This essay is an account of the "revisionism" movement of the 1970s and 1980s in Soviet history, analyzing its challenge to the totalitarian model in terms of Kuhnian paradigm shift. The focus is on revisionism of the Stalin period, an area that was particularly highly charged by the passions of the Cold War. These passions tended to obscure the fact that one of the main issues at stake was not ideological but purely disciplinary, namely a challenge by social historians to (...) the dominance of political history. A similar challenge, this time against the dominance of social history on behalf of cultural history, was issued in the 1990s by "post-revisionists." Although I was a participant in the battles of the 1970s, the essay is less a personal account than a case-based analysis of the way disciplinary orthodoxies in the social sciences and humanities are established and challenged, and why this happens when it does. In the case of Soviet history, I argue that new data and external events played a surprisingly small role, and generational change a large one. (shrink)

This lecture presents the text of the speech about the ending of the Russian Revolution delivered by the author at the 2008 Elie Kedourie Memorial Lecture held at the British Academy. It addresses the problems for historians in determining the meaning and moral of a revolution. The lecture analogizes the French and Russian Revolution and suggests that the Russian Revolution and its historiography has always been to some extent in the shadow of the French.

The ABC of communism by Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhenskii was both an exercise in utopian planning and a Left Communist manifesto. As such, Lenin viewed it with some suspicion. Its educational section combined ideological prescription with description of the actual policy of the Soviet People’s Commissariat of Education, as well as elements of polemic with that policy. Preobrazhenskii, its author, would shortly emerge as a major opponent of Narkompros’s core commitments in education, clashing with Nadezhda Krupskaia, Lenin’s wife, and (...) other Narkompros leaders. (shrink)