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The Archives of Evil
A Review by Martin Malia

I.
Now that Soviet communism is at last "history," what do we understand about its workings that we failed to grasp when it seemed a permanent fixture of modernity? After all, the CIA notoriously overestimated its economic strength (some two-thirds of the American economy), thereby playing to our fears; and academic Sovietology exaggerated its potential for reform, thereby fostering the wishful hopes that culminated in late 1980s Gorbomania. So what deeper insights have emerged from more than a decade of digging in now largely open Soviet archives? Has there been an "archival revolution," as many enthusiastic researchers claim?

A consensus seems to have formed in Soviet studies that the politicized debates of the years before 1991 are now meaningless relics, because the "truth" became available only with our recent documentary windfall -- as read, of course, in an austerely factual and neutral manner. Be that as it may, of one thing we may be sure: the Soviet archives have confirmed in abundant detail our most somber pre-1991 assessments of the Soviet record. So taking that grim verdict as a given, what is our present understanding of the one-time Soviet "enigma"?

Recall what a strange affair Soviet studies was before 1991. Whereas most national histories are written primarily by natives of the countries concerned, serious scholarly work on Soviet Russia, after being launched by such émigrés as the classical liberal Leonard Shapiro and the former Menshevik David Dallin, was thereafter the work of foreigners. Indeed, most of these were Americans, if not always by birth then by education and nationality. Since these outsiders hailed from a world in permanent confrontation with the object of their study, assessing the Soviet "experiment" became the most passionate public issue of the age, for supporters of Western policy and for its critics alike.

The greatest obstacle to our understanding, of course, was that before 1991 we did not know how the Soviet story would turn out; and Hegel was surely right about the importance of closure to historical understanding when he declared that Minerva's owl takes flight only as night falls. Before 1991, writing Soviet history was thus a game of guessing the "experiment's" third act by giving different readings of the first two acts, the answer to the riddle of course hanging on whether Stalin was an "aberration" or the "fulfillment" of Lenin's heritage.

Interpretations of the Soviet riddle in American scholarship before the fall may be conveniently sorted out according to Turgenev's classic dichotomy of fathers and sons. In the immediate postwar decades, the "fathers" unhesitatingly accepted Stalin as Lenin's true heir; and they were equally certain that the pair's joint handiwork was a "totalitarianism" founded on the coercive action of the state and dedicated to ceaseless international expansion. Merle Fainsod of Harvard was the founding father of this school, and his book How Russia Is Ruled, which appeared in 1953, became the canonical text. After the 1960s, their more radical sons -- and daughters -- for the most part argued in favor of discontinuity between Lenin and Stalin, and hence for a real possibility of reform. Regarding the post-Stalin period, they asserted that burgeoning "interest groups" -- technocrats, scientists, managers -- constituted an "institutional pluralism" that made the Soviet Union virtually a new country. Jerry Hough, who had been Fainsod's star pupil, became the leading "revisionist" by rewriting his mentor's book in 1979 under the title How the Soviet Union Is Governed. Methodologically, the "totalitarians" emphasized the primacy of party power acting "from above" in molding Soviet society, while the "revisionists" found the revolution's driving force in social and economic forces, as articulated by the people acting "from below."

For both camps, Marxist ideology was secondary. What was primary in communism, the two agreed, was modernization and "overcoming backwardness," as W.W. Rostow's Stages of Economic Growth confidently assured us in 1960. Unsurprisingly, there was a political subtext to this generational division: the fathers were unabashedly anti-communist, while the sons were by and large anti-anti-communist, the two groups differing correspondingly in assessing Western policy in the Cold War. In consequence, the sons denounced the totalitarian model as blatantly "political," while portraying their own contributions as rigorously professional -- as if a "value-free" approach to communism's revolutionary pretensions were humanly possible.

