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Where the Cold War Still Rages: 'Totalitarian' and 'revisionist' historians debate who was right; some say it's time to move on (ALICE GOMSTYN, February 6, 2004, Chronicle of Higher Education)

During the cold war, a debate flourished among American scholars studying Russian history: What fueled the survival of the Soviet regime? Unlike the two superpowers themselves, the opposing sides waged no proxy wars. They fought each other with the tenacity of babushkas on a bread line, armed with dueling theses and impassioned critiques.

One group of scholars, known as the "totalitarians," argued that the oppressive power wielded by Soviet leaders compelled Soviet citizens to work as cogs in the system, ensuring the regime's survival. The other group, the "revisionists," held that the Soviet people themselves provided the support necessary to keep the regime afloat. [...]

The end of the cold war froze the political urgency of the issue, but the debate itself remained unresolved. Nor did the subsequent mass opening of Russian archives build any consensus between totalitarians and revisionists, as some had expected. Instead, the new stream of information reinforced their differences. The totalitarians in particular, upon discovering firsthand accounts of the terror and suffering endured by the Soviet population, used the information to bolster their claims that Soviet citizens were helpless victims of a merciless regime.

The archival documents, in combination with the collapse of the Soviet Union itself in 1991, prove "that the regime was not stable and not popular," says Richard Pipes, a longtime leader of the totalitarian school. The former professor of history at Harvard University chronicles his experiences in Russian scholarship in his autobiography, Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger. Mr. Pipes served as an adviser to President Ronald Reagan and helped to shape that administration's hard-line stance on Soviet affairs. Materials found in the archives since 1991, he argues, show that the revisionists have "suffered a great defeat."

Key members of the revisionist school, though, have raised no white flags. Sheila Fitzpatrick, who is described by colleagues as having been the "pace setter" for revisionist historians in the 1970s, says that access to Soviet archives has given scholars "the opportunity to see how things work in much more detail," but that "I wouldn't say that my sort of general picture has changed in some dramatic way."

Revisionists also argue that totalitarians are wrong to neglect the ways that the Soviet regime did benefit its people. In the March 2000 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Mr. Getty argued that "terror does not wholly negate achievements such as universal literacy, one of the best technological-education systems in the world, the first man in space, free education and health care, and security in old age."

Ms. Fitzpatrick, a professor of history at the University of Chicago, and others have used information uncovered in the archives to show how members of Soviet society were able to cope with the hardships under Soviet rule. She notes, however, that her research is not focused on proving or disproving the existence of popular support for the regime. "The interests of historians change," she says. "People exhaust one line of investigation, and then they move on to other approaches."

To Mr. Pipes, the revisionists' claim to have moved on is itself troubling. "They simply went on without looking backwards at what they have done," he says. "They have never explained or apologized for their mistakes."

Mr. Malia, a contemporary of Mr. Pipes and a leading totalitarian historian himself, says wiping the slate clean of revisionist arguments is essential to provide a proper grounding for the subsequent generation of researchers. A "valid new historiography of the Soviet Union," he wrote in a fall 2002 issue of the foreign-policy magazine National Interest, "can be built only by reversing revisionism's explanatory priorities."

But reversing revisionism seems absent from the agenda of most Russian historians today. "I think there's much to be gained from both sides" of the debate, says Cathy A. Frierson, a professor of Russian history at the University of New Hampshire and a former student of Mr. Pipes. "They're not mutually exclusive."

Silly conservatives, all those miles of concertina wire were there to keep out eager Westerners seeking utopia, not to keep the inmates shut inside.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 10, 2004 8:58 AM