Content

Preface 2

Introduction 4

Early images of Russia 6

Slavist studies 11

The initial phase of Sovietology and the totalitarianism model 14

The Harvard project and the Smolensk archive 18

Other theories in Sovietology 21

The “Revisionists” in Sovietology 23

The debate about Stalin's terror 28

Sovietology and the Dissolution of the Soviet Union 31

The Cultural turn in Sovietology 34

Closing words 37

References 40

Footnotes 46

1
Preface
This text was originally intended to be included as a chapter in a planned book on the origin,
development and dissolution of the Soviet Union, with the preliminary title “Utopia lost: the
Soviet Union 1922-91”. The purpose of the chapter was to place the book in a longer tradition
of research about the Soviet Union and partly to touch the debates that took place during the
second half the Soviet Union’s existence. What was inteded as a short overview, however,
appeared to be a too long text to fit into the planned book, and therefore the proposed chapter
was instead published in Swedish in a shortened version in the Research Report Series at the
Institute for Sociology and Work Science at the University of Gothenburg. This article is an
English translation of the former published Swedish version.

The material on which this report is based consists of three main parts. The first part consists
of studies of the content of Sovietology and its various aspects. From its beginning as an area
of what is known as “area studies”, various analyzes of the origin and development of Soviet-
ology and its most important debates have been made. These analyzes have been used as
background material in this study. The second part consists of the debates that have occured
within the framework of Sovietology, which in some cases have been rather hard. Sometimes
special editions of relevant journals have been entirely devoted to these debates. These
debates are mentioned in some places in this text, but to make a fair presentation of the
discussions would require at least as much space as this article. A third type of material has
been based on a number of important individual studies, both at a theoretical and an empirical
level. These studies are regarded as important milestones in the development of the Sovieto-
logy, and therefore a number of them will be given a closer, yet short, description.

What became known as Sovietology is essentially an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon, where the

United States completely has dominated, but there are also some English researchers
represented because of the similarity of languages. In addition, there were single researchers
from other countries, such as Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Finland, Norway and Sweden,
but these are only mentioned if they are included in different debates or directly related to
different themes in Sovietology. The fact that much of the research about the Soviet Union
that was carried out in other countries took place outside of Sovietology suggests that the
basis for its origin, existence and internal development and debates basically was linked to the
occurrence of the cold war and the division of the world into two blocks, where many
scientists in the “Western block” outside of the United States and England was standing more
free in the cold war.

2
The academic disciplines that are represented in Sovietology are mainly polotical science and
history, but also sociology, psychology and, to some extent, economic history and social
anthropology have contributed. Sovietology can therefore be said to be an interdisciplinary
subject within a social scientific discourse. In addition, the boundaries between subjects are
sometimes unclear, why the disciplinary background of different studies is not highlighted.
Finally, I would like to thank all the students in my Russians courses who read previous
versions of this text for their views, as well as those collegues who commented on the text at
the History-Sociological Seminar in April 2016.

3
 Introduction

Sovietology was born and grew in an ideological bubble. It lagged behind theoretical develop-
ments in social sciences and received them only in a heavily mediated fashion. It was unable to
encounter the society it studied except through specially chosen academics, censured media or bit-
ter dissidents. It constructed its object as sui generis so that comparisons with other societies only
served to emphasize its difference. (Michael Burawoy 1995:78)

For more than seventy years, the vast majority of academic knowledge of various aspects of
the development of Soviet Union has taken place in the context of what is called “Sovieto-
logy”, literally meaning “the knowledge about the Soviet Union”. The expression “the
knowledge about” – which is also found in the subject of psychology (“the knowledge about
the soul”) or sociology (“the knowledge about the social”) or other “knowledge about”
(ethnology, anthropology, zoology, etc.) – contains an interesting ambiguity that captures a
duality that also could be found in Sovietology. The “knowledge about” can partly mean the
knowledge should have the implied addition “the scientific (true) knowledge about”. Most
sovietologists have explicitly or unspoken used this meaning of the word, which means that
the development of Sovietology from its birth after the Second World War until some decades
ago has been a part of the general development of social science. The questions of the Soviet
Union and debates have therefore, in part, been similar to the questions and debates that have
been formulated for the social sciences in the last six decades.

But the word “knowledge” also has another meaning, which is more about a general or special
doctrine closer to religious or ideological terms. In e.g. “the Catholic doctrine” or “the liberal
doctrine” it is not a matter of a scientific truth, it is about beliefs or doctrins that cannot be
proven or rejected on empirical or logical grounds. This type of belief systems can be
analyzed in different ways, but to try to test them to see if they are trou or false would be
meaningless. Another and more constructive and enlightening way of analyzing this type of
doctrines is to see them as shaped by and expressing different groups and interests in society,
to understand them as ideologies, or in other words, as sociological phenomena. Then the
main question will not be the “truth” of a thesis or a doctrine, which in no way will affect the
interests expressed in this kind of knowledge. This approach is thus more open to religions
and political ideals than to science-based principles.

Sovietology is an example of such a multifaceted knowledge area developed in the field of

social science and policy/ideology from the 1940s and onwards. This means that sovietology
neither can be reduced to “pure science” or “pure ideology”, and it is precisely these two
poles that characterize most of the research about the Soviet Union. The pole that is easiest to

4
see is the politically-ideological side of Sovietology, and how it came about to address the
organizational, theoretical and empirical development of the subject. If we try to find a
starting point for sovietology we find it in the advent of the Cold War between the Second
World War winners, on the one hand, the United States, England and other Western powers,
and on the other hand the Soviet Union and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe
occupied by the Red Army. It was, among other things, the Soviey leader Josef Stalin’s
reluctance to allow these countries to have free political elections and instead install regimes
that obeyed him in order to set up a buffer zone towards the West that made the West to react
and regard its former ally as an enemy. The emergence of the Cold War was a complicated
process in which the two conflicting sides blamed each other and reacted with suspicion on
each other's actions. It is difficult to say exactly when the Cold War began, but one of the
earliest proof of it was Winston Churchill's famous speech at Westminster College in Fulton,
Missouri, with President Truman by his side on March 5, 1946, on the same day as and seven
years before Stalin died:

From Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the
continent. Behind that line, lie all the capitals of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe—
Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia. ... This is certainly not
the liberated Europe which we fought to build up. (Davies 1997:1065)

Knowledge in the West about the Soviet Union did of course not only existed when the Cold
War began and Sovietology was established. Valuable work “on different aspects of Soviet
life and politics emerged in the West almost as soon as Soviet Russia came into being, but it
was the second World War, the emergence of the USSR as a major international force after it,
and, above all the Cold War, boosted Soviet studies in the West from their once marginal
status to a more central position in area studies, political science and international history.”i
There was a very significant reason for this. If the new Soviet state before the war could be
perceived as an unpleasant ideological enemy, which, not least during the depression of the
1930s, inspired radical initiatives demonstrations and actions, unless they spoke of to trans-
form the revolutionary assembly into a revolution, the Soviet Union after the war became the
enemy with big E for the Western world. Sovietology was born in this atmosphere, which
strongly influenced the new discipline:

The serious study of the USSR clearly pre-dated the Cold War. But its exponential growth as a
subject was very much the result of the collapse of the wartime alliance and the West's need to
understand the dynamics of Soviet policy ... But it also had a great deal to do with developments in
the West itself: anti-communist hysteria in the United States, the Korean war, the requirements of
military planning for the long term, and above all the need to mobilize domestic support for what
was turning into a costly and lengthy struggle ... The dominant paradigm of the Cold War,
totalitarianism, … seemed to describe the peculiarities of the Soviet system rather well. It was
simple. It was politically correct by the conservative standards of the time.ii

5
But it was not only the struggle for world domination between the blocks and the Soviet
Union that made the Soviet Union an enemy of the imperial West. It also meant to be able to
understand a foreigner for many Westerners foreign strangers. What, from a Western point of
view, can be regarded as “foreign” and “ancient” in Russia has both frightened and fascinated
many, even before the revolution of 1917, during the Soviet era, but even with regard to the
current Russia. In the course of the eighteenth century, Russia has been perceived as “diffe-
rent” (implicitly “in relation to the West”) and many have been marveled at life in the “Rude
& Barbarous Kingdom”.iii This notion of Russia as “the other” in Europe was developed early
when Russia with Moscow was founded in the 14th and 16th centuries, when the new
exterminational kingdom was also seen as a threat to its neighbors. This overview of Soviet
origin, development and later declining, therefore, begins with a brief background to how
West's approach to the emerging Russian empire was founded relatively early. Thus, when
Soviet power was institutionalized in the 1920s, there was already a certain Russian-critical
discourse in the West, something which is undoubtedly reappeared now more than 25 years
after the Soviet Union's dissolution.

The early image of Russia

The first Russian state Kievrus, was, according to the so-called Normandic theory, founded
by Scandinavian vikings. They respondet to an invitation from slavic tribes who, according
to a chronical from the 12th century said that ”Our land is great and rich, but there is no order
in it; come and rule and have dominion over us”.”iv A viking called Rurik and two of his
brothers traveled across the Baltic Sea, and after the brothers had died the rest of the vikings
were soon assimilated to the slavic culture and both they and the slavic tribes started to call
thier land ”Rus”. Some of them came to Kiev and became prices of this state, and the many of
the first princes in Rus continued to have close contacts with their origins via military
alliances and through marriages with Scandinavians.v In addition to this, there were many
contacts between German cities and cities in northwestern Russia, such as Novgorod, Pskov,
Polotszk, Violtebsk and Smolensk, where Gotland and Visby played a significant role as an
intermediator in the Hanseatic league’s trade with Novgorod. Furthermore, alliances and
marriages between Russian prince and chieftains and princes and princesses in both northern
and central Europe continued during the Middle Ages. One can therefore assert, on the one
hand, that “Russia's relations with Central Europe during this period were considerably closer
than commonly realized” (Cross 1935:139), but this does not mean, on the other hand, that
Rus was well-known in the rest of Europe:

6
 The extent of early Russian-European contacts should not, however, be exaggerated. Even at
Kiev’s zenith of in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, political links between the Ruirikid and
European princely families families were weak, amounting to little more more than a few marria-
ges, mostly to Germans and Poles. Almost no European traveled to Russia in medieval times, and
those who did so were on their way to the Mongol horde or China. European chronicles discussed
Kievan Russia only in passing. The destruction of Kiev by the Mongols in the thirteenth century
further isolated Russia from Europe. (Poe 2000:12)

When the Mongols occupied Kiev in 1240 and carried out a veritable massacre on its in-
habitants, the political and cultural center of the Russian Empire was moved to the northeast.
During the 14th century, the principals of the small principality of Moscow began gathering
“all Russian country” during their reign, while Novgorod continued to have intimate contacts
with the German Hansan. Under Ivan III (1462-1505), his son Vasily III (1505-1533) and
grandson Ivan IV (“the dreadful”, 1533-1584), the new mosque-spiritual kingdom was
expanded from a medium-sized principality embedded in endless forest areas on the side of a
gigantic kingdom stretching westwards from the Swedish-Finnish border and Livland in the
north, through Central Europe with a border with the Polish-Lithuanian Sam The Empire,
reaching the Caspian Sea in the south, reached into Asia after Ivan IV had defeated three
Tatars. This meant that the growth of the Russian state became a threat not only to Sweden
and Poland-Lithuania but also to other European powers, not least the Holy German-Roman
Empire. On both sides, diplo- ments and envoys were sent to various headquarters for
consultations, general proposals and trade exchanges, but also as spies as saw with suspicion
on the intentions of other princes. You sent ambassadors to each other, and those who were
sent out of Moscow learned how to behave, not least in the case of drinks:

You should drink right and not so that you get drunk. Wherever you happen to drink, you should
watch over yourself and drink gently so that your negligence does not overlook my name. If you
act improperly, it is a shame for us and a shame for you. Take heed to yourselves in everything ...
the sons of the mansions shall know that there is none among them. They shall sit, approach [the
king's] hand, [kiss it] and take the trophy, all without taking precedence into account. There should
be no quarrel about this among them. If there is someone who does not obey, give him a hard
blow.vi

Towards the end of the 15th century and in the 16th and 17th centuries, several books were
published in which emissaries, diplomats, merchants or “cosmographs” in the Renaissance era
describe the power, life and customs of the new kingdom that grew in the east, as was done
with other “newly discovered” parts of the world. Several of the books about Moscow were
published in several editions and translated into many languages. In 1517, Maciej z Miecho-
wa, a geographer, physician and historian at Krakow University, published his book Tractatus
de duabus Sarmatians Asiana et Europe et i contentis EIS (”Treaty on two Sarmatia, Asia and
Europe, and what's in them”). The book was translated to German, Polish, Italian and Dutch

7
and published in more than twenty editions. Miechowa was never in Russia, but built his text
on previous books, mainly by the Livonian Christian Bomhover and the Hungarian Jacob
Piso, who praise the Teutonic order as “a bastion and shield of all Christianity” against the
hethens in Moscovy. The Muscovites are further, according to Bomhover, “barbaric and
cruel; their master, Ivan III, is a tyrant; and worst of all, they have secretly convenanted with
the Tatars and the Turks to lay Christianity low”.vii During the Livonian war (also called the
first Nordic war) in 1558-1582 with Ivan IV on the Russian side, a lot of war pamphlets were
published in the West against Moscovy in general, and the tsar Ivan the terrible in particular
who was regared as a “godless, cruel invader, bent on destrying Livonia and indeed all Chris-
tendom”.viii

The one who, during these years, came to form the West'six view of the new Muscovy
kingdom, was the Slovenian diplomat Sigmund von Herberstein, who spent several years in
Moscow. “For the established world in Europe, Russia was discovered in the 16th century by
Freedom Lord Sigmund von Herberstein” and “every discussion of the development of
European knowledge of Russia in the second half of the 16th century must begin with
Herberstein's Comments on the Muscovy”.x The book was published in Vienna in 1549 with
new editions in 1551 and 1556. The following years it was translated into a variety of
languages and was published in continually new editions in different languages. Just in 1549
and 1589, the book was published in eighteen editions in several languages.xi It was highly
likely that the English exploration journey as 1553 went out to find a way to China north of
Scandinavia and Russia. Two of the three ships sailed off went into autumn storms, as the
third vessel under the direction of Richard Chancellor sought shelter in the White Sea and
ended up unaware of where they were in the Ivan IV empire. Ivan, who had just appointed the
Kazantians, realized when he learned what had happened to the great potential of a trade
exchange with England and invited the Chancellor to Moscow. As he “sailed home after a
sumptuous reception, he brought the Tsar's letter of promise, which gave the English merch-
ants full freedom to trade in his kingdom. It was the beginning of almost a century of English-
Russian konsens.”xii

At about the same time, the new Russian Mosque became interesting both as “cruel” and
“different” and as an important trading partner. It is primarily in the first catechism that
Herberstein's description of the country and its rulers and subordinates have become fashion-
forming. In addition to describing the rhythmic nature and geography, many of his cities he
traveled through on his way to Moscow and the Russian people's customs and practices, he
discusses the board of directors and, perhaps, not surprisingly, how foreign diplomats and

8
embassies are received. But it is primarily in his description of the relation of the ruler to his
subjugations as the Lord's perception became pattern-forming:

Everyone in the country calls themselves the prince's cholopy, or sold slaves. The Grand Duchess
exercises its power over both the people of the Church and laymen, both property and life. None of
his counselors dare to say anything to his master's opinion. Everybody agrees that the will of the
Lord is the will of God, and that the princess is divinely inspired in all that he does. Therefore,
they call their prince for God's clergymy or key bearer in a sense of camaraderie and only see him
as the one who fulfills God's purpose. So when someone appeals to a prisoner, he says: “What God
orders will happen without your prayer.” And when you ask for something that there is no answer
to, they say, “God knows and the great prince.” One can discuss whether such a people must have
such tyrannical rulers or if the tyrannical rulers have made the people so foolish.xiii

