Barry McLoughlin and Kevin McDermott (eds), Stalin's Terror. High politics and mass repression in the Soviet Union, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pb edition, 2004, xviii & pp256, ISBN 1-4039-3903-9.
Brigitte Studer, Berthold Unfried and Irène Hermann (eds), Parler de soi sous Staline. La construction identitaire dans le communisme des années trente, (Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme), 2002, ppviii & 210, ISBN 2-7351-0947-X.
Brigitte Studer and Heiko Haumann (eds), Stalinistische Subjekte. Invdividuum und System in der Sowjetunion und der Komintern 1929-1953, (Zürich: Chronos), 2006, pp555. ISBN 3-0340-0736-1.
One characteristic of the historical literature on stalinism has been its compartmentalisation; not only on those familiar political and intellectual lines which can be traced across national boundaries, but in more complex ways in which subject matter, academic discipline, language, historiographical formation and ideological persuasion have all played a part. When the 'revisionist' debate broke out among writers on Stalin's Russia in the mid-1980s, an argument of some revisionists was they were claiming for historical scholarship a field hitherto dominated by political scientists. More specifically, the claim advanced was that of social history, either replacing or extending the institutional focus of a more narrowly conceived 'political' history. Though sometimes they cut across them, these disciplinary distinctions could be mapped onto distinct historiographical traditions and wide variations in the political saliency of communist history. Further muddying the canvass were differences of subject matter, for beyond the far from negligible differences that existed between different western communist parties there lay the larger distinction between stalinism as an organised political tendency and stalinism as a system of government and/or terror. Though the interconnections between these stalinisms were everywhere recognised, and often accorded a determining significance, conceptually distinct literatures developed almost without reference to each other. Of the contributors to the initial revisionist debate, only Geoff Eley, a relative outsider to the subject, appears to have engaged simultaneously with the similar historiographical challenges being posed in respect of oppositional communist parties. [ 1 ] Significant contributions to the debate did not come from historians of these parties. The level of cross-fertilisation, even among historians of different national parties, was at best uneven, as was the practice of comparative or collaborative scholarship. Even accounts stressing transnational lines of determination, sometimes perhaps especially these, could nevertheless be documented and constructed almost entirely within a national framework. It is telling that the one major attempt in English to write a history of international communism was produced as part of a project on Soviet Russia - the work, of course, of E H Carr.
In recent years things have been changing fast. Whether to clarify distinctions or underline commonalities, communism's transnational character, or its incomprehensibility without a transnational frame of reference, has given rise to an increasing number of exchanges and collaborations. So, too, despite the persistence of certain older refrains, has an avowed pluri-disciplinarity and the attenuation of partisan anathemas. Introducing the first of the collections under review, Barry McLoughlin and Kevin McDermott characterise describe earlier debates on stalinism as 'cantankerous, and ultimately sterile' and note that the goalposts have now been moved along. Indeed, there is a further related paradox: that a greater sensitivity to national or subnational variations in the movement's character and political dynamic has itself helped stimulate transnational and comparative scholarship, as the inadequacy of reading off assumed general characteristics from any single national case, even perhaps the Russian, becomes widely accepted. The goalposts haven't just moved; the very exercise of simply kicking from one end (e.g. 'centre') to another (e.g. 'periphery') has come to appear simplistic and arcane, like an echo of the 'battles of ideas' with which communism and its early historiographies were so identified.