Well, we now know that the Soviet story ended badly, and our historical challenge is to account for an actual failure rather than a potential success. Many of the fathers and all of the children are still active, and both have now submitted their cases to the judgment of the archives. As a result, the former have fleshed out their earlier briefs and the latter have had to backtrack on theirs -- though without ever explaining why any such change was necessary, while a few even remind us of the experiment's "noble ideals." This generational difference is apparent even in Yale University Press's prestigious Annals of Communism series, which publishes selected archival documents interspersed with editorial commentaries: the volume on Lenin, edited by Richard Pipes, reads like an indictment, and the volume on the purges, edited by J. Arch Getty, visibly strains to make the Terror look somewhat less terrible. Even the tribunal of the archives, apparently, does not necessarily produce a unanimous verdict.

II.
And what of the generation that has come of age since 1991, and whose members sometimes call themselves "the grandsons"? Distance in time from the Soviet experiment clearly gives them a great advantage over their predecessors. Even so, they cannot avoid a question that is intrinsic to the experiment's very nature as a revolutionary enterprise: the pre-1991 methodological issue of the relative weight to be assigned to politics and ideology on the one hand, and to socioeconomic forces on the other. Ideally, of course, the two factors should constitute the warp and woof of any comprehensive historical explanation. For the moment, however, the revisionists' overemphasis on the social has produced the understandable reaction of a return to politics and culture.

This change is not without irony; for the revisionists embraced the primacy of socioeconomic forces in the 1970s and 1980s just as their reductionist dangers were becoming clear in the study of Western revolutions. Historians of the Bolshevik revolution are therefore only now starting to catch up with the efforts, a full generation earlier, of François Furet to take the French Revolution back from the Marxists, and of Bernard Bailyn to substitute an ideological reading of the American Revolution for the economic interpretation of the Progressive School of Charles Beard and company.

The shift in scholarly understanding of Soviet history first became apparent in 1995 with the publication of Magnetic Mountain by Stephen Kotkin, a close study of how Stalin actually "built socialism" in the 1930s in the new steel city of Magnitogorsk. In this pathbreaking work, state and people, "above" and "below," are brought together in a single "Soviet civilization." Kotkin's synthesis is this: since Stalin's Five-Year Plans made the party's ideological discourse ubiquitous and unavoidable, the mass of peasants-turned-workers inevitably came to "speak Bolshevik" as their very own language, and the result was a bizarre but nonetheless functioning civilization. The new proletarians genuinely identified with "building socialism" and took pride in their assigned roles as "shock workers"; but at the same time, in order to survive socialist penury, they felt it legitimate to occasionally "borrow" their factory's tools to work for private gain.

Indeed, the omnipresence of ideology in Soviet life is the one genuine revelation of the Soviet archives. For it is now clear that Soviet officials, behind closed doors, and from the Politburo down to the local ispolkom, invariably "spoke Bolshevik" among themselves. Soviet leaders were not cynics, as many Western observers have imagined, but authentic true believers. And this included the man at the top, as we can now see from such sources as Yale University Press's excellent editions of Stalin's correspondence with Molotov and Kaganovich.

A selection of first books by younger scholars may permit us to gauge how the reevaluation of the Soviet adventure is proceeding. In From Darkness to Light and Terror in My Soul (in reality two parts of a single study), Igal Halfin undertakes the difficult task of defending the primacy of Marxist ideology in molding the Soviet system. He begins with a critique of social-history revisionism as exemplified by its doyenne Sheila Fitzpatrick. Her basic research on worker advancement under Stalin (somewhat abusively Americanized as "social mobility") led her eventually to investigate a Bolshevik policy that rather baffled her: namely, the party's relentless effort to foist Marxism's urban social categories onto peasant Russia, a practice that in fact meant "inventing" classes that were not there. Yet Fitzpatrick never asked the real question that this policy posed, which is why the party so desperately needed those bogus classes. The great case in point, of course, is the supposititious existence of a kulak "petty bourgeoisie" and a poor-peasant (bedniak) "proletariat" in the Russian village.

