Stalinism: The Essential Readings (review)

Was Stalinism a betrayal of Bolshevism or was it Bolshevism's logical successor? Was the Stalinist autocracy a product of Russia's "backward" population, economy, and social structures, or was it an inevitable result of the effort to implement socialist ideology? Was Stalinism a particular manifestation of modernity? These questions and others are explored in Stalinism: The Essential Readings, edited by David L. Hoffman. The contributors to this valuable collection of essays include younger historians as well as long-established scholars.

Hoffman begins the collection with an introductory chapter that gives a succinct overview of the historiography of Stalinism. He discusses the shift from totalitarian interpretations, which often emphasized the importance of Marxist-Leninist ideology and the "illegitimate" nature of the Bolshevik government, to revisionist explanations that focused more on social factors. Although totalitarian and revisionist understandings continue to inform new work, Hoffman notes that more recent literature has been marked by a turn toward cultural history. This "post-revisionism" has also been marked by an effort to situate Stalinism in an international comparative context. The partial opening of some archives in the former Soviet Union has contributed to another important trend in post-revisionist scholarship: greater investigation of ordinary people's responses to Stalinism. Of particular interest to Hoffman are the new studies that focus on popular resistance and Soviet subjectivity. Hoffman's insightful discussion of the wide range of interpretations of Stalinism provides useful background for the collection's essays.

The collection is divided into two parts. Six chapters make up the first part, "The Origins of Stalinism." Ronald Grigor Suny begins this section by providing a broad assessment of Stalin's rule. Although Suny argues that many aspects of Stalinism departed from Bolshevism, he maintains that both revolutionary and conservative restorative impulses gave rise to and shaped the Stalinist system. Moshe Lewin's essay considers how the interaction between Soviet state and society contributed to the evolution of Stalinism. He argues that a variety of social forces helped to breed Stalinist authoritarianism. Martin Malia, in the third essay, stresses the role of Marxist-Leninist ideology. In his view, the logic of socialism, in conjunction with Russia's specific historical conditions, produced Stalinism's mass coercion and violence. Oleg Khlevniuk's essay discusses the Great Terror. Although Khlevniuk shows both here and in other publications that Stalin played a decisive role in the terror, he does not attribute the upheavals solely to Stalin's malevolence (as some scholars do). Instead, Khlevniuk argues that fears of a "fifth column," combined with the threat of an impending war and foreign invasion, played a key role in motivating Stalin's resort to purges.

The final two essays in the first part of the collection exemplify the trend within post-revisionist scholarship to incorporate Soviet history into the larger framework of European history. Stephen Kotkin argues that Stalinism represented a radical incarnation of the Enlightenment project to transform society and create a more rational social order. He contends that the Stalinist state, like other modern states, pursued its goals of social engineering via the establishment of social welfare. In Kotkin's narrative, the Soviet system under Stalin exemplified an alternative version of modernity. Peter Holquist's essay proposes that state violence in the Soviet Union cannot be understood apart from the intensification of violent practices in other modern European states. According to Holquist, the development of the social sciences in the late nineteenth century helped give rise to new technologies of social intervention and new methods of state violence during the early twentieth century. During World War I, European governments increasingly adopted coercive interventionist policies such as deportation. Soviet state violence developed within this wider context, expanding on the tactics of violence that were already being practiced by the Tsarist regime. Significantly, even though Kotkin and Holquist maintain that the use of social welfare or state violence to shape the body politic was not uniquely Soviet, they acknowledge the differences between Stalinist practices and their European counterparts. Both authors...