Almost ninety years after Herberstein's book, German diplomat Adam Olearius published a
similar travel story after visiting Moscow and Persia to negotiate a deal with Russian Tsar
Michail. England had largely had a monopoly on trade with and through Russia to Persia, but
in 1590 the English company's rights were taken by the Russian Tsar. During the “Great Time
of the Orthans” (Smutnoe Vremja, 1598-1613), many foreigners came to Russia, not least
Poles and Swedes who were there and waged and, as a result, proclaimed their own
pretendents as tsars in the horror of had arisen after the last of Rurik's son, Ivan IV's insane
son, Fjodor, had died in 1598.xiv Once the order had been restored and Michail Romanov was
elected until the tsar 1613, many attempted in the West, among others. English, Dutch,
French, Danish and Swedish, have access to lucrative trade with and through Russia. It was
on such a mission as Olearius was sent by Duke Fredrik III of Holstein in two rounds 1633-35
and 1635-39. Like Herberstein's book, Olearius's description of a trip to Moskovia and Persia
from 1647 is full of concrete observances of geography and nature, New Year's Eve,
reception of ambassadors, food and beverage cooking, various bathing and sexual habits,xv
weddings and trade fairs and performances. Under suspicion, suspicion of foreigner for
intelligible reasons had increased, and foreigners and merchants were detained from ordinary
Russians, just as the Russians were “for offer, with threats of bodily punishment, to leave
their country on their own initiative “so that they could discover” the free institutions found in
foreign countries. Similarly, no merchant can cross the border and trade abroad without
permission. “Olearius describes the relationship between the Tsar and the subordinates:

When they appeal to the Tsar, the rulers must not only shamelessly write their names in diminutive
form, but also call themselves to slaves and they are treated as such. Previously, guests and
fighters who appeared at general audiences in magnificent clothes were knocked on knuckles only
on their backs, like slaves, if they failed to appear without good reason. Now, however, they are in
prison with two or three days' imprisonment, depending on the influence of their masters or
defenders at the court. The most oppressive aspect of most of them is that they are banned from
the face of His Majesty and deny the right to behold his clear eyes. (Olarieus 1967:173ff)

9
Herberstein and Olearius were of course not the only ones who wrote travel records from
Russia during this time, but “decades after its first publication, foreigners' work on Russia
was deeply colored by what Olearius had written. As Baron von Herberstein's dissolution in
the 16th century had shaped Europe's image of Russia, Olearius's work came to influence
European opinion in the 17th century.xvi “In the 1700's, Peter saw the great foundation of St
Petersburg, “the window to Europe” but also the “window to Russia”. Russia assumed a
position as a superpower in northern Europe as a result of the victory over Sweden in the
Great Northern War 1700-1721, the conquest of larger areas south and the colonization of
Siberia and finally the victory over Napoleon in 1812, which made the Russian Empire to one
of Europe's “gendarms” that would guard the state and prevent new revolutions.

Nicholas I succeeded his brother Alexander in 1825. He set up “the third section,” a kind of
secret police, and introduced centuries. Despite – or perhaps thanks to – this had a new
trajectory of social criticism and rebellion ideas emerging in the Russian society, from
Alexander Radishevsky's Journey from Petersburg to Moscow (1790), which was strongly
critical of Catherine the great regime, and secret society among officers who, after the war
against Napoleon, were in Paris and founded business with Western ideas, which led to the
decree of 1825, to Pyotr Tjaadaevs against Russia. Critical Philosophical Letters, published in
France in 1829 and the subsequent debate on Russia's relationship with the West. It is in this
situation that another Westerner travels to Russia and writes a travel document that both
fulfills the previous tradition of descriptions of the Russian despotism and has a great
influence on contemporary and future view of Russia. The Western Territory is called
Astolphe Marquis de Custine, who travels to Russia in 1839 on the occasion of his good
friend, author Honoré de Balzac, where he spends three months and, among other things, hits
and talks with Tsar Nikolaj I. In 1843, Custine publishes his Russia in 1839 in French and it
translates directly into English and comes out in many editions the closest decades under
different titles.xvii

Russia as the main character of Custine (an awful bearer of the commander but not yet
identical to him) meets makes him abandon the original intention of the journey to find
defense for a self-ruling empire and return as defender of a representative board of directors.
The book therefore contains mainly negative depictions of different parts of the Russian
society, such as:

Russia is a nation of stupid. Some mighty wizard has transformed sixty million people into robots
who have to wait for another magician's wand before they can enjoy life again ... The Keys must
suffer from such a state. Whoever is born to command loves obedience, but the obedience of a
man is worth more than a man.

10
Or as the awning writes after meeting the Russian bureaucracy:

In Russian administration, extreme accuracy does not rule out disorder. A great deal of effort is
being made to achieve unimportant goals, and the employees think they can never do enough to
show their rivet. The reason for this noble contest among officials and managers is that even if
having adapted a form, it does not save the visitor from another. It is like a robbery in which an
unfortunate stunner who has escaped a bandit thrown into a new and a new one.

Custine's book was published seventyfour years before the Russian Revolution and almost a
hundred years before the arrival of Sovietology. Nevertheless, it and many other similar
descriptions of Russia came to play an important role in the debate in the Soviet Union. In a
preface to the book, written just in the final phase of the Soviet Union's existence, Daniel J.
Boorstein:
This book can help us encourage realistic hopes and counteract expectations. Custine can help us
correct a modern Myopia. Custine's vivid and readable story can remind us that during the Soviet
Union's veil there is still a Russia – a legacy of the tsar's empire. Is there an empire that marched west
through half Europe and still remained throughout Asia? The endless streams of printed matter and
films and television pictures of “The Soviet Union today” should not blind us to the fact that the
Russian people cannot, as little as any other, escape their history . In order to understand the “Soviet
people, ”we must more than ever try to understand how to get to know the history of their instituti-
ons, their way of life and their rulers.xviii

Slavist studies
In addition to Custine's and other travelers' descriptions of the Russian people, society and the
empire, during the 19th century, an emphasis was developed on Slavic languages and Slavic
culture, which came under the name of slave studies. For obvious reasons, these were not
limited to Russia and the Russian language. The interest in Slavic languages and Slavic
literature and culture was linked to both raised nationalist currents in various southern and
western provinces, as well as to panslavistic currents in the 19th century. Although over time,
more and more researchers, mostly language researchers and philologists, both from Slavic
areas and from the United States and Western Europe, who began to research and write about
Slavic language issues, such as speech or grammar, were still very few among a wider public
who came into contact with the emerging slave homes. In comparison with Custine's and
other travelers' (e.g. Knox 2008 [1887]) descriptions of Russia, the more scientifically
oriented slave research had difficulty reaching and influencing the generally negative Russian
image formed for several centuries of people such as baron herberstein, adam olearius and
marchis de custienne:

In Western Europe, there were not many, if any, some who knew enough about Russia to compare
the image that was found in Custine's settlement to the realities of the great country. At this time,
slavish studies had not advanced enough far enough to occupy a place of some kind among the
Westerners. There were no “experts” in Russia in the modern sense of the word. Certainly, there

11
 were people who had ever lived in Russia, and even more who had traveled there, but very few of
them were of such an intellectual caliber that they could literally compare with Custine.xix

A few years after the Custine's book, a book in Germany published a key role in how Russia
was perceived in the west: Baron August von Haxthausen's study on the inside of Zuvestände,
the Volksleben, and in particular the läntlichen Einrichtungen Russland (Housing of Internal
Conditions, People's Way of Life and, in particular, Russia's Rural Institutions) in two
volumes of 1847 and a third volume of 1852. The book was quickly translated into both
French and English. In this, Haxthausen analyzes after a long “journey of more than 1100
miles to the euro area Russia, Caucasus and Crimea” (Starr 1968:470) an old Russian
institution, the city council of prayer (obsjtjina) and its governing city council (mir). The book
“became a necessary reading for Westerners who were interested in Russia. [Haxthausen's]
description of the principles of community was widely documented in Western European and
American texts about Russia. The book also inspired the most important English-language
work on Russia in the 19th century, Donald MacKenzie Wallace's book with the short title
Russia” (Engerman 2003:25). Empty. Karl Marx studied the Haxthausen when he was
interested in Russia, and the question of urbanism could help Russia “skip” the capitalist
phase “in its development against socialism (Shanin 1983:46f , 159).

Slavist studies also began to develop in the United States in the second half of the 19th
century. Towards the cessation of the century there were some fire souls who traveled to,
wrote and pub- lished books about Russia, but they were less than ten”.xx Around the turn of
the 1900s, teaching schools in the Russian language and Russian language had been
established, and in 1914 there were professorships at three universities in the United States,
two of which also offered courses. in Russian history (Gleason 1985:45). After the first world
war and the Russian revivals, the slave studies continued to develop, but few of them
suggested it new society that was emerging, and “the American people and their government
continued to use the word Russia as a synonym for the Soviet Union “(Manning 1957:62f).
As late as the sluggishness of the 1930s was only “around twelve amateurs engaged in a
vegetable study by Russia. “(Byrnes 1976:17). What was mainly raised was the language and
history of the Slavic countries, while the development of the same Soviet Union was difficult
to develop. sera because of the country's isolation and the associated difficulty of knowing
what happened.xxi

In connection with the Molotov-Ribbentroppakt in August 1939 and Soviet assault on Fin-
land, public opinion in the US became increasingly critical of the country. In 1940, Edmund
Wilson's To the Finland Station, which was one of the first books to use socialist history,

12
included “Marx who had come to the vision that the working class should dispel the
capitalists by two false analogies” (Wilson 1940:482), to explain the development after the
revolution in 1917.xxii Another influential book that was published the same year was Arthur
Koestler's Night at noon on the day of the Moscow trials. The book was translated the
following year. to Swedish.

However, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the attitude of the
United States changed to the new allies. A lot of books about Russia and the Soviet Union
were published, “around 200 books were published in 1943-45 only in the United States.
Ambassador Davies memoirs Mission to Moscow (December 1941) “was sold in 700,000
copies, based on a Hollywood film that praised the progress of the Soviet Union,” condemned
“the accused in the Moscow trials, justified the Soviet attack on Finland and presented Stalin
as benign unmarried patriarch. “(Suny 2006:19). However, the film was subjected to a lot of
criticism, and when the Cold War began, all copies of the film were destroyed.

In Europe, as mentioned, there was a somewhat longer tradition of Russian and slavic studies.
There, a school of Slavonic studies had been set up in Paris in the middle of the 1800s,xxiii
several very read books on Russia were published and towards the end of the century there
were several universities, mainly in Germany, Austria and at Balkan which “developed
thriving centers for slave studies”.xxiv The Germans had founded the first journal that focused
directly on Russia, Russia's Revue, which however ceased in the 1890s. Before and during the
presumed world publication, new magazines were published, in Germany, Zeitschrift für
Osteuropäische Geschichte, in England Russian Review and in France Monde Slave (Laqueur
& Labedz 1965:4f).

In Germany, after the revolution in 1917, several new centers for “Osteuropaforschung” were
founded, partly because Germany was the western country that first developed congresses.
With the new regulation in Soviet Russia. This led to the fact that “Germany had a leading
position in the area after the world war” (Hacker 1965:69), which meant that there were
“more” Russian More in Germany than in any other country and more pub- lishments… The
words were the best before 1933 on the whole formed the people of Russia “(Laqueur &
Labedz 1965:8). This was changed when Hitler came to power. Monthly Russian investiga-
tors then fled west, others stopped, but were increasingly difficult to accept Hitler's racial
thinking about slavery. During the 30th and 40th centuries, the Russian-country studios also
moved to the west, where during the Second World War, an “exploration of research was
carried out. and teaching at American colleges and universities about Russia and Eastern

13
Europe “(Byrnes 1994:3). In 1945, there were 81 university institutions in the United States
that offered courses in history and 147 colleges that gave courses in Slavonic history and
culture (Manning 1957:65).

The initial phase of Sovietology and the totalitarianism model

Thus, when the Sovietology began to be established, there was a certain scientific tradition to
fall back on, but after the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War, a
formal explosion of Soviet studies took place. In 1946, a Russian National Institute was
founded at Columbia University in New York, and two years later, a Center for Russian
Studies at Harvard, Boston was created. These represented something new in the study of
Russia. On the one hand, they would concentrate their research on the contemporary Soviet
Union, and on the other, researchers from several disciples gathered in these new area studies.
Similar area studies then quickly spread to other US universities. Private foundations such as
Rockerfeller, Carnegie and Ford Foundation gave generous contributions to various research
projects, the federal government A funded money via the foreign and defense departments,
and the CIA and the Pen- dents created their own training pro- grammes. ¬gram. A few years
into the 1950s, the “Soviet Union Course - a clumsy but usable word for the professional
study of the Soviet Union - was a flourishing year. In the United States academical life
“(Cohen 1985:3). In 1951, there were such Russian country institutions at five universities, in
1971 it had increased to fifty-eight (Byrnes 1976:27). The number of dissertations on the
subject also increased. Between 1850 and 1950, approximately 250 treaties were submitted on
Russia and the Soviet Union, while around fifteen years between 1950 and 1965, around 1000
negotiations were written (Laqueur & Labedz 1965:9n). At this time, there was plenty of
work for Soviet experiments, within both research and teaching, but also in the maternity
welfare district where Of the educated Soviet states grew as the cold war became more
cool.xxv

The rapid breakthrough for Soviet studies around 1950 was also facilitated by the fact that a
number of Russian and Eastern European graduates, who had fled their countries when
establishing Communist regimes, had gained positions at various universities and that they
could thus act as mentors to a new generation of Sovjet researchers. It was in the nature of
these things that these early Soviet subjects were critical of the regimes that had expelled
them or caused them to flee. In addition, the Soviet Union received an early theoretical
charter in the form of a model that could be used to understand and illustrate how the Soviet
Union developed in the early 50's. the number. The background to this model, which came to
dominate the Soviet research during its decades, was in the wars of the Military War on “the

14
weakness of the liberalism. hot “and the emergence of” total- eral movements “and”
totalitarian states “, where especially Italy, Germany and soon also the Soviet Union began to
be perceived as totalitarianism . During the second world war, however, the criticism of the
Soviet system was toned down so as to return with full force after the end of the war and the
cold war's initiation. It was, therefore, in a certain political environment - in extreme form
expressed by McCarthy in the United States - that Sovietology emerged and was
institutionalized, something that came to affect its theory formation.xxvi At the same time, the
introduction of the bedroom logic led to the earlier “overhaul of the police information and re-
the meaning of the terms “totalitarian” or totalism “measured expressly” in a more consistent,
but also content way “(Gleason 1995:21).

The concepts of totalitarian and totalitarianism originate from Italy, where they were first
used by the opposition against Mussolini's endeavor to introduce a one-party state towards the
middle of the 1920s.xxvii The term swept through quickly, and soon Musolini and the Fascists
began to use them, but now as a positive note for their political goals.xxviii The word was also
launched by the Nazi states' state philosopher Carl Schmitt in the expressions “total state” or
“the total state”, but Hitler himself rather used the term “extraordinary” to denote his regime,
partly to he “does not want to present ... any ideological guilt to Mussolini from the side of
the national socialism” (Schaerpi 1972:14). After Hitler's machtübernahme in 1933, more and
more people in the Anglo-Saxon countries were convinced that the regimes in Italy, Germany
and Russia represented a new kind of state and a new kind of society, and constituted a
phenomenon that arose during the 20th century. During the 30's, several books were
published where the reviews were compared. The American journalist Willyliam Henry
Chamberlin wrote in a newspaper article in 1935 that “housing companies are rapidly taking
off their interna- tional Revolutionary skins and transforms into something that can best be
called red fascism “(cit in Gleasson 1995:42). The language use spread rapidly, not least
during the covenant between Sta- llin and Hitler in 1939-41. In the American presidential
election in 1940, it was a common practice that the adversary “assisted the totalitarian states”.