Halfin's answer to this conundrum is that the alleged social actors in the Soviet story -- bourgeoisie, proletariat, intelligentsia -- are not objectively given classes but moral figures in a salvation drama leading to an End of History. Real groupings in society have fuzzy boundaries and ambiguous profiles ("bourgeois intelligentsia," for example). But Marxism, since it seeks less to understand the world than to change it, reduces this complexity to a stark polarity of proletariat and bourgeoisie, which is simultaneously a moral antithesis of good and evil. The result is an eschatological vision of history as humanity's ascent from the "darkness" of servitude under class society to its luminous "emancipation" in classless society. It is only in this context that Stalin's steel mills and collective farms acquire their deeper socialist significance as means for creating a New World and a New Man.

The thesis that Marxism constitutes a secular religion is hardly new. It has been magisterially formulated by Raymond Aron, Leszek Kolakowski, and (with direct reference to Soviet policy) Andrzej Walicki, among others. But historians have largely resisted it, and Sovietologists have simply ignored it. The "totalitarians" treated Marxism as camouflage for the pursuit of power for its own sake or as an avatar of traditional Russian autocracy, and the "revisionists," though in fact honoring ideology with E.P. Thompson-style studies in Russian labor history that gave the Soviet order a proper social base, were nonetheless uninterested in examining ideology's role in the functioning of the regime. Yet if any work cries out for an ideological reading, it is the world built by Bolshevism. It should be completely obvious that in October 1917 it was not the Russian working class but a political faction of ideologues that seized power. Without their millenarian intoxication, the Soviet regime could hardly have achieved the prodigies of social transformation and mass violence to which it immediately proceeded.

Halfin's purpose is to bring out into the open the parareligious premises that made all this possible. His first step is a study in intellectual history, exploring the parallels between Soviet Marxism and Christian eschatology as these appear in major Bolshevik texts. From 1900 onward, figures such as Lenin's longtime chief aide Aleksandr Bogdanov, the proponent of socialism as "God-building," consistently envisaged Russia's impending revolution as a millennial transformation in which the intelligentsia would lead the "dark" masses to the Marxist "light," themes tirelessly reiterated in Bolshevik propaganda down to Minister of Education Anatolii Lunacharskii in the 1920s. This evidence, of course, does not constitute a case for the direct derivation of Marxism from religion. But it does establish that the structural similarities between Marxism's historical determinism and Christian eschatology can produce millenarian expectations and dogmatic convictions as readily in the socialist militant as in the religious enthusiast.

All this is quite credible, but it is difficult to render in rigorously empirical terms. So Halfin falls back on reiteration, which not infrequently leads to redundancies and convoluted argumentation. Halfin's reader is often obliged to work too hard. Still, the effort is worth it in the end; and the payoff is a probing analysis of a unique culture in which party-speak itself has become a social force as potent as any material agent. In this new culture, Marxism is no mere social theory; it is a drama of redemption in which the proletariat is the redeemer class, a role that it earned by being the most suffering class in society. Yet this redeemer is at first not conscious of its mission: the workers must be illumined from without by special prophets, who comprise the socialist intelligentsia. (After prophets and masses together have made the revolution, under the resulting egalitarian conditions the workers are expected to become their own intelligentsia.)

In fact, however, once the Bolsheviks had seized power, the tension between the two messiahs of their theory began to emerge. Halfin therefore turns from intellectual history to a valuable new archival source: the autobiographies that party members were periodically obliged to write. The purpose of these professions of faith (similar to the conversion testimonies of reborn Christians) was to give proof of a level of political commitment sufficient for party membership, or later, in the ritual of "self-criticism," to show repentance for lapses from "correct" party positions. Using these autobiographies, Halfin sketches the evolution of the ideal communist "self," or "soul," from 1917 to 1937.

The October Revolution of 1917 had marked the world-historical breakthrough to the End of History. But since the immediate result could not offer the property-less, classless, and stateless millennium of full communism, Bolshevik eschatology contained provisions for temporary setbacks. The first of these arrived in 1921 with the New Economic Policy, or NEP, providing for a limited market economy. Coming after the heady years of the Civil War and War Communism, this partial retreat to "capitalism" was a clear defeat for the party. For the foreseeable future, then, embattled Soviet socialism would exist in an intermediate world between the redemptive promise of October and its eventual realization in full, a world of "already" but "not yet" familiar in Christian eschatology.

