New Horizons: Conceptualizing the Soviet 1930s

There was a time when Soviet history seemed to end with the early 1930s. Practically all studies in the field dealt with the revolution and its immediate aftermath; if the 1930s were evoked, it was usually in the last chapters of works or in order to show that the first years of the decade were the end of an epoch.¹ The 1930s did receive more or less extensive treatment in monographs devoted to specific questions of Soviet economy, society, and politics.² Their authors managed to make ingenious use of the accessible sources. Still, it appeared that little more could be squeezed from the material. This perception reigned after Merle Fainsod's remarkable exploration of the "Smolensk Archive," a work that focused mainly on the 1930s.³ For quite a long time, scholars made scarce use of the Smolensk records because they thought that the documents were not necessarily typical of the rest of the country.⁴

There was one aspect of the 1930s that benefited from particular attention: terror and forced labor.⁵ These issues were intimately related to many processes at work in the pre-war USSR. The nature of the sources, however, did not facilitate research. An abundant memoir literature gave insight into the ordeal of the victims. But it was not a simple task to evaluate the scope of the terror on the basis of autobiographical accounts.⁶ There was also no guarantee that the trials individual memoirists endured would elucidate the ins and outs of the regime's punitive zeal. Even the carefully filtered revelations from Soviet authorities after the mid-1950s were not as helpful as they first appeared. They had a tendency to direct attention to topics high on the priority list of the Kremlin's propaganda. Heavy reliance on these disclosures, moreover, tended to induce Western authors to take on board more than a few assumptions derived from the logic of Soviet party hagiography.⁷

The late 1970s signaled new interest in the years preceding World War II. On the one hand, the period's sociopolitical conjuncture was put into broad perspective.⁸ On the other hand, more and more research was done on the 1930s per se.⁹ Even though the 1980s were not notable for extraordinary curiosity about the 1930s, the decade was marked by intensive work by a number of scholars. It led to the appearance of several studies, some hotly debated in the United States, others barely noticed.¹⁰ A common feature of these studies was the researchers' innovative use of Soviet documents, including efforts to analyze the Smolensk holdings in the context of a broad range of sources. Another of their common features was that they explored relationships between Soviet policies and the social environment in which the political process took place. A third characteristic of these works was that the authors arrived at nuanced conclusions about the regime's ability to control processes it had unleashed.

Those attempts to focus on the 1930s aroused objections that perhaps tell us more about Western historiography than about the history of the USSR. Critics found that state intervention and the human costs of Soviet policies did not receive sufficient emphasis, and occasionally even worried about the moral qualities of researchers who did not seem to allot enough place to terror.¹¹ Some critics were insensitive to the circumstance that the available documentation was suited, above all, to considering the interplay between the regime's moves and the rest of society's reactions. They also seemed to overlook the fact that material on human losses and terror hardly allowed more than hazardous estimates about the dimensions of the phenomenon, the discussion of which had less to do with ethics than with scholarly choices constricted by a fairly limited source base.¹²

Partial access to former Soviet archives reinvigorated research on the 1930s and brought about a quantum leap in our knowledge on the period. It would be almost impossible to review the great number of publications that have appeared about the pre-war decade since the late 1980s. It is less difficult...