Soviet and communist studies

Soviet and communist studies, or Soviet studies is the field of historical studies of the Soviet Union and other Communist states as well as historical studies of the Communist parties that existed or still exist in some form in many countries, both inside and outside the former Eastern Bloc, such as the Communist Party USA.^[1] Aspects of its historiography have attracted debates between historians on topics including totalitarianism and Cold War espionage.^[2][3]

Soviet and Eastern European studies was also a form of area studies that included the study of various aspects of Soviet society, including agriculture, trade relations in the Warsaw Pact, nationality policy, Kremlinology, human rights, empire, and collectivization. The wider field included independent study in universities and academia, as well as some support from military and intelligence.^[1] Major contemporary journals included Soviet Studies (now Europe-Asia Studies), Communisme, and The Russian Review, among others. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the field focused on historical studies and began to include comparisons to the post-Soviet years as well as new data from the Soviet archives.

Historiography

The academic field after World War II and during the Cold War was dominated by the "totalitarian model" of the Soviet Union,^[4] stressing the absolute nature of Joseph Stalin's power. The "totalitarian model" was first outlined in the 1950s by political scientist Carl Joachim Friedrich, who posited that the Soviet Union and other Communist states were totalitarian systems, with the personality cult and almost unlimited powers of the "great leader" such as Stalin.^[5] The "revisionist school" beginning in the 1960s focused on relatively autonomous institutions which might influence policy at the higher level.^[6] Matt Lenoe describes the "revisionist school" as representing those who "insisted that the old image of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state bent on world domination was oversimplified or just plain wrong. They tended to be interested in social history and to argue that the Communist Party leadership had had to adjust to social forces."^[7] These "revisionist school" historians such as J. Arch Getty and Lynne Viola challenged the "totalitarian model", which was considered to be outdated,^[8] and were active in the former Communist states' archives, especially the State Archive of the Russian Federation related to the Soviet Union.^[6][9]

Some critics of the totalitarian model, such as Robert C. Tucker, formulated an alternative that also focused on the personality cult of Stalin. Tucker, influenced by George F. Kennan's writings on how the Soviet Union had reverted into a tsarist autocracy, emphasized that the Soviet Union was not guided by socialism or ideology but more by ruling class.^[1] This perspective emerged significantly from ideas of neo-Freudian psychoanalysis, evaluating Stalin as a deeply paranoid tyrant and in the process creating a more tsarist-type government.^[10] Moshe Lewin cautioned historians not to "over-Stalinize" the whole of Soviet history, while he also stated that the Soviet Union developed a "propensity for authoritarianism" after Marxian principles had failed to be established.^[11] Lewin argued that the Soviet Union recapitulated a "bureaucratic absolutism" almost Prussian in nature, where the "monarch was dependent on his bureaucracy".^[12] Some revisionists also focused on contradictions of the Soviet regime, such as the idea that Soviet elites had betrayed communist ideals in forming top-down apparatuses, as well as demonstrating national chauvinism in oppressive policies or become anti-leftist despite the state imagery.^[13] One example was David Brandenberger's concept of National Bolshevism to describe the Stalinist regime's turn against internationalism, with Russian cultural hegemony and xenophobia becoming the main ideological currents from the 1930s.^[14][13] Nikolai Mitrokhin highlighted the ethnocentrism and antisemitism of the CPSU and Moscow administration of the Soviet era.^[13]

According to John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, the historiography is characterized by a split between traditionalists and revisionists. "Traditionalists" characterize themselves as objective reporters of what they see as a "totalitarian nature" of communism and Communist states. They are criticized by their opponents as being anti-communist in their eagerness on continuing to focus on the issues of the Cold War. Alternative characterizations for traditionalists include "anti-Communist", "conservative", "Draperite" (after Theodore Draper), "orthodox", and "right-wing";^[2] Haynes and Klehr argue that "revisionists" categorize all "traditionalists" as conservative to undermine liberal forms of this study, despite the liberal or even left background of many of the founding members of this view on communism, such as Draper and the Cold War liberals.^[15] Norman Markowitz, a prominent "revisionist", referred to traditionalists as "reactionaries", "right-wing romantics", and "triumphalist" who belong to the "HUAC school of CPUSA scholarship."^[16] Haynes and Klehr criticize some "revisionists" for characterizing "traditionalists" as "lowercase" ideological anticommunists (communism in general) rather than anti-Communists (the historically established Communist parties). In their view, "revisionists" such as Joel Kovel imply that "traditionalists" in Communist studies are foremost opposing the establishment of an "ideal" Marxist society, when in practice, traditionalists have criticized the form of "real socialism" that existed in the Soviet system at the time, a form also criticized by many revisionists. Kovel wrote that the "Soviet system while nominally communist was, given its hierarchy, exploitation and lack of democracy, neither communist nor even authentically socialist."^[17] "Revisionists", characterized by Haynes and Klehr as historical revisionists, are more numerous and dominate academic institutions and learned journals.^[18] A suggested alternative formulation is "new historians of American communism", but that has not caught on because these historians would describe themselves as unbiased and scholarly and contrast their work to the work of anti-communist "traditionalists", whom they would term biased and unscholarly.^[15]