In this ambiguous interlude, the relationship between the two communist messiahs could only be a ceaseless conflict between proletarian good and bourgeois evil. For only part of the intelligentsia was socialist and good. Most of it was "bourgeois" and bad, and this very component was entrenched in the universities inherited from the old regime. And just as in the larger society the party needed such "bourgeois specialists" as managers and engineers to make NEP work, in the universities it needed the old intelligentsia to train their worker successors. To get through the painful eschatological interim, therefore, the party saturated the university curriculum with the language of class (as it did with the larger society), and added "workers' faculties," or adult educational courses, to existing academic units.

This solution led to conflict, called "class struggle," between the worker faculties and traditional academia. Moreover, there were too few semi-qualified workers to maintain the universities' proletarian component at a properly socialist level, while too many qualified "former people" (as nobles and children of priests were now called) sought higher education. Hence both groups took to editing their biographies to fit the regime's ideological categories. Since this inevitably brought pseudo-proletarians into the university, the workers' faculties demanded a "purge," meaning expulsion from the party or from school. By the mid-1920s, in the university system, and indeed in all sensitive Soviet institutions, ideological "purity" came to take precedence over practical professional needs, and "pollution" from "class-alien" infiltrators became the supreme counterrevolutionary danger.

This process was carried a step further at the end of the decade, when first the Left Opposition and then the Right Opposition was condemned and their leaders expelled from the party. For the first time, the enemies of socialism were not just class-alien interlopers, but real proletarians and long-standing Bolshevik chiefs. In the early 1930s, opposition came to be viewed as a kind of illness or degeneration within the working class. Still, if these "degenerates" recanted, they might yet be saved for the cause. The arch-oppositionists Zinoviev and Kamenev were re-admitted to the party as late as 1932.

With the crash industrialization and the forced collectivization of the First Five-Year Plan, the Soviet experiment's place on the eschatological timeline changed radically. In 1936, the "Stalin Constitution" certified that socialism had been essentially "built." All exploiting classes were now declared to be extinct, leaving only the "non-antagonistic" categories of workers, kolkhoz peasants, and intelligentsia, groups that taken together constituted the "people." In this perfected New World, the New Man, too, must surely have appeared.

New deviations from party orthodoxy, therefore, could no longer be explained as "class-alien" behavior or a temporary lapse from party norms. All deviations were now inherently anti-party and actively counter-revolutionary. In consequence, the persons involved represented ineradicable evil, ontological evil. They were persons too vile for mere expulsion from the party, and fit only for judgment by the criminal courts. Accordingly, the Constitution of 1936 created the catchall category of "enemies of the people," for whom the automatic penalty was death. In the next two years the former oppositions were fused into a single Trotskyite-Zinovievite-Bukharinite counter-revolutionary bloc allied with fascism to restore capitalism. All the chief figures were duly executed.

This escalating ideological delirium matched every step of the 1930s revolution from above. In 1929, when Stalin launched his "great offensive" against the "petty bourgeois kulaks," he justified the mass coercion required with the novel (and for some, paradoxical) theory that the closer society approached socialism, the more intense the class struggle became. In consequence, once socialism's advent had been officially proclaimed in mid-decade, all critical, or even doubting, elements in society could only be innate "enemies," perverse "wreckers," concealing their machinations behind a display of party zeal. How else was it possible to explain the very real shortages, breakdowns, and crises still racking the perfect new Soviet world? In 1937, when Stalin set out to "unmask" all enemies in the Great Terror of that year, he proclaimed the ultimate refinement of the principle of class struggle: "the most dangerous enemy is the man with a party card in his pocket."

III.
Terry Martin's Affirmative Action Empire reads as though it were written about a different country. It treats an important subject, indeed one that many would consider the central matter of the Soviet story: the Soviet Union as a "multinational empire." And communism's finale of 1991 is in fact now commonly called the "collapse of the Soviet Union," while for relevant historical comparisons we are referred to those other multinational states, the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. But when did that pair ever build socialism? All its ethnic diversity notwithstanding, surely the most important fact about the Soviet empire was that it was a Communist Party empire.

