Studies in Russian and East European History and Society Series Editors: R. W. Davies, E. A. Rees, M. ]. Ilic and J. R. Smith at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham Recent titles include: Lynne Attwood CREATING THE NEW SOVIET WOMAN John Barber and Mark Harrison (editors) THE SOVIET DEFENCE-INDUSTRY COMPLEX FROM STALIN TO KHRUSHCHEV Vincent Barnett KONDRATIEV AND THE DYNAMICS OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT R. W. Davies SOVIET HISTORY IN THE YELTSIN ERA Linda Edmondson (editor) GENDER IN RUSSIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE James Hughes STALINISM IN A RUSSIAN PROVINCE Melanie Ilic WOMEN WORKERS IN THE SOVIET INTERWAR ECONOMY WOMEN IN THE STALIN ERA (editor) Peter Kirkow RUSSIA'S PROVINCES Maureen Perrie THE CULT OF IVAN THE TERRIBLE IN STALIN'S RUSSIA E. A. Rees (editor) DECISION-MAKING IN THE STALINIST COMMAND ECONOMY Lennart Samuelson PLANS FOR STALIN'S WAR MACHINE Tukhachevskii and Military-Economic Planning, 1925-1941 Vera Tolz RUSSIAN ACADEMICIANS AND THE REVOLUTION J. N. Westwood SOVIET RAILWAYS TO RUSSIAN RAILWAYS Stephen G. Wheatcroft (editor) CHALLENGING TRADITIONAL VIEWS OF RUSSIAN HISTORY Galina M. Yemelianova RUSSIA AND ISLAM A Historical Survey Studies in Russian and East European History and Society Series Standing Order ISBN 0-333-71239-0 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England Challenging Traditional Views of Russian History
Edited by
Stephen G. Wheatcroft Associate Professor in Russian and Soviet History, University of Melbourne
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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Challenging traditional views of Russian history I edited by Stephen G. Wheatcroft. p. cm. - (Studies in Russian and East European history and society) lncludes bibliographical references and index.
1. Russia- Historiography. 2. Soviet Union- Historiography. 3. Russia (Federation)- Historiography. I. Wheatcroft, S. G. II. Series. DK38 .C38 2002 947'.007'2- dc21 2001059829
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 11 10 09 08 07 06 OS 04 03 02
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne Contents
List of Figures viii
List of Tables ix
List of Abbreviations xi
Notes on the Contributors xiii
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction xvii
PART I: THE PRE-REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD 1 1 The Kaghanate of the Rus': Non-Slavic Sources of Russian Statehood 3 David Christian 1.1 The background: peasant migrations, Khazar power and expanding trade 4 1.2 Volga Bulgaria 13 1.3 The Kaghanate of the Rus' 14 1.4 The turn to the Dnieper 19 1.5 Conclusions 21
2 The Crisis of the Late Tsarist Penal System 27 Stephen G. Wheatcroft 2.1 Developments in the Russian prison system in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in comparison with the West 29 2.2 Detailed materials from the annual reports of the Tsarist Prison Administration from the 1880s to 1905: the years of imprisonment 33 2.3 Changes in prison developments, 1906-14 39 2.4 Conclusion 42
3 The Russian Army and American Industry, 1915-17: Globalisation and the Transfer of Technology 55 Frederick R. Zuckerman
v vi Contents
PART II: THE STALIN PERIOD 67 4 The Soviet Famine of 1932-33 and the Crisis in Agriculture 69 R. W. Davies and S. G. Wheatcroft 4.1 The grain harvest 69 4.2 Why was grain production so low in 1931 and 1932? 71 4.3 The grain crisis of 1932-33 78 4.4 Changes in the grain balance 87 4.5 Conclusion 88 S Patronage and the Intelligentsia in Stalin's Russia 92 Sheila Fitzpatrick 5.1 Who were the patrons? 94 5.2 What could the patrons do for their clients? 97 5.3 How to acquire a patron 98 5.4 Brokers 99 5.5 How to write to a patron 100 5.6 The human factor: affective ties between patrons and clients 101 5.7 Hierarchies of patronage 103 5.8 Perils and pleasures of patronage 104 6 Towards Explaining the Changing Levels of Stalinist Repression in the 1930s: Mass Killings 112 S. G. Wheatcroft 6.1 Stalinist mass killings in perspective 113 6.2 The 1930-31 wave of mass killings, and why the killings were drastically reduced in July 1931 114 6.3 The reduction in mass killings from the second half of 1931 to 1936 123 6.4 The Ezhovshchina and the resumption of mass killings, 1937-38 129 6.5 Conclusions 138 7 The Great Terror: Leningrad- a Quantitative Analysis 147 Melanie !lie 7.1 The purges: historiographical debates 147 7.2 Sources 149 7.3 Methodology 150 7.4 Sex ratios 150 7.5 Age profile 151 7.6 Residency 151 7.7 Communist Party membership 152 7.8 Nationality 154 Contents vii