In Communist studies, post-Soviet access to archives, including Eastern Bloc archives and the Venona project's decrypts, also bolstered traditionalists' view on Cold War intelligence that the CPUSA was subsidized by the Soviet Union, and particularly before the 1950s aiding it in espionage, as well as the knowledge that extensive operations were conducted by atomic spies for the Soviet Union.^[19][20][21] Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a United States Senator for the Democratic Party who led the Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy, played a major role in publicizing the Venona evidence.^[19][20] Archives have also shed new light on inter-Communist rivalries during the Cold War, such as the "Soviet Chinese spy wars" during the Sino–Soviet split.^[22]

Notable debates

Totalitarianism, revisionism, and the Holodomor

J. Arch Getty's Origins of Great Purges, a book published in 1985 in which Getty posits that the Soviet political system was not completely controlled from the center and that Stalin only responded to political events as they arose,^[6] was a challenge to works by Robert Conquest and part of the debates between the "totalitarian model" and "revisionist school" of the Soviet Union. In an appendix to the book, Getty also questioned the previously published findings that Stalin organized himself the murder of Sergey Kirov to justify his campaign of Great Purge.^[7] The "totalitarian model" historians objected to the "revisionist school" of historians such as Getty as apologetics for Stalin and accused them of downplaying the terror. Lenoe responds that "Getty has not denied Stalin's ultimate responsibility for the Terror, nor is he an admirer of Stalin."^[7][23] As the leader of the second generation of the "revisionist school", or "revisionist historians", Sheila Fitzpatrick was the first to call the group of historians working on Soviet history in the 1980s "a new cohort of [revisionist school] historians."^[24] Most young "revisionist school" historians did not want to separate the social history of the Soviet Union from the evolution of the political system. Fitzpatrick explained in the 1980s, when the "totalitarian model" was still widely used, "it was very useful to show that the model had an inherent bias and it did not explain everything about Soviet society. Now, whereas a new generation of academics considers sometimes as self evident that the totalitarian model was completely erroneous and harmful, it is perhaps more useful to show than there were certain things about the Soviet company that it explained very well."^[25]

Hannah Arendt, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Conquest, and Carl Joachim Friedrich were prominent advocates of applying the totalitarian concept to comparison of Nazism and Stalinism. It was considered to be outdated by the 1980s and for the post-Stalinist era,^[8] and is seen as a useful word, but the old 1950s theory about it is defunct among scholars.^[26] Fitzpatrick and Michael Geyer criticize the concept and highlight the differences between Nazism and Stalinism.^[27] Henry Rousso defends the work of Friedrich et al. while noting the concept is both useful and descriptive rather than analytical, with the conclusion the regimes described as totalitarian do not have a common origin and did not arise in similar ways. Philippe Burrin and Nicholas Werth take a middle position between one making Stalin seem all-powerful and the other making him seem like a weak dictator.^[28] Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin take a longer historical perspective and regard Nazism and Stalinism not so much as examples of a new type of society like Arendt, Brzezinski and Friedrich did, but more as historical "anomalies" or unusual deviations from the typical path of development that most industrial societies are expected to follow.^[29]

