote: “Even though the enemy in the American Cold War was the Soviet Union, I was always surprised why American Sovietologists, in their internal wars, are so reminiscent of the Stalinists(Trotskyism = revisionism), turning all debates into binaries and marginalizing all voices outside the mainstream.”. The practice of labeling has become widespread. Revisionists have been accused of communism, of apologetics for Stalin, and even of Holocaust denial. Richard Pipes stated: "I ignore them(revisionist) work. How can you deal with people who deny the Holocaust? It's like if someone believes the earth is flat.". This was an outright lie. The revisionists had little sympathy for Stalin (quite the contrary) and never denied the Holocaust. Despite such pressure, the influence of the revisionists increased. In a short time, supporters of the revisionist approach appeared in Western Europe as well.

Perestroika played a cruel joke on the revisionists. The revisionists saw Gorbachev's new course as confirmation of their concept that the Soviet system was not static totalitarian and was quite capable of political evolution. But it was precisely thanks to perestroika that the theory of totalitarianism became most widespread in Russia, just at the moment when it began to decline in the West. Perhaps, almost the only revisionist work published in the USSR was a book by Stephen Cohen (who can only be to the revisionists) about Bukharin. The reason for the publication, in my opinion, followed from the then historical policy of M.S. Gorbachev and A.N. Yakovleva - hit good Bukharin on bad Stalin. It was quite natural. For the ideological war waged by Russian liberals against the Soviet past, the concept of totalitarianism was much more convenient. The destruction of the Soviet Union, although it provided the revisionists with a long-awaited admission to the Soviet archives, at the same time left revisionism outside the Russian public discourse. As a result, the terminology of the totalitarian school freely dominated the Russian media in the 1990s. A fairly large number of Russian historians, especially those who are closely associated with Society "Memorial", turned to totalitarianism. Only after 2000, then, when the train has already left some revisionist works were translated into Russian, but they no longer had the desired effect.

The end of the Cold War led to a marked softening of the controversy between the totalitarian and revisionist directions. This is due, among other things, to the reorientation of American geopolitics towards the Middle and Far East. According to Lynn Viola, totalitarianism has been replaced by the concept clash of civilizations, Huntington replaced Pipes. Some historians talk about post-revisionism and post-totalitarianism, but it seems to me that it is premature to talk about the complete blurring of these two concepts. After all, the followers of totalitarianism have retained the tool for shaping the consciousness of the US political elite. What these gentlemen Today they persistently learn Farsi and talk about the totalitarian nature of the regimes of Gaddafi and Assad, does not mean at all that tomorrow they will not start remembering Russian again. Formula of Mars and Minerva it remains valid.

Returning to the words of Rommovsky Lenin, I would like to call for a detailed development of the developments of the revisionists. Yes, the revisionists did not have much sympathy for the Soviet Union, and sometimes they despised everything Soviet. But, just as Berdyaev, hating Bolshevism, was able to discover an interesting side in it (in fact, restoring the connection of Russian Orthodox culture with the Soviet project), so too revisionists were able to discover many interesting aspects of the Stalin era. The revisionist approach is by far the most thorough rebuff to the theory of totalitarianism so popular among Russian liberals. If you learn to isolate the anti-Soviet judgments of the revisionists, concentrating on the semantic and factual core, then you can gain knowledge, and therefore a weapon to fight the dominance of the totalitarian approach in Russia.

Scientific heritage American and European revisionists is too big to be contained in one article. Therefore, I hope that I was able not only to conduct a mini-excursion into the American historiography of Stalinism, but also to show how notorious western view

Lynne Viola: The best sons of the fatherland. Workers in the vanguard of Soviet collectivization. New York, 1987.

Lynne Viola: Peasant rebels under Stalin. Collectivization and the culture of peasant resistance. New York, Oxford 1996.

John Arch Getty: Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938. New York, 1985.

Quoted in: Sheila Fitzpatrick: Revisionism in Retrospect: A Personal view, in Slavic Review, vol. 67, no. 3, 2008, p. 691.

Lynne Viola: The Cold War within Cold War, in: Kritika. Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Vol.12, Num. 3, 2011, p. 689.