The collections under review indicate both the advantages of this increasing openness of boundaries and some of the practical and methodological challenges which it poses. All present research of high quality, all are impeccably edited and they can be recommended unreservedly. Stalin's Terror is in many respects the most 'traditional' of the three - though not in any pejorative sense. Edited by two leading English-language authorities on the subject, its primary focus is on the Soviet experience of the terror. Its contributors include both western specialists like David Shearer and Russian historians including Aleksandr Vatlin, who (with Natalia Musienko) provides a micro-level study of the workings of the terror, and Oleg Khlevniuk, who writes on relations between the Soviet party and NKVD. Of special interest to Comintern historians are Fridrickh I. Firsov's discussion of the Comintern's role in the terror, substantially deriving from the now-published diary of Dimitrov, and an English adaptation of some of the themes in Berthold Unfried's chapters on self-criticism in Autobiographies, autocritiques, aveux (see review in CHNN 17) and Parler de soi sous Staline (see below). While the editors broadly uphold an 'intentionalist' perspective on the terror, they also note the contribution of work on 'socio-cultural and ideological themes' including gender, popular culture and the construction of social and national identities. Implicitly, the validity seems to be recognised of a range of methodological perspectives which need not be regarded as mutually exclusive or reducible to a single dominant narrative of stalinism. On the specific debate over the terror, cogently summarised in the same introduction, the editors further suggest that continuing differences of opinion are unlikely to be settled on the basis of 'archival revelations' or the achievement of any simple consensus. That may be compared with Stephen Kotkin's recent observation that perspective and not archives remain determinative and that common archival sources - as in any other field of history - persist in giving rise to very different narratives and interpretations. [ 2 ]
The other two collections may be linked with the Autobiographies, autocritiques, aveux collection, and several themes and contributors feature in more than one of the collections. Deriving from a Paris seminar held in 1999, Parler de soi sous Staline begins with an overview by Brigitte Studer in which she notes the paradox by which the 'totalitarian' system of stalinism, described by Nicholas Werth as a civilisation du rapport, gave rise to a proliferation of narratives of self-representation. Some of these narratives have become accessible since the opening of the archives; others, as Studer notes, were already accessible but largely neglected. The papers which follow comprise four contributions each in French and English, and though they adopt a variety of methodological perspectives they are all more or less kicking towards the same goalposts. Some contributors take up the Foucauldian themes outlined in Studer's introduction and further elaborated by Urs Martin. Claude Pennetier and Bernard Pudal, in their discussion of the PCF's institutional autobiographies of the 1930s, and specifically the 'problematic' ones, hence describe the stalinist subject as a Foucauldian subject, and by extension perhaps an Althusserian one too. Other points of reference include Weber's Sociology of Religion (Klaus-Georg Riegel), while Sheila Fitzpatrick revisits one of the autobiographies reproduced in her co-edited collection In the Shadow of Revolution. Other contributions include Oleg Kharkhordin's on the origins of individualisation in the USSR; Berthold Unfried's aforementioned discussion of self-criticism in the Comintern; and an essay of Jochen Kellbeck's, 'Working, struggling, becoming', which originally appeared in the Russian Review in 2001.
Stalinist Subjects is the largest and the most ambitious of the three collections. For a start it is trilingual, with roughly equal numbers of contributions in German (9), English (8) and French (6), a wide-ranging introduction by the editors in both German and English and English summaries of all chapters. Studer and Haumann describe as one of its objects that of bringing together the fields of Russian history and communist history, hence some three-quarters of the contributions deal primarily with some aspect of Soviet history while the remainder draw on the French, Swiss and Belgian cases and the distinct political milieu that was the Comintern itself. Contributors range from prominent revisionists like Gabor Rittersporn to Nicolas Werth, who wrote on state violence and terror in the anything-but-revisionist Livre noir du communisme. As well as the work of Haumann himself, the collection also features a number of younger Swiss historians previously unknown to me. An introduction by Haumann and Studer provides both historiographical and theoretical bearings, locating the collection in the context of the cultural turn and characterising stalinism as a collective social project in which the mobilisation of identity was central. In subjecting newly accessible sources to a variety of cultural-historical readings, the aim, tentatively expressed, is to help establish new explanatory schemes for stalinism and the 'agents, typology and function' of the stalinist state apparatus (p39).
If the collections confirm the increasingly transnational character of the literature on stalinism, this should not therefore be mistaken for a sort of general historiographical melting-pot in which disparate traditions and perspectives are indiscriminately thrown together. Not only are distinct intellectual traditions and political conjunctures reflected in what remain anything but uniform historiographies. Beyond that, even the forms of interaction between them are not diffuse and interchangeable but represent quite specific lines of development. Already there was discernible within the Siècle des communismes project the coming together of two particularly influential traditions in recent communist historiography. One was a mainly Francophone literature on communist identities, in which influences like Foucault and also Bourdieu combine with strong intellectual traditions of prosopography and political sociology. The other was a mainly Anglophone literature on Soviet communism, the famous 'revisionism' and its offshoots, which provided the majority of contributions in the 'Russian' section of Le siècle des communismes. Stalinist Subjects takes this further, just as Stalin's Terror features a Russian and German scholarship to some extent rooted in the experience of totalitarianism and the need to bear witness to its tragedies as well as make sense of them. Other connections remain to be made. One, as the introduction to Stalinist Subjects points out, is the extension of Russian history into 'Eastern European history'. Another might be the extension of the communist history component into southern Europe, the Nordic countries, Asia or Latin America. For any such projects, these volumes will provide a major stimulus and point of reference.