7.9 Social composition 154 7.10 Dates of arrests, trials and executions 157 7.11 Number of days between arrest and trial, trial and execution 161 7.12 State organisation responsible for conducting trials 162 7.13 Statute Code 163 7.14 Women 166 7.15 Family ties 166 7.16 Conclusions 167
PART III: THE POST-STALIN PERIOD 171 8 The Dissident Roots of Glasnost 173 Robert Horvath 8.1 Leninist sources of Gorbachev's glasnost 175 8.2 The demand for glasnost 176 8.3 The weapon of glasnost 182 8.4 The practice of glasnost 185 8.5 Official glasnost versus dissident glasnost 189 9 Rethinking Yermolov's Legacy: New Patriotic Narratives of Russia's Engagement with Chechnya 203 Julie Elkner 9.1 Seeing the Chechen through Yermolov's eyes 207 9.2 Yermolov's tragedy 209 9.3 Punishing civilians 210 9.4 Conclusion 212 10 Stalinism and the Fall of the Soviet Union 217 Graeme Gill 10.1 The emergence of the Stalinist power structure 218 10.2 Reform of the power structure? 225 10.3 The collapse of the power structure? 230
Name index 235
Subject index 240 List of Maps and Figures
Maps 1.1 The Khaganate of the Rus' 5 1.2 The Khazar empire, 630-965 8
Figures 2.1 Russian crude death rates per thousand population: civil adjusted and prisoner, 1885-1906 38 2.2 Russian crude death rates per thousand population: civil adjusted and prisoner, 1906-15 41
viii List of Tables
2.1 Russian and British execution rates per million population 30 2.2 The scale of Russian exile in comparison with British exile to America and Australia: average per year and estimates of transportation mortality rates 31 2.3 Annual migration beyond the Urals in thousands 32 2.4 Death sentences and executions per year, 1876-1913: various sources 40 2.5 Russian prisoners according to institution 45 2.6 Russian prisoners according to category within institution 46 2. 7 Russian prisoners according to time spent within each category in year equivalents each year 48 2.8 Russian prison mortality for different categories of prisoners: Crude Death Rate per thousand population SO 4.1 Grain production, 1909-13-1933: alternative series (million tons) 72 4.2 Grain collections (zagotovki), 1931-32 and 1932-33 (thousand tons) 79 4.3 State grain collections, agricultural year July 1932-June 1933: peasant sector (kolkhozy plus individual peasants) (thousand tons) 80 4.4 State grain resources and allocation, 1931-32 and 1932-33 (thousand tons) 85 6.1 Comparative international data on death sentences and executions 114 6.2 Main periods of upsurge of repression as indicated by death sentences in Russia and the USSR 115 6.3 Cases prosecuted by the security agencies, 1926-32: all cases and especially those with death sentences, for USSR, Moscow, Tomsk and Altai 118 6.4 Death sentences 1930-36 prosecuted by the security agencies: All-USSR, Moscow and other regions 125 6.5 Death sentences, 1936-39 prosecuted by security agencies: All-USSR, Moscow and other regions 130 6.6 The growth in numbers of prisoners in Western Siberian prisons (excluding camps) and in the USSR as a whole 135 6. 7 Available figures on initial limits and increases in limits for NKVD operation 00447 138 7.1 Age profile, in percentage terms, of Leningrad adult population (1939) and victims of the purges (1937) 152
ix x List of Tables
7.2 Residency of purge victims: Leningrad 1937 (selected sample) 153 7.3 Nationality, in percentage terms, of All-Union, RSFSR and Leningrad populations (1939) and victims of the purges (1937) 155 7.4 Social composition of Leningrad population (1939) and victims of the purges (1937) 157 7.5 Dates of arrests, trials and executions: Leningrad 1937 158 7.6 Number of days between arrest and trials: Leningrad 1937 161 7.7 Number of days between trial and execution: Leningrad 1937 162 7.8 Statute Code used in purge trials: Leningrad 1937 164 List of Abbreviations
