Rewriting History in Soviet Russia: The Politics of Revisionist Historiography 1956–1974

345 Pages·2001·1.357 MB·English

by  Roger D. Markwick (auth.)

Rewriting History in Soviet Russia
Also by Roger D. Markwick
RUSSIA’S STILLBORN DEMOCRACY? From Gorbachev to Yeltsin
(with Graeme Gill)
Rewriting History in
Soviet Russia
The Politics of Revisionist Historiography,
1956–1974
Roger D. Markwick
Lecturer in Modern European History
University of Newcastle
Australia
Foreword by
Donald J. Raleigh
Pardue Professor of History
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
palgrave
© Roger D.Markwick 2001
Foreword © Donald J.Raleigh 2001
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2001 978-0-333-79209-4
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Markwick,Roger D.
Rewriting Soviet history :the politics of revisionist historiography,
1956–1974 / Roger D.Markwick ;foreword by Donald J.Raleigh.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-349-41923-4
1.Soviet Union—Historiography.I.Title.
DK38 .M2725 2000
947'.0072—dc21
00–048337
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01
To Therese and our children, Caitlin and Eleanor –
for all those days and nights far away
‘The history of the Soviet Union is in one sense no more than the
history of the attempt to teach the intellectuals their new place in a
cosmos of socialist modernity.’
J. P. Nettl, ‘Ideas, Intellectuals, and Structures of Dissent’, in
Philip Rieff (ed.),On Intellectuals: Theoretical Studies, Case Studies
(Garden City, New York, 1970), p. 103
‘In olden times maps lacked a consistent scale; together with the
more or less correct reproduction of a locality they contained
fantastic pictures and simply blank spots. Nowadays, some
historical narrative is similar to such maps: fabrication coexists with
truth, perspective is distorted, while much that is important is
reduced to patter or simply passed over in silence.’
A. V. Gulyga, in Istoriya i sotsiologiya(Moscow, 1964), p. 85
Contents
Foreword ix
Preface xiii
Acknowledgements xvi
List of Abbreviations and Russian Terms xviii
PART I THE CONTEXT OF THE DISCUSSIONS
1 A Resurgent Intelligentsia 3
Totalitarian theory 5
A civil society in embryo 8
Paradigm shift 11
Historians as intellectuals 13
The conscience of society 20
Intellectuals, the state and civil society 31
2 The Twentieth Party Congress and History 38
The Short Courseparadigm 42
Unmasking the ‘cult of the personality’ 47
The Burdzhalov affair 51
The production of historical science 62
PART II SOME MAJOR DISCUSSIONS
3 The New Direction Historians 75
Russian imperialism under the tsars 76
Rural Russia: capitalist or feudal? 84
Russia’s ‘multistructuredness’ 89
Towards a paradigm shift 97
Crypto-Trotskyism? 102
Russian absolutism 105
4 Writing and Rewriting the History of Collectivization 111
Rural Russia in the 1920s 115
Archival sources 119
An unpublished manuscript 124
Censorship at work 134
vii
viii Contents
The famine 145
Revisionism on the retreat 149
5 The ‘Hour of Methodology’ 155
History and sociology 156
The Sector of Methodology 164
Precapitalist societies 173
A paradigm in crisis 179
History and the present 183
PART III THE POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES
6 Collision Course 199
The Trapeznikov offensive 200
The ‘democratic’ partkom 201
The Nekrich affair 209
Volobuev appointed director 219
Coup de grâce: Volobuev dismissed 229
7 From Zastoito Perestroika 234
Notes 248
Bibliography 301
Index 315
Foreword
In the early years of perestroika associated with the M. S. Gorbachev
era, millions of Soviet citizens participated in a national dialogue on
the past and future of their society. This passionate debate, which
involved writers, publicists, politicians and historians, not only
forced a rethinking of the principles of Soviet-style socialism, but also
brought about what R. W. Davies has so appropriately called a
‘mental revolution’. The reaction of professional historians to the
challenges posed by the public discussion eventually swept away
decades of Stalinist dogma, creating conditions that enabled Russian
historians to rejoin the world community of historical scholarship.
Roger Markwick’s articulate and penetrating study of the politics of
revisionist historiography in the Soviet Union offers a prehistory of
the crisis that befell Soviet historical scholarship in the Gorbachev
era, and then some.
Drawing on Kuhn’s concept of a paradigm shift, Markwick zooms in
on the relationship between the appearance of revisionist currents
within Soviet historical writing in the shadow of N. S. Khrushchev’s
denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, and
the rise of a new generation of so-called intelligentyduring the 1960s.
In revealing the socio-political implications of the emergence of a revi-
sionist historical scholarship, Markwick shows that the maverick histo-
rians carried on not only the Russian historiographical tradition but
also that of the intelligent. The self-proclaimed conscience of society,
the intelligentsiahad arisen in the nineteenth century. Dedicated to
the Russian people or narod, the intelligentsia espoused a critical
world outlook and sought to close the gulf that separated the elite from
the Russian masses.
In locating the emergence of revisionist historians within the specific
tradition of the Russian intelligent, Markwick explains how revisionism
represented a form of legal dissent that ultimately threatened the very
legitimacy of the party elite. He likewise places his renegade historians
within the larger context of the shestidesyatniki, the key generation of
men and women of the Soviet Sixties Generation, persuasively arguing
that they represented a manifestation of an embryonic civil society.
The bureaucratic political elite’s stifling of the ferment caused by this
unique cohort contributed to the onset of stagnation in the Brezhnev
ix