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  • Really-Existing Revisionism?

"Adelman … was … at that twilight stage in his career when most of his life seemed to be spent in airplanes or foreign hotels: symposia, conferences, honorary degrees… But Kelso didn't begrudge him his honors. He was good. And brave. It had taken courage to write his kind of books, thirty years ago, on the Famine and the Terror, when every other useful idiot in academia was screeching for détente."

Robert Harris, Archangel: A Novel (New York: Random House, 1998), 40–41.

Every discipline has its internal, specialized debates and its external, public face. The latter, in Russian studies as elsewhere, is shaped by manner in which the field is depicted to other scholars, professionals, intellectuals, and the educated public. Its image is affected to a great degree by the way its leading practitioners participate in public debates in a range of media outside the field. The field of Soviet history, one can argue, has enjoyed both an extraordinarily prominent public profile and yet, at the same time, has suffered from particularly acrimonious and politicized depictions of its activities to interested outsiders. The centrality of Soviet communism to political and intellectual debate in the 20th century, even after its demise, still creates an atmosphere in which leading vehicles of public intellectual life, such as the New York Review of Books or the Times Literary Supplement, maintain interest in Russian and Soviet history and, for example, regularly pay high-profile attention to certain topics such as Stalin and Stalinism. This prominence does not come without its costs. Russian history, even 20th-century history, is often reduced to one period – Stalinism – or even one decade, the 1930s. The same polemical nature of discussion that leads to the placement of such topics in non-specialist venues simultaneously means that they often result in politicized in-fighting rather than a substantive airing of the most striking or most relevant debates in the field. For many years, perhaps no public issue in Soviet history has generated more heat, or snuffed out more light, than the continuing polemics over "revisionism." [End Page 707]

Whether revisionism is a word of praise or an accusation is highly dependent upon the context in which it is used. To orthodox Marxists, the turn-of-the-century revisionism of an Eduard Bernstein was a dirty word, but others might well not perceive it that way at all. Any provocative work of history might be lauded as highly revisionist, but in the context of the Holocaust the provocation would be of an entirely different sort. In the case of French revolutionary studies – ironically enough, considering the roughly contemporaneous and inverted case of Russian historiography – "revisionism" beginning in the 1980s meant rejection of the previously predominant "social" and Marxist interpretations of the revolution and the embrace of new political interpretations initiated with the "political culture" approach first associated with François Furet.1 In Cold War studies, revisionism refers to a particular post-1960s wave of scholarship much more critical of the United States than previous accounts of international relations. There were certain parallels between the phenomenon of revisionism in the Cold War and "domestic" Soviet historiographies, notably their sometimes vaguely, sometimes overtly leftist orientations, the intense politicization that surrounded them, and the fact that they both flourished in a specific, pre-1991 intellectual environment.

The context for understanding the meaning and nature of revisionism in Soviet studies, then, is particular. As is well known, it was a scholarly movement that arose in the mid to late 1970s, defining itself in opposition to the historical understandings of the "totalitarian school." The political context was the Cold War, debates over socialism, and the continuing contemporary relevance of the Russian Revolution; the academic context was the rise of social history "from below" in historical studies. Forests of paper were felled and oceans of ink were spilled in the political-academic debates that resulted, and we have no wish to rehash them here. But it would be salutary to remember and rethink a thing or two now that revisionism is, or should be, a part of the history of the field rather than a concept fundamental to its current contours.

First, revisionists...

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