Theories of Stalinism

Can we speak of a historical phenomenon called Stalinism? One is tempted to a brusque riposte: the answer is self-evident to millions of its victims. But this would avoid the issue raised by the question, which is whether the Stalinshchina (Epoch of Stalin) represented more than the culmination of something else—be it “Leninism,” “totalitarianism,” or, indeed, “Russia.”

Few questions have agitated students of Soviet history more, undoubtedly because one cannot think about Stalinism without interpreting the Russian Revolution and, indeed, Russian history. For Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn it
is a simple matter: there was an absolute historical break in 1917. Thereafter, his “nation, an organism,” was infected; a viral-un-Russian—logic unfolded with ironclad necessity. Stalin’s reign was “a direct continuation of the Lenin era.” No wonder his ire was roused by contemporary scholars like Robert C. Tucker, for whom the Vozhd (the Leader) was a “national Bolshevik” reinvention of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, or Moshe Lewin, who insists on complexity, not inevitability, in Stalinism’s trajectory.

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