History and Theory, Theme Issue 46 (December 2007), 77-91 © Wesleyan University 2007 ISSN: 0018-2656 REVISIONISM IN SOVIET HISTORY SHEIla FITzpaTRIck aBSTRacT This essay is an account of the “revisionism” movement of the 1970s and 1980s in Soviet history, analyzing its challenge to the totalitarian model in terms of kuhnian paradigm shift. The focus is on revisionism of the Stalin period, an area that was particularly highly charged by the passions of the cold War. These passions tended to obscure the fact that one of the main issues at stake was not ideological but purely disciplinary, namely a chal- lenge by social historians to the dominance of political history. a similar challenge, this time against the dominance of social history on behalf of cultural history, was issued in the 1990s by “post-revisionists.”although I was a participant in the battles of the 1970s, the essay is less a personal account than a case-based analysis of the way disciplinary orthodoxies in the social sciences and humanities are established and challenged, and why this happens when it does. In the case of Soviet history, I argue that new data and external events played a surprisingly small role, and generational change a large one. I was a participant in the “revisionism” that is the subject of this essay, and this essay will necessarily reflect my experience and (despite my best efforts at detachment) my biases. The movement of young historians and political scientists in the US and the Uk that was labeled “revisionism” in the 1970s involved a challenge to the then dominant totalitarian model. The two main loci of revisionist scholarship were Stalinism (meaning primarily its prewar version, from the late 1920s to the Second World War) and the Russian Revolution of 1917. I will concentrate on the former, since it is both the arena I know best and the one where the totalitarian model was most entrenched. This essay is not intended as a personal account of what it felt like to be a Soviet-history revision- ist back in the 1970s, though I have offered such an account elsewhere. 1 It is an attempt, informed by this particular historiographical case study, to think about how knowledge develops within academic disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, how disciplinary orthodoxies are established and challenged, and what’s at stake when this happens. I. paRaDIgM SHIFTS I am going to treat revisionism as a paradigm for understanding Soviet history, a paradigm that in the 1970s and 1980s successfully challenged the then regnant 1. For the account of my personal experiences as a revisionist, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Revisionism in Retrospect: a personal View,” forthcoming in Slavic Review (2008).