One approach is what might crudely be described as an Anglo-American approach to communist history, not in the sense of any particularly well-developed transatlantic networks, but through common roots in a Thompsonian tradition of labour and social history. Sometimes, particularly in the States, this literature too has been described as revisionist, and hence implicitly conflated with the Soviet revisionists like Fitzpatrick and Rittersporn. Certainly, the view that non-Russian communist historiography has largely involved 'a traditional history of organisations and parties' (Stalinist Subjects, p40) would be shared neither by revisionists nor their detractors on either side of the Atlantic. Even so, the implications of these revisionisms may vary widely, just because 'stalinism' itself was far from uniform and a characteristic of revisionism has been the recognition of difference. Donald Filtzer's contribution to Stalinist Subjects is in this respect instructive. Invoking Hillel Ticktin's example in support of a class-based analysis of stalinism, Filtzer is concerned that some of his co-contributors imply a consensual basis for stalinism, a position which Filtzer rejects categorically. 'We know that many who embraced the official ideology of the system wound up in conflict with the system precisely because of their internalization of that ideology', he warns. 'We know that people could internalize some aspects of ideology but reject others, both in articulation and in practice.' Within the historiography of western communist parties it is precisely this recognition of conflict within the framework of party loyalty that has been taken as a hallmark of revisionism. Stalinism, as Filtzer puts it, displayed a 'high level of contradiction':
Charged with the actual implementation and execution of regime policy on the ground, [party managers and functionaries] learned that they could achieve this only by reaching various degrees of compromise and accommodation with individual workers and collective farmers. They understood that they could carry out their orders and instructions … only by violating key aspects of those same orders and instructions. They thus subverted the formal policies of the regime in order to ensure the system's institutional coherence, and with this its long-term survival.
Whether or not specifically grounded in class analysis, this emphasis on agency, potential conflict and sheer dysfunctionality has been a crucial element in the historicisation of stalinism, particularly in the case of communist parties lacking effective powers of compulsion over their members or other actors needing to be accommodated. It is a subject crying out for comparative analysis, though this field of scholarship too is only just getting off the ground.
This in turn raises a more fundamental issue. In establishing a bridge between Russian and communist history, the editors of Stalinist Subjects observe (p40) that both 'deal more or less with one and the same subject, "Stalinism", and both have equally profited from the "archival revolution"'. This seems a large assumption. Indeed, I'm not sure that even the latter point is strictly true. Without in any way underestimating the importance of the Comintern archives, through oral sources, defectors' papers and the records of wider networks and movements histories could arguably be written of western communist parties - Theodore Draper's, for example - to which only the fortuitous accessibility of the Smolensk archives offered any real Soviet equivalent. Moreover, such materials continue to become accessible. In Britain, for example, there has begun another archival revolution involving the records of the British secret state, including abundant and intrusive personal files on communists (among others) that might also be worked into a Foucauldian analysis.
Unpoliced interviews, freely deposited archives, wider political networks, competing systems of surveillance - all are symptomatic of a more basic issue concerning the sameness of stalinism. In clarifying the terms 'individual' and 'system' which hold the collection together, Studer and Haumann define the latter as follows:
the specific interlocking configuration, under Stalin, of the organs of power, the state, the party and the secret police, with their cognitive schemata and organisational rules, their administrative apparatus and personnel (p44).
Such a definition is clearly not meant to extend to communist parties in which there was no such configuration with state or secret police, and where adhesion to communism need not exclude other commitments, sometimes of a formative and durable character. Stalinism as a political project no doubt was 'more or less' the same despite these distinctions. In respect of relations between system and individual, on the other hand, it is hard to imagine a distinction of more existential significance - quite literally so, for example, if one compares the fate of 'Old Bolsheviks' in Britain and the USSR. Hence, of course, only natural that the volume's sections on societal mobilisation and experiencing violence should relate exclusively to experiences in Russia, albeit including a sobering account of American victims of the purges that further underlined how densely interconnected these histories were. But as Serge Wolikow points out in his contribution, the interconnections did not preclude significant variations in both form and chronology (p276).
