Summary
Sovietologists
The rise of revisionist theoreticians among the ranks of Sovietologists had resulted in the inability of this branch of the social sciences to predict the collapse of communism in the former USSR. Revisionists base their theories on the popular concepts espoused by Bolshevik activists at the time of the Russian revolution in 1917. The collapse of communism had led to the discreditation of this school of thought.See the full content of this document
Extract
1917 and the revisionists.
IN THE 1970s and 1980s self-proclaimed "revisionists" in the field of Soviet history took over many of the leading university chairs in the United States, England, and Germany, and by means of patronage more appropriate to politics than scholarship, imposed their views on students and professional organizations. The consequence has been a stultifying form of "political correctness" in the writing and teaching of twentieth-century Russian history. Such thought control is a new and highly disturbing phenomenon with no obvious parallel in any other branch of historiography, save possibly Black studies.(1)
"Revisionism" originally referred to the views of Eduard Bernstein, who a century ago called on the German Social-Democrats to abandon Marx's theory of revolution as invalidated by events and adopt in its place an evolutionary ideology. More recently it has come to define diverse schools of Western historians who challenged the traditional views of their countries' histories by employing a class approach close to but not slavishly imitative of Marx's. (In the German field it has been applied to those pseudo-academics who deny that the Nazis carried out a program of mass extermination of Jews, but that is another matter.) One of these schools has made it its mission to reformulate the view of Soviet history prevalent in the West, in order to supplant it with what it claims to be a more balanced and less politically motivated interpretation. In practice, the "revisionist" conception of the origins of the Soviet state comes close to that promoted by the now defunct communist establishment. Revisionism emerged in the United States and England in the 1960's, when all the branches of the social sciences underwent radicalization. Its methodology was inspired by the French Annales school and the writings of the British radical historian and publicist, E.P. Thompson, especially his Making of the English Working Class (1963). Derivatively, it was, of course, influenced by Marx and Engels. It was the onset of detente, when the hostility toward communism was being softened by the quest for an understanding with Moscow, an attitude which led to emphasis of its positive features and attribution of responsibility for the Cold War to the West. These shifts ...See the full content of this document
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