During the debates in the 1980s, the use of émigré sources and the insistence on Stalin's engineering of Kirov's murder became embedded in the two sides' position. In a review of Conquest's work on the Soviet famine of 1932–1933, especially The Harvest of Sorrow,^[30] Getty writes that Stalin and the Soviet Politburo played a major role,^[31] but "there is plenty of blame to go around. It must be shared by the tens of thousands of activists and officials who carried out the policy and by the peasants who chose to slaughter animals, burn fields, and boycott cultivation in protest."^[32] In an analysis of scholarship surrounding the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, Jeff Coplon says that allegations by "mainstream academics", including Conquest, of genocide against the Soviet Union were historically dubious and politically motivated as part of a campaign by the Ukrainian nationalist community.^[32] In a letter to the editors, Conquest dismissed the article as "error and absurdity."^[33] Michael Ellman states that in the end it all depends on the definition of genocide^[34] and that if Stalin was guilty of genocide in the Holodomor, then "[m]any other events of the 1917–53 era (e.g. the deportation of whole nationalities, and the 'national operations' of 1937–38) would also qualify as genocide, as would the acts of [many Western countries]",^[35] such as the Atlantic slave trade, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, among many others. Historian Hiroaki Kuromiya finds it persuasive.^[34]

As summarized by David R. Marples, Conquest's thesis that the famine constituted genocide and was deliberately inflicted is controversial and remains part of the ongoing debates on the Holodomor genocide question.^[36] Vladimir N. Brovkin describes it as a challenge to the "revisionist school" of historians, while Alexander Nove states "Conquest seems prone to accept the Ukrainian nationalist myth."^[36] Hiroaki writes that "those who examine the famine from a general Soviet perspective downplay any specific Ukrainian factor, while specialists on Ukraine generally support the concept of a genocidal famine."^[36] The most notable work in the field that maintains the famine was not genocide is by R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, both of whom cite a letter from Conquest stating "he does not believe that Stalin deliberately inflicted the 1933 famine."^[36]

Sarah Davies and James Harris write that with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the release of the Soviet archives, some of the heat has gone out of the debate.^[37] A 1993 study of archival data by Getty et al. showed that a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934 to 1953.^[38] Getty and Wheatcroft write that the opening of the Soviet archives has vindicated the lower estimates put forth by the "revisionist school" scholars.^[39][40]

Another major part of the debate involved Soviet nationality policy and Stalin's deportations. Historian Jon Chang argued that many self-declared "social historians" generally falling into the revisionist school, relied almost exclusively on archival sources while neglecting oral history, despite social history officially being focused on the lived experiences of the common people. According to Chang, because of this reliance on Soviet archival sources "when it came to the Soviet diaspora peoples and the 'nationalities deportations' from 1937 to 1950," some revisionist historians "held that these cases of ethnic cleansing were not racial but ideological in nature, in which both elites and ordinary people could be targeted as 'enemies of the people.'"^[41] This subgroup of revisionists sought to recapitulate a "relatively pure" communism in the Soviet Union and explain all of its policies, such as the nationality operations of the NKVD and deportations of Koreans, as a reflection of Marxism.^[41] Eric D. Weitz wrote that, while revisionists on the topic of Soviet deportations "raise the term race, they step around it gingerly and quickly retreat to the safer language of ethnicity and [Soviet] nationality." He added, "The Soviets explicitly and loudly rejected the ideology of race... Yet at the same time, traces of racial politics crept into Soviet nationalities policies, especially between 1937 and 1953. [...] The particular traits could be the source of praise and power, as with Russians, or could lead to round-ups, forced deportations, and resettlement in horrendous conditions."^[42]

Victims of Stalinism

According to J. Arch Getty, over half of the 100 million deaths which are commonly attributed to Communism were due to famines. Getty writes that the "overwhelming weight of opinion among scholars working in the new archives is that the terrible famine of the 1930s was the result of Stalinist bungling and rigidity rather than some genocidal plan."^[43] As the majority of excess deaths under Joseph Stalin were not direct killings, the exact number of victims of Stalinism is difficult to calculate due to lack of consensus among scholars on which deaths can be attributed to the regime.^[44]

Stephen G. Wheatcroft posits that "[t]he Stalinist regime was consequently responsible for about a million purposive killings, and through its criminal neglect and irresponsibility it was probably responsible for the premature deaths of about another two million more victims amongst the repressed population, i.e. in the camps, colonies, prisons, exile, in transit and in the POW camps for Germans. These are clearly much lower figures than those for whom Hitler's regime was responsible." Wheatcroft states that Stalin's "purposive killings" fit more closely into the category of "execution" than "murder", given he thought the accused were indeed guilty of crimes against the state and insisted on documentation. Hitler simply wanted to kill Jews and communists because of who they were, insisted on no documentation and was indifferent at even a pretence of legality for these actions.^[45]

