Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

societies and the resulting “black-and-white” dichotomy between
“free world vs. totalitarianism” characteristic of Cold War political
discourses. In this context, a new generation of social historians rejected
simplified accounts of the Soviet society as being made up
solely of the ruling communist elite and the working people or, in
moral terms, of “victims” and “victimizers,” with no intermediary social
strata or interest groups in-between. In an attempt to “bring
the society back in,” in their study of communist regimes the new
“revisionist” historians focused on the Stalinist “revolution” as a
form of forced social mobility induced “from below” as well as “from
above,” and emphasized the complexity of the social structure in
communist societies and the possibility of autonomous action by
various social or professional groups. 38 Methodologically, they promoted
an “interest group approach” and an “institutional pluralist
model” which they found more suitable to analyzing post-Stalinist
communist societies than the “directed-society model” characteristic
of the totalitarian approach they openly rejected. 39
In the 1980s and 1990, the totalitarian approach was further challenged
by a new generation of anthropologists and cultural historians
who conducted fieldwork in the Soviet-dominated Eastern
Europe. 40 Informed by original primary research, the new generation
of researchers refuted the idea of a monolithic and almighty totalitarian
state, based on the omnipotence of party and state agents
and the complete dependence of the local on central agencies.
38 For the new revisionist trend, see Ronald Grigor Suny, “Revision and Retreat
in the Historiography of 1917: Social History and Its Critics,” Russian Review,
53 (1994) 2, 165-182; Stephen F. Cohen, “Stalin’s Terror As Social
History,” Russian Review, 45 (1986) 4, 375-384; William Case, “Social History
and the Revisionism of the Stalinist Era,” Russian Review, 46 (1987) 4,
382-385.
39 See H. Gordon Skilling, “Interest Groups and Communist Politics,” World
Politics, 18 (1966), 435-451; H. Gordon Skilling and Franklyn Griffiths, Interest
Groups in Soviet Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971);
and H. Gordon Skilling, “Interest Groups and Communist Politics Revisited,”
World Politics, 36 (1983) 1, 1-27.
40 For the political implications of field research in communist societies, see
Steven L. Sampson and David A. Kideckel, “Anthropologists Going into the
Cold: Research in the Age of Mutually Assured Destruction,” in Paul Turner and
David Pitt Hadley, eds., The Anthropology of War and Peace (Hadley, Massachusetts:
Bergin and Garvery, 1989), 160–173.
141 Constantin Iordachi