Chapter 1

The study of Soviet politics, on the other hand, was deeply influenced in the im¬mediate postwar period by former Russian Mensheviks like Boris Nikolaevsky and Alexander Dallin, whose tendency to ignore the nationality question flowed from orthodox Marxism. Of today’s major scholars of the Stalin period, Moshe Lewin is most directly heir to this Menshevik tradition.

Some historians, most notably Theodore von Laue in the 1980s, argued that the interests of peace and international understanding place a special obligation on specialists in Soviet studies to treat their subject “responsibly,” that is, apologetically. Von Laue attempted to place Stalin’s terror “into a context in which overweening ambition and vast human sacrifice for political ends have been accepted as legitimate policy.” He argued that a full consideration of the factors that produced Stalinism would allow us to dismiss it “as an ominous symptom of an age” and that so doing “may help to change attitudes and even policies.” 3 In von Laue’s view, any expression of moral repugnance at what Stalin was forced to do because of “circumstances” becomes a sort of Western moral imperialism, an attempt to impose Western moral values upon a society where they were inappropriate. Von Laue, it seems, sought both to explain and excuse Stalin. His latest approach has found little echo in the field.

Far more influential was E. H. Carr, who emphasized the inevitability of the historical process and the need for a sympathetic understanding of those who made and implemented Soviet policy. Influenced by Carr, some Sovietologists, especially in Britain, have focused on the idealism of the implementors of Stalin’s policies in the countryside rather than on the effects those policies had on the agricultural population. 4 A classic example of this view may be gleaned from the writings of Carr’s close collaborator of many years, Professor R. W. Davies of the University of Birmingham, who remarked that:

“The historian sympathetic to industrialization is almost tempted, as he turns these yellowing pages [of Soviet journals —JM], to forget elementary economics and common sense, and identify himself for the moment with these inexperienced urban enthusiasts in those grim January days of 1930, boldly dreaming about rapid progress towards giant mechanized factory farms, cajoling reluctant peasants into kolkhozy denouncing recalcitrants and driving them out of the villages into the endless snow.” 5

The reader will find little in Davies’s work about those who were in fact driven “out of the villages into the endless snow.”
A recent example of this preoccupation with the idealism of the thousands of urban workers recruited to carry out the crash collectivization of agriculture is Lynne Viola’s study of the Twenty-Five Thousanders” campaign of 1929-1931.

……………………………..

3 Theodore H. von Laue, “Stalin in Focus,” Slavic Review, XLII:3, 1983, p. 373.

4 James Billington wrote of Carr’s multivolume History of Soviet Russia, The work is scrupulously
honest and thorough in detail, but the perspective of the whole remains that of a restrained but
admiring recording secretary of the Leninist Central Committee.” James Billington, “Six Views of the
Russian Revolution,” World Politics, April 1966, p. 463; as cited by Walter Laqueur, The Fate of the
Revolution: Interpretations of Soviet History (New York, Macmillan, 1967), p. 125.

5 R. W. Davies, “The Soviet Rural Economy in 1929-1930: the Size of the Kolkhoz » Essays in Honor of E. H. Carr, ed. C. Abramsky and Beryl J. Williams (Hamden, CT, Archon Books, 1970)