AKhRR Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia APRF Archive of the President of the Russian Federation ASSR Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic ChK Cheka (the Soviet security agencies, 1917-22) GARF State Archive of the Russian Federation GAU Main Artillery Administration GPU State Political Administration (the Soviet security agencies, 1922-23) Gosfond State Reserves HIA Hoover Institution Archives Komzag Committee on Grain Collections KPK Committee of Party Control LO Leningrad oblast' LOKAF Literary Association of the Red Army and Navy LVO Leningrad Military District MTM Machine-Tractor Workshop/s MTS Machine-Tractor Station/s Narkompros People's Commissariat of Enlightenment Narkomsnab People's Commissariat for [Food] Supply (also NKSnab) Narkomzem People's Commissariat for Agriculture (also NKZem) Nepfond Untouchable Fund NKRKI/TsKK People's Commissariat of Worker-Peasant Inspectorate [of State Agencies]/Central Control Commission [of Party Agencies] NKSnab People's Commissariat for [Food] Supply NKVD People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (also Soviet security agencies, 1934-46) NKZem People's Commissariat for Agriculture obkom Oblast'-level [Party] Committee OGPU Combined State Political Administration (the Soviet security agencies, 1923-34) okruzhkom Okrug-level [Party] Committee Orgburo Organisational Bureau of the Central Committee of the Party oso Special Boards [of the Soviet security agencies] RAPP Russian Association of Proletarian Writers RGAE Russian State Archives of the Economy RGASPI Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (former Party archives)
xi xii List of Abbreviations
RSFSR Russian Soviet Federated Soviet Socialist Republic RTsKhiDNI Russian Centre for the Deposition and Documentation of Recent History (former Party archive, now known as RGASPI) sou Secret Operations Department (of Soviet security agencies) Sovnarkom Council of People's Commissars SSSR USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) TsDAGOU Former Party archives in Ukraine TsGAIPD Central State Archives of Historical and Political Documen• tation in St Petersburg TsiK Central Executive Committee [of a soviet] TsK Central [Party] Committee TsKK Central [Party] Control Commission TsSU Central Statistical Administration TsUNKhU Central Department of National Economic Accounts (for• merly known as Central Statistical Administration) UNKVD Department of People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs at separate administrative levels VChK All-Union Cheka (see also 'ChK') VSNKh Supreme Council of the National Economy Notes on the Contributors
David Christian, formerly of Macquarie University, Sydney, is now at San Diego State University. He is author of A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia, val. 1: Inner Eurasia from Prehistory to the Mongol Empire (1998); Imperial and Soviet Russia: Power Privilege and the Challenge of Modernity (1997); Living Water: Vodka and Russian Society on the Eve of Emancipation (1990); Bread and Salt: a Social and Economic History ofFood and Drink in Russia (with R. E. F. Smith) (1984). He is working on the second volume of his A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia.
R. W. Davies is Professor Emeritus, Centre for Russian and East European Studies, Birmingham University, sometime Visiting Professorial Fellow, the University of Melbourne. Author of The Industrialization of Soviet Russia, 1929-1937 (four volumes have so far appeared; another two volumes are planned) (1980-96); The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913-1945 (editor with M. Harrison and S. G. Wheatcroft) (1994); Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution (1989); Soviet History in the Yeltsin Era (1997); and many more. Currently completing volumes 5 and 6 of The Indus• trialization of Soviet Russia, of which volume 5 will be jointly written with S. G. Wheatcroft, and volume 6 with Oleg Khlevnyuk and S. G. Wheatcroft.
Julie Elkner completed her Master's degree at the University of Melbourne on the Committees of Soldiers' Mothers, and is currently working on the mythology of the Cheka.
Sheila Fitzpatrick of Chicago University is sometime Visiting Professorial Fellow, the University of Melbourne. Author of Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (1999); Accusatory Prac• tices: Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789-1989 (editor with R. Gellately) (1997); Stalin's Peasants: Resistance & Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (1994); The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolu• tionary Russia; Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921-1934 (1979); Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931 (editor) (1978), and more. Currently working on post-war Stalinism.