When Germany attacked the Soviet on June 22, 1941 and Stalin entered into a pact with the
Western powers, “the use of the term almost disappeared overnight”, but after Churchill's
Fultontal in 1946 - where he used the term “totalitarianism twice” - returned “nose”
Immediately the metaphor of the mainstream of the American political discourse “(ibid:54,
69). It became again an official US position that the Soviet Union, like the defeated Fascist
Italy and Nazi Germany, belonged to a new type of state that could not be compared to any
other state in history. US President Truman expressed this when, at a press conference in

15
1950, he believed that “there is no difference between totalitarian Russia and Hitler's regime
... they are completely equal. They are police regimes – police state regimes.”xxix

Around 1950 some works came out that played a major role in the theoretical development of
Sovietism. Most importantly, Hannah Arendt's The Origin of Totalitarianism came out in
1951. In it she mainly analyzes the Nazi movement and its role in Hitlerland, but she believes
that also the Soviet Union (during Stalin) exhibits strong traits of what she calls a totalitarian
state.xxx Admittedly, there were differences between Hitlerland and the Soviet Union of
Stalin, but basically it is “no major difference if totalitarian movements assume the pattern of
Nazism or Bolshevism, if they organize the masses in the name of race or class, pretend to
follow the laws of life and nature or the laws of dialectics and economics” (Arendt 1967:313).
For a totalitarian movement, it does

not matter what specific national tradition or particular spiritual source its ideology has. Totalita-
rian governments always transform classes into masses, exterminate the party system, not through
a one-party system but through a mass movement, move the power center from the army to the
police and establish a foreign policy openly focused on world domination. (Ibid:460)

The historical background to the emergence of totalitarian movements and totalitarian

regimes is, according to Arendt, in a long and prevalent Western tradition of anti-Semitism,
which, in combination with the rest thinking in modern imperialism and the development of a
new type of “atomized mass society” during and after World War I led to a new type of
movement that is able to “organize the masses - not classes like the old stakeholders in the
continental nation states, not citizens with views and interest in the management of public
affairs as in the Anglo-Saxon countries” (ibid:308). It is with the help of such a “bullying
mentality” that totalitarian movements can emerge in social crisis situations, and these
“totalitarian movements are possible wherever there are masses which, for one reason or
another, have had an appetite for political organization” (ibid:311).

According to Arendt, totalitarianism is a phenomenon that originates from a western tradition.

A similar position is presented by JL Talmon in 1952 published The Origins of Totalarian
Democracy. Like Arendt, Talmon is seeking the roots of totalitarianism in a western tradition,
but he highlights French enlightenment philosophers such as Helvétius, Holbach, Morelly and
Mably as authors. But more importantly, Rousseau talks about the “general will” that gave
rise to the “totalitarian democracy” of Jacob's, which was passed on in the tradition of French
revolutionaries and Babeauf and Blanqui to the Russian revolutionaries and Lenin. Therefore,
totalitarianism is not

16
 a phenomenon that has emerged recently and beyond the western tradition, [without it] has its
roots in a common tribe of eighteenth-century ideas. It branched out as a separate and identifiable
direction in the development of the French Revolution and has had an uninterrupted continuity
since then. Its origins go much further back than to the 19th century, e.g. Marxism, for Marxism is
only one, though the most viable of various versions of the totalitarian democratic ideal that has
followed one another over the past hundred and fifty years.xxxi

In the early 1950s, it became increasingly common in the young Sovietology to designate the
Soviet Union as a totalitarian state. In an early and widely used textbook, Merle Fainsods
How Russia is Ruled (1953), the evolution of the Bolsheviks' takeover of power in 1917 to
Stalin's Soviet is summed up in the expression “from a totalitarian embryo grew a fully
developed totalitarianism” (Fainsod 1963:59). However, other researchers used concepts such
as “authoritarian” or “monolithic” society (Moore 1951). But as of a remarkable historical
coincidence, March 6, 1953 - the day after Stalin had died on his datcha outside Moscow -
forty well-known scholars and intellectuals gathered at a conference in the United States to
discuss the usefulness of the concept of totalitarianism in Soviet Union research.xxxii Nineteen
of the posts and the discussion after each session at the conference were published the
following year as a book (Friedrich 1954). At about the same time, Friedrich began working
with a young Polish refugee who shared his and Fainsod's views on the Soviet, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, who himself published two books from the same perspective (Brzezinski in 1954
and 1955). Their collaboration led to a new book in which the totalitarianism model was
developed (Friedrich & Brzezinski in 1956), and this book became “for some time the most
influential and” authorized “treatment of totalitarianism ever written” (Gleason 1995:125).

Already at the conference in 1953, Friedrich stated in his speech that “(a) fascist and
communist totalitarian societies are basically alike, that is, are more similar to each other
government or social system, and (b) totalitarian society is historical unique and sui generis
“(Friedrich 1954:47). He also advocated “five factors or aspects that are basically shared by
all totalitarian societies”:An official ideology covering all the essential aspects of human
existence and all of which are expected to at least passively adhere to and which promise a
“perfect” final state for mankind; a mass party, organized hierarchically and with a single
leader, a technically conditioned total control of the armed forces and of the media, and
finally a system of police races that not only targets clear “enemies” to the regime but also to
arbitrarily selected classes when the regime's survival is threatened (ibid:52f). These five
points developed somewhat and were supplemented by a sixth, a centrally controlled and
controlled economy, in the common book.xxxiii

17
In this book Nazi Germany, Mussolini's Italy and the Soviet Union (and in part Mao's new
Chinese people's republic) are analyzed from the six points of the model with strong
concentration on the dictator, the one-party state, the ideology, the terror and the planned
economy. It was easy for the authors to show that all these points existed in the totalitarian
states, and even though they were not as prominent in the various countries (e.g. Russian
planning of the economy was more far-reaching than in Germany and Italy) all in the
determination of a totalitarian society. Such a society is further characterized by that its

totalitarian dictator tries to divide and rule in the most radical and extreme way: every human
being must, in order to have the strongest effect, face the monolithic totalitarian power as an
isolated “atom”. By thus becoming atomized, the people with their many natural subgroups
become a “mass” and the citizen turns into a mass human. (Ibid:281)

After the manuscript was completed but before the book was published, Khrushchev kept his
famous secret speech on the “personal cult” at the 20th Party Congress in February 1956. This
led to the authors making “a few minor changes and additions to the text”, but “the hard core
of the analysis has not changed ... yet no fundamental changes seem to have occurred in the
Soviet system (ibid:ix). In the following years, several works were published that in various
ways linked to the totalitarian model with its concentration on ideology, political system and
terror,xxxiv and the model “won a significant connection and came to the literature as a
standard determination of the totalitarian society” (Tarschys 1976:325 ).

The paradox was that this happened at the same time as the Soviet Union was leaving the
most obvious totalitarian traits during Stalin, which later also aroused criticism of the model
because it was “static, narrow and too insensitive to the basics [of Nazi Germany and Soviet
regimes] to be able to make important predictions about the future of the now surviving
totalitarian regimes “(Groth 1964:901). At the same time, Soviet researchers began to gain
access to new types of sources. Instead of having previously been limited to building their
analyzes on newspapers, magazines and other printed material published in the Soviet Union
and therefore expressing the position of the regime, they were given the opportunity during
the 1950s to analyze more “uncensored” material. Most of these sources were the material
that was collected in the Harvard project and the documents that were in the so-called.
Smolensk archive.

The Harvard project and the Smolensk archive

The Harvard project was based on surveys and interviews with Soviet citizens who, for
various reasons, remained in the West after the end of the war. First, the number of Soviet
citizens who had fled, surrendered to the Germans and been detained or detained as

18
“Ostarbeiter” for forced labor camps in Germany was estimated at about five million. Most
were sent or returned home (where they were put in new labor camps by Stalin who were
afraid that they were “infected” by the west and that they would carry the infection further),
but several hundred thousand remained in the west (Inkeles & Bauer 1959:8) . Many of these
gathered in the camps were questioned by the US intelligence service who wanted
information about the Soviet Union. Some Soviet researchers also succeeded in interviewing
refugees about the existence of labor camps in the Soviet Union, a study published in a book
(Dallin & Nicolaevsky 1947).

1950 a research group at Harvard, under the leadership of sociologist Talcott Parsons, get
permission to conduct a sociological study of the refugees. Here one was less interested in
political and ideological issues, and more of educational and professional conditions, how the
Soviet public informed themselves, its family pattern and attitude to the state and the regime,
in short how the Soviet citizens lived their everyday life. Only that the researchers were
interested in the “atomized and terrorized” people meant that they directed the headlights to a
different direction than what the totalitarian model did. Not that the researchers denied the
terror, it was the one who made many of the refugees choose to remain in the West. But it was
the people's attitudes and actions that the researchers were interested in, which made the
character of the survey different from the totalitarianists' focus on the elite's power and
ideology. After some inconvenience, the research group finally managed to get 2718
answered questionnaires and interview 329 refugees, and after several years of analyzing the
answers, they published their results in a book (Inkeles & Bauer 1959:14,17).

The image of the Soviet way of life that the book gives is very complex and sometimes
contradictory. On the one hand, many in each industrial community could recognize
themselves in how the investigated described the conditions at work, at leisure or at home in
the Soviet Union. On the other hand, there were clear differences, e.g. in how Russians and
Americans valued education. The Americans saw 90 percent training as a “personal
instrumental target”, while only 66 percent of Soviet citizens did so. Instead, they later valued
“humanistic, scientific and social goals” for their education higher than the Americans
(ibid:155). The researchers were also struck by the fact that the regime had some kind of
passive support, mainly because it through information and education control succeeded in
getting people to think in the terms that the official Marxist-Leninist ideology was built up of,
and “both the interviewers and people who have read the interviews. has been struck by the
special Soviet style of thinking “(ibid:179).xxxv

19
The collected material in the Harvard project was used in several analyzes, which also applied
to the documents that were included in the Smolensk archive. This was a local party archive
found by the Germans when they occupied Smolensk in June 1941. The archive consisted of
just over 500 folders containing about 200,000 document pages that ended up in the US at the
end of the war, where it was eventually made available to researchers. It was a unique
opportunity for the Soviet researchers, because, although similar archives existed in every
local branch of the Soviet Communist Party, “access to this type of party archive had long
been denied Western non-communist researchers”. Therefore, the Smolensk archive offered
“a unique opportunity to study the regional and local government process from the inside of
the Soviet Union” (Fainson 1958:3).

The picture of the conditions in and around Smolensk that the archives gave showed that
reality was more complicated than what the totalitarianists claimed. Admittedly, the
documents show the power and influence of the Communist Party, but it was not until the 30's
that the party more successfully managed to “invade” the area. During the NEP period in the
1920s, the region was affected very little. Life continued as before before the revolution,
except in the larger cities. But above all, the archive showed “ordinary people who
desperately tried to live a normal life amidst extraordinary and abnormal circumstances”. The
categories that the Sovietologists used to analyze the rise and development of the Soviet
Union have “obviously their important uses, but somehow the people who populate the
archive seem pale and abstract.” (Ibid:446). The regime was not the totalitarian monolith that
the totalitarian model portrayed it as, and “the average party member was far from the
devoted fanatic that the party's rules required”. Instead, it was paradoxically enough, Fainsod
said, “the great machine's inefficiency that made it bearable” (ibid:450).

Like the Harvard project, the Smolensk archives showed a different side to reality than did the
analysis of the Soviet elite's ideology and politics. It was not a united regime that opposed an
atomized population. Rather, collectivization, industrialization and terror had led to extensive
upward social mobility, which meant that the regime had some support. The archive also
showed that the population was difficult to control, that there were many who complained and
troubled the authorities, but it also showed the regime's

ability to manipulate and discipline the new social forces that its grandiose experiments in social
engineering released ... and the vast human costs and the bitter anger that the Communist regime
has brought with it. The archive can serve as a reminder, if needed, that the totalitarian facade hid
a lot of contradictions, that the yoke imposed by communism left a legacy of disturbing
dissatisfaction and that yesterday's suppressed aspirations can become a benchmark for tomorrow's
fierce debates. “(Ibid:454)

20
Other theories in Sovietology
Although the totalitarian model largely dominated Soviet research in the 1950s and 1960s,
there were other perspectives. In an article from 1958, Daniel Bell distinguished no less than
ten different theories that all tried to explain the Soviet reality.xxxvi Around 1950, several
social psychological and cultural studies were published (e.g. Gorer & Rickman 1949, Mead
1951 and Bauer 1952). Later in the 1950s and 60s, works concentrating on economic and
social development and which often addressed the question of how and in what direction the
Soviet Union changed (e.g. Bergson 1953, Black 1960, Inkeles & Geiger 1961, Treadgold
1964, Inkeles 1968 and Johnson 1970). Instead of seeing as the totalitarian model the Soviet
Union as a “frozen” society that could not change, these studies highlighted the socio-
economic development that the Soviet underwent under Khrushchev's regime. The question
was therefore in which direction the country developed, not if it could change at all. Against
some researchers “who believe that modern totalitarianism as it evolved in the Soviet Union
is unchanged and unchanging”, other researchers now believed that “a gradual
democratization of Soviet society is inevitable and [they] claim that [they] have concrete
evidence that the process already made progress “(Inkeles and Bauer 1959:377f).

From these and other similar studies, new perspectives and perspectives were developed, and
many agreed that the totalitarian model “had become obscured by the evolution of events”
and that one now had to develop “new social science concepts of change, development and”
modernization “(Johnson 1970:1 ). In 1968, a number of researchers met to discuss “changes
in communist systems” and most of the participants (neither Brzezinski nor Friedrich
attended) agreed that the Soviet Union was not the immutable, static and atomized society the
totalitarianists claimed. Instead, the development showed that the country has become
increasingly similar to other “normal” industrial communities:

With the modernization of the Soviet Union, Stalinism will disappear and pave the way for a
democratic political system that is more functional for the pluralistic social structure created.
Increased prosperity and increased political literacy among the entire population will allow
separate elites and even the masses of consumers and citizens to participate in political life.
(Meyer, in Johnson 1970:320)

The development thus went against the Soviet Union and its satellite states becoming
increasingly similar to Western societies. This “convergence theory” became very popular
towards the end of the 1960s. In the Soviet Union as well as in the United States, it meant
there were various political elites competing for power, and the former monolithic
Communist Party had become “an arena of politics” (ibid:26) where various interests compete
for influence. These organized interests could be different in different studies, but in a very

21
influential book from 1971 an analysis of the party apparatus, the security police, the military,
the industrial directors, the economists, the authors and the lawyers is made as examples of
such interest groups that have emerged in Soviet society (Skilling & Griffits 1971).

The idea behind the theory was that Stalin, with his rapid industrialization, had created a more
differentiated and complex society, and that the new complex social structure and the
abolition of terror had led to the emergence of various interest groups that fought within the
party. This meant that the Soviet Union could no longer be seen as a totalitarian system,
possibly as an authoritarian. However, the political process could hardly be said to be a
“genuine pluralism”, rather an “elite pluralism” (ibid:17), ie. more oligarchic than democratic
in character. But the important thing was still that Soviet politics could be analyzed using
common scientific concepts. The Soviet Union was not completely unique:

There is no doubt that, despite its monolithic appearance and the claims of homogeneity made by
its supporters, the Communist society is in fact as complex and stratified as any other society, and
is divided into social classes and other categories that are distinguished from factors such as
nationality and religion. Each group has its own values and interests and its sharp internal
differences, and everyone is inevitably involved in conflict with other groups. (Ibid:13)

The Convergence theory not only claimed that the Soviet Union and other Communist states
would become more like the West. Even the opposite was supposed to happen: West would
also approach at least important features in the Soviet Union such as free school, health care,
statutory holiday, etc. Therefore, this theory was often presented by researchers who had
socialist sympathies without being positive to communism. The idea was that while the Soviet
Union was being liberalized and democratized, but still retained its socialist traits, Western
societies would develop towards a democratically socialist place. Western states would
therefore become more and more like a reformed Soviet Union, and thus many of the
problems in the various countries would become common:

As the Soviet Union continues to mature, it acquires more and more of the traits that are
characteristic of the Western type of social system. This is accompanied by an erosion of some of
its own distinctive features, such as political terror. New problems will arise, which again do not
eliminate the old but which one has to intervene. So, for example, the problem of youth culture
and the weak integration of the young in large-scale societies in the western world a problem that
requires serious attention ... Other shared problems include the result of technological change and
the subsequent unemployment ... The problem of leisure and the threat it poses, the changing
nature of old age and the social issues it represents - more and more of these issues will come to
the fore in the Soviet Union in the same way as they did in other industrialized countries. If we
want to join the Soviet Union as a society in the future, we must address these questions and
issues.”xxxvii

22
Thus, this direction of Sovietology challenged the very basis of the totalitarianism model,
namely that the Soviet Union (along with Hitler Germany and the Fascist Italy, and later also
other Communist states) was a state of a completely new type which was not similar to
democratic societies and therefore could not accepted social science concepts and approaches.
The special “freezing” of the totalitarian society that the totalitarianists talked about in their
abstract model had to give way to a more development-theoretical approach, and the question
of where the Soviet Union was going seemed suddenly more open than before. It was not just
the party and the state that governed Soviet development, even society and its people were
important factors.xxxviii

A slightly different but also more direct criticism of the totalitarianism model was directed in
a famous 1961 article by the historian and political scientist Robert Tucker, who said it was “a
mistake to equate not only Stalinism and fascism but also communism and fascism”.
Communism is a broader concept than Stalinism, and by calling it all for communism, it has
dispensed with the possibility of seeing the development and changes in the Soviet Union
from Lenin over Stalin to Khrushchev. Thus, according to Tucker, it was important to
separate Leninism from Stalinism, and “a clear recognition of this is an essential and
necessary precondition for the theory of comparative politics to advance” (Tucker 1961:282).