That said, the treatment accorded its non-Russian minorities remains a significant matter. Martin approaches the subject not by examining the nationalities themselves, but by tracing the development of Soviet policy toward them. The result is a straightforward political -- or more exactly, administrative -- history of that policy between 1923 and 1939. Its five hundred chronologically organized pages offer as densely factual a narrative as one could desire. Indeed, the book is a kind of Exhibit A of what the "archival revolution" stands for; and it is for this archival strength that Martin's work has been lavishly praised. Yet it should be noted that his book does not offer any larger analysis or overall thesis; and the story ends abruptly in 1939 without a word of conclusion. The tone is generally bland and neutral, in the current nonjudgmental mode of Soviet studies. Apparently the archival facts are supposed to be self-interpreting.

The story runs as follows. In the early 1920s, the Bolsheviks re-organized the re-conquered Russian Empire as a federation of republics, named the Soviet Union, which, as Stalin later put it, were to be "national in form and socialist in content." This strategy was called korenizatsiia, or "indigenization," meaning that the minorities were to be made communist by rooting party values in their indigenous cultures. Concretely, this entailed conceding to the constituent republics, as well as to thousands of lesser ethnic units within them, the cultural accoutrements of nationhood: use of the native language in instruction and administration, a national literature, folklore, even an opera -- though not, of course, the supreme attribute of nationhood, political independence.

The joint work of Lenin and Stalin during 1923, this policy was adopted for a mixture of ideological and practical reasons. In the Marxist canon, nationalism belonged to the "bourgeois" stage of history and hence could have no place in the new Soviet state. Yet there were peoples within that state's boundaries whose resistance to czarism had found expression in nationalism rather than in socialism. Indigenization was thus a means for easing these peoples through their dangerous nationalist phase while preserving Soviet unity for the coming socialist offensive. Indeed, this policy entailed some reverse discrimination against Russians, since their "chauvinism" under czarism had made the minorities leery of any government, no matter how progressive, installed in the Kremlin. What is more, the spectacle of Austria-Hungary's dissolution in 1918 served as a potent warning to the Bolsheviks to treat their own minorities with caution.

In the Union's more advanced western nations -- Ukraine being the critical case -- the Bolsheviks boldly promoted an enhanced, even preponderant, role in public life for the native cultures. In the backward eastern nations, by contrast, the Bolsheviks had to create literate ethnic identities from scratch, with internationalist Latin, not "chauvinist" Cyrillic, alphabets. All this worked more or less until the end of the decade, and even during the frenzy of collectivization in 1930-1932; literacy spread and local elites did in fact emerge. But eventually indigenization began to cause trouble for the regime, as resistance to collectivization greatly sharpened Ukrainian national sentiment just when Moscow's new command economy required increased centralization. In 1932, for this reason, Stalin began to backtrack from his earlier radicalism toward the minority nations.

Although indigenization was never abandoned, it was seriously diluted as Russian language and culture came to be emphasized as pan-Soviet unifiers. The Latin alphabets of minority languages were now changed to Cyrillic, and Pushkin became a kind of pan-Union national poet. At the end of the 1930s, Stalin went still further and enshrined as governing principle of the Soviet motherland the ideal of "Friendship of the Peoples," with the Russians assigned the role of elder brother. This general picture is not new -- the scholar Gerhard Simon gave a good outline of it in 1991 -- but Martin has fleshed it out more fully than any other before him. His book offers the best handbook of information on its subject that we will have for a long time to come.

But the rhetorical packaging of this information is quite a different matter. The problem begins with the cover of Martin's book, which displays the smiling faces of Stalin and an Uzbek girl under the words "Affirmative Action Empire." And the book's opening sentence solemnly proclaims that "the Soviet Union was the world's first Affirmative Action Empire." (Are we supposed to hope for others?) These words then recur, always uppercase, like an incantation, on almost every other page. But "affirmative action" was never a Soviet term. As Martin himself recognizes, Lenin used the expression polozhitel' naia deiatel'nost', or "positive action," only once, in 1905 -- and with reference to "bourgeois nationalists"! Even so, Martin informs us that he found the "social mobility" fostered by indigenization so exceptional that it required a special name; so he appropriated an American ideal of civil rights and bestowed it on the imperium of Lenin and Stalin.