Michael Ellman says that "the very category 'victims of Stalinism' is a matter of political judgement." Ellman says that mass deaths from famines are not a "uniquely Stalinist evil", and compares the behavior of the Stalinist regime vis-à-vis the Holodomor to that of the British Empire (towards Ireland and India) and the G8 in contemporary times. According to Ellman, the latter "are guilty of mass manslaughter or mass deaths from criminal negligence because of their not taking obvious measures to reduce mass deaths" and a possible defense of Stalin and his associates is that "their behaviour was no worse than that of many rulers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."^[44]

Ellman, Getty, and Wheatcroft in particular, among others, criticized Robert Conquest (Wheatcroft said that Conquest's victim totals for Stalinist repressions are still too high, even in his reassessments)^[46] and other historians for relying on hearsay and rumour as evidence, and cautioned that historians should instead utilize archive material.^[40] During the debates, Ellman distinguished between historians who based their research on archive materials, and those like Conquest whose estimates were based on witnesses evidence and other unreliable data.^[44] Wheatcroft stated that historians relied on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to support their estimates of deaths under Stalin in the tens of millions but research in the state archives vindicated the lower estimates, while adding that the popular press has continued to include serious errors that should not be cited, or relied on, in academia.^[40]

Journals in the field

While this area is now seldom offered as a field of study in itself, in which one might become a specialist, there are related fields emerging, as may be judged by the titles of academic journals, some of which have changed to reflect the passage of time since 1989 and the effect of the end of Soviet rule. These include Communisme, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Demokratizatsiya, Eastern European Politics (previously Journal of Communist Studies), Europe-Asia Studies (successor of Soviet Studies), Journal of Cold War Studies, Journal of Contemporary History, Kritika, Post-Soviet Affairs, Problems of Communism (renamed Problems of Post-Communism), The Russian Review, The Slavonic and East European Review (succeeded by Studies in East European Thought), Jane's Soviet Intelligence Review (succeeded by Jane's Intelligence Review), and Studies in Soviet Thought (succeeded by Studies in East European Thought).The historiography of strictly Communist studies is also changing, with some different models of its aims as well as the major shift caused by access to archives.^[9] The access to archives, including post-Soviet archives and the Venona project, also bolstered traditionalist views on Soviet espionage in the United States.^[19][20][21]

Printed journals include Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung (Yearbook for Historical Communist Studies) and Slavic Review. Other serial publications include the Yearbook on International Communist Affairs (1966–1991) published by the Hoover Institution Press and Stanford University^[47][48][49] as well as the World Strength of the Communist Party Organizations, an annual report published by the Bureau of Intelligence and Research of the United States Department of State beginning in 1948.^[50][51]