Instead of the concept of totalitarianism with its equation of communism and fascism, Tucker
constructed a new concept, revolutionary mass movement-based regime under one-party
protection, abbreviated as “movement regimes”. With this he meant a number of mass
movement-based one-party regimes - Turkey under Kemal Atatürk, Nationalist China under
Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, Tunisia under Bourguiba, Egypt under Nasser and Ghana
under Nkruma etc - arising during the 20th century and having great similarities.xxxix By
including Hitlerland and the Soviet regime under this concept, all these states could be studied
comparatively. The totalitarian states in Italy, Germany and Russia were therefore not as
unique new as alleged:

Expressed in another way, it is not the totalitarian dictatorship itself that is a new political form
during our century, but possibly one of the forms that this phenomenon can assume. The particular
new type of political formation that needs to be studied both as a general form and in its specific
variants is the revolutionary mass movement-based regime under one-party protection. (Ibid:7)

The “Revisionists” in Sovietology

In 1958, the same year as Fainsod's book about Smolensk was published, the Soviet Union
and the United States began an academic exchange (Byrnes 1976). This, in a similar way to
the Harvard projects and the Smolensk archives, became important for the development of the

23
Soviet, primarily because a new generation of Soviet researchers now got personal contact
with the society they studied. After having been hermetically sealed for western visitors for a
long time - between 1938 and 1958, not a single American student had read in Russia - 1958
to 1975, perhaps as many as 3000 graduate students and researchers from Western countries
could study or research in the Soviet Union a few months or an entire academic year “(Byrnes
1994:104). This meant that many of the younger Sovietologists

met ordinary Soviet citizens and understood their lives in ways that foreigners had very difficult to
do for decades. Impressionist testimonies meant… that the totalitarianism model was undermined.
The state admittedly [in the lives of the Russians], but the gap between this intruder and the
nightmare version in 1984 was evident and did not diminish. The state had not only failed to
eliminate “privacy”. Even the hospitality of the Soviet citizens and the great value they put on
friendship often impressed the Americans, and sometimes made them wonder if they were not the
ones who were atomized. (Gleason 1984:153)

In the 1970s, this new generation of Sovietologists published several studies that came to
represent another challenge to the totalitarian model. One of the first was the historian Sheila
Fitzpatrick,xl who in 1970 published a study of the “Enlightenment Commissioner” (roughly
the Ministry of Education) development between 1917 and 1921. In the book, one of the
Soviet state's institutions is analyzed during the first years after the revolution from a strict
historical perspective. Although this book is among the first to establish the perspective that
later became the hallmark of the “revisionist” school within the Sovietology, there is no
“revisionist manifesto” in the book.xli What makes the study different is more the tone
Fitzpatrick makes. There are no references to the “totalitarian embryo of the Bolsheviks”, but
the commissioner is portrayed as chaotic, with great difficulty in having different decisions
enforced, but the people who worked there were also filled with “a sense of excitement and of
a world in constant change, but to the better “(Fitzpatrick 2002 [1970]:xi).

Two years before, in 1968, another book was published where the author analyzed the role of
the Bolsheviks in the failed July uprising in 1917. In both Soviet and Western historiography,
the uprising was largely seen as controlled by the Bolsheviks. This coincided well with the
image that both the Soviet ideology and at least some parts wanted to give the Soviet
theology: the Bolsheviks were a united party which, with some exceptions, was determined to
follow the true (respectively fateful) path of Lenin, and the masses were guided (or deceived)
by party policy. In this book, Rabinowitch shows how complex the situation was in Petrograd
in the summer of 1917, where the “masses” (mainly soldiers and workers) organized
themselves into a variety of types of organizations, with several power centers (or rather no
definite power centers) and with a Bolshevik party that Opened wide gable and “was divided,
not just for strategic and ideological reasons, but also for the existence of relatively

24
autonomous party organizations”. Within the party, there were at least three centers of power
that often pursued an opposite policy: the Central Committee, the Allied Military
Organization and the Petersburg Committee (Rabinowitch 1991:viiif).

In his next book for Rabinowitch presented the analysis of the Russian Revolution to the
Bolsheviks' takeover of power in October. The intention is “to reconstruct as completely and
accurately as possible the development of the” bottom-up revolution “and the attitude and
activity of the Bolshevik party organization at all levels in Petrograd between February and
October 1917” (Rabinowitch 1976:xvii). Instead of explaining the takeover of power in
October by the Bolsheviks being a monolithic party that, like an army with a general staff, led
the successful coup, Rabinowitch believes that the “October coup” was a genuine popular
revolution. The decisive factor in the takeover of power was therefore “both the party's
internal, relatively democratic, tolerant and decentralized structure and working methods as
its fundamentally open and mass-oriented character - in striking contrast to the traditional
Leninist model” (ibid:311).

In a third book that was published 2007, Rabinowitch continues the analysis of the Russian
Revolution with how it evolved during the first years of the Bolsheviks in power. The
previous books had shown that the Bolsheviks had won “partly because of their open,
relatively democratic and decentralized character”, and if “the Soviets were genuinely
democratic embryonic organizations for popular self-government ... how could the Soviets
and other independent mass organizations be destroyed so quickly? ... How can one explain
the extraordinary speed with which the ideals [about an egalitarian society and a democratic
socialist multi-party system] were changed and the Bolsheviks' authoritarian traits were
consolidated? “(Rabinowitch 2008:x). The book is a thorough review of the first years of the
Bolsheviks until the celebration on the first anniversary of the October Revolution of 7-9
November 1918. Rabinowitch replies to his own question above:

Neither revolutionary ideology nor established patterns of dictatorial behavior are helpful in
explaining fundamental changes in the character and political role of the Bolshevik Party between
November 1917 and November 1918. In fact, the Petrograd Bolshevik had to turn from rebels to
rulers without being able to benefit from a far-reaching plan or even a concept of the road. Most
important in designing the party's and Soviet's earliest development, their relationship with one
another and the Soviet political system in general, were the realities that the Bolsheviks
encountered in their often seemingly hopeless struggle for survival. (Ibid:390)

Here, there is no possibility to record even a fraction of all that can be categorized as
“revisionists”, only the titles of their books and articles would fill an entire chapter. But some
of those who raised more excitement than others can be mentioned. In addition to Fitzpatrick's

25
many texts, which, in addition to a host of debates, revolve around the cultural and social
development during NEP and Stalin's revolution, three influential works can be highlighted:
Stephen Cohen's biography of Bukharin, Jerry Hough's reworking of Fainsod's classic How
Russia is Ruled that came in a new edition 1979 with the new title How Soviet Union is
Governed and Arch Getty's “reinterpretation” of the 30's purges in Origins of the Great Purge
(1985). These researchers have also been very active in the debate on the Soviet Union and
the Soviet Union, even though they have also criticized each other. Cohen, in particular, has
repeatedly expressed concerns that parts of “the new cohort of social historians ... are closing
their eyes with one or both eyes for a significant dimension of the social reality of the” 30s -
the protracted mass star during Stalin's years “(Cohen 1986:378).

In his biography about Bukharin, Cohen discusses a question that Tucker (whose student he
was) already raised, the question of whether there was a necessary development of the
Bolshevik revolution from Lenin to Stalin. According to Cohen, there is no such historical
inevitability, there are always historical alternatives and Bukharin's more cautious policy of
socialism in the 1920s was such an alternative. Previously, Trotsky, at least by his followers
and by his biographer Isaac Deutscher, had been seen as the only alternative to Stalin, but he
had been crushed by Russia's social backwardness.xlii For the majority of the Soviet
researchers had

Stalinist politics from the coercive collectiveization of the peasants 1929-33 to the twenty-year
mass murder and detention system either inevitably emerged from the nature of the Bolshevik
Party and its revolution or has been necessary for the modernization of a poor peasant community.
(Cohen 1981:435)

But Bukharin's defeat against Stalin, according to Cohen, had definite historical explanations,
which were partly about the internal development of the party where “the confined and closed
nature of the struggle” in the party tops made it impossible for Bukharin to turn to groups
“outside the highest party leadership and ... beyond themselves. the party [among] the peasant
majority “(ibid:363f) where he had strong support. By replacing all of Bukharin's supporters
in local party organizations, Stalin succeeded in persuading Bukharin and his political
supporters in the party tops and regions to be depicted as “right-wing deviators” and
eventually Stalin had many of them deposed, accused, convicted and executed.

Thus, the development from Lenin to Stalin was not as inevitable as both the official Soviet
ideology and parts of the Soviet ideology claimed. According to Cohen, “Bucharest was a
more liberal and humane variant of Russian communism, with its native authoritarian
traditions. Partly inspired by Lenin's own reconsiderations towards the end of his life,

26
Bukharin sought a path for Soviet development that would avoid the most brutal aspects of
these traditions or anything worse “(ibid:443). This “liberal and humanistic variant” has in
fact been a constant companion to the dominant Stalinist variant, from the emergence of a
Euro-Communism in Western Europe, to the search for a “socialism with human face” in
Eastern Europe until the reform attempts of Gorbachev began towards the end of 1980 -the
number. Here, Bukharin and NEP have been seen as a possible alternative to “totalitarianism”
during Stalin, not least because it was Lenin himself who pushed through NEP towards the
end of his life. The revisionists therefore criticize the idea of an “unbroken continuity between
Bolshevism and Stalinism” (Cohen 1986:40).

When Fainsod's classical How Russia is Ruled, which was the first and most widely used
historiography of the Soviet Union from a totalitarian perspective, was released by Jerry
Hough in a revised edition entitled How the Soviet Union is Governed, it was not just the title
that changed, the book had also been worked so thoroughly that many were wondering why
Fainsod was still co-author.xliii The title change was symptomatic. Where Fainsod
“concentrated on the techniques that the Bolsheviks - and then Stalin - had used to take
control of the Russian political system and their ability to maintain control” Hough analyzed
“how politics is formed and how the Soviet Union is ruled” (Hought & Fainsod 1979:vi).
Thus, the emphasis was no longer on the regime's path to power, but on how the Soviet Union
functioned as a system, an illustration of the development of the Soviet theory from the
totalitarianists 'concentration on ideology and the elite's policy to the revisionists' assertion
that the country must be able to be studied as any society. Wherever possible, Hough had, in
its revision, “tried to analyze groupings and mutual relations between institutions” (ibid:vii).
The reason was that the researchers in previous analyzes (also Fainsod’s) had primarily been
interested in politics' out-put, ie how the regime governed the country. Hough and revisionists
generally attached greater importance to politics' “in-put”, ie. analyzed the political processes
by which the influence of different elite groups affected the regime.

This meant that the political process in the Soviet Union could be studied with completely
normal Western theories, and for example. US political “in-put processes” could be compared
to that of the Soviet Union. Lobby groups in Washington who tried to influence the White
House were perhaps not so different the different “interest groups” that tried to influence the
Kremlin. Thus, the totalitarianism model, with its assertion of the soviet state's uniqueness
and its total opposition to liberal states, was completely upside-down. In a final chapter, the
future of the Soviet Union is discussed and - although very cautious and with many
reservations - Hough believes that there are two main alternatives for the development of the

27
Soviet Union in the 1980s and beyond: Development towards constitutional democracy with
associated liberalization or that various shortcomings in the system, t. ex. The succession
order of Brezhnev and the regime's increasingly old-fashioned nature leads to extensive
crises. Although Hough does not believe in “the development of a completely constitutional
democracy in the Soviet Union in the near future” unless zero growth occurs in the economy
or the political system in Eastern Europe collapses, then a new, younger and more vital
Secretary-General along with a younger, liberal generation implement the reforms that the
Soviet system needs. The question of how and to whom power was transferred after Brezhnev
would therefore determine much of the future of the Soviet Union: “The next succession has
the potential to become a real crisis and result in more radical change, if not immediately so at
least in its later stages.” (Ibid:575). Hough missed Andropov and Chernenko, but otherwise
he got it right.

The debate about Stalin's terror

In the 1980s, a new issue came to dominate the debate between totalitarian and revisionists,
the issue of Stalin's terror, mainly in the 30s. The reason why this theme came on the agenda
was partly that many of the younger historians who published themselves had chosen the 30s
as their study object, and partly that many of the older researchers considered that the younger
underestimated both the extent of the terror, cruelty and its importance for how the system
was built up. In particular, Getty's Origins of the Great Purges were criticized, which by many
were considered an attempt to defend Stalin and free him from his moral guilt to what
happened.xliv Getty denies this and believes that

although the moral issue seems clear, the historical issues are not. If it were enough to determine
the debt burden, no historical research is needed. To every understanding of why something
happened, it is first of all necessary to know what happened. (Getty 1985:9)

The picture that Getty paints from the 30's purges is more like the one presented by Fainsod in
Smolensk during Soviet Rule (even Getty built largely on the Smolensk archives) than the
usual picture of Stalin's 30s. In this picture, Soviet society was seen as “something that was
exploited and shaped by the totalitarian leadership, [and] social support for the regime was
created by propaganda and driven by terror” (Getty & Manning 1994:4), but according to
Getty, the Communist Party had not yet “Penetrated every corner of Russian life ... Soviet
Russia resembled more of a retarded traditional society than a sophisticated totalitarian
system” (Getty 1985:27). Nor was the Communist Party the united struggle organization that
both the regime itself and its western explorers had painted it as:

[The Communist Party was] neither monolithic nor disciplined. Its upper layer was fragmented,
and its lower organizations were disorganized, chaotic and undisciplined. The leaders of Moscow

28
 were divided on political issues, and the central leaders disagreed with the regional secretaries,
whose organizations suffered from internal disarray and conflicts. A growing party in the party,
which contained politically illiterate and apolitical opportunists plus a lazy and insensitive
leadership in the regions, was hardly the right formula for a Leninist party. Such a clumsy and
unmanageable organization may not have been an effective and satisfactory instrument for
Moscow's purposes. (Getty 1985:37)

The terror of the thirties also consisted of several different and sometimes interwoven
processes: the collectivization of peasants and the “extermination of the kulaks as a class”,
purges within the party, a number of different controls and exchanges of membership cards in
the Communist Party (tjistka),xlv settlements with the old opposition etc. Each process had its
particular context and its particular causes, but when viewed from a historical distance, they
seemed to be part of a great terrorist plan imposed on the defenseless Soviet people by the
regime - and ultimately by Stalin. But, according to Getty, some of those who were convicted
were actually corrupt and had committed crimes, and in many cases intrigues at different
levels of the party, usually the anger of the people against the new rulers and envy against
those who succeeded in the new society, a major role. The terror was thus not only the
regime's way of setting up a totalitarian dictatorship, it consisted of closer scrutiny of societal
processes in which millions of citizens actively participated, apart from those who became
victims. This meant that the totalitarianists' image of the Soviet as “a frozen and atomized
society” hardly matched reality.

