1917 and the revisionists

National Interest, The, Spring, 1993 by Richard Pipes

IN THE 1970s and 1980s self-proclaimed "revisionists" in the field of Soviet history took over many of the leading university chairs in the United States, England, and Germany, and by means of patronage more appropriate to politics than scholarship, imposed their views on students and professional organizations. The consequence has been a stultifying form of "political correctness" in the writing and teaching of twentieth-century Russian history. Such thought control is a new and highly disturbing phenomenon with no obvious parallel in any other branch of historiography, save possibly Black studies.(1)

"Revisionism" originally referred to the views of Eduard Bernstein, who a century ago called on the German Social-Democrats to abandon Marx's theory of revolution as invalidated by events and adopt in its place an evolutionary ideology. More recently it has come to define diverse schools of Western historians who challenged the traditional views of their countries' histories by employing a class approach close to but not slavishly imitative of Marx's. (In the German field it has been applied to those pseudo-academics who deny that the Nazis carried out a program of mass extermination of Jews, but that is another matter.) One of these schools has made it its mission to reformulate the view of Soviet history prevalent in the West, in order to supplant it with what it claims to be a more balanced and less politically motivated interpretation. In practice, the "revisionist" conception of the origins of the Soviet state comes close to that promoted by the now defunct communist establishment.

Revisionism emerged in the United States and England in the 1960's, when all the branches of the social sciences underwent radicalization. Its methodology was inspired by the French Annales school and the writings of the British radical historian and publicist, E.P. Thompson, especially his Making of the English Working Class (1963). Derivatively, it was, of course, influenced by Marx and Engels. It was the onset of detente, when the hostility toward communism was being softened by the quest for an understanding with Moscow, an attitude which led to emphasis of its positive features and attribution of responsibility for the Cold War to the West.

These shifts in Western opinion happened to coincide with changes in the direction of Soviet historiography that followed the accession of Brezhnev in 1964, when Soviet scholars were told to devote greater attention to the historic role of the "masses," especially industrial labor. (This role had been minimized under Stalin who preferred to give credit for Soviet successes to the party and himself). Through contacts with Soviet academic institutions which encouraged their endeavors, the revisionists gained access to some archives. During Gorbachev's perestroika a few found sufficient approval in Moscow's eyes to have their books and articles published in the Soviet Union.

Before proceeding to the tenets of revisionism, something needs to be said about its political ramifications. On the face of it, events that had occurred in distant Russia decades ago are not a subject likely to exercise Western academics. If some of the latter nevertheless have come to feel passionately about them, it is because the origins of the communist state bear directly on its legitimacy. If the Soviet state had come into being as the result of a conspiracy, as argued by traditional Western and non-Communist Russian historians, then its claim to rule was tenuous at best. If, on the other hand, it had been conceived in a popular revolt then it was a legitimate government with which the West had to come to terms, regardless of its feelings about it. To demonstrate the need for accommodation with the communist regime, the Western revisionists, like their counter-parts in the USSR, felt the need to assert both the legitimacy and the permanence of the Soviet state with reference to its allegedly popular beginnings. In other words, the motive animating the revisionists was not so much intellectual curiosity as political zeal, namely a fervent dislike of anticommunism and the so-called "Cold War" policies to which it was said to give rise.(2)

It is easier to determine what the revisionists are against than what they are for, because their movement is quite diffuse and at times contradictory. They are largely agreed in rejecting the image of October 1917 as a putsch carried out by a conspiratorial party against the wishes of the "masses" or, at any rate, without their active participation: for them, it was an inevitable and popular uprising. They reject the concept of "totalitarianism" on the grounds that it portrays the Communist elite as manipulating a passive populace. As far as methodology is concerned, they insist on viewing events "from below," that is, looking for the prime mover of history in the masses, principally industrial labor.(3) They denigrate politics and ideology, which, like the Marxists, they view as belonging to the "superstructure."