Abstract
This edited volume is unlike any other that I have reviewed. It is a collection of reflections by senior scholars with regard to their historical writings on Stalin and Stalinism. This includes much personal biography, from how authors first became involved with the topic and the context in which they made discoveries. Some authors consider other scholarship that has appeared since the publication of their (often-groundbreaking) articles and monographs. Indeed, the collection can be viewed as part of a larger, if still small, trend of noting hierarchy and celebrity in academia as in, for example, ‘feature reviews’ and interviews with ‘leading scholars’ in academic journals. The book's main audience will thereby be readers interested in the biographies and historiographical contributions of some of the famous faces in Stalin studies whose chapters incorporate useful summaries of their authors’ main findings and conclusions. Some readers may go further and delve into the useful reference lists that accompany each chapter.
The rationale for the collection is that senior scholars possess unique and valuable outlooks: ‘The chapters they produced cross styles, disciplines, periodizations, and interpretative boundaries in ways that only senior scholars feel free to do … They offer the reader reflections based on long experience and thought while at the same time contributing both new and refined insights’ (7, 11). No attempt was made to impose conformity of presentation or to aim for comprehensive coverage. The contributors are well known to each other and, in most cases, have sustained friendships of several decades that includes invitations to deliver guest lectures, joint excursions to the movies, and taking walks (82, 120, 178). The selection criteria, senior scholars known to the editors, inevitably leaves its mark on the collection in two basic ways. Given the editors’ base in the USA, the collection is heavily biased towards senior scholars who are from or who have worked predominantly in North America. Second, the topics covered reflect the interests and obsessions of the invited contributors. Exclusions are as notable as inclusions. The editors acknowledge that ‘absence in no way reflects our view of their value’ (7).
Given my timeline and connections forged as a student and Lecturer at the Institute of Soviet and East European Studies, University of Glasgow, I could not help reading the reflections through my own history. I was pleased, for example, to note Donald Filtzer's acknowledgement of the importance of Hillel Ticktin's often overlooked contribution to the political economy of Stalinism (48–9, 59) and saddened by not one reference to Alec Nove. There is also an institutional aspect that should be covered in reflections on the study of Stalinism. In the UK, for example, the work of the Soviet Industrialization Project and its related seminars at CREES, University of Birmingham, was fertile and vital. Glasgow was home to journals, chiefly Critique and Soviet Studies, that promoted original and critical research into the USSR during and post Stalin.
To return to what is in the book, this is a sui generis and self-consciously one-sided experiment in reflections on Stalinism. The contents will come as no surprise to readers already familiar with the contributors’ earlier publications. The essays are sensibly divided into five parts, covering the social, mass repression/terror, beliefs and emotions, the ideological, and the spacial aspects of Stalinism. The essays will be useful for teachers and students as concise summaries of methods, sources, and the main issues of interpretation in the areas under reflection. What stands out will differ for each reader, coloured by their interests and antipathies. For me, predominantly a historian of biography and the history of ideas, the essays by Lars Lih and Alfred Rieber were of import. This aside, taken separately and collectively all chapters can be recommended and read with profit.
A volume that celebrates senior historians begins by noting the impact on the authors of the preceding generation of senior scholars that included Stephen Cohen, Moshe Lewin, and E. P. Thompson. Sadly co-editor J. Arch Getty recently joined this exalted departed company. I had the great pleasure of attending J. Arch Getty's conference presentations. He struck me as an open-minded scholar who was continually probing the detail of questions large and small. J. Arch Getty's urge to practise history to the very end is well-explained and will strike a chord with many fellow historians: The hardest part of the historian's job is to step inside the shoes of people with vastly different cultures, lives, and beliefs than ours. As I became older, the passing of friends and family made me more emotionally conscious of tragic death and of the almost incomprehensible horror of the 1930s Stalinist violence. But with that horror came a need to apply the tools of the historian to understand it … I still feel the need to try and explain the unimaginable. (154–5)