These variations have important implications for the construction of 'stalinist subjects'. Studer and Haumann in their introduction refuse the simplicities of the old totalitarian model and insist that the internalisation of stalinist norms was always negotiated. Precisely because this was the case, wide variations in the terms of such negotiation demand the closest attention. Within the context of Stalin's Russia, for example, Studer points out in Stalinist Subjects that foreigners attracted particular suspicion because they 'possessed a resource Soviet citizens did not: their life and experience were partly beyond the control of the party institution' (p210). Berthold Unfried's essays in the other two collections are especially insightful in respect of the difficulties that western communists had in internalising or even comprehending Soviet norms that violated already internalised 'western' notions of individuality and the private sphere (Stalin's Terror, p175). Beyond these Russian contexts, and for the many stalinists who never experienced them at first hand, these personal resources included not only past lives but future ones too, and hence the ultimate revocability even of what might turn out to be a lifetime's commitment. It would be surprising if stalinist norms themselves were not subtly redefined in the process of negotiation.
If I have a reservation about Stalinist Subjects it is that these distinctions too might have been better documented and theorised and the specific parameters of the subject set out more fully. Though all of the accounts are finely nuanced, the predominant concern is with the working of stalinist norms outwards. The other possible notions of the self to which Unfried refers - and which might involve rival collective identities, such as that of the trade unionist, as well as western ideas of individuality - are not really considered except as obstacles for bolsheviks to overcome, or at least try to. Perhaps the archival revolution itself is ready for its NEP. In a fascinating contribution showing the preoccupation of Belgian communists with party education even during the country's wartime occupation, José Gotovitch is one of the few contributors to make extensive use of non-Russian archival collections. Nevertheless, Gotovitch also notes that how the reading even of previously accessible sources has been transformed by the Moscow archives. While the collections under review eloquently prove the point, one may also wonder whether the very richness of the Comintern archives, especially in respect of biographical materials, may obscure the fact that this is fundamentally an institutional repository in which the organisational logic, political priorities and material resources of the institution are reflected in its character, arrangement and language (in both senses of the word) as well as its disposition over time.
Given the parameters of the project, it is interesting, for example, how few of the contributors draw on oral testimony for the exploration of subjectivities and the construction of identities. Apart from Juliane Furst's account of the Soviet dance craze and some methodological reflections of Heiko Haumann's, the main example is Eva Maeder's contribution on the Siberian communist and former Old Believer, Ivan Petrov. Maeder's account is of particular interest both in showing how Petrov in 1996 simply passed over the two-year forced labour sentence he received in 1937 and in comparing his oral testimony with the party autobiographies he had written in the early 1930s. Struck by the surprising consistency of these accounts on many points, Maeder speculates on how far this might demonstrate the internalisation of the party's norms for the construction of such narratives. Here one may observe how the metaphor of internalisation, even in the process of embracing subjectivity, almost intrinsically suggests the primacy of some external agency or discourse penetrating inwards. If, for the sake of argument, one were to use the oral testimony as the yardstick, such consistencies might suggest the durability of a certain sense of self that had not simply been reshaped according to institutional norms. That again will depend on context. Clearly it has less force in the context of Soviet Russia, where remembering itself was an activity fraught with danger. [ 3 ] The same, of course, could not be said of less powerful and pervasive external agencies like many of the western communist parties. [ 4 ]
The comparison and relativisation of these particular narratives of self therefore raises issues of considerable critical interest. Here I can give only one illustration. Studer's own contribution in Stalinist Subjects is devoted to the stalinist practice of 'techniques of the self' culminating in the purge - as what one French communist described as 'the highest form of self-criticism' - and in the practice of torture as the ultimate logic of 'unmasking' and biographical transparency. It is a brilliant essay in the use of Foucauldian concepts, utterly convincing on its own terms, but leaves the reader unsure as to their scope and application. Studer states that her sources allow the identification of three such techniques of the self within the communist party: the autobiography; the practice of criticism and self-criticism; and the self-report or self-evaluation. These, it might be noted, were not only performative acts but particularly stylised and ritualised ones. They were generated by the institution, then meticulously recorded, filed and preserved by the apparatus, thanks to whom historians of western communist parties spend a good deal longer in Moscow than most of the subjects they are looking at. Just as any diplomatic historian buried in a foreign office archive, the researcher too needs to be careful not to internalise their logic. Even when deployed with such enormous sophistication, the use of sources generated by the single system of stalinism, and the reconstruction of subjectivities in sole relation to that system, may obscure the fact that subjectivities in complex societies are typically - even in the case of communists - constructed in relation to a variety of external agencies or contexts, whether concurrently or over the course of a lifetime. But again, the immediate issue is actually a wider one of our usages of stalinism itself as a concept.
