Abstract
Most of the revolutions discussed in this volume involved complete changes of regime, the more or less violent overthrow of an established government by revolutionaries dedicated to far-reaching political and, usually, economic and social change. By these criteria, Stalin’s so-called ‘great turn’ of 1929–32 is not at first an obvious candidate for the title of revolution. The Soviet Union’s leadership was not overthrown, and the political programme to which Lenin’s revolution of 1917 had been dedicated was ostensibly continued. But the speed and scope of change in the three years in question defy most other definitions. Contemporaries referred to the period as the ‘great break’ (velikii perelom); historians have spoken of ‘cultural revolution’, ‘revolution from above’, the turning point.
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Notes and References
For an excellent discussion of the ‘revolution from above’, see R. Tucker (ed.), Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York, 1977).
T. Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), p. 4.
The best account of this in English remains R. W. Davies, The Socialist Offensive: the Collectivisation of Soviet Agriculture, 1929–1930 (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1980).
See R. Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine (London, 1986).
See A. M. Ball, Russia’s Last Capitalists, the Nepmen, 1921–1929 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987) especially Chapter 3.
R. W. Davies, The Soviet Economy in Turmoil, 1929–1930 (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1989).
see S. Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–34 (Cambridge, 1979).
For the ‘Industrial Party’ trial, see H. Kuromiya, Stalin’s Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 167–72.
These changes are discussed in C. Merridale, Moscow Politics and the Rise of Stalin (London, 1990), Chapters 4 and 9.
On Kamenev’s political style and its contrast with the ‘Russian’ Stalinists, see C. Merridale, ‘The Making of a Moderate Bolshevik: an Introduction to L. B. Kamenev’s Political Biography’, in J. Cooper, M. Perrie and E. A. Rees (eds), Soviet History, 1917–1953, Essays in Honour of R. W. Davies (London, 1995).
See P. A. Ginsborg, ‘Gramsci and the Era of Bourgeois Revolutions’, in J. Davies (ed.), Gramsci and Italy’s Passive Revolution (London, 1978).
For an example, see R. Medvedev, Let History Judge (New York, 1972 and 1989).
On this remark, and the literature about it, see Ger P. van den Berg, ‘The Soviet Union and the Death Penalty’, Soviet Studies, vol. XXXV, no. 2 (April 1983), pp. 156 and 168.
For Lenin’s last years, see R. Service, Lenin: a Political Life, vol. III (London, 1995).
M. Fainsod, Smolensk under Soviet Rule (Cambridge, Mass., 1958 and 1989).
See J. Habermas, ‘Vom öffentlichen Gebrauch der Historie’, Die Zeit, 7 November 1986.
O. Yu. Danilov, ‘Gosudarstvennaya deyatel’nost’ L. B. Kameneva 1917–1923 gg.’ Rossiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet istoriko-arkhivnyi institut, diplomnaya rabota (1993), p. 64.
For an example, see C. Merridale, ‘The 1937 Census and the Limits of Stalinist Rule’, Historical Journal, 39, 1 (1996), pp. 225–40.
Numerous recent works document this view. For an example, see E. A. Rees, Stalinism and Soviet Rail Transport, 1928–41 (London, 1995).
For examples of low-level protest, see D. Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization (London, 1986), pp. 130–51.
Mutual protection among groups of ex-peasants within Moscow industry is discussed by David Hofman, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929–1941 (Ithaca and London, 1994), pp. 85–91.
S. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1995), p. 228.
A study of this phenomenon was made in the 1920s by the Bolshevik Party itself. N. Semenov, Litso fabrichnykh rabochikh prozhivayushchikh v derevnyakh i politprosvetrabota sredi nikh (Moscow-Leningrad, 1929).
S. Merl, ‘Socio-economic Differentiation of the Peasantry’, in R. W. Davies (ed.), From Tsarism to the New Economic Policy (Basingstoke and London, 1990).
See L. A. and L. M. Vasil’evskii, Kniga o golode (Petrograd, 1920).
See R. Tucker’s ‘What Time is it in Russia’s History?’ in C. Merridale and C. Ward (eds), Perestroika: the Historical Perspective (Sevenoaks, 1991).
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© 2001 Catherine Merridale
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Merridale, C. (2001). Stalin’s Great Turn: a Revolution without Footsoldiers?. In: Donald, M., Rees, T. (eds) Reinterpreting Revolution in Twentieth-Century Europe. Themes in Focus. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-4026-1_5
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