See also

•  Communism portal

• Historiography of the Cold War
• Russian studies
• Post-Soviet studies

Notes

References

1. Dresen, F. Joseph. "Looking Back at the Origins of Soviet Studies". Wilson Center. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Retrieved 8 December 2021.
2. Haynes, John Earl; Klehr, Harvey (2003). "Revising History". In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage. San Francisco: Encounter. pp. 11–57. ISBN 1-893554-72-4.
3. Davies, Sarah; Harris, James (2005). "Joseph Stalin: Power and Ideas". Stalin: A New History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 1–17. ISBN 978-1-139-44663-1.
4. Davies, Sarah; Harris, James (2005). "Joseph Stalin: Power and Ideas". Stalin: A New History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 3. ISBN 978-1-139-44663-1. Academic Sovietology, a child of the early Cold War, was dominated by the 'totalitarian model' of Soviet politics. Until the 1960s it was almost impossible to advance any other interpretation, in the USA at least.
5. Davies, Sarah; Harris, James (2005). "Joseph Stalin: Power and Ideas". Stalin: A New History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 3–4. ISBN 978-1-139-44663-1. In 1953, Carl Friedrich characterised totalitarian systems in terms of five points: an official ideology, control of weapons and of media, use of terror, and a single mass party, 'usually under a single leader.' There was of course an assumption that the leader was critical to the workings of totalitarianism: at the apex of a monolithic, centralised, and hierarchical system, it was he who issued the orders which were fulfilled unquestioningly by his subordinates.
6. Davies, Sarah; Harris, James (2005). "Joseph Stalin: Power and Ideas". Stalin: A New History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 4–5. ISBN 978-1-139-44663-1. Tucker's work stressed the absolute nature of Stalin's power, an assumption which was increasingly challenged by later revisionist historians. In his Origins of the Great Purges, Arch Getty argued that the Soviet political system was chaotic, that institutions often escaped the control of the centre, and that Stalin's leadership consisted to a considerable extent in responding, on an ad hoc basis, to political crises as they arose. Getty's work was influenced by political science of the 1960s onwards, which, in a critique of the totalitarian model, began to consider the possibility that relatively autonomous bureaucratic institutions might have had some influence on policy-making at the highest level.
7. Lenoe, Matt (June 2002). "Did Stalin Kill Kirov and Does It Matter?". The Journal of Modern History. 74 (2): 352–380. doi:10.1086/343411. ISSN 0022-2801. S2CID 142829949.
8. Zimmerman, William (September 1980). "Review: How the Soviet Union is Governed". Slavic Review. 39 (3): 482–486. doi:10.2307/2497167. JSTOR 2497167. In the intervening quarter-century, the Soviet Union has changed substantially. Our knowledge of the Soviet Union has changed as well. We all know that the traditional paradigm no longer satisfies, despite several efforts, primarily in the early 1960s (the directed society, totalitarianism without terror, the mobilization system) to articulate an acceptable variant. We have come to realize that models which were, in effect, offshoots of totalitarian models do not provide good approximations of post-Stalinist reality.
9. Sheila, Fitzpatrick (November 2007). "Revisionism in Soviet History". History and Theory. 46 (4): 77–91. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2303.2007.00429.x. ISSN 1468-2303. ... the Western scholars who in the 1990s and 2000s were most active in scouring the new archives for data on Soviet repression were revisionists (always 'archive rats') such as Arch Getty and Lynne Viola.
10. Martin, Douglas (1 August 2010). "Robert C. Tucker, a Scholar of Marx, Stalin and Soviet Affairs, Dies at 92". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 8 December 2021.
11. Cohen, Stephen F.; English, Robert; Kraus, Michael; Lih, Lars T.; Sharlet, Robert (Spring 2011). "Moshe Lewin". Slavic Review. Cambridge University Press. 70 (1): 242. doi:10.5612/slavicreview.70.1.0242. ISSN 0037-6779. S2CID 163943811.
12. Lewin, Moshe (2005). The Soviet Century. London: Verso. p. 383.
13. "National Bolshevism (review): Was Stalinism nationalistic?". socialhistoryportal.org. 2005. Analysts such as Tucker, Barghoorn and Agursky have, in one way or another, understood Soviet policies as being in fundamental conflict with the regime's own official ideology insofar as the Soviet leadership often pursued de facto non- or even antileftist policies, and, above all, russocentric aims. The scholarly documentation of such tendencies has markedly grown during the last fifteen years, including books written or edited by Shimon Redlich, Gennadii Kostyrchenko, Yitzhak Brudny, Hildegard Kochanek, Aleksandr Borshchagovskii, William Korey and others.
14. Brandenberger, David (2002). National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-00906-6.
15. Haynes, John Earl; Klehr, Harvey (2003). "Revising History". In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage. San Francisco: Encounter. pp. 43–44. ISBN 1-893554-72-4.
16. Haynes, John Earl; Klehr, Harvey (2003). "Revising History". In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage. San Francisco: Encounter. p. 43. ISBN 1-893554-72-4.
17. Haynes, John Earl; Klehr, Harvey (2003). "Revising History". In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage. San Francisco: Encounter. pp. 50–51. ISBN 1-893554-72-4.
18. Haynes, John Earl; Klehr, Harvey (2005). In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage. San Francisco: Encounter. p. 87. ISBN 1-59403-088-X.
