Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2009
Summary
Serious academic study of the Stalin period began in the 1950s. Carried out mostly by political scientists and supported by the “know your enemy” mandate of the Cold War, research on the USSR fairly quickly led to a “shared paradigm” of Soviet history. That view, which was loosely labeled totalitarian, reflected scholarly consensus in a scientific manner and seemed to explain Soviet reality in a satisfactory way. Of course, like all scientific paradigms, it did not spring from nothing. Writings and testimonies of active anti-Soviet or anti-Stalin politicians (Trotskyists, Mensheviks, and former Whites) combined with memoirs of victims and with our limited external view of a closed society to produce a vision of a monolithic and unitary dictatorship whose existence and survival were based on terror. Research evidence available at the time confirmed totalitarianism as logical, honest, and scientific.
In a nutshell, and necessarily at the expense of nuance, the totalitarian paradigm went as follows. The Soviet system under Stalin consisted of a nonpluralist, hierarchical dictatorship in which command authority existed only at the top of the pyramid of political power. Ideology and violence were monopolies of the ruling elite, which passed its orders down a pseudo-military chain of command whose discipline was the product of Leninist prescriptions on party organization and Stalinist enforcement of these norms. At the top of the ruling elite stood an autocratic Stalin whose personal control was virtually unlimited in all areas of life and culture, from art to zoology.
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- Stalinist TerrorNew Perspectives, pp. 1 - 18Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993