Debates on Stalinism by Mark Edele (review)

"Historians," writes Mark Mazower, an outstanding historian himself,

lead for the most part pretty dull lives … [with] endless conferences, gripes about publishers, and the eventual bestowal of honors. Readers do not generally care about infighting in academia. Nor is it easy to be gripped by the more important but largely abstract questions of intellectual argument and debate that articulate positions and create schools of thought.

Mark Edele writes into the teeth of Mazower's dictum. His approach to debates among historians about Stalinism is biographical, contains a good deal about their infighting, and seeks to define – and complicate – schools of thought. That he has made a worthy contribution to Manchester University Press' series on Issues of Historiography is a testament to the magnitude of his reading, the sharpness and consistency of his argument, and the unusual politicisation of the subject he has chosen.

Edele, the inaugural Hansen Chair in History at the University of Melbourne, is an indefatigable historian. Since 2008, he has authored five books ranging from monographs on Soviet veterans and defectors from the Great Patriotic War (2008, 2017), to a short history of the USSR (2019), a longer analysis of "Stalinist society" (2011) and, now, this book under review. He also has co-edited books on "totalitarian dictatorship" (2014) and escapees from the Holocaust who fled eastward (2017) and written numerous scholarly articles and review essays. Of German origin, he studied at Tübingen, came to the University of Chicago where he earned his PhD under Sheila Fitzpatrick, and then took up a position at the University of Western Australia before moving on to Melbourne.

Transnationalism, as it happens, is the main theme of Debates on Stalinism. That is because Edele understands the "particular richness of this historiography" in terms of the displacement of the scholars who contributed to it, the circulation of their ideas across national and linguistic boundaries, and the "multiplicity of national, political, ideological and temporal contexts." He also interprets the acrimony of debates and the frequency of "mutual misunderstandings" as fueled by transnationality. After opening with a chapter on the brouhaha that erupted after Sheila Fitzpatrick's article "New Perspectives on Stalinism" appeared in Russian Review in 1986, Edele devotes part one to Moshe Lewin, Richard Pipes, and Sheila Fitzpatrick, all international transplants in the USA. He deems these three historians central to debates on Stalinism, even though Pipes actually wrote almost nothing on the Stalin era.

Part two surveys biographies of Stalin, the totalitarian vs. revisionist kerfuffle, and post-revisionism. Here the sub-themes of misunderstandings and historiographic amnesia, adumbrated in the first chapter, are developed, as Edele highlights considerable blurring of arguments separating totalitarian and revisionist camps, and also some common origins. Finally, in part three he takes up two recent debates involving historians beyond the Anglophone world, primarily in Russia and Ukraine. The first involves the Russian state's prosecution of historians who violated its Memory Law (of 2014, criminalising "lies about the activities of the Soviet Union in the Second World War"), the origins of the law, and the fraught question of whether the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was justified as a defensive manoeuvre or represented the fulfilment of Soviet designs on lands to its west. The second concerns the Great Famine of 1932–33, the Holodomor (a compound in Ukrainian for "hunger" and "devastation"), and whether the Soviet state arranged it to eliminate the wellspring of Ukrainian nationalism, namely its peasants. A concluding chapter identifies five promising areas of recent scholarly activity: gender, the environment, the economy, World War II, and empire.

So, how reliable a guide is Edele? Very, when it comes to the nuances of interpretations and their implications, the origins and evolution of schools and, thanks to his reading of the correspondence among the three pro/antagonists in part one, the "strife, resentment and jealousy" (106) that alas, accompanied much of this scholarship. As a former Chicagets, a graduate student supervised by Fitzpatrick, he is well-placed to survey and gain a profound...