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

They also criticized “revisionist” historians for their tendency to “normalize”
the working of the Soviet system, by explaining its stability
solely in terms of a social pact between the ruling elite and lower
strata of the society interested in new opportunities for social
mobility provided by the regime. Cultural historians and anthropologists
attempted instead to “bring the ideology back in,” by using
new theories and methods—such as oral history—for studying discourses,
political languages, and ritual practices in their original
environment. Informed by this direct and unmediated access to
sources, anthropologists and cultural historians were thus able to
uncover multiple forms of legitimization of power, mass mobilization,
and consensus-building in communist societies, underscoring,
for example, the capacity of the official utopian-ideological
discourses to politically activate the population and instil allegiance
to the regime, resulting in novel forms of “participatory totalitarianism.”
41 In the long run, cultural historians and anthropologists
advanced new interdisciplinary perspectives on the complexities of
communist societies but without going as far as to de-ideologise
them.
The end of the Cold War stimulated comparative studies on
totalitarianism. 42 On the one hand, consecrated Sovietologists
41 As main representatives of this trend, I mention selectively: Sheila Fitzpatrick,
ed., The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1992); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch, and
Richard Stites, eds. Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society
and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Sheila Fitzpatrick,
ed., Stalinism: New Directions (London: Routledge, 1999); and Stephen
Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995).
42 See, among others, Robert Conquest: The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet collectivization
and the terror-famine (New York: Arrow Books, 1988); and The
Great Terror: A Reassessment (Edmonton, Canada: University of Alberta Press,
1990); and Achim Siegel, ed., The Totalitarian Paradigm after the End of Communism.
Toward a Theoretical Reassessment (Amsterdam: Atlanta, 1998). For
the revival of the concept of totalitarianism in former Eastern Europe, see the
activity of new research institutes, such as the Hannah Arendt Institute for the
Research on Totalitarianism at the Technical University of Dresden, Germany,
The National Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism, Bucharest, Romania,
and the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam. For an overview of
neo-totalitarian approaches in the former Soviet Union, see Viktor Zaslavsky,
“The Post-Soviet Stage in the Study of Totalitarianism. New Trends and
Methodological Tendencies,” Russian Social Science Review, 44 (2003) 5,
4-31.
142