It is not a semantic quibble to object to this procedure. Particularity of time and of place is the essence of history as a discipline. The Soviet Union was not, to put it mildly, the United States, and the 1920s were not the 1970s, and reversing these identities simply denatures the past. Martin's "Affirmative Action" mantra gives us an improbably humanitarian Soviet Union, an enterprise that unlike European colonial empires, say, was a progressive -- indeed, a model -- empire. With "Affirmative Action" as the "national constitution of the Soviet Union," it constituted a "fascinating experiment in governing a multiethnic state," to which there was "nothing comparable . . . with the possible exception of India."

Martin's title is simply the most extreme case of the book's use of argument by verbal suggestion. There is also the pervasive use of social-science-speak to make distinctively Soviet practices look like neutral governing techniques. Thus we find "terror as a system of signaling," meaning that "asymmetrical" state violence can be an effective political tool. Now this is certainly true as a practical matter, but the way Martin states it de-Bolshevizes its context and its purposes. A similar effect can be produced by ordinary language. Thus Martin insists that the Bolsheviks' hostility to the outside world must be called "Soviet xenophobia," as if it were garden-variety nationalism, whereas in fact it derived from their view of foreign relations as "international class struggle." Cumulatively, such procedures create a tone of bland neutrality that in fact blurs the otherness of Soviet society. In Martin's "Affirmative Action" Empire, no one speaks Bolshevik anymore.

To be sure, Martin duly notes that Soviet "Affirmative Action" was not an end in itself but a preliminary to socialist modernization. True also, he distinguishes between "hard-line" and "soft-line" Soviet policies, the former being the core programs of collectivization and crash industrialization, and the latter such egalitarian adjuncts as nationalities policy. He also duly notes that when the two conflicted the soft line invariably had to give way, as in Ukraine in 1932. All the same, the reader receives the impression of a generally beneficent and at least partially successful enterprise.

In truth, indigenization was a basically naïve and misguided policy -- and Martin's own evidence indicts it as such. This is not to say that the Soviet state was eventually destroyed by minority nationalism, as is often alleged. The Soviet pseudo-Union collapsed when Gorbachev, in promoting perestroika, recklessly dismantled the party's Central Committee; once that command center had been demolished, the governing apparatchiki of the various republics had a free hand to declare their satrapies independent "nations." Indigenization's failure, rather, was that it generated ethnic conflict during the empire's lifetime; and when the end came, most of the successor states were not viable entities.

A major source of their weakness was what Martin calls "the hole in the middle" that was left over from indigenization. In the Eastern republics especially, Soviet power had created an apparatchik elite above and powerless plebs below, but with no middle class or proto-civil society in between. In consequence, if we leave aside the only partially Sovietized Baltic states, we see that Belarus, Moldova, and what Stephen Kotkin called in these pages the "Trashcanistans" of Central Asia are clearly disasters; even such genuinely "historic nations" as Armenia and Georgia are now a shambles; and Ukraine is still touch-and-go on the way to real nationhood. The only national unit that basically works is the one that had been least favored by indigenization, Russia, and such of its sub-units as Tatarstan -- though not, of course, Chechnya. Clearly, the world's first Affirmative Action Empire has left no usable legacy to its successor states.

IV.
Amir Weiner returns us to the real, unadulterated Soviet Union. In Making Sense of War, he indeed takes us into a new and little-known segment of its history, namely the country's wartime and postwar internal development. Until now, this subject has been ignored by Western historians primarily concerned with the more urgent matter of Soviet international behavior. Domestic developments, for their part, were dismissed with the summary judgment that after 1945 prewar Soviet structures were simply put back in place. Weiner's archivally based study of the Ukrainian province of Vinnytsia demonstrates that, on the contrary, the postwar restoration was in fact a new departure both for the province and the Union at large. Indeed, his central thesis is that the trauma of war and its aftermath amounted to a renewal of the revolution, a second founding of the Soviet enterprise.