Getty did not want to deprive Stalin and his “cronies” of their responsibilities and thereby
cleanse them from their guilt. Stalin and the highest surviving party leadership undoubtedly
bore the ultimate responsibility for the terrorist waves. But even if one “recognizes Stalin's
tremendous role in terror”, questions remain

how much terror was pushed from above or from below, the state's efficiency or inefficiency in
this process, and the relative influence of the state or society ... Although Stalin sparked the spark,
the terrorist disaster required dry licks and favorable winds to become what it became. There are at
least two sides of this story, the personal and the contextual, which are constantly interacting with
each other, input from above and from below. Since so much has been written about Stalin's role,
it can be useful ... to study why so much dry lime was available and why the winds blew in the
direction they did. (Getty & Manning 1994:14f)

Getty also addressed criticism of how earlier analyzes of 30's terror, such as Robert
Conquest's Great Terror and Russian historian Roy Medvedev's Let History Judge, used
sources. Their depictions of the 30's terror were mainly based on the former and often
testimonies of anonymous camp prisoners, on the tasks of Soviet defectors, published and
unpublished memoirs and, not least, on Khrushchev's speech at the 20th Party Congress in
1956 on “Stalin's crime”. Getty himself is primarily based on “sources from archives and

29
press ... and the overall production of emigrant memoirs and Soviet underground press
(samizdat) plays little role” in his analysis (Getty 1985:211).xlvi Too long, he says, has

The monstrosity of Stalin's crimes and the formation of attitudes during the Cold War contributed
to what in other areas of research would be perceived as careless and methodologically
substandard scientific accuracy ... Fortunately, the historiography of the Stalin period - as well as
the French or Russian revolution - begins to grow from its one-sided concentration on it Great
Leader. It is time to use all the sources in the study of Stalinism's political history. (Ibid:220)

Thus, Cohen, Hough, Getty and other revisionists believe that the history of the Soviet Union
cannot be reduced to “the great men”, to the development of the regime or to the influence of
the official ideology. One has to treat the country as a society, with social processes at
different levels that interacted with each other and where political development was not given
at the moment the Bolsheviks took power. Those who build on the totalitarian model claim
that “the totalitarian Soviet state was trying to transform society in accordance with Marxist-
Leninist ideology, using the Communist Party as a mobilizing agent, and reinforcing its
dictatorship with policing and terror. Society is reduced [by them] to an object, sluggish and
without characteristics, shaped and manipulated by the energetic actions of the totalitarian
regime “(Fitzpatrick 1986a:359). Revisionists instead emphasize the impulses that came
“from below”, from millions of ordinary people. Getty himself means in an article that

It seems increasingly clear that the failure to build communism after 1917 was less about Stalin's
personality, pathology or “mistakes” and more about the final triumph of social reality, from
below, of the utopian politics of the Bolsheviks and administrative deficiencies. Even when the
state seemed to triumph over society, as in the collectivization, it was forced to accept significant
compromises. Society changed the Bolsheviks as much as they changed society. (Getty 1987:393)

In a later book that mainly contains documents from the 1930s that were released in
connection with the opening of Russian archives in the 1990s, Getty returns to the question. It
is not about liberating Stalin from the moral responsibility of the purges and terror,xlvii but
about “trying to understand the social, political and economic system in which the people of
the Soviet Union lived and worked in the 1930s, but also the backgrounds, experiences of
these people. , preconceived opinions and the thinking they brought to politics. Finally, the
hardest part is that we must study the actions of the people, especially the political actors
when they interact with their surroundings. By presenting these documents in the light of such
issues, we hope to provide some insights into the most difficult issue regarding the terror:
How was it possible at all? “(Getty & Naumov 1999:10).

30
Sovietology and the dissolution of the Soviet Union
The debate between “totalitarianists” and “revisionists” (although few of those involved
accept the designations, they still point out an important dividing line in the sovietology)
raged in the 1980s and gained additional fuel in the cooler political climate that arose after the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan 1979 and US President Reagan's designation of the Soviet
Union as “the evil of the evil”. After Gorbachev's power entry in 1985, the debate entered a
new phase.xlviii An important issue that was intertwined in it was if the Soviet Union could
change, and when perestroika and glasnost were introduced, the question in the title of a book,
Is Russia Reformable, appeared? (Daniels 1988), can be answered in the affirmative. The
Soviet Union seemed to be a normal society with normal social processes, and the
totalitarianists had not seen that “the country has undergone a revolution while Brezhnev
slept” (Walker 1987:234). This was due to one of the most renowned revisionists, that the
concept of totalitarianism was basically of ideological nature:

Although the term very well fulfilled its ideological function, it was unusable as a conceptual
category. It had nothing to say about where the system came from, where it was going, what kind
of changes it underwent, if it underwent any changes, and how to study it critically and seriously.
In fact, the term itself, in this context, was “totalitarian” in its empty self-sufficiency. It did not
recognize any change mechanism in the Soviet Union and had no use for even a shadow of any
historical process. (Lewin 1988:3)

The other side, on the other hand, said that Gorbachev, like Khrushchev, was to be deposed
and the country returned to the “frozen and atomized society” it had been under Stalin and
Brezhnev. When the “State Committee for the Extraordinary Situation” carried out its coup in
August 1991, these predictions appeared to have struck. When the Soviet Union collapsed in
the rapid development of the fall of 1991, the force relations between the revisionists and the
totalitarianists changed. Now it was the latter who triumphed, for what happened was exactly
what they had predicted for so long: the Communist regime could not change, only abolished.
The previous stability had been a glow, and contrary to what many scholars had claimed, the
regime had never been legitimate, and its efforts for “development” and “modernization” had
only been one major disaster. As one of the leading representatives of the totalitarianism
model triumphantly proclaimed: “If Communism finally collapsed as a house of cards, it is
because it has always been a house of cards” (Malia 1994:496). Another criticized the
revisionists not only in matters of fact but also in their

works rarely find anything that deviates from the guideline or sudden inspirational flashes that
surprise the reader. They stack facts on facts, statistics on statistics, all supported by a heavy
appliance of learned references, but they lack the basic quality of good historians to be able to
distinguish the important from the trivial They treat all the facts and figures as if they were equally

31
 significant, obviously hoping that the crowd will get the reader to accept their conclusions. There
is not only lacking in humanism in their work, there is no life, no sweep, nothing that can
challenge the imagination ... For those who have been teaching at the university for many years,
this material is barely accepted or rejected ... battle for the revisionist society that it will hardly
recover from. (Pipes 1993:77ff)

From the point of view of the revisionists, the case was no better because many Eastern Euro-
pean researchers in the 1980s had begun to use the concept of totalitarianism as a description
of their own or the Soviet regime. Finally, under glasnost, it was possible to address the
concept in the Soviet Union itself (e.g. Kara-Murza in 1989), at the same time as a majority of
the Soviet scientists in the West avoided the word. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and
the “victory over communism” meant that the totalitarianism model finally seemed to have
won. The debate which, after all, continued and the amount of books and articles with a
“revisionist perspective” that continued to be published, now by an even younger generation,
has returned to the specialists' crowd.xlix In the public conversation about communism, the
totalitarianists have undoubtedly had an impact on their image of “evil communism”. This
impact did not primarily relate to the scientific debate, rather to political and ideological
conditions of the time.l The hegemony of this approach became so strong that one of the
“accused”, formerly the Left Party leader H.C. Hermansson, wondered:

The phenomenon of the Soviet Union no longer exists today, but are we - and the story - thus
finished with it? One cannot dismiss near a century's history in a large country and with
repercussions on the entire world development only with a single pen pull. What was wrong with
the revolutionary evolution that began in 1917 and which undeniably had socialist signs from the
beginning? Was the lack of democracy crucial, as was the whole Leninist party concept? Will the
Russian Revolution be given a place parallel to the French Revolution in the history of the future,
or will it be considered a coup d'état by a minority? (Hermansson 1997:7)

The dissolution of the Soviet Union was another matter for the Soviet Union. The fact that
fifteen new states succeeded the Union meant that now the Soviet era could be seen as just an
era in the respective countries, including Russia's history. If one perceives the Soviet era
mainly as a phase in Russia's historical development - and thus the Soviet Union as a
continuation of the old Tsar empire - questions arise about the links between old Russia and
the “socialist building” that took place during Soviet times. In addition to the debate on the
continuity from Lenin to Stalin, a corresponding debate arises about the continuity from the
old Russia over the Soviet Union to the new Russia. This is not least important for the post-
communist Russia's development and search for identity, but it is also important in the
attempts to understand and explain the development of the Soviet Union. In a similar way to
present-day Russia bearing a great heritage from the Soviet era, the design of the Soviet
system and the development of the Soviet society were a major legacy of pre-revolutionary
Russia. The fall of the Soviet regime therefore meant that some Soviet connoisseurs believed

32
that it was necessary to “think about the entire Soviet experiment” and place it in its historical
context.li

The importance of the old pre-revolutionary Russia for the post-revolution development has
been included as an undercurrent of Soviet politics, but has rarely been highlighted and
discussed.lii Although the Soviet Union at the beginning of its existence of most was
perceived primarily as a specific Russian, though revolutionized, phenomenon (see above xx),
the Cold War and the opposite to the United States led the country to increasingly be
perceived as a totalitarian communist phenomenon. The rejection by the early Communist
regime of the tsarist regime and arguing that it built a new society was therefore correlated
and confirmed in the Soviet analysis: the Soviet Union was a new and unique phenomenon
that could not be compared to anything else (except Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and other
Communist states) . In this way, the ideological opponents supported each other by
confirming each other's image of the country. In this situation, it was not easy for the
historically-oriented researchers to claim their “continuity paradigm”.

The question of the role of the Revolutionary Russia in establishing the Bolshevik regime,
and the role of pre-revolutionary institutions and traditions in building the Soviet power, adds
another dimension to the attempts to understand and explain the Soviet Union. Of course, this
is not a question of reducing the Soviet Union to the Tsar, and claiming that nothing
distinguished them. It would be absurd. But there are far too many analogies between the
Soviet regime and the various tsarist regimes in order for this possible “step-dependence” not
to be included in the analysis. This does not mean that there was no revolution in 1917-21, it
just means that “the old Russia” remained in the first years of the revolution, and it was
precisely these years that shaped the foundations of the new society. Therefore, new
institutions arise which, to some extent, are modeled on old conditions, and old mindsets,
habits and traditions remain to only gradually change in both the population and the elite. liii

This long historical aspect had not been completely absent in the Soviet analyzes. For
example, when one of the foremost totalitarianists, historian Richard Pipes, in his Russia
Under the Old Regime (1974) wrote that “unlike most historians seeking the roots of 20th
century totalitarianism in Western ideas, I seek them in Russian institutions” he received
criticism for his thesis on “the continuity between the political practitioners in the Moscow
and late Imperial Russia (1878-1905) on the one hand and those in the Soviet Union on the
other. This thesis displeased both Communist historians and their opponents, anti-Communist
nationalists, who for various reasons claimed that October 1917 marked a fundamental crime

33
in Russian history. “(Pipes 1992:xixff). Unlike Arendt and Talmond, Pipes thus believes that
totalitarianism is primarily a domestic Russian tradition, and that therefore the Western
socialist tradition played less role in the development of the Soviet Union.liv

The question of Russia's role in the formation of the Communist Soviet Union has thus come
to be a new point of discussion in the Soviet Union, which partially divided the former
totalitarian and revisionist camps. Where some of the former - like Pipes above - at least see a
background to communism in pre-revolutionary Russia, others believe that it is still socialism
that is the only factor that can explain the post-revolution development:

And Russia's contribution to this drama? Her role was hardly to ruin the experiment, as a
comfortable historical scapegoat would want it to. Russia's role was rather to provide the
experiment with a social tabula rage in the form of a civil society, broken by a modern war,
creating a lack of balancing forces that allowed the Party to realize its imagination. However, this
contribution was a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the communist adventure. The
Russian chaos in itself could have created a national authoritarian regime of only regional
importance. But it was the ideological socialism that proved to be the sufficient condition for
triggering the world-historical Soviet tragedy. (Malia 1994:504)

A straight opposite view of the relationship between old Russia and the socialist tradition is
taken by another Soviet scientist, who believes that “it is as true of Russian society as any
other society that a valuation of the present which is not based knowledge of the past risks
becoming superficial and distorted “(Action 1995:xii). This also applies to the relationship
between the Tsar and the Soviet Union:

Although 1917 is rightly perceived as a cesur in the development of the country, it is equally true
that neither the Bolshevik revolution nor the direction taken by the post-revolutionary Bolshevik
regime can be understood without reference to what has happened before. The victory of the
extreme left in 1917 was no success. It was not a craft of a few red intellectuals, but the result of
an acute social polarization. Nor did the Bolsheviks act when they came to power on a tabula rage.
Russia offered no passively isolated social laboratory in which the dreams of the European
socialist tradition could be scientifically tested. To their last days, every aspect reflected the Soviet
“socialism” heritage of Tsarrisland. To judge this heritage, it is essential to understand the nature
of the socio-economic changes, which were produced by both international and domestic pressures
that began to destabilize the empire from the mid-19th century. This, in turn, requires an
understanding of the traditional society to which these changes collided, the political, social,
economic and cultural composition of the imperial Russia in its beginning. The starting point must
be an examination of the way in which the empire was formed. (Ibid:xiii).

The Cultural turn in Sovietology

In the 1990s, naturally, the most intense and ideologically charged debates naturally escaped
as more and more years passed after the Soviet Union's dissolution. Some of the younger
Sovietologists turned to researching the new Russia or any other part of the former Union, but

34
within Soviet research, another “paradigm arose as a new generation schooled in
postmodernist or poststructuralist theories began to analyze Soviet phenomena on a new
way.lv In this way, a similar “cultural turn” took place within the Sovietology as in other
social sciences. Where “totalitarianists” were distinguished by the fact that they analyzed the
Soviet Union “from above” and that the party, its leadership and ideology were central areas
of study, and “revisionists” had written the story “from below” and instead of political history
researched on social conditions in the periphery or on Lower levels of society now came to a
number of researchers interested in cultural and identity issues and for symbolic levels of the
Russian Revolution and in different phases of the Soviet Union. Of course, studies of Russian
or Soviet culture were not a new study area, but, as in the West, the new cultural studies were
linked to new study areas that were analyzed from new theoretical perspectives. In 1998, the
editors wrote in an anthology on “cultural studies” that “in recent years there has been a
marked increase in cultural studies of Russian and especially the Soviet history. This reflects
a more general trend in historical research in the West and the influence of new research areas
that have been opened to highlight previously unknown stories, in particular women's history,
the history of the blacks and the history of homosexuals “and continues:

The postulating of the Soviet Union as the “other” to which the West must struggle in clear
economic, ideological and moral terms was summed up in the totalitarian model commonly used
in the analysis of the development of the Soviet Union. Where political scientists used the
totalitarian model relatively roughly but still comparatively, historians who used the model
emphasized the uniqueness of the country's course. When they argued that it was only those who
fully took into account the special cultural peculiarities of Russia, they fell into the same kind of
cultural isolationism as the Soviet Union itself. The modernization theories, which focused more
on social and economic conditions than on political in their quest to highlight common
experiences between the Soviet and the West, opened up for a criticism of gross economic
determinism and cultural insensitivity. (Kelly & Shepard 1998:4)

This “cultural turn” is, if possible, more complex and multifaceted than the views and
analyzes of the totalitarianists as well as of the revisionists. But there are still some themes
that go through in many of the works that were published after 1991, and as individual works
even before. Such a theme is about a type of analysis of the different classes that participated
in the Russian Revolution and in the Civil War, and how, for example. the Russian workers
developed a proletarian self-awareness that became responsive to the class propaganda of the
Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks (Steinberg 2001). Other works that study working class
identities and symbolic levels can be found in an analysis of stachanism, the movement that
was named after the coal mine worker Andrei Stachanov “who broke 102 tons of coal, or
fourteen times his quota, on the night between the 30th and 31st of August 1935” (
Siegelbaum 1990:2), and an anthology about the development of working class identities
before, during and after the revolution of 1917 (Siegelbaum & Suny 1994). The spoken and

35
written language and other symbols played a major role in this development of the workers'
self-consciousness, and one of the studies deals with “the ways in which the language was
used to define identities and create new sentences in the 1917 policy.” other similar studies,
defined the language “in its widest sense, such as songs and texts, symbolic banners and
emblems, images and monuments, banners and slogans, mundane speeches and rumors,
clothing and body language, mass ritualized demonstrations, parades and other ceremonies to
represent and show their allegiance to the idea of the 'revolution' (Figes & Kolonitskii
1999:1). Several studies investigate the conditions of everyday life during various phases of
the Soviet Union's development, such as Shiela Fitzpatrick's classic Everyday Stalinism
(1999), Siegelbaum & Sokolov (2000), about how different working groups reacted to “the
socialist offensive” in the 1930s and Olga) Velikanova's (2013) analysis of how “ordinary
people” perceived the new regime's policy during the 1920s. Diary analyzes have become a
method of accessing how people reacted to various events during the Soviet era, from how
opposed to the revolution experienced these dramatic years in their everyday lives (Got´e
1988, Bunin 1998) to how people in confidence wrote in their diary what they actually
thought about the regime during the darkest years of the 1930s (Garros et al. 1995, Hellbeck
1996, 1998 and 2000). Finally, several of the recent studies published a clear gender
perspective, e.g. Fitzpatrick & Slezkine (2000) or Goldman (2002).

