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Comment: Life and Fate of Western Revisionism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
Extract
In 1969, when Sheila Fitzpatrick defended her dissertation in Oxford, I lived on the other side of the “iron curtain.” Being a happy Soviet Young Octobrist at an elementary school in the small town of Klimovsk, in the Moscow region, I knew about neither Iosif Stalin nor the birth of revisionism in western historiography. Even later as a history student at Moscow State University, the institution that provided the best academic education in the Soviet Union, I did not have the slightest idea about the ongoing bitter struggle between the advocates of the Cold War vision of Stalinism and the younger generation of historians who rejected that view.
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- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2008
References
1. I began my professional career as a quantitative historian focusing on the economy. Osokina, Elena A., “Sotsial'no-ekonomicheskaia struktura krest'ianskogo khoziaistva Tsentral'no-Promyshlennogo raiona Rossii v kontse 19-nachale 20 veka: Opyt kolichestvennogo analiza zemskoi statistiki” (Kandidat nauk diss., Moscow State University, 1987)Google Scholar.
2. Osokina, Elena A., “Raspredelenie i rynok v snabzhenii naseleniia v gody pervykh piatiletok, 1927-1941” (Doktor nauk diss., Moscow State University, 1998)Google Scholar.
3. Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1966)Google Scholar.
4. The University of South Carolina where I teach Russian history adopted a family friendly policy that allowed a paid maternal leave for a principal care provider only in 2007.
5. Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995)Google Scholar.
6. As I see it, post-revisionism represents a creative convergence of the approaches of both the totalitarian school and revisionism. It continues the search for the reasons for the rational social support of Stalinism initiated by revisionist historians. At the same time, post-revisionists revived the thesis of the totalitarian school concerning the state's formative influence on society, although they did not limit this influence to repression.