Graeme Gill, Sydney University. Author of The Dynamics ofDemocratization: Elites, Civil Society, and the Transition Process (2000), Power in the Party: the Organization of Power and Central Republican Relations in the CPSU (with R. Pitty) (1997); The Collapse of a Single Party System: the Disintegration of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1995); Twentieth Century Russia: the
xiii xiv Notes on the Contributors
Search for Power and Authority (1994); The Origins of the Stalinist Political System (1990); Stalinism (1990); Peasants and Government in the Soviet Revolution (1979) and more. Currently working on post-Soviet politics.
Robert Horvath is lecturer and Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, where he recently completed his PhD thesis on 'The Significance of the Dissident Movement in Russia'. Author of 'The Specter of Russophobia', in The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, 25, no. 2 (1998).
Melanie Ilic is senior lecturer at the University of Gloucestershire Higher Education, and Research Fellow at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, Birmingham University. Author of Women Workers in the Soviet Interwar Economy: from 'Protection' to Equality (1999), and Women in the Stalin Era (2001).
S. G. Wheatcroft, University of Melbourne. Author of Materials to the Balance of the Soviet National Economy, 1928-1930 (editor with R. W. Davies) (1985); and The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913-1945 (editor with R. W. Davies and M. Harrison) (1994); currently completing with R. W. Davies, vol. 5 of The Industrialization of Soviet Russia: the Years of Hunger, 1931-33.
Frederick R. Zuckerman, University of Adelaide. Author of The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society, 1880-1917 (1996). Currently working on technological transfers between Russia and the USA. Acknowledgements
This book owes its origins to a series of conferences which we were able to organize at the University of Melbourne under the aegis of the Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies (now part of the Contemporary Europe Research Centre). We are grateful to the Victorian Education Foundation, the Australian Research Council and the University of Melbourne for supporting the Centre in this and other ventures. We are also grateful to the History Department of the University of Melbourne for their ongoing support in this area. Within Australia we have a quite remarkable collection of scholars on Russian and Soviet History who give tremendous support for developments in this area. Professor T. H. Rigby, the Dean of Soviet Studies in Australia, has always attended our conferences and been a wonderfully inspiring figure. Several of the chapters in this volume develop themes that Harry pioneered. Graeme Gill, Steven Fortescue, David Christian, Rick Zuckerman, Adrian Jones, Roger Markwick, David Lockwood and Leslie Holmes have also been constant in their support and advice. We will greatly miss David now that he has moved on to America. But it was the regular visits of the tower• ing figures of Sheila Fitzpatrick and Bob Davies that turned our local gatherings into something that we could argue was of some international significance. Sheila is of course a local and it is only fitting that her home university should wish to develop an ongoing association with the leading social historian of Stalinism in the world. Bob Davies, the leading economic historian of the Stalin period and a great authority on Soviet decision• making and Soviet history in general, has also been a regular visitor, and we hope will long continue to be so. We are grateful to the university for sup• porting his visits. My former students Robert Horvath, Julie Elkner and Emma Gilligan have provided great assistance in the production of this book, including two extremely fine chapters. Julie deserves particular acknowledgement for combining her academic skills with the administrative skills of running the Centre and her wonderful editorial and proof-reading skills. I am grateful to Emma for her assistance in indexing the volume. Yuri Tsygunov provided assistance in data processing. Bob Davies, Melanie Ilic and Jeremy Smith at Birmingham have all been helpful in providing advice about the volume. And I am greatly indebted to Nick Brock, Luciana O'Flaherty and other members of the Palgrave production team for making the production task so easy. It would be impossible to provide an adequate statement of the great support that western scholars receive from their Russian and other FSU
XV xvi Acknowledgements colleagues. But I would like to single out Professor Viktor Danilov, who has been a great friend and inspiration for decades, and Professor Oleg Khlevnyuk of a younger generation, but to whom so many of us are greatly indebted. It is also my pleasure to record the assistance that we have all received from Russian and, in my case, Ukrainian archivists. Elena Turina of RGAE, Larissa Rogovaya of RGASPI and Dina Nokhotovich of GARF have all been particularly helpful. We acknowledge the permission granted by Professor Manfred Hildermeir and Georg Kalmer from Historischen Kollegs, for permission to repro• duce the article by Sheila Fitzpatrick which is based on her article 'Intelli• gentsia and Power: Client--Patron Relations in Stalin's Russia' in Manfred Hildermeir, Hg. "Stalinismus vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Neue Wege der Forschung", R. Oldenbourg Verlag Munchen 1998. Sarah Bennett of Carfax has granted permission for us to reproduce the article by Melanie Ilic, from Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 52, no. 8, December 2000, pp. 1515-1534. See also http://www.tandfco.uk. Finally Graeme Gill's paper appeared in a slightly different form in Rosenfeldt, Jensen and Kulavig (eds), Mechanisms of Power in the Soviet Union (Macmillan, 2000) and we are grateful to Palgrave Macmillan for allowing us to use this material here.
