#9 - JRL 8058
From: "Robert Service" <robert.service@st-antonys.oxford.ac.uk>
Subject: Totalitarianists and Revisionists
Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2004

Dear David,

I append two attached files for publication in the JRL. The second answers the first. Robert

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Message from Stephen Cohen

Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2004

To: robert.service@st-antonys.oxford.ac.uk

Dear Robert Service:

In connection with the excerpt from your book that appeared in JRL, #8049, Feb. 5, 2004, I would be grateful to receive from you exact quotations from my work in which I express the view you attribute to me -- "that Lenin's revolutionary strategy had much to be admired."

If you cannot do so, I would be equally grateful for a public correction by you in JRL and an assurance that the allegation will not appear in any of your future publications.

Sincerely,

Stephen Cohen

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From Robert Service:

Stephen Cohen is annoyed by my comment that he, among others, ‘agreed that there was much to be admired in Lenin’s revolutionary strategy’. I am happy to correct any impression that Cohen directly expressed this opinion in exactly these words. My comment was a summary one.

Cohen’s book ‘Bukharin and the Russian Revolution’ seems to me to suggest a) that Bukharin in the course of the NEP went over to an evolutionary viewpoint on the installation of socialism, b) that this change of viewpoint was a direct development of the modified revolutionary strategy of Lenin in 1922-3, c) that Bukharin’s ideas and activity contained much that was admirable. It was because of this reading that my Introduction, which covers the influential trends in the literature on Soviet history, proposed that Cohen’s interpretation implied a degree of approval of Lenin’s revolutionary strategy. If I have misunderstood Cohen’s book on points a), b) and c), I doubt that I am alone.

It will anyway be clear to anyone who has read our respective books that we differ in our interpretations of both Lenin and Bukharin. I have always thought that Cohen’s work, in its treatment of 1922-1923, too readily accepted that Lenin’s last writings involved the beginning of a fundamental revision of Bolshevik party strategy; I also take a more critical approach to Bukharin’s ideas and behaviour under the NEP than Cohen allowed.

More generally I argued the general case in my Introduction that the dispute between the ‘totalitarianists’ and the ‘revisionists’ over more than two decades has been stuck in the aspic of mutual incomprehension. Having previously eschewed involvement in discussions on terminology and definitions, I came to the opinion that a fresh attempt at conceptualisation was in order. It was for this reason that the Introduction advanced a heavily modified version of the totalitarian model which, I believe, incorporates the most useful insights and findings of 'revisionist' writings. Historians of the Soviet Union need to move beyond the opposing pieties of the ‘schools’ of the 1970s and 1980s.

Cohen believes that the controversy between 'totalitarianism' and ‘revisionism’ were among the one of the richest intellectual chapters in the historiography of the USSR. He is entitled to his opinion. But it is tinged with nostalgia. Both 'totalitarianists' and 'revisionists' made important independent contributions, but the controversy was frequently more bad-tempered than clarificatory - and the archers in the controversy too often aimed past targets rather than at them. This is not all. ‘Revisionism’ was a school too ill-defined and diverse to offer a grand counter-model to ‘totalitarianism’ while traditional ‘totalitarianism’ too frequently took the extremes of ‘revisionism’ to be its core.

I wholly concur with David Johnson's plea for calm. But let the debate continue.

ROBERT SERVICE

9 February 2004.