Though a number of contributors touch briefly on these issues, they are most clearly flagged up in Serge Wolikow's triple distinction, not only between the individual and system and the national and international, but between stalinism and stalinisation, with its sense of process. Wolikow's reading of stalinism suggests a clear distinction between the Soviet symbiosis of party/state/society and the national communist parties that were clearly subordinated to this Soviet centre but not merely its epiphenomena. What then are the limits, the subdivisions or the modifiers of this concept of stalinism? The notion of a 'century of communisms', with which Wolikow along with several of the other contributors has been associated, is one explicitly opposed to homogenising narratives or the conception of communism as an international conspiracy. Where, then, does stalinism fit into this picture? Was stalinism one of these communisms? Or are the two concepts interchangeable, at least in the period of Stalin's ascendancy, so that communisms plural need to be plotted over time, not as a modifier of stalinism itself? If the latter is the case, do we then need to think of stalinisms as a plural concept to register these differences of environment if not of intent? Does it refer to a system, more or less closed according to one's interpretation, or is it a set of attributes or qualities that can be found in complex relations with other traditions or discourses, including its possible modification by them? If that no doubt allows the broadest possible usage, then the further danger may need to be recognised of attenuating its moral and political distinctiveness as a closed political system culminating in terror, along with those aspects of communist politics, nationally or internationally, most closely bound up with its functioning or legitimation.
No doubt it is the easy identification of stalinism with a centralised command system and the ascendancy of its begetter that has lent itself to colloquial uses that scarcely go beyond that of a descriptive qualifier. Fitzpatrick for example has described it as 'a convenient term for the new political, economic, and social structures that emerged in the Soviet Union after the great break associated with collectivization and the First Five Year Plan'; or as 'a shorthand for the complex of institutions, structures, and rituals that made up the habitat of Homo Sovieticus in the Stalin era'. [ 5 ] If, on the other hand, stalinism is to be used in a more comparative and analytical way that is relevant to both stalinist and non-stalinist societies, then one must presumably envisage at least as painstaking a discussion of its defining characteristics as has taken place in respect of fascist systems and fascist movements.
In making such observations, I am aware once again of the old conundrum of how far differences in perspective between the historians of different communist parties arise from different historiographical approaches and how far they reflect significant variations in the location and political culture of the parties themselves. In any event, almost the only British communist to figure in any of these volumes is the Lenin School student William Cowe, a former Scottish railwaymen, whom Unfried in Stalin's Terror cites as an example of some students' resistance to Stalinist rules of conspiracy. Unfried rightly links this with the relative legal security enjoyed by communists in Britain. What is also clear from the unpublished autobiography which Cowe wrote many years later is the depth of his socialisation into a labour movement culture as well as Stalinism. His Lenin School rapporteurs saw this, and attributed his dangerous errors to 'strong remnants of petty-bourgeois individualism and traditions of the labour aristocracy'. As Cowe himself put it in his autobiography, he was had on the mat:
for taking the role of a shop steward in a capitalist factory, a trade union representative wanting a negotiated settlement of demands without realising that I was in a Socialist country where the rights of workers or students are the very first safeguards of Socialist management. I was told that I was void of self-criticism and showed I was a victim of social democratic tendencies. It set me thinking. At least it was a natural state to be in coming from and growing up in bourgeois democratic Britain.
Unfried points out that Cowe, despite his 'dangerous counter-revolutionary opinions', was returned to the CPGB's central committee with Harry Pollitt's in 1938. 'What was now emerging', he noted complacently in his autobiography, 'was that it was not so much the fault of the student, as some fault in the running of the School.' Cowe, nevertheless, was also a loyal stalinist and remained one all his life, working for the party and grateful for the education he had received in Moscow. 'Dangerous' opinions were a good deal less dangerous in Britain for all concerned.
There is possibly a large scope here for more comparative work if we are to clarify what it is we are talking about when we refer to stalinism. Nevertheless, this is not intended as a criticism of three outstanding collections. Taken together, Parler de soi sous Staline and Stalinist Subjects in particular represent major collaborative efforts which take the international literature on stalinism into genuinely new areas and raise searching questions about existing approaches. Where so much work on the subject consists of variations on familiar themes, they are likely to provide something of a scholarly landmark.
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Communist History Network Newsletter, Issue 20, Autumn
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