STEPHEN G. WHEATCROFT Introduction
In times of remarkable change, when empires fall and their secret archives become accessible for the first time, it would be remarkable indeed if there were no radical challenges to the traditional view of history. But the Soviet case is not that simple, for several reasons. Quite apart from the question of the accessibility of hitherto unavailable material, the fall of Soviet Com• munism has also resulted in a series of swings in popular attitudes regard• ing Soviet history. In addition, there has also been a separate significant shift in academic opinion, which has coincided with the emergence of another generation of young scholars. 1 While the emergence of new schools and cohorts is not, of course, a bad thing in itself, it would be regrettable if this were to lead to a failure to engage with and actively challenge the work of others. It seems ironic that at a time when masses of new and important social scientific materials are becoming available, there are relatively few historians in Russia or the West who are interested in looking at these new materials and using them to challenge the traditional views of the past. In Russia, the ongoing economic crisis is seriously undermining the historical research capability of the distinguished universities and institutes that Russia still possesses. How much longer Russia will be able to support a first-world academic community on a weak economic base is unclear. Work on Russian history will naturally be led by Russian scholars, but it is a tragedy for all of us that the Russian economy is in such a parlous state that it is difficult for many Russian scholars to devote themselves seriously to academic work. Nevertheless, the contribution of such major Russian scholars as Viktor Danilov, Oleg Khlevnyuk, and Nikita Petrov has been enormous, in opening up new areas, and the work of numerous historians working out of local voluntary historical associations across Russia promises to be even more important in the future. It is to be hoped that the archives will be able to maintain and extend the great services that they have continued to provide, despite the extremely difficult circumstances in which they are working. In the West, some major established scholars seem to be suggesting that the archives are not telling us anything new, and that the records they contain are probably distorted in any case.2 This attitude has unfortunately become fairly widely accepted amongst non-specialists, and even amongst some specialists. At the same time, at least one leading figure in the younger generation of cultural historians has effectively dismissed the previous work of social historians as unworthy of serious consideration and as preoccupied with irrelevant issues which are no longer of interest.3
xvii xviii Introduction
The current collection is made up of articles which do engage with pre• vious scholarship in the area, and which offer challenging new under• standings of some of the most important questions in Russian and Soviet history. It is based on a conference on 'New Work in Russian and Soviet History' held at the University of Melbourne, supplemented by some additional essays with a view to broadening the scope. Julie Elkner pro• vided assistance in preparing the essays for publication, which is gratefully acknowledged. The volume contains ten chapters which fall into three groups. The first three are devoted to the pre-revolutionary period; the next four to the Stalin period; and the last three to the post-Stalin period. All the chapters challenge traditional views in their area, but in different ways. The challenges offered by all the chapters in Part II and by Zuckerman's chapter in Part I are all based on significant archival work on materials previously unavail• able for study. The challenges from the other chapters are largely based on offering new approaches. The first of the three pre-revolutionary essays is David Christian's chapter on 'The Kaghanate of the Rus", which traces the non-Slavic, non-western roots of the Russian state. This provides a striking challenge to the con• ventional view that minimises the influence of non-western factors on early Russian development, before the period of Mongol rule. Stephen Wheatcroft's contribution on the tsarist prison system draws attention to a remarkable deterioration in the prison system in the last years of the empire following the 1905 Revolution. It argues that the reforms of the earlier period were not sustained in the late years of tsarism, and that there was a major deterioration in the penal system at this time. While Wheatcroft is using materials that were previously known, his challenge is based on a far more comprehensive analysis of the materials of the tsarist prison adminis• tration than has previously been carried out. This is an analysis requiring the abstraction and compilation of large amounts of statistical material from the separate annual reports, which would have been impossible before the availability of computers. Rick Zuckerman's chapter on 'The Russian Army and American Industry, 1915-1917: The Transfer of Technology' challenges the established view of Russian technological and administrative inferiority. Readers will be surprised to see that Zuckerman is discussing the transfer of Russian technology to America, and not vice versa. Faced with large Russian armaments orders during the First World War, the Americans had the mass production capacity to satisfy the order - but they failed the surprisingly high Russian quality requirements. Zuckerman uses Russian and American