New perspectives on Stalinism

The nature of Stalinism has always been a highly contentious question, charged with political significance for almost all disputants. This chapter investigates the likely impact of historians, particularly social historians, on the study of the Stalin period. The overarching theme that Western historians have commonly used for interpreting the Stalin period is state against society, nachal'stvo against narod. This is a familiar framework in Russian historiography. Advancement in the commercial sector was evidently much less dependent on education and party membership—the two standard criteria for upward mobility in the Stalin period—than was the case in other spheres. The high level of state coercion characteristic of the Stalin period is another basic Sovietological theme that deserves reconsideration in the context of high social mobility. Social historians are generally inclined to prefer the perspective "from below"—that is, from within the society, or even from the grass-roots viewpoint of ordinary lower-class citizens—to the governmental and elite perspective "from above."