In the twenty years before the war, whatever legitimacy Soviet communism could claim derived from its Civil War victory and Stalin's building of socialism. Yet these accomplishments had been visited by a minority on a largely hostile population, and the question remained whether the new regime could meet the military test that had destroyed its predecessor. That the Great Fatherland War of 1941-1945 answered this question positively is largely because it was a joint enterprise of party and people. Victory therefore gave the regime a new and deeper legitimacy than ever before, as well as forty more years of life as a superpower.

This process of rebirth is particularly vivid in the border province of Vinnytsia. An area of some 2.3 million inhabitants before the war, it took twelve years after it to reach the same figure. In these difficult postwar years the provincial administration had not only to rebuild the socialist economy, but also to contend with the increasingly vexed matter of a mixed Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish population. In short, Vinnytsia province offered a microcosm of the Soviet Union's most acute problems.

The war affected the province both in ways peculiar to it and in ways common to Soviet society as a whole. Nationally the regime treated the war as the great showdown between socialism and imperialism, a historically necessary "apocalypse" in which the Soviets' victory had consolidated their system for eternity. And this position was indeed shared by the true believers in Marxism-Leninism who dominated the party hierarchy at every level. To more sensitive believers, however, who were wracked by doubts about the cost of collectivization and the purges, the war was a "purgatory" that cleansed the communist utopia of its past crimes. To the more tepid mass of the population, the war meant defense of home and motherland, for Russians obviously but also for a majority of Ukrainians. Even for the masses, though, the war had consequences for their place in the official Soviet system.

Before the war, proletarian class origin was the most proper Soviet pedigree; after it, as Weiner shows, a record of valorous combat was an even better credential. Accordingly, many victims of the 1930s purges who had been released from the Gulag during the war to serve in the army after victory were reinstated in the party. Even more important, the new patriotic criterion of Soviet identity made Red Army membership the key to future advancement in the system. Conversely, the legacy of the war created new categories of "enemies."

Among these, of course, were genuinely "alien" elements, above all Ukrainian nationalists who had participated in local administration under the Germans, and whose guerrilla bands would fight on until the 1950s. Combating these forces was a relatively simple matter, for most of the population turned against them either during or just after the wartime occupation. Far more dangerous, however, were enemies within the Soviet family. First to be confronted were the partisans; glorified during the conflict, they were now shouldered aside as "anarchic." Similarly suspect to the local population and to the higher party leadership were lower party cadres who had accepted duly authorized evacuation to the rear during the war. But most distrusted of all were party members who had remained in the province under German occupation. When the Red Army returned, in 1944, the regime's first priority was a massive, time-consuming "verification" of their behavior. Most were "cleansed" or purged from the party's ranks, even when their professional qualifications were urgently needed. The scope of this turnover of personnel was enlarged by the Soviet obsession with rooting out all "alien" social elements as potentially traitorous "pollution."

Postwar Vinnytsia was thus brought back into line by a less extreme application of the 1930s logic of terror and purge. Even though this time party discipline was largely bloodless, at least at the local level, by 1947 Vinnytsia, and indeed all Ukraine, had acquired a virtually new party, and its ranks were filled overwhelmingly with Red Army veterans. Mostly younger men, they would form the postwar Soviet elite almost until Gorbachev's perestroika. Tempered in battle, moreover, they were more assertive than the party recruits produced by the revolution from above of the 1930s; for example, in the postwar purges, such as the 1952 trial of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the victims, unlike their prewar predecessors, for the most part refused to confess. Owing to this generational assertiveness, they later furnished a ready clientele for Khrushchev's "thaw." And since they were also largely from the peasantry, their ascendancy in the party did much to reconcile to Soviet power the great victim class of collectivization. Yet in Vinnytsia they were in addition largely Ukrainian, and so they felt a submerged Soviet Ukrainian patriotism that could be transferred to an independent state when the Union crumbled, just as Soviet Russian patriotism would triumph over party loyalty in Moscow. Thus with the wartime victory the virus of nationalism for the first time entered officially into the ethos of the experiment.