19. Moynihan, Daniel Patrick (1998). Secrecy: The American Experience. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. pp. 15–16. ISBN 978-0-300-08079-7. Retrieved 8 December 2021 – via Internet Archive.
20. Haynes, John Earl (February 2000). "Exchange with Arthur Herman and Venona book talk". John Earl Haynes. Retrieved 8 December 2021.
21. Storrs, Landon R. Y. (2 July 2015). "McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare". Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.6. ISBN 978-0-199-32917-5. The tenor of debate shifted again when the end of the Cold War made available new evidence from Soviet archives and U.S. intelligence sources such as the VENONA decrypts. That evidence indicated that scholars had underestimated the success of Soviet espionage in the United States as well as the extent of Soviet control over the American Communist Party.
22. "The Soviet-Chinese Spy Wars in the 1970s: What KGB Counterintelligence Knew, Part II". Wilson Center. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Retrieved 8 December 2021.
23. Haynes, John Earl; Klehr, Harvey (2003). In Denial: Historians, Communism, & Espionage. Encounter Books. pp. 15–17. ISBN 978-1-893554-72-6.
24. Fitzpatrick, Sheila (October 1986). "New Perspectives on Stalinism". The Russian Review. Wiley. 45 (4): 409–413. doi:10.2307/130466. JSTOR 130466.
25. Fitzpatrick, Sheila (October 1986). "New Perspectives on Stalinism". The Russian Review. Wiley. 45 (4): 357–373. doi:10.2307/130471. JSTOR 130471.
26. Connelly, John (September 2010). "Totalitarianism: Defunct Theory, Useful Word". Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. 11 (4): 819–835. doi:10.1353/kri.2010.0001. S2CID 143510612. The word is as functional now as it was 50 years ago. It means the kind of regime that existed in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Soviet satellites, Communist China, and maybe Fascist Italy, where the word originated. ... Who are we to tell Václav Havel or Adam Michnik that they were fooling themselves when they perceived their rulers as totalitarian? Or for that matter any of the millions of former subjects of Soviet-type rule who use the local equivalents of the Czech totalita to describe the systems they lived under before 1989? It is a useful word and everyone knows what it means as a general referent. Problems arise when people confuse the useful descriptive term with the old 'theory' from the 1950s.
27. Fitzpatrick, Sheila; Geyer, Michael, eds. (2009). Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared. Cambridge University Press. pp. 3–4, 8–12, 17–19. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511802652. ISBN 978-0-521-72397-8.
28. Goslan, Richard Joseph; Rousso, Henry, eds. (2004). Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0-803-29000-6.
29. Kershaw, Ian; Lewin, Moshe, eds. (1997). Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-56521-9.
30. Getty, J. Arch (22 January 1987). "Starving the Ukraine". The London Review of Books. 9 (2): 7–8. Retrieved 20 December 2020. Conquest's hypothesis, sources and evidence are not new. Indeed, he himself first put forward his view two years ago in a work sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute. The intentional famine story, however, has been an article of faith for Ukrainian émigrés in the West since the Cold War. ... Conquest's book will thus give a certain academic credibility to a theory which has not been generally accepted by non-partisan scholars outside the circles of exiled nationalities. In today's conservative political climate, with its 'evil empire' discourse, I am sure that the book will be very popular.
31. Getty, J. Arch (22 January 1987). "Starving the Ukraine". The London Review of Books. 9 (2). Retrieved 20 December 2020. Stalin gave his backing to radicals in the Party who saw the mixed economy of the Twenties as an unwarranted concession to capitalism. These leftists, for whom Stalin was spokesman and leader, argued that the free market in grain confronted the state with an unpredictable, inefficient and expensive food supply. ... These radical activists, who became the shock troops of the voluntarist 'Stalin Revolution' which swept the Soviet Union in the Thirties, were concentrated in working-class and youth groups. ... The collectivisation of agriculture from 1929 to about 1934 proceeded in several fitful campaigns characterised by confusion, lurches to left and right, and the substitution of enthusiasm, exhortation and violence for careful planning. Hard-line officials and volunteers forced reluctant peasants into improvised collective farms. Peasants resisted by slaughtering animals and refusing to plant, harvest or market grain. Neither side would give way. By 1934 the Stalinists had won, at least insofar as the collective farm system was permanently established, but they had paid a painful price: catastrophic livestock losses, social dislocation and, in some places, famine. Millions of people died from starvation, deportation and violence.
32. Coplon, Jeff (12 January 1988). "In Search of a Soviet Holocaust". Village Voice. Retrieved 30 November 2020 – via Montclair State University. 'There is no evidence it was intentionally directed against Ukrainians,' said Alexander Dallin of Stanford, the father of modern Sovietology. 'That would be totally out of keeping with what we know -- it makes no sense.' 'This is crap, rubbish,' said Moshe Lewin of the University of Pennsylvania, whose Russian Peasants and Soviet Power broke new ground in social history. 'I am an anti-Stalinist, but I don't see how this [genocide] campaign adds to our knowledge. It's adding horrors, adding horrors, until it becomes a pathology.' 'I absolutely reject it,' said Lynne Viola of SUNY-Binghamton, the first US historian to examine Moscow's Central State Archive on collectivization. 'Why in god's name would this paranoid government consciously produce a famine when they were terrified of war [with Germany]?' 'He's terrible at doing research,' said veteran Sovietologist Roberta Manning of Boston College. 'He misuses sources, he twists everything.'
