Stalinism is a much abused term. In the discourse of public politics in the West, particularly on the left of the political spectrum, it has become a form of abuse with little substantive content. In academic pursuits, too, the term has had a distinctly pejorative air. But even where it has been used in an analytical rather than a combative fashion, its use has often been characterised by a looseness of terminology and of thinking which clearly compromises its utility as a tool of both analysis and understanding. Furthermore, the difficulties with the use of the term reflect problems with the concept of Stalinism itself. The major difficulty is a lack of agreement about what should constitute Stalinism. All of those who have studied Stalinism – and there are surprisingly few studies of Stalinism as a system as opposed to Stalin as a person – have their own conceptions of what it means and these different conceptions are not always easily reconcilable. However, this is very often less a result of different positions in debate than of different foci of analysis; students often talk past one another rather than to one another. This problem of focus is well illustrated by the contemporary disputes about the role and nature of social history as applied to Stalinism.

Although social history had made earlier incursions into the question of Stalinism and its origins, it did not begin to make a major impact upon our conception of Stalinism until the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the middle of the 1980s, a crop of new, younger historians has been making an impact upon our understanding of the Stalinist period in the USSR.