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#11 - JRL 8055
Date: Sun, 08 Feb 2004
Subject: totalitarian/revisionist (re: JRL #8049)
From: Arch Getty <getty@ucla.edu>

Stephen Cohen is right when he complains that journalists and reviewers rarely seem to have read or digested the works they criticize. This is an age-old frustration for writers. How many of us have been surprised at reviews of our books and at the conclusions reviewers draw from them? How often have we wondered if (or been shocked at how) others read our works? So I suppose I shouldn't have been amazed at the far-reaching and dubious conclusions Ed Dolan made when he wrote (JRL #8049):

"According to the revisionists, Russians today should be embracing reformers­voting for candidates who pledge to improve education, provide better security in old age, and so on. They are not."

While the second sentence is true, the first is at least illogical. Most of the "revisionists" wrote on rather narrow research topics on the 1920s and 1930s, and avoided the earlier grand generalizations on the nature of the Soviet system. Certainly, "revisionist" writings had a different focus than "totalitarian" ones and pointed to different ways to understand Soviet history. But to what extent can authors be held responsible for the implications others draw form their works, especially when those implications do not resemble anything the authors wrote, or are illogical on their face?

For example, some (but not all) of the "revisionists" maintained that the Soviet system had some popular support. And even if we admit this gross generalization, it would follow that Russians today should regard the breakup of the USSR as a mistake, not that they should embrace the reformers who dismantled it.

Polls continue to show majorities of Russians opposing the breakup of the USSR. And how can one equate "reformers" with pledges to improve education, old-age security, health care, and so forth? It was the "reformers" who systematically destroyed these. Russian seem to understand this better than we do, and this helps to explain why "reformers" were trounced in the recent elections.

J. Arch Getty
Professor of History, UCLA.