archival materials to argue that it was the transfer of Russian technology and management to America that enabled the American armaments industry to combine mass production with high quality production in the armaments industry. There are four chapters that are devoted exclusively to the Stalinist period. All of these are based on significant archival research on materials that were Introduction xix formerly unavailable, and deal with topics that were previously unresearch• able in the USSR. These cover the famine of 1931-33; the relations between the cultural and political elites; the nature and chronology of the most extreme aspect of mass repression; and an analysis of the social composi• tion of the victims of this repression. The contribution by R. W. Davies and S. G. Wheatcroft covers both the political and the socioeconomic background to the major social crisis of the Stalin period: the 1931-33 famine. It traces the complex causation of agri• cultural crises over a number of years and challenges the conventional view that presumed that human motivation was the exclusively important factor. The chapter also considers the response of the Soviet government to this tragedy, based on Politburo archival sources, rather than the very restricted published documents. The picture that emerges is very different to the tra• ditional view. The Soviet authorities were indeed ruthless in their responses to the famine, but it is incorrect to suggest that they provoked the famine or failed to take any steps to try to ameliorate its effect. In chapter 5, Sheila Fitzpatrick considers elite cultural relationships in Stalin's Russia and the way that cultural patronage worked. She reveals a complex and subtle world of interrelationships, which challenges the con• ventional views of the atomisation of Stalinist society. Stalinist patronage is seen to have many similarities with the traditional patronage of Russian elites in the time of Catherine the Great, but with two distinguishing fea• tures: greater insecurity, and the chronic short supply of goods and services in Stalin's Russia. Stephen Wheatcroft's chapter on mass killings in the Stalinist period attempts to move closer to an explanation of the nature of mass executions, by examining their intensity, chronology and the mechanism through which they developed in 1930, were reduced in 1931, and then rose to unprecedented levels from July 1937 to mid-1938. This chapter is based on both archival research and an analysis of the large amount of materials being supplied by local historical groups within Russia. Melanie Hie's essay (chapter 7) carries the analysis of the victims of the purge further, via a detailed survey of the lists of victims of the first three months of the Ezhovshchina in Leningrad, August- October 1937. The final three essays cover the later post-Stalinist period. Their challenges to traditional views are based more on their new approaches than on their use of newly released archival sources. Robert Horvath offers a reconsidera• tion of the dissident roots of glasnost, in which he challenges the margin• alisation of the dissident role in Sovietological accounts of the origins of the collapse of Communism and the creation of democratic institutions in Russia. Julie Elkner returns us to the question of the construction of nationalism that was raised by David Christian in the first chapter, when she looks at new 'patriotic' rewrites of the nineteenth-century war in the Caucasus which have emerged in the course of the more recent conflicts in Chechnya. This chapter differs from the others in that it is not itself a xx Introduction challenge to traditional views of history, but rather an account of how the Russian 'patriotic press' is challenging previous accounts of the history of the Russian military presence in Chechnya, as part of its construction of a new patriotic historical consciousness in Russia. Finally, Graeme Gill traces the tensions between the personalist principle and organisational norms in the Soviet power structure from the late 1930s to the collapse of Soviet Com• munism. He sees the great reliance on the personalist principle as an indi• cator of the weak nature of infrastructural power, which under Stalin was supported by terror (the continuing use of extraordinary measures), popular enthusiasm, and Stalin's personal dominance. While Khrushchev removed the worst aspects of the terror, and claimed to reject the personality cult, his own style of personalist rule failed to allow organisational norms to become embodied in infrastructural power. Brezhnev was less arbitrary in his personalist policy, but he allowed local power structures to build up their own corrupt personalist 'family' relations, rather than strengthen a real infrastructure of power. By the time that Gorbachev attempted to carry out radical reform aimed at providing a firmer basis for infrastructural power, it was too late. The country was facing enormous economic problems which had been ignored since Brezhnev's day, and the remaining elements of personalist rule eventually moved to stop the reform in a coup, which unwittingly destroyed the system that they were trying to preserve. Graeme Gill's account challenges the traditional view of the excessive strength of the Stalinist political system. This is a story of a weak political system that over a period of seventy years failed to acquire an infrastructure of power that was independent of personalist features, that is, it is the failure to develop a non-personalised political tradition that is seen as the basis for the collapse of the Soviet state.