When the research on the Soviet Union in this way has “taken the readers deeper into the
discursive reality of the revolution” (Steinberg 2001:5), one can say that the Soviet studies
have reached a concrete level that has become possible precisely because of the Soviet Union
with its closed borders and closed archives vanished. Although not all archives have been
opened, access to many archives for many researchers has meant that they have been able to
deepen and supplement their previous analyzes, for others to maintain their previous positions
largely.lvi

However, it is clear that in the research there have been different generations that have been
influenced by the conditions they have had to work within, and that theoretical and research-
based positions have changed because new generations are growing up under new conditions.
The totalitarianists began their research on the Soviet Union when the Cold War had just
started living in this now aging group, although of course not all of the older or now deceased
researchers were supporters of the totalitarianism model. After that, a new generation of
Sovietologists came to educate and start their research career under Khrushchev's “storm”,
which meant that many of these revisionists perceived the Soviet as a “common” country than
as a completely unique “frozen” society. The harsh political climate that followed the

36
invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and even more so after the inauguration in Afghanistan in
1979 led to the debates continuing, under Gorbachev concentrating on Soviet survival at all.
Similarly, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a new generation has now emerged from
the old disputes and is simply trying to study what happened during the Russian Revolution
and during the Soviet Union's seventy-four years of existence. It is increasingly rare that
writers now find themselves forced to relate to the “old” disputes, such as Stephen Kotkin in
his epoch-making study of Stalinism as a civilization in is own way in Magnetic Mountain
(1997:2ff).

This overview of the Soviet cultural turn is just a drop in the ocean of everything that has
been published over the past 25 years. Obviously, it is impossible to say confidently about
how the dissolution of the Soviet Union has affected and in the future will influence the
research on these for good and badly fascinated years that began with the takeover of the
Bolsheviks in October 1917, which ended with the resignation of the Soviet Union's first and
last president from its post on December 25, 1991. If the earlier pattern of contemporary
conditions will continue to have a certain role in the theoretical and analytical work, one can
expect that the development in the present Russia and its relation to the West will have a
certain importance for whether and if so how the Soviet Union is regarded as a precursor to
Putin's Russia. In this case, there are two tendencies that are possible in the future: On the one
hand, it may be that the Soviet - the doctrine of the Soviet Union - if not completely
disappeared, in any case changed the character, the part of the concept that stands for “
learning “in a more ideological sense, toned down. Then it is about trying to upgrade the
scientific part of the term “learning”. But on the other hand, if the relationship between the
West and the present Russia continues to deteriorate, this can lead to the studies of the Soviet
Union, as well as to the pre-revolutionary Russia, re-entering the mythical picture of the early
Russian studies of the “foreign Russia” which, with Churchill's famous words “Is a riddle
wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” that any rational thinking Westerner cannot
understand, just criticize. Which of the trends that will win only the future can tell.

Ending
Sovietology has, over its fifty-year existence, if not changed the world, at least tried to
interpret it. Its origins and close connection to the Cold War made it closely tied to “West”,
and especially the US attempt to resist what it considered to be Soviet aggression and
attempts to crush Western civilization. This attempt to get to know their enemy not only led to
the study of the enemy being given great resources, mainly in the United States, but also to
the fact that several of the leaders came close to the corridors of power in Washington. The

37
most famous on the conservative side were Robert Conquest, who worked in the English
counter-espionage during World War II, Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, who served as advisor to
President Jimmy Carter and Richard Pipes who did the same under Ronald Reagan. Together
with Adam Ulam and Martin Malia brought them a long and intense fight against all attempts,
among other things. by Richard Nixon, that the United States would pursue a policy that
contributed to the relaxation of the world. Although these and other similar researchers, for
certain parts, were responsible for different research directions, they agreed that the Soviet
Union should primarily be understood as a totalitarian society.

On the liberal side, on the other hand, there were sovietologists who tried to influence the US
policy towards the Soviet in the direction of increased relaxation. Perhaps the most important
of these was the one who founded revisionism with his biography of Bukharin, Stephen
Cohen. Others, such as Jerry Hough and Moshe Lewin, also published articles that entered the
debate on US foreign policy, but generally, most of the revisionist camps were more inclined
to stay away from direct policy. Here, Shiela Fitzpatrick is a good example of a historian who
admittedly had a left-wing Marxist father in Australia, Brian Fitzpatrick, but who always
emphasized the professional goals of the historians in relation to political agitation. Already
in England, she was opposed to moral judgments in her research, which were rather
developed into anti-anti-Soviet research. When she came in contact with US Sovietology, she
became deeply appalled at how ideological American Soviet studies were, as she meant more
“reminded her of Soviet research, with an empirical center surrounded by ideological
orthodox statements at the beginning and end” (Fitzpatrick 2007:481). Nevertheless, or
perhaps for that very reason, Fitzpatrick has participated in a variety of debates in the Soviet
Union, mainly on the revisionist side.lvii

It is from these and a number of other similar examples that it can be argued that the
sovietology by its very nature was a mixture of the two meanings of the term
“accommodation” mentioned in the introduction of this text. But it is not only its proximity to
political power centers in mainly the United States that has led to the research being said to
have been “infected” with ideology. At least as important was the fact that the study object -
the Soviet Union - itself was “saturated” with ideology, and that this ideological reality also
contaminated itself on the studies done by the country, but now usually in perverted form as
in a mirror image. The fact that studying a social science object incorporates parts of the
object's properties into its own explanatory model is nothing new, it would rather be strange if
it were not in that way. In this way, one can see that the concentration of the early Soviet on
ideology and the political top layer of the totalitarian model was a reflection of the self-

38
immolation of the Soviet ideology and the emphasis of political leadership on its own
significance for the path to the communist future. Also, many of the revisionists' analyzes
were partly based on non-realized hopes from the early post-revolutionary evolution of the
1920s, where Cohen's study of Bukharin as an alternative to Stalin's “top-of-the-world
revolution” with all that involved in destroying the humanist parts of the revolution and
widespread mass suffering was such a lost opportunity. Cohen himself wrote such a book
about “lost options” in Soviet history, where he believes that many of his colleagues in the
Sovietology

never thought there were any real alternatives during the Soviet seventy-four year existence.
During the forty years of the Cold War, when the academic field was formed, they saw the story as
a “straight line,” pre-determined by some inevitable factor - the governing party's organization, its
ideology, or Russia's gloomy traditions. But history written without including defeated alternatives
does not take into account the past or can give a true explanation of what happened. It is only the
winners' historical writing that makes them appear to be inevitable. (Cohen 2009:xi)

What the whole of the Soviet Union's history and the rest of this knowledge-based area
ultimately culminates in is the question that Cohen sets above: Was the Soviet Union's history
written from the beginning or were there alternate paths of development? Why, if so, was it
exactly the development that it actually became? Or was the truth about the Soviet that
Fainsod wrote in his textbook: “From a totalitarian embryo grew a fully developed
totalitarianism” (Fainsod 1963:59)? In that case, as the totalitarianists claimed, the Soviet
socialist or communist ideology explaining the development was not the choice of actions by
a large number of actors in a number of situations. It is in this fusion of socialist ideology
with the Soviet field of knowledge that the expression Soviet(ide)ology has its relevance. But
now that the Soviet Union is no longer there but has been passed on to history, these and a
host of other issues that existed as long as the Soviet Union has existed can be relegated,
without risking being drawn into the ideological struggle between East and West, between
socialism and capitalism , between dictatorship and democracy. Or will the image of the pre-
revolutionary Russia and the Soviet division of “the other” and “we” be revived in Western
research on post-communist Russia?

39
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Shukman 2003:1. Shlapentokh, Shiraev & Carroll (2008:14-19) briefly discusses American supporters and
critics of the Russian Revolution and the young Soviet state before World War II. Among the followers were,
among others, Edward Ross, ”a leading American sociologist in the beginning of the twenteenth century and a
strong self-identified opponent of private property and individualism, [who] openly praised Russia's attempts to
create a socialist society” (ibid:15) in his book Russia in Upheavel. Others who praised the new state but later
became increasingly critical of it was the American historian and journalist William H. Chamberlin who lived in
Russia in the 1920s and 30s. In the book Soviet Russia: A living Record and a History from 1930, he was
essentially positive to the new regime, but in a later book, The Russian Revolution 1917-18 (1935), he was more
critical. There were also many other ”fellow travelers” during the Stalin period who were considered to be very
important, and their visits were often organized in detail: “The fellow travelers of the later Stalin era were drawn
to the Soviet Union as pilgrims, as converts; their journeys were the consequence rather than the cause of their
commitment. Transported by airplane and greeted by flower-laden reception committees, they conducted their
benign odyssey in an atmosphere of physical and spiritual comfort. “(Caute 1973:17). Most famous of these
“fellow travelers” are probably the spouses Sidney and Beatrice Webb who visited the Soviet Union in 1932 and
Sidney Webb also in 1934. Their Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (where the question mark was remo-
ved in the second edition (ibid:78) became one of the most discussed books during this period. In the summary,
they write: “The characteristics of the Soviet Communism, which we have summarised one by one, exhibit,
when we take them together, a distict unity, itself in striking contrast with the disunity of western civilisation.
The code of conduct based on service to the community in social equality, and the maximum development of the
health and capacity in every individual, is in harmony with the exclusion of exploitation and the profit-making
motive, and with the deliberate planning of production for community consumption; whilst both are in full
accord with that universal participation in a multiform administration which characterises the soviet system. The
economic and political organizations, and with them the ethical code, are alike staked on a wholehearted reliance
on the beneficial effect of making known to every citizens all that is known of the facts of the universe,
including human nature itself; that is to say, on science as interpreted dialectically, to the exclusion of any
miraculous supernaturalism or mystical faith in the persistence about the survival of personal life after death.
The Worship of God is replaced by Service of Man. “(Webb & Webb 1935:1138). When one reacts to their
cluelessness one must keep in mind that they made their journeys in the middle of the worst depression in the
West, and during the relatively success of the first five-year plans. The fact that they only were shown what the
regime wanted them to see also contributed to their celebrations of the system.
ii
Cox 1998:18ff. The political climate around 1950 meant that several of the early Sovietologists were viewed
with suspicion. The professors who founded the Russian Institute at Columbia University were accused of
communist sympathies, a couple of them ”had to file affidavits that they were not Communists to obtain United
States passports”, but despite this they were branded by Senator Joseph McCarthy as “members of a Communist
conspiracy”. The assistant director at the Harvard Russian Research Center was forced to leave his position and a
special “arrangement” was made between the institution and the FBI's anti-subversive hunt. The journal
Problems of Communism, in which “most prominent Sovietologists during this period wrote regularly had to be
secretly ‘security cleared’ before their writings appeared.” This continued until 1977 (Cohen 1985:17f).
iii
The expression is taken from the title of a book in which Berry & Crummey (1968) has collected six English
accounts of travelers’ impressions of Russia after their visits to Russia in the 16th century. For contemporary
expressions of Russia’s “differentness”, see Waage 1992 or Kangaspuro 1999.
iv
Cross 1953:38f. This is supposed to have happened in 6370 after the creation of the world, i.e. 862 A.D.
v
Rurik’s son Igor married Olga from Pskov who was the daughter of a Scandinavian settler, their son Svjatoslav
got the son Vladimir through a relationship with one of his mother's servants, Malmfred. Vladmimir, who was
thus an illegitimate son of great prince Svyatoslav, had to defeat his brothers in several wars to become great
prince himself. He was then baptized in the Greek Orthodox Faith 988 and began to Christianize Rus but was
thus partly of Scandinavian origins. He was also the father of Prince Yaroslav the Wise of Novgorod, later great
prince of Kiev, who 1016 married Ingegärd, daughter of the Swedish king Olof Skötkonung and his queen
Estrrid. Several of their daughters then married European princes or prominent Vikings. Ingegärd took the
Russian name Irina, but shortly before her death in 1050 she went to the monastery and changed the name to
Anna. She was sanctified and considered today as the saint of both the Catholic and the Orthodox Church. Relics
of her body were returned to Sweden to Heliga Anna's orthodox parish in Eskilstuna as late as spring 2009 (see
Dagen, 26/2 2009).
vi
Crosskey 1987:292-92. The instruction was issued by Ivan III to an embassy in Poland in 1503.
vii
Christian Bomhover: Eynne schonne hystorie van vnderlyken gescheffthen der heren tho lyfflanth myth den
Rüssen unde tataren (Cologne 1508:135), cit. in Poe 2000:19.