33. Conquest, Robert (21 February 1988). "Letters to the Editors". The Ukrainian Weekly. Retrieved 14 September 2021.
34. Hiroaki, Kuromiya (June 2008). "The Soviet Famine of 1932–1933 Reconsidered". Europe-Asia Studies. 60 (4): 663–675. doi:10.1080/09668130801999912. JSTOR 20451530. S2CID 143876370.
35. Ellman, Michael (June 2007). "Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932–33 Revisited" (PDF). Europe-Asia Studies. 59 (4): 663–693. doi:10.1080/09668130701291899. JSTOR 20451381. S2CID 53655536.
36. Marples, David R. (May 2009). "Ethnic Issues in the Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine". Europe-Asia Studies. 61 (3): 505–518. doi:10.1080/09668130902753325. S2CID 67783643.
37. Sarah Davies; James Harris (8 September 2005). "Joseph Stalin: Power and Ideas". Stalin: A New History. Cambridge University Press. pp. 3–5. ISBN 978-1-139-44663-1.
38. Getty, J. Arch; Rittersporn, Gábor; Zemskov, Viktor (1993). "Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence" (PDF). American Historical Review. 98 (4): 1017–1049. doi:10.2307/2166597. JSTOR 2166597. Retrieved 30 November 2020.
39. Getty, J. Arch; Rittersporn, Gábor; Zemskov, Viktor (1993). "Victims of the Soviet penal system in the pre-war years: a first approach on the basis of archival evidence" (PDF). American Historical Review. 98 (4): 1017–1049. doi:10.2307/2166597. JSTOR 2166597. The long-awaited archival evidence on repression in the period of the Great Purges shows that levels of arrests, political prisoners, executions, and general camp populations tend to confirm the orders of magnitude indicated by those labeled as 'revisionists' and mocked by those proposing high estimates.
40. Wheatcroft, Stephen G. (1999). "Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet Secret Police: The Comparability and Reliability of the Archival Data. Not the Last Word" (PDF). Europe-Asia Studies. 51 (2): 340–342. doi:10.1080/09668139999056. For decades, many historians counted Stalin' s victims in 'tens of millions', which was a figure supported by Solzhenitsyn. Since the collapse of the USSR, the lower estimates of the scale of the camps have been vindicated. The arguments about excess mortality are far more complex than normally believed. R. Conquest, The Great Terror: A Re-assessment (London, 1992) does not really get to grips with the new data and continues to present an exaggerated picture of the repression. The view of the 'revisionists' has been largely substantiated (J. Arch Getty & R. T. Manning (eds), Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (Cambridge, 1993)). The popular press, even TLS and The Independent, have contained erroneous journalistic articles that should not be cited in respectable academic articles.
41. Chang, Jon K. (2019). "Ethnic Cleansing and Revisionist Russian and Soviet History". Academic Questions. 32 (2): 263–270. doi:10.1007/s12129-019-09791-8. ISSN 0895-4852. S2CID 150711796.
42. Weitz, Eric D. (2002). "Racial Politics without the Concept of Race: Reevaluating Soviet Ethnic and National Purges". Slavic Review. 61 (1): 1–29. doi:10.2307/2696978. ISSN 0037-6779. JSTOR 2696978. S2CID 156279881.
43. Ghodsee, Kristen (Fall 2014). "A Tale of 'Two Totalitarianisms': The Crisis of Capitalism and the Historical Memory of Communism" (PDF). History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History. 4 (2): 115–142. doi:10.5406/historypresent.4.2.0115. JSTOR 10.5406/historypresent.4.2.0115.
44. Ellman, Michael (November 2002). "Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments". Europe-Asia Studies. Taylor & Francis. 54 (7): 1152–1172. doi:10.1080/0966813022000017177. JSTOR 826310.
45. Wheatcroft, Stephen G. (1996). "The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Repression and Mass Killings, 1930–45" (PDF). Europe-Asia Studies. 48 (8): 1319–1353. doi:10.1080/09668139608412415. JSTOR 152781.
46. Wheatcroft, Stephen G. (September 2000). "The Scale and Nature of Stalinist Repression and its Demographic Significance: On Comments by Keep and Conquest" (PDF). Europe-Asia Studies. 52 (6): 1143–1159. doi:10.1080/09668130050143860. JSTOR 153593. PMID 19326595. S2CID 205667754. Retrieved 1 September 2021.
47. Gyorgy, Andrew (1978). "1975 Yearbook on International Communist Affairs. Edited by Staar Richard F.. (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1975. Pp. 678. $25.00.)". American Political Science Review. 72 (2): 819. doi:10.2307/1954276. JSTOR 1954276. S2CID 147472919. Retrieved 13 May 2017.
48. Szawlowski, Richard (October 1979). "Reviewed Work: Yearbook on International Communist Affairs 1978 by Richard F. Starr". Soviet Studies. Taylor & Francis. 31 (4): 617–619. JSTOR 150933.
49. Goshko, John M. (3 December 1991). "As Soviet Union dissolves, 'kremlinologists' shift gears". The Washington Post. from the original on 31 January 2018. Retrieved 31 January 2018.
50. Morris, Bernard S. (December 1970). "Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, 1968. by Richard V. Allen". Slavic Review. Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; Cambridge University Press. 29 (4): 704–705. doi:10.2307/2493285. JSTOR 2493285.
51. McLane, Charles B. (Autumn 1972). "1970 Yearbook on International Communist Affairs and 1971 Yearbook on International Communist Affairs by Richard F. Staar". Canadian Slavonic Papers. Taylor & Francis. 14 (3): 548–551. JSTOR 40866482.

