The Russian Revolution Read Free

some dissident Soviet scholars started to reach Western audiences in the 1970s, Western scholarly work on the Russian Revolution was still treated as `bourgeois falsification' and effectively banned from the USSR (though some works, including Robert Conquest's The Great Terror circulated clandestinely along with Solzhenitsyn's Gulag). All the same, conditions had improved for Western scholars. They were now able to conduct research in the Soviet Union, albeit with limited and strictly controlled access to archives, whereas in earlier times conditions had been so difficult that many Western Soviet scholars never visited the Soviet Union at all, and others were summarily expelled as spies or subjected to various kinds of harassment. As access to archives and primary sources in the Soviet Union improved in the late 197os and t98os, increasing numbers of young Western historians chose to study the Russian Revolution and its aftermath; and history, especially social history, started to displace political science as the dominant discipline in American Sovietology.
    A new chapter in the scholarship began in the early 199os, when most restrictions on access to archives in Russia were lifted and the first works drawing on previously classified Soviet documents began to appear. With the passing of the cold war, the field of Soviet history became less politicized in the West, to its great advantage. Russian and other post-Soviet historians were no longer isolated from their Western counterparts, and the old distinctions between `Soviet', `emigre', and `Western' scholarship largely vanished: among the scholars whose work had most influence in Russia and outside were the Moscow-based `Russian' (actually, Ukrainianborn) Oleg Khlevnyuk, a pioneer in archive-based study of the Politburo, and Yuri Slezkine, a Moscow-born former emigre, resident in the United States since the 198os, whose Jewish Century offered a major reinterpretation of the place of Jews in the Revolution and the Soviet intelligentsia.
    New archive-based biographies of Lenin and Stalin appeared, and topics like Gulag and popular resistance, previously inaccessible to archival work, attracted many historians. Responding to the break-up of the Soviet Union and the emergence of independent states on the basis of the old Union republics, scholars like Ronald Suny and Terry Martin developed Soviet nationalities as a historical field. Regional studies flourished, including Stephen Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain on Magnitogorsk in the Urals, which argued for the emergence in the 1930s of a distinctive Soviet culture ('Stalinist civilization') that was implicitly the product of the Revolution. Social historians discovered a wealth of ordinary citizens' letters to authority (complaints, denunciations, appeals) in the archives, contributing to a rapidly development of scholarship on everyday life that has much in common with historical anthropology. In contrast to the 198os (and reflecting general developments within the historical profession), the current generation of young historians has been drawn as much to cultural and intellectual history as social, using diaries and autobiographies to illuminate the subjective and individual side of Soviet experience.
    Interpreting the revolution
    All revolutions have liberte, egalite, fraternite, and other noble slogans inscribed on their banners. All revolutionaries are enthusiasts, zealots; all are utopians, with dreams of creating a new world in which the injustice, corruption, and apathy of the old world are banished forever. They are intolerant of disagreement; incapable of compromise; mesmerized by big, distant goals; violent, suspicious, and destructive. Revolutionaries are unrealistic and inexperienced in government; their institutions and procedures are extemporized. They have the intoxicating illusion of personifying the will of the people, which means they assume the people is monolithic. They are Manicheans, dividing the world into two