46
viii
Poe 2002:142. The Livonian order (lay approximately in presentdays Estonia and Latvia) were a loose
cohesion between the Teutonic order and more or less independent bishops and Hanseatic cities, which together
with (in different stages) Lithuania and Poland (who then entered into a coalition), Denmark and Sweden made
war against Ivan IV. During the war, Ivan created his famous obrichnina, a state in the state with obrichniki, a
sort of secret police officer who rode around and murdered Ivan's enemies among the boyars. The Tatars also
returned and burned down Moscow in 1571, but lost to the Russian army in a big battle the following year. At
the ending of Livonian War Russia gave up its claims to parts of Livonia and lost Narva and the southern part of
the Gulf of Finland to Sweden.
ix
The expression “West's view of Russia” is really a wrong because it “before the eighteenth century, there was
only the faintest idea of ‘West’ as a term for collective identity in Europe ... Proof of absence of the idea of a
distinct ‘West’ and ‘East’ is found on the very pages of the European travelers’ accounts … The writers of the
early descriptions of Muscovy preferred to identify themselves with particular kingdoms or kings and when they
used compass orientations of comfort (very rarely) they chose ‘the North’ and ‘the South,’ Muscovy being an
accepted part of the North. “(Poe 2000:8).
x
Nyström 1974:128 and Poe 2002:133 respectively. The original name of the book was Rerum Moscovicticarum
Commitarii. It was based on two diplomatic missions Herberstein had carried out, the first 1517-18 and the
second 1526-27, from the German empires Maxi-milylian I and Ferdinand I respectively to induce Poland and
Russia to quit peace and united them against the common enemy turks. The first mission failed, while the second
one succeeded partly when the countries entered into a five-year ceasefire. It was, however, too late for Hungary
to be conquered by the Turks in 1526. Herberstein partly understood Russian by speaking a Slavic language then
was born in Carniola in present-day Slovenia, which allowed him to communicate with Russians during his stay
in Moscow.
xi
“Editors preface”, in Herberstein 1969:2.
xii
“General introduction”, in Berry & Crummey:xi. For a discussion of Herberstein's significance for the
attempts to find a way to China through the Arctic Ocean, see Baron 1991, Chapter XIV.
xiii
Herberstein 1969:43f. “The most important account in this regard was, of course, Herberstein's Notes on the
Muscovites, which were both easily accessible and particularly hard in their condemnation of Russian social life.
To find out more about the Russian government, authors turned to authors for this important work almost
immediately after its first publication in 1549. Towards the turn of the century, Herberstein's view was that the
great princess was a tyrant became an essential part of the European perception about Moscow. The popularity
of Possevino and Olearius, both of which had much to thank Herberstein, made sure to spread the message of the
Habsburg diplomat about the Russian tyranny.” (Poe 2000:199-200).
xiv
One of those who was supposed to be tsar in Russia was Gustav II Adolf's brother Karl Filip. A Swedish,
Petrus Petrejus published an eyewitness account of the Great Oredans Russia 1608, see for example Attius
Sohlman 1997.
xv
“Although the Russians are big addicts of sexual intercourse, both inside and outside the marriage bed, they
still consider it to be sinful and unclean. Therefore, during the gathering, they temporarily lay aside the small
cross they get when they are baptized and which they carry around their neck. Since intercourse should not take
place in the presence of sacred icons, these are also carefully covered. Anyone who has had sexual intercourse is
not supposed to go to a church the same day if he has not washed himself properly and taken on clean clothes.
The highly godly do not enter the church, but stop the cabinet to pray. After a priest has been with his wife, he
must wash himself thoroughly over and under the navel before he can enter the church, and he should not go to
the altar. Women are considered more unclean than men and must therefore not participate fully when
celebrating a fair and usually stand farther behind, near the church doors. “(Olearius 1967; 172).
xvi
“Preface”, in Olearius 1967:vii. Poe (ed.) 1995 contains a bibliography of foreign descriptions of Russia in the
16th and 17th centuries, with special emphasis on descriptions by the state, while Poe (ed) in 2003 consists of 12
volumes where most published about Russia from the 16th century up to the first half of the 19th century has
been assembled.
xvii
The book came in four French editions in the first three years, as well as in four editions in Belgium. In
addition to translation into English, the book was quickly translated into German and Danish. A few years after
the first edition, “Custine could estimate that sales amounted to at least 200,000 copies” (Kennan 1971:95).
However, the book was banned in Russia because of its highly critical content against the country.
xviii
“Foreword” in the Custine 1989:xiv. Italic in original.
xix
Kennan 1971:97. This George F. Kennan is the same as 1933-39 and 1944-46 worked at the American
Embassy in Moscow, from which he wrote in 1946 the famous “long telegram” that described the Soviet Union

47
as a against the western threatening aggressive power, which because of historical experiences always tried to
create protection zones against the outside world. The following year, in 1947, he published under the
pseudonym “X” the article “The Source of Soviet Conduct” in Foreign Affairs, where he developed his views.
These two articles largely shaped the American administration's view of the post-war Soviet. In 1951, he became
ambassador in Moscow, but soon expanded. For several years, he worked in US foreign affairs, but became
increasingly critical of President Truman's and later President Eisenhower's tough policies against the Soviet
Union, even though he had initiated it. In his book, Kennan tells that after a lecture in Oxford in 1969 about
Custine's journey and book, he was contacted by a Russian-born England resident known as 126 years after the
publication of Russia in 1839 was equally upset by the negative image of Russia and meant that “ only
[Custine's] “frenetic factual inaccuracy” made it impossible to treat as a serious witness. He had simply benefited
from the general anti-Russian prejudices that were prevalent in England and France. This was the secret of his
popularity wave at this time. “Kennan comments on this by saying that” This speaks in a way that the
importance of the questions the book poses ... that the challenge it presents - right or wrong, fraudulent or
reasonable hot - continues to feel like a challenge to people who live one hundred and seventy-seven years after
it was written. “(1971:118f).
xx
Byrnes 1994:11. One of the most important was Charles R. Crane, who inherited a fortune that allowed him to
travel around the world. In 1888 he came to Russia for the first time, and during a later trip he met Tsar Nicholas
II. In a letter home to his wife, Crane tells him that he told the Tsar that “his people had preserved the finest
traditions in the Orient, the tradition of hospitality and the way in which it was practiced.” the tsar replied, “there
is one thing we do not want to change; we do not want to change anything “(Lasch 1962:5). In this single
sentence, one of the main reasons why the revolution broke out in 1917 is seen. Crane then founded the first
Russian center in the United States in Chicago. Also George Kennan, a distant relative of the previous note
mentioned George F. Kennan, traveled around Russia and wrote several books and many articles about the
unknown country. The most famous book was the Sibiria and the Exile System which came in 1891 and which
made many turn to the Tsar Russia.
xxi
“During the period up to 1941, most American researchers' studies on Russian history and literature were
before 1917. A prominent exception was Samuel N. Harper and several of his students at the University of
Chicago.” (Fisher 1959:4). Harpers Civic Training in Soviet Union (1929) and The Government of the Soviet
Union (1938) are still very readable, as are his memoirs The Russia I believe in (1945). Another very readable
work from the first category is Geroid Robinson's Rural Russia during the old régime from 1932. The lack of
analyzes of “communism” during this time has led Richard Pipes to mean that “During the interwar period no
serious historical or theoretical analysis of the rise of the communist regime. The few systematic studies
published on Soviet Russia, mainly during the 1930s, described the country under the rule of Stalin, creating the
false impression that it was he, rather than Lenin, who was the author of the one-party dictatorship. “(Pipes
1994:241).
xxii
The “false analogies” that Wilson talks about were partly that Marx transferred “a probably unconscious
tendency to argue from a Jewish position to the position of the proletariat”. The second false analogy was that
Marx expected the middle class behavior against the feudal nobility to become the same behavior as the working
class would show against the bourgeoisie. Where the middle class had been trained, the working class
completely lacked this formation. (Wilson 1940:482).
xxiii
In 1840, Julimonarkin established a professorship in Slavic studies at the Collège de France “for Adam
Mickiewicz, largely to show his sympathy for the Poles who were under Russian, Prussian and Austrian
domination. Education Minister Victor Cousin revealed an ignorance that was common even among interested
French statesmen, because he believed Polish was the most widely spoken Slavic language. “(Byrnes 1994:7).
xxiv
Manning 1957:viii. In the 1870s, Mackenzie Wallaces Russia (1877), Ramba's Histoire de Russie (1878) and
Brueckners Culturhistorischen Study (1878) (Laqueur & Labedz 1965:4).
xxv
There was also a great demand for knowledge of the Soviet Union outside the universities and state
institutions. So, for example, wrote researchers from Columbia and Harvard “hundreds of articles in non-
academic magazines such as Newsweek, in major newspapers such as the New York Times and in magazines
read by a broad public such as Foreign Affairs” (Engerman 2009:262).
xxvi
“The serious study of the Soviet Union began before the Cold War. But its exponential growth as a subject
was very much a result of the war alliance's collapse and the West's need to understand the dynamics of Soviet
politics ... It also had to do with the development of the West itself: anti-communist hysteria, the Korean War,
the requirement for a long-term military planning and, above all, the need to mobilize domestic support for what
developed into a costly and long-lasting struggle ... The dominant paradigm of the Cold War, totalitarianism ...
seemed to describe the peculiarities of the Soviet system relatively well. It was simple and politically correct

48
based on the conservative measures of that time. “(Cox 1998:18ff). Several of the early Sovietologists were
viewed with suspicion. The professors who founded the Russian Institute at Columbia University were accused
of communist sympathies, a couple of whom were writing on noble assurances that this was not the case for
obtaining a US passport, but despite being branded by Senator Joseph McCarthy as “members of a Communist
conspiracy”. Even at Harvard, the assistant director was forced away and a special “arrangement” was made
between the institute and the FBI's anti-subversive front. The journal Problems of Communism in which “most
prominent Sovietologists during this period regularly wrote became secretly” security-reviewed “before the
articles could be published.” This continued until 1977 (Cohen 1985:17f).
xxvii
After local elections in 1923, where the opposition was prevented from conducting an election campaign, a
journalist wrote that the fascists were creating a “totalitarian system” (sistema totalitario), and this is “as far as
you know the first time the word” totalitarian “pops up” (Petersen 1978 :117). Two years later, a young socialist
journalist, Leilo Basso, made the word a noun in an article claiming that the Fascist's goal was a state where “all
governmental bodies, the crown, the parliament, the law ... the armed forces ... become instruments of an
individual party that makes himself an interpreter of the will of the people, an undifferentiated totalitarianism
“(cit in Wipperman 1997:10).
xxviii
In a speech at the Fascist's Fourth Party Congress in June 1925, Mussolini said that “we want the Italians to
make a choice ... We have brought out the fight in an open arena so now there is only one clear for or against.
And further: Every goal that our violent totalitarian will strives for will be achieved with even greater
relentlessness. in “The Doctrine of Fascism” that “for the Fascist is everything in the state and nothing human or
spiritual exists - or has any value whatsoever - outside the state. In this sense, fascism is totalitarian. “(Cit in
Petersen 1978:109). The statement had its philosophical counterpart to “the state philosopher of fascism”,
Giovanni Gentile (1975-1944). Gentile joined the fascist party in May 1923 and was Minister of Education
1922-25. In 1932 he wrote in Enciclopedia italiana: “The fascist state concept is inclusive. Outside it, no human
or spiritual values can exist, let alone have any value. In this way, fascism is totalitarian, and the fascist state - a
synthesis and unity that includes all values - interprets, develops, and enables the entire life of the people. “(G.
Gentile:” The Doctrin of Fascism “, in J. Sommerville & RE Santioni (eds): Social and Political Philosophy
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday 1963), p. 426, cit in Gleason 1995:19)
xxix
Cit in Adler & Paterson 1970:1054. The concept also came to play an important role in connection with the
adoption of the new West German Constitution in 1949. It intended to prevent the new Federal Republic from
developing into a totalitarian state: “The totalitarian theory that compares and even equates fascism and
communism can therefore be considered a dominant idea behind the fundamental constitutional law and to some
extent also seen as the official ideology of the federal republic. “(Wippermann 1976:192).
xxx
Arendt explicitly distinguishes between Lenin's and Stalin's contribution to the development of the totalitarian
state: “There is no doubt that Lenin suffered its greatest defeat when, with the outbreak of the civil war, the
supreme power he originally planned to concentrate on the Soviets definitely turned to the hands of the party
bureaucracy. But not even this evolution, however tragic it was for the direction of the revolution, would not
necessarily have led to totalitarianism ... At the time of Lenin's death, the roads were still open. “(Arendt
1979:319).
xxxi
Talmon 1955:249. The Talmud's thesis on the origin of totalitarianism in the French Enlightenment
philosophy sparked much debate, but also received strong support. So, for example, wrote Crane Brinton of the
New York Times that after reading the book he had understood that “all the essentials of Marxism-Leninism-
Stalinism exist already in 1796: class struggle, the role of the enlightened avant-garde or the elite, an ambivalent
attitude of contempt and absolute belief in the masses, one of the revolution's chosen people who must be
protected from foreign corruption by an iron curtain, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the state's expulsion and
all the other. “(Cit in Gleason 1995:115f).
xxxii
In addition to Carl Friedrich, the conference included. Hannah Arendt, W H Chamberlin, Erik H Erikson,
Merle Fainsod, Alex Inkeles, Leo Löwental, David Riesman and two of the most influential Sovietologists,
Adam Ulam and Bertram D Wolfe. The fact that Stalin had died the day before is, for understandable reasons,
not noticed in the articles, but in the discussions one can sometimes hear the wings of history as, for example,
when former US Ambassador George F Kennan says, “And now - beginning today, is the post-revolutionary
generation in power” (Friedrich 1954:32). This coincidence, that Stalin passed away the day before the
conference that “pre-scientific” the concept of totalitarianism - which is primarily linked to the stalin era - was
gathered, can be seen as a direct illustration of Hegel's dictum that “Minerva's owl lifts first at dusk”.
xxxiii
Friedrich & Brzezinski 1956:10. Expressed in the more developed model, the most important feature of a
totalitarian society is defined as:

49
“1) An official ideology, consisting of an official doctrine covering all the important aspects of human existence
to which every person living in this society must adhere, at least passively. This ideology is characterized by the
fact that it focuses and strives for a perfect final stage of humanity; it contains chilastic claims based on a radical
denial of the existing society and the conquest of the world for a new one.
2) An individual mass party, usually led by a man, the “dictator”, and consisting of a relatively small proportion
of the total population (maximum 10 percent), of which a hard core of them is passionate and without
questioning the devoted ideology and prepared to contribute in all ways to its general acceptance. This party is
hierarchically and oligarchically organized, and usually either superior or fully interwoven with the government
bureaucracy.
3) A system of terrorist police control that supports but also monitors the party to its leaders. The police control
is characterized by not only being directed towards designated “enemies” to the regime, but also to arbitrarily
selected classes among the population. The secret police's terror systematically utilizes modern science,
especially modern psychology.
4) The party and its service framework have a technically and largely complete monopoly on all modern mass
communication means, such as press, radio and films.
5) In the same hands, a similarly technically conditioned, almost complete monopoly lies in the control of the
armed forces.
6) Central control and governance of the entire economy through a bureaucratic coordination of its formerly
independent corporate entities, which usually include most other associations and groups.” (Friedrich &
Brzezinski 1956:9f).
xxxiv
A selection of books from the late 1940s and some decade ahead that focus their studies on the Communist
Party's politics and ideology, although not all use the term “totalitarianism”, is Lasswell & Leites 1949, Inkeles
1951, Leites 1951, Moore Jr. 1965 [1950], Baldwin 1953, Leites 1953, Moore Jr. 1954, Eudin & Fisher 1957,
Meissner 1957, Bauer, Inkeles & Kluckhorn 1959, Armstrong 1961 and Swayze 1962.
xxxv
According to the authors, “the Soviet citizens seemed to have absorbed a lot of Marxism's” metaphysics “.
We do not mean so much that they use the language of Marxism, even if they do, without expressing many of
their comments in a form that we have come to recognize as specific in Soviet Marxist writings. A special study
of our personal interviews from this perspective revealed that the term “dialectic” and the idea that “the
existence determines consciousness” were the ones that were most mentioned. Asked for religion and atheism to
co-exist in society, one respondent replied: “Yes, it should be so. The Marxists are probably right in that. There
must be contradictions and something new evolving from them. “Another revealed his indoctrination when he
answered, on the question of who believed in the regime:” The fanatics do not realize contradictions. They think
they can hold them back. They can be done, but only to a certain point. For man does not do the story, it is the
story that makes man. ““ (Inkeles & Bauer 1959:179).
xxxvi
“Ten Theories in Search of Realty: The Prediction of Soviet Behavior” was first published in World Politics,
Vol 10, No. 3 April 1958:327-356, but is also available in Bell 1960 and Inkeles & Geiger (eds) in 1961. The ten
theories as Bell distinguishes are: Characterological theories based on 1) anthropology or 2) psychoanalysis;
sociological theories of 3) social systems or studies based on 4) the ideal type method; political theories such as
5) marxism, 6) neomarxism, 7) totalitarianism or 8) cremlinology; and finally, historical theories based on 9)
Slavic institutions or 10) geopolitical factors (Bell 1960:301ff). Regarding totalitarianism, Bell believes that the
model is too abstract and sweeping: “From such heights, the mountain terrain and ravines of the political terrain
are flattened, and the weary hiker finds little guidance to concrete problems. Even on a simpler intuitive basis,
one can question the fundamental assumption of the theory - namely that society becomes completely atomized
and that domination is anomalous and direct. In a crisis situation, a state can fragment all social life and, perhaps,
through terror, shape the people according to their will. But can a society live in a permanent crisis? Can it be in
such a stiff state without exploding in a war or relaxing. The reason for all social life requires not only a
minimum of personal security, but also reasonable expectations from parents that their children should be
educated, developed careers, etc. To some extent, there is a tendency for “normalization” in each crisis situation.
“(Ibid:308f).
xxxvii
Inkeles 1968:429. The idea that the Communist East and the capitalist West would meet was not new. As
early as 1944, Moore wrote that “At first glance, the role of the Russian factory directors seems to have been
very similar to the role of his corresponding American business leader.” (Moore, Jr. 1944:273).
xxxviii
Later, the various “schools” of Sovietology were characterized in this way: “Thus, with the Sovietology
isolated from the field of comparative politics through the hermetically sealed category of totalitarianism, the”
revisionists “and” pluralists “of the 1960s re-attempted to incorporate the Sovietology into political science ...

