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Comment: Revisionism Avant la Lettre

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Robert V. Daniels
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Extract

I guess I was a revisionist before anyone had ever heard the term used in its contemporary sense. When I embarked on Soviet studies, revisionism meant the democratic and gradualist revision of Marxism by Eduard Bernstein and his followers. That, of course, was heresy in the eyes of Marxist-Leninists, and “revisionism” became a familiar swearword in the Soviet lexicon.

My own unwitting revisionism in the new sense of deviation from the Soviet studies mainstream really began with my participation in Michael Karpovich's seminar in Russian history in 1947. In my paper, “The Russian Proletariat as a Revolutionary Force in 1917,” I highlighted the Bolsheviks and the fabzavkomy, because that was where the published sources were.

Type
Discussion
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 67 , Issue 3 , Fall 2008 , pp. 705 - 710
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2008

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References

1. E.g., Meller, V. L. and Pankratova, A. M., eds., Rabochee dvizhenie v 1917godu (Moscow and Leningrad, 1926)Google Scholar. Contrary to legend, Karpovich did not refuse to teach about the revolution and the Soviet period.

2. Daniels, Robert V., Red October: The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 (New York, 1967)Google Scholar; Daniels, , “The Bolshevik Gamble,” Russian Review 26, no. 4 (October 1967): 331-40CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reworked in Daniels, , The Rise and Fall of Communism in Russia (New Haven, 2007), chap. 8 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. By Suny, Ronald Grigor, in “Toward a Social History of the October Revolution,“ American Historical Review 88, no. 1 (February 1983): 40–41 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cf. 1.1. Mints, , “Neveroiatnye shansy Roberta Deniel'sa,” Kommunist, no. 8 (April 1970)Google Scholar.

4. See Daniels, Robert V, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1960)Google Scholar; also Daniels, , The Nature of Communism (New York, 1962)Google Scholar, chap. 9, sec. 6 (“The Transformation of the Movement and the Function of Doctrine“). For a later reflection, see Daniels, , “Stalinist Ideology as False Consciousness,” in Flores, Marcello and Gori, Francesca, eds., // mito dell'URSS: La cultura occidentals e I'Unione Sovietica (Milan, 1990)Google Scholar, condensed version in Daniels, , Rise and Fall of Communism, chap. 22 Google Scholar.

5. See Daniels, Robert V, “Office Holding and Elite Status: The Central Committee of the CPSU,” in Cocks, Paul, Daniels, Robert V., and Heer, Nancy Whittier, eds., The Dynamics of Soviet Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 1976)Google Scholar, condensed as “The Central Committee as a Bureaucratic Elite,” in Daniels, Rise andFall of Communism, chap. 27; also Daniels, , “Political Processes and Generational Change,” in Brown, Archie, ed., Political Leadership in the Soviet Union (London, 1989)Google Scholar, condensed as “The Generational Revolution,” in Daniels, Rise and Fall of Communism, chap. 28.

6. I recall Conyers Read's scandalous presidential address to the American Historical Association in December 1949 when the Cold War was pretty hot, to the effect that academic judgments should be subordinated to the national interest in prevailing against the Soviet Union. Read, Conyers, “The Social Responsibilities of the Historian,” American Historical Review 55, no. 2 (January 1950): 275-85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951)Google Scholar; Fainsod, Merle, How Russia Is Ruled (Cambridge, Mass., 1953)Google Scholar; Friedrich, Carl J. and Brzezinski, Zbigniew K., Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, Mass., 1956)Google Scholar; Schapiro, Leonard, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York, 1960)Google Scholar.

8. See, e.g., Conquest, Robert, “What Is Terror?” Slavic Review 45, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 235–37Google Scholar.

9. Gleason, Abbott, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York, 1995), 16–20 Google Scholar. Gleason does a masterful job of showing how the concept of totalitarianism arose between the wars and how it subsequently played out in American academic life.

10. Kirkpatrick, Jeanne, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” Commentary 68, no. 5 (1979)Google Scholar.

11. Daniels, Robert V., ed. and introduction, The Stalin Revolution: Fulfillment or Betrayal of Communism? (Boston, 1965; in later editions the subtitle became Foundations of Soviet Totalitarianism)Google Scholar. I included selections from Sheila Fitzpatrick in die 3d (1990) and 4th (1997) editions.

12. See, in particular, Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “The Civil War as a Formative Experience,“ in Gleason, Abbott, Kenez, Peter, and Stites, Richard, eds., Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution (Bloomington, 1985)Google Scholar.

13. Daniels, , Conscience of the Revolution, chap. 13 Google Scholar. In a personal bit of post-Soviet revisionism, I see an analogous chain of ad hoc decisions by Boris El'tsin in the course of his feud with Mikhail Gorbachev, a “perelom” in the opposite direction of radically antisocialist economics: Daniels, Robert V, “Per Mosca vedo un rischio cileno,” L'Unitd (Rome), 28 October 1992 Google Scholar, translated as “Interdependence, or a Russian Pinochet?” in Daniels, , Russia's Transformation: Snapshots of a Crumbling System (Lanham, Md., 1998), chap. 29 Google Scholar.

14. Daniels, Robert V, “Soviet Thought in the 1930s: An Interpretive Sketch,” Indiana Slavic Studies 1 (1956)Google Scholar, reprinted in Daniels, , Trotsky, Stalin, and Socialism (Boulder, Colo., 1991)Google Scholar, condensed as “Stalin's Cultural Counterrevolution,” in Daniels, , Rise and Fall of Communism, chap. 20 Google Scholar.1 had planned to develop the thesis into a book, but that project never came to fruition.

15. Daniels, , “Intellectuals and the Russian Revolution,” American Slavic and East European Review 20, no. 2 (April 1961): 270–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar, condensed version in Daniels, , Rise andFall of Communism, chap. 4 Google Scholar.

16. See Daniels, , Rise and Fall of Communism, 320–22Google Scholar.

17. Daniels, Robert V, “Eurocommunist Views of the Development of the Soviet System: The PCI and Stalinism,” Slavic Review 49, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 109-15Google Scholar. I presented an earlier version at the November 1988 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in Honolulu.

18. Enrico Berlinguer on Italian television (RAI), 13 December 1981.

19. Chronicled in his book, La grande svolta, translated into English as Boffa, Giuseppe, Inside the Khrushchev Era (New York, 1959)Google Scholar.

20. Boffa, Giuseppe, Ilfenomeno Stalin nella storia del XX secolo: Le interpretazioni dello Stalinismo (Rome, 1982)Google Scholar, translated as The Stalin Phenomenon (Ithaca, 1992); and Boffa, , Storia dell'Unione Sovietica, 2 vols. (Milan, 1976-79)Google Scholar.

21. Giulietto Chiesa, conversation with the author, Moscow, April 1984.

22. See Daniels, , “Does the Present Change the Past?” Journal of Modern History 70, no. 2 (June 1998): 431–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reworked as “Past and Present,” in Daniels, , Rise and Fall of Communism, chap. 35 Google Scholar.