This meant trouble for Ukraine's numerous Jews. Before the war they had generally prospered under Soviet power, but now they were excluded from the re-founded Soviet family. This change of attitude, moreover, owed something to the Nazi occupier, who had acquainted the population with new racial criteria of "purity" and "pollution." As applied to both Russians and Jews, these criteria appealed to long-standing Ukrainian prejudice, and increasingly also to a regime battling nationalist guerrillas. Both the regime and the population, therefore, began to "ethnicize" the already existing and well-honed Soviet concepts of "enemy," "pollution," and "purge." Whole groups, not just individuals, could now be "excised" from the polity in good Marxist conscience, though the regime insisted that its version of group purge had nothing to do with the "zoological" Nazi variety.

In this new perspective, the Jews as a diaspora nation were automatically suspect of harboring foreign loyalties. No matter how sterling their war record, no special status could be accorded them as victims of Nazism. Their sufferings existed only as part of Soviet suffering, and there was no place for the Holocaust in the iconography of the Great Fatherland War. The growing postwar ostracism of Soviet Jewry, moreover, was aggravated by new international tensions. American imperialism now replaced fascism as the great external menace to world socialism, and Zionism became its secret agent within the Soviet Union. Thus did both popular and official anti-Semitism reappear on the Soviet scene, reinforced by the ideology of revolutionary purity that had nurtured the Soviet system from the beginning.

V.
This look at the new scholarly literature on the Soviet Union, though limited, may provide a sense of the field's directions of change. We may give at least a provisional answer to the question with which we began: how much better do we understand the Soviet adventure today than we did before the liberating collapse of 1991? The answer may be summarized in two points. The first is that the "archival revolution" has been over-rated. New information, no matter how valuable, is not the same as new insight. If the recent flood of documentation has been perceived as "revolutionary," this is owing to the exhilaration of discovery that accompanied it. But this excitement will pass, leaving us with the normal situation in any mature historical field: the archives are simply there, and the real problem is to derive meaning from their mute data. In order to hasten the arrival of such maturity in Soviet studies, a more critical attitude toward the current archival fetishism would certainly be welcome.

The second point is that, after the long dominance of social history, the time has naturally come for a turn (or a return) to ideology, and more broadly to cultural history. Such a methodological adjustment is all the more logical in light of the Soviet regime's overtly ideocratic nature. As we have seen, this scholarly transition is well under way, and with promising results. Even so, no field of scholarship can be turned around in a decade; and Soviet studies are still far from the level of achievement in the most creative areas of contemporary historical writing, the study of Nazi Germany and the French Revolution -- fields that are all the richer for having grown from national into international enterprises.

How can Soviet history make the leap to a comparable level of accomplishment? Not by an injection of new facts, but by an act of conceptual imagination, a fundamental rethinking of the Russian Revolution. (François Furet's Penser la Revolution française comes to mind.) This means recovering a clear awareness of what constitutes the Soviet phenomenon's historical particularity. For that phenomenon was not defined by such secondary features as "modernization" or "neo-autocracy," but by the ideological name it proudly gave itself -- communism -- as understood in its full millenarian and militant sense.

And let us not forget how incredible that phenomenon was. In briefest outline, the story is this. Profiting from the war-induced disintegration of society, a small band of ideologues took over the Russian Empire and amid its ruins, in less than twenty years, "built socialism" for the first time in history, a feat that mesmerized and polarized the planet, and whose impact was immeasurably reinforced by victory in World War II, a triumph that also made the Soviet Union a superpower. But the most amazing Soviet feat of all came forty years later, when this world-straddling colossus collapsed like a house of cards, in peacetime, and without any effort of defense by its elite.

This strange epic, no matter how we may evaluate it politically or morally, is surely hors pair in history. It will not be grasped by comparisons with Austro-Hungarian multi-nationalism or American social policy. It can only be approached with a strict mind, and in a spirit of wonder and awe at an enigma that will never really go away, the mystery of an impossible utopian ambition so firmly institutionalized in state power that it lasted fully three-quarters of a century.

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