50
The symmetry between totalitarian and pluralists was striking. The subtitle of the former song: “Their policy is
the opposite of our [western democratic]”. In response, they maintained the former: “We both share
[substantially] the same institutions and processes”. An approach wanted us to think of the Soviet Union as it
would be Nazi Germany - the other as if it were the United States! None of the mindsets drew attention to the
Soviet Union itself as a social formation sui generis that demanded theorizing. “(Michael Urban & M. Steven
Fish:” Does Post-Sovietology have a furure? “, in Cox 1998:166f).
xxxix
Many years later, John H. Kautsky makes a similar analysis in the book Marxism and Leninism, not
Marxism-Leninism. Kautsky, based on an ideology analysis of Marxism and Leninism, believes that the former
is primarily a working class ideology, while the latter is primarily an anti-traditional and anti-colonial
modernization ideology that only resembles Marxism because of Lenin's language. Marxism has greater
similarities with other workers ideologies such as fabianism in England, Bernstein in Germany, Jaurés in France
and the Scandinavian social democracy, while Leninism is more similar to other modernization ideologies such
as Sun, Kemal, Nehru, Sukarno, Nasser and Nkruma. The latter similarity is hidden by different language usage.
The fate of both ideologies describes Kautsky like this: “The little Marxism that existed in Russia died with
Menshevism and Leninism's triumph long ago. Since there has been no Marxism in the Soviet Union ever since,
the recent events prove nothing about the vitality of Marxism in any way. In the industrialized West, Marxism
had the attraction of alienated industrial workers and promised an end to their alienation. When their alienation
disappeared or at least reduced ... Marxism lost its temptation to the workers and, in this way, died it. “(Kautsky
1994:2).
xl
Fitzpatrick herself writes later that “I was one of the original revisionists of the 1970s, although in the mid-
1980s I expressed skepticism for some approaches by revisionists” (Fitzpatrick 2000:13, 12).
xli
In a later article, Fitzpatrick distinguishes three views that are common in revisionists' work on the early
development of the Soviet Union: 1) “The regime had less real control over society than it claimed, its actions
were often rather improvised than part of a large plan, the implementation of its radical policy often differed
from the political intentions and politics often had unplanned and unexpected social consequences. “2)” The
regime's policy appealed to particular social groups and was a response to social pressure and complaints, and
was subject to a modification in practice through various informal social negotiation processes. “3)” The third
and most challenging approach sees such a policy as a product of initiative from below rather than deriving it
from the top of the regime's initiative. “(Fitzpatrick 1986:368). Here, it is clearly expressed how the totalitarian
views on the political process in the Soviet Union have been turned upside down. Instead of the state and the
regime, it is society and the population that is the driving force.
xlii
“Stalinism represented a summary of Marxism and all that was primitive and archaic semi-Asian in Russia:
the illiteracy of music and barabari on the one hand and the absolutist traditions of the ancient ruling groups on
the other. Against all this, Trotsky stood for an undiminished classical Marxism in all its intellectual and moral
strength, but at the same time political weakness - a weakness that went back to its own incompatibility with
Russian backwardness and the defeat of socialism in the West. “(Deutscher 1972:329f).
xliii
“At his death, Fainsod had left scanty information about how he would have reworked his text. Hough… has
virtually written about the 1963 edition… and made much more than updated Fainsod's presentation. “(Osborn
1979:487). A critic asked, “It was the best way for Professor Hough to make his own major contribution to the
understanding of the Soviet system of rewriting a classical work. The title change reflects the fact that the new
edition is very different from its predecessors, but the compromise achieved ... is unhappy and confusing ... it
would have been better to avoid the ambiguity inherent in a shared authorship between a living and a dead. “
Brown 1979:103), and another meant that Hough's election to publish his book “as a direct successor to Fainsods
How Russia is Ruled ... aroused the hope that, given what the first edition achieved, the book in a single volume
would offer one new and integrated vision of Soviet politics that sets the tone for students and for the coming
years ... Unfortunately, this hope has not been fulfilled. “(Zimmerman 1979:482). Members, including Richard
Pipes, of the Russian Research Center at Harvard, who sponsored the first editions, was very critical of the new
edition and wanted to remove Fainsod's name from the new edition, something Hough himself was not against.
But the publisher “refused to remove the name of the original author, attitude that the executive member of the
RRC attributed to its interest in marketing the book.” (Engerman 2009:301). It was thus purely economic
calculations that lay behind one of the greatest quarrels in the Sovietology.
xliv
One critic said Getty's “subject matter is reminiscent of a historian who chooses to write an account of a shoe
factory working in Auswitz death camp. He uses many documents and he does not forge the material. He decides
not to use all available sources and dismisses the survivors' testimony as “biased”. Instead, he concentrates on
factory documents. He discusses issues about production, supply and marketing. One can even say that he

51
contributes something to the wealth of human knowledge, but yet he completely misses the point. He does not
notice the gas chambers. “(Kenez 1986:398f).
xlv
Den fullständiga oredan i partiets medlemsregister ställde till stora problem för ledningen. På ett tal på den
17:e partikongressen 1934 sade en ledande bolsjevik att man “i tio regioner som kontrollerats i tjistkan den 1
januari 1934 funnit 56 500 “döda själar” – personer som var registrerade som medlemmar men inte kunde
lokaliseras… [V]arken den lokala eller den nationella ledningen för partiet visste vem som var medlem och vem
som inte var det. Man lade skulden för de oacceptabla förhållandena som rådde i ’partiets skötsel’ på det kaos i
städerna och på landsbygden som funnits under den föregående perioden. Problemet upptäcktes men löstes inte
1933, och skulle fortsätta att plåga partiet fram till andra världskriget”. (Getty 1985:55).
xlvi
Getty believes that “such documentation is methodologically unacceptable in other areas of history. One
would be hesitant about a footnote where it says “unpublished memoirs of duke de” in a work about the terror of
the French Revolution. “(Getty 1985:265).
xlvii
In a recently published biography about Stalin, the author believes that “documents from the archives clearly
show that Stalin initiated all important decisions that were related to purges from the party and the government's
institutions and the mass operations that went beyond ordinary citizens. He not only ordered the arrests and
hundreds of thousands of people's execution, he was also very interested in details […] In many cases, he
himself decided if anyone would be shot or sent to labor camps “(Khlevniuk 2015:159)
xlviii
See e.g. the debates in Russian Review, vol. 45, no. 4 1986 and vol 46, no. 4, 1987, where several of the
most important researchers in the debate have contributions.
xlix
The debate continued even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. For example, when The American Sas-
tian Studies Promotion Association (AAASS) held its annual congress in Boston in the fall of 1996 was the most
visited and lively discussion session that revolved around this debate. Among other things, The above-quoted
book by Martin Malia was taken on a very well attended session, and one of the commentators, “revisionist”
Ronald Suny, said that “Malia replaces a socio-economic determinism against an ahistoric ideological
reductionism. One does not need history, for Soviet history is about the elaboration of a logic, there is an
inevitability from beginning to end. If there were deviations, there were temporary deviations from the true
socialism. NEP, Khrushchev and Gorbachev were deviations, war communism and Stalin were socialism “(Suny
1996:3).
l
The question of the relationship of contemporary politics to scientific studies of the Soviet Union has followed
with the Soviet the beginning. Since much of the early Sovietology perceived that “the Politburo is striving for a
worldwide expansion of its own power as a necessary condition for the worldwide establishment of”
Communism “(Leites 1953:31), it was difficult to imagine a” scientific neutrality “ against the enemy. If only in
the past had been “aware of the nature and purpose of total Soviet totalitarianism”, it would “have been a
difference in freedom for hundreds of millions of people” evicted by the Soviet Union after World War II (Wolfe
1957:659). Despite this, the early Sovietologists were congratulated for “the healthy way they, on the whole,
have coped with the adaptation to the power polarization in world politics ... Instead, the most important effect
of this polarization has been to increase the importance of and inspire greater efforts to promote Russian studies.
The spirit of the scientific endeavor, the ambition to serve our democracy by striving for objectivity in the
analysis, has been a strong protection against the risk of non-scientific and even the anti-scientific conclusions.
“(Fisher 1959:20). Another overview of Soviet politics states that “specialists in Russia and Eastern Europe were
never subjected to the pressure that plagued those who studied the Far East, especially China, in the 1940s and
50s” (Byrnes, in Laqueur & Labedz 1965:24). Relatively soon, however, the Soviet studies began to be criticized
for ideological distortion. A scientist wondered that if a Sovietologist cannot “discuss any aspect of the Soviet
scene without mumbling” totalitarianism “or” stalinism, “then he really differs from a Soviet student studying
conditions in the West and whatever he writes about must give the biblical references to “monopoly capitalism”
or wall street “(Ulam 1965b:16), another said that” the study of communism has become so permeated by values
widespread in the United States that we have no objective and precise set of knowledge of communism, but
rather an ideologically distorted image. Not just our theories, but also the concepts we use – e.g.
“Totalitarianism” - is full of values ”(Fleron 1968:339). Criticism of “policy's unintentional intrusion into
academic studies” (Dallin 1973:565) has continued, and as recently as the end of the 1980s, one of the chief
Soviet connoisseurs wrote that “The” totalitarian “label was used to describe regimes such as Nazi Germany
under Hitler and Soviet Russia during Stalin, and the term seemed to serve some cognitive purposes. But, as is
well known, during the Cold War, the term was appropriate in the West for propagandic and ideological use in
the service of strategic struggle. The reluctance inherent in the term was transferred from a former enemy - Nazi
Germany - to a new, Soviet Russia. At the same time, influential sovietologists, not at all innocent of the

52
ideological content of the company, tried to get totalitarianism to look like an explanatory, theoretical concept
that offers the audience and the student a tool for understanding the system in question. “(Lewin 1988:2f).
li
“Where to start thinking? One can argue that in the autopsy [of the Soviet Union] one should include most of
Russian history, for this history has in many ways been sui generis, separated from the history of other European
countries. If the question of a Sonderweg, a special “road” for development, has engaged those who are studying
Germany for a considerable time, this can be applied more strongly in Russia. The story is, as has often been
pointed out, a network without seams: Gorbachev and Yeltsin cannot be understood without the previous
“stagnation period”, which in turn can only be understood in relation to the stalin. If you want to discuss the
revolution in 1917, it should not be said that this can only be done in relation to the conditions in Russia under
Nicholas II. “(Laqueur 1994:v).
lii
Some early works dealing with this theme are Dino Tomasics The Impact of Russian Culture on Russian
Communism (1953) and Ernest Simmons Continuty and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought (1955). The
latter book is a result of a conference in 1954 where 41 Russian researchers discussed the relationship between
pre-revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union from various aspects (realism and utopianism in Russian
economic thinking; authoritarianism and democracy; collectivism and individualism; rationality and
irrationalism; literature, state and society; Russia and nations' community). In the introduction, Simmons writes
“For its most extreme followers in the early years, the Bolshevik revolution seemed to represent a total rejection
of the past. The old Russia was officially declared dead ... You should clean the house with the story. A new
government, a new economic system, new laws, a new culture, a new way of life would replace the old order.
Raised from his ancient sacrifice of the immense release of energy that the Revolution brought, even the farmer
Ivan would come down from his place on the oven and plunge into a whole new existence. Even human nature
itself would change in accordance with Marxist determinants. On the way to communism, a new psychology
would transform the traditional Russian character's passive and fatalistic patterns of behavior into a dynamic,
optimistic new Soviet human. “(Simmons 1955:3). However, this utopism was increasingly replaced during the
30s and not least during the “Great Patriotic War” of a policy that highlighted the glorious in Russia's history.
Therefore, “a difficulty in estimating the elements of change and continuity in the Soviet Union with reference to
the country's past in the changed Soviet attitude towards the old Russia which was first denied ...” In fact, the
conservative colors of the ancient Russian regime have long since begun to shine through the Soviet Marxist the
fading revolutionary red color of communism ... the earlier tendency to seek the solution of the Soviet mystery in
revolutionary change has increasingly been replaced by explanations based on various aspects of continuity
between the old and the new. “(ibid:4). This was written while the totalitarian model was designed. Simmons,
however, meets the totalitarianists and believes that “although Soviet totalitarianism is often seen as a
continuation of tsarist autocracy, the differences are more fundamental than the similarities” (ibid:5).
liii
“The existing power institutions in the Soviet Union are largely similar to those found in Tsarryland. E.g. the
czar's personal exercise of power has its counterpart in the rule of the party leader (or leaders). In both periods,
the entire authority hierarchy is subordinate and personally responsible to the leader, and even to the leader. the
idea of parallel hierarchies has been transferred. “(Golan 1975:21). Hedlund (2005, and in a shorter version
2006) links Russia's “path dependence”, including the Soviet Union's and the post-communist Russia's, path
dependence to its formation with its “hard prince rule, [which] became the starting point for several centuries of
processes of negative track dependence , here defined as a constant inability to carry out such reforms so that the
country's economic potential could be fully realized. “(Hedlund 2005:73). This meant that even though “there
was a great parallel influence from Marxism-Leninism [in the Soviet Union] we should argue that this influence
was essentially superficial. The core elements of the institutional matrix continued to be track dependent.
“(Ibid:239). Even in post-Soviet Russia, “it is both simple and fascinating to witness how all the key elements of
the Moscow-institutional matrix have been reintroduced [by Putin]. Logically, the greatest importance has been
given to the restoration of autocracy, through the suppression of all ambitions to demand accountability. Coving
the Duma, the mutilation of regional barons and the suppression of all independent media has been part of this
ambition. “(Hedlund 2006:32).
liv
Later, Pipes modified his position that “Totalitarianism can neither be explained by reference to Marxist
doctrine or to Russian history. It was the fruit of their union. “(Pipes 1994:501) and” the Communist regime that
took power in Russia in October 1917 was not a self-effected child of either Western ideology or the Russian
political tradition but a descendant of this union. “ (Pipes 1995:12).
lv
In an article about a political and a social interpretation of the Russian Revolution, Suny presents what the
discussion is about: “The question that has occupied historians since 1917 has been how could the Bolsheviks,
an insignificant minority in February conquer power eight months later?”. The political interpretation states that
it was Lenin and the Bolsheviks who conquered power through their political manipulation, the social

53
interpretation claiming that behind the Bolsheviks there was an increasingly radicalized working class, a ground-
hungry peasant class and a war-torn army. The question, according to Suny, is whether it is possible to combine
a social and a political interpretation of the revolution and bridge the gap between them. Here, he says, one
cannot just assume that “a sense of” class solidarity “was only created from shared experiences, however intense
they were, or the elimination of internal differences, but merely by making sense of the activities that people
devoted themselves to. . Here, the approaches associated with discourse analyzes, with the concept of political
culture, and with ideas of cultural hegemony and resistance cultures can be the necessary link to bring together
structures, experiences and the creation of meaning. “(Suny 1994:174, 179). This, according to a commentator,
is an invitation to both politically oriented historians and social historians “to overcome their respective
weaknesses and to work together towards a superior” postmodern “synthesis of the rival historiographic
directions” (Marot 1995:260).
lvi
So, for example, writes Richard Pipes in his 1994 published Russia under the Bolshevik Regime that he “was
not, in one case, required to revise opinions that [he] had designed on the basis of printed sources and archives in
the West (Pipes 1994:xviii).
lvii
It was when Fitzpatrick1992 met Stephen Cohan in the early 1970s that she was first told that there were
Soviet revisionists, and that “I was one of them” (Fitzpatrick 1992:xii).

54