Notes
1. Sheila Fitzpatrick diagnoses this development in her recent collection of new writings on Stalinism: In this same period, Russian historians in the United States and Europe, like their counterparts in other fields of history, were experiencing a shift away from social history, dominant in the 1960s and 1970s, towards a new cultural history. This was accompanied by a growing interest in cultural and social theory that in the 1990s pulled the historical profession away from the social sciences and towards the humanities ... Of course there are disciplinary imperatives at work here: political and economic history are out of fashion, and most of the liveli• est minds of the younger generation are drawn to socio-cultural issues. (Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Stalinism: New Directions (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 1, 3) 2. In the introduction to the final part of his trilogy on the Russian Revolution Richard Pipes wrote that 'in the last stages of writing' he was given access to what Introduction xxi
had been the Central Party Archives in Moscow, and that this enabled him to 'modify and amplify certain parts of [his] narrative'. However, he was emphatic that 'not in a single instance did it compel me to revise views which I had formed on the basis of printed sources and archives located in the West'. And he went on to say that: 'This gives me a certain degree of confidence that no new and startling information from other, still secret, archival repositories ... is likely to invalidate my account'; R. Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 1919-1924 (1994), p. xviii. In The Great Terror: a Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), Conquest claims that the new materials from the Soviet archives have 'clarified and added' to 'certain historical points', but that otherwise they have only 'confirmed' 'the nature of the Terror' (p. 485). Conquest correctly argues that his 'calculations and considerations [of casualty figures] in The Great Terror, have been made superfluous by Soviet figures given in 1987-1989' (p. 485). However, he continues to use them and to claim incorrectly that they have been 'confirmed' by later official and unofficial testimonies. When challenged further on this by Getty and Rittersporn in American Historical Review and by myself in Europe-Asia Studies he has continued to adhere to his old figures and to deny that the archival materials can be trusted. See R. Conquest, 'Letter to the Editor', American Histori• cal Review (June 1994) 1039, and the response from Getty and Rittersporn in the same issue; and R. Conquest, 'Victims of Stalinism: a Comment', Europe-Asia Studies, 49, no. 7 (1997) 1317-19, and his 'Comment of Wheatcroft', Europe-Asia Studies, 51, no. 8 (1999) 1479-83; and responses by S. G. Wheatcroft, 'Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet Secret Police: the Comparability and Reliability of the Archival Data- Not the Last Word', in Europe-Asia Studies, 51, no. 2 (1999) 315-45, and 'The Scale and Nature of Stalinist Repression and its Demographic Signifi• cance: On Comments by Keep and Conquest', Europe-Asia Studies, 52, no. 6 (2000) 1143-59. 3. Stephen Kotkin recently criticised the earlier generation of social historians for not being interested in the things that interest him, and for being absorbed with controversies over the number of Stalin's victims:
Rather than fostering a discussion of language, popular psychology, modes of political practice, the role of the individual will in history, the dynamics of interagency rivalries, the ambitions of subordinates, and the significance of having or not having explicit instructions, this incognizant intentionalist and functionalist debate on Stalinism became absorbed with controversies over the number of victims and the size of the Gulag population. (S. Kotkin, '1991 and the Russian Revolution: Sources, Conceptual Categories, Analytical Frame• works', Journal of Modern History, 70 (June 1998) 414)
Earlier Kotkin had described the social historical debates as having degenerated 'into a campaign for lower-end Gulag statistics' (ibid., 386, n. 5), and of aiming 'to diminish the scope and significance of the terror' (S. Kotkin, Magnetic Moun• tain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1995), p. 285). Leaving aside the misleading and reductionist claims in these statements, the strangest aspect of Kotkin's criticism is his assump• tion that he can identify with certainty what is an exaggeration or diminution of the scale and the significance of repression and terror, and his apparent disincli• nation to interrogate the basis for his knowledge of this topic.