External links

Account required for online access

The following journals can only be accessed through participating institutions such as libraries or institutions of higher learning which have a subscription:

• Communist and Post-Communist Studies. 1–52 (1993–2019). University of California Press. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via Elsevier.
• Eastern European Politics. 28–36 (2012–2020). Taylor & Francis. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via Taylor & Francis Online. Previously known as Journal of Communist Studies. 1–9 (1985–1993). Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics. 10–27 (1994–2011).
• Europe-Asia Studies. 45–64 (1993–2012). Taylor & Francis. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via JSTOR.
• Journal of Cold War Studies. 1–16 (1999–2014). The MIT Press. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via JSTOR.
• Journal of Contemporary History. 1–51 (1966–2016). SAGE Publications. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via JSTOR.
• Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. 1–21 (2000–2020). Slavica Publishers. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via Project MUSE.
• Post-Soviet Affairs. 8–36 (1992–2020). Taylor & Francis. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via Taylor & Francis Online. Previously known as Soviet Economy. 1–8 (1985–1992).
• Problems of Post-Communism. 42–67 (1995–2020). Taylor & Francis. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via Taylor & Francis Online. Previously known as Problems of Communism. 1–41 (1954–1992). Taylor & Francis.
• The Russian Review. 1–73 (1941–2014). Wiley on behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via JSTOR.
• The Slavonic and East European Review. 6–98 (1928–2020). Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via JSTOR.
• The Slavonic Review. 1–6 (1922–1927). Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via JSTOR.
• Studies in East European Thought. 45–68 (1993–2016). Springer. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via JSTOR.
• Studies in Soviet Thought. 1–44 (1961–1992). Springer. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via JSTOR.
• Soviet Studies. 1–44 (1949–1992). Taylor & Francis. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via JSTOR.

Mostly free-online access

The following journals are by subscription but most of the back-issue articles can be accessed free of charge online:

• Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization. 1–14 (1992–2006).

Printed journals

• Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung (in German). Yearbook for Historical Communist Studies (1993–2020). ISSN 0944-629X. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via Bundesstiftung Aufarbeitung.
• Slavic Review. 20–76 (1961–2017). Cambridge University Press. ISSN 0037-6779. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via JSTOR. Previously known as The Slavonic Year-Book. 1 (1941). Cambridge University Press. The Slavonic and East European Review. American Series. 2–3 (1943–1944). Cambridge University Press. The American Slavic and East European Review. 4–20 (1945–1961). Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; Cambridge University Press.

Academic programs

• Berkeley Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies. Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. 2 September 2004. 4 December 2004 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via Socrates and Berkeley Scholars.
• Publications. Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. 20 August 2004. 9 October 2004 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 24 December 2020 – via Socrates and Berkeley Scholars.