The heart of the problem amounts to this: born as a mythological embodiment of the working people’s hopes for deliverance from their day-to-day burdens, utopian collectivism becomes in practice, when it is put into effect, worse in many ways than slavery. Inherent in utopia are both the basis for the future movement of liberation and an internal danger thereto. And inasmuch as the future is always imagined in the consciousness of the masses in a way that is to some extent utopian, any party that is orientated on the future constantly comes up against the phenomenon of utopianism. No scientific knowledge can guarantee against this. Bernard Shaw, discussing Darwinism, remarked that any science can become an ideology in itself — even a religion (and can consequently engender utopian illusions). In the twentieth century, he observed, we see ‘the revival of religion on a scientific basis’.77 Even where scientific ideas have triumphed, in the shape of Marxism, nothing yet ensures that utopian thinking will not make a comeback, assuming different forms. A relapse from science to utopia is sometimes expressed in a false interpretation of scientific conclusions. ‘The correctness of a principle does not guarantee the correctness of its application,’ wrote G. Vodolazov.78 An objectively reactionary utopia can adopt scientific terminology and acquire an appearance of soundness. The utopianism of the mass consciousness helps totalitarianism to subject the people, if only at first, but that is not the whole story. Totalitarianism sometimes performs really necessary work. The only question is how it does this.
According to Cheshkov and Vodolazov, for example, there are objective historical tasks that confront every society — tasks which are, so to speak, supra-class. But the means and methods for accomplishing these tasks possess a class character. Such a task is the modernizing of a backward country. In its own way, totalitarianism copes very well with that task. The point is, though, that it does this at man’s expense. ‘If this condition is not “stipulated”,’ wrote Vodolazov,
the problem is rendered extremely simple. All ‘subtleties’ are then eliminated from the problem with all the complications of transitional stages and measures, the solution to the problem is set out in straight lines, and a system made up of these lines is realized in the form of a system of barbed-wire fences, places of detention, prisons, concentration camps, and so on.79
All these general-theoretical conclusions became concrete in discussions among historians. One can even speak of a renaissance of historiography in the USSR at the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies. The acuteness of the problems, their ‘non-theoretical’ significance, compelled the historians to think very intensely and productively.
In the 1940s George Orwell wrote that ‘what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.’80 After Stalin’s death it fell to the historians to rectify a situation that seemed irremediable: they had to rehabilitate not just this or that person, but historiography as a whole in the USSR. Later, in 1965, a group of historians, replying to Izvestiya's attacks on Novy Mir, wrote that they regarded it as their duty ‘in the name of the past and of the future, to comprehend historical truth in all its fullness.’81 But it was impossible to tell the truth about the past without affecting certain interests that exist in the present. At first, however, the government itself encouraged the search for new ideas in history. Soon after the Twenty-Second Party Congress an All-Union Conference of Historians was held and was addressed by B.N. Ponomarev, who at that time was already a prominent ideologue of the CPSU. He blamed Stalin for having ‘placed the study of historical problems under his own supervision, subordinating it to the task of glorifying his personality’, and even spoke of ‘the Procrustean bed of Stalinist schemas and formulas’.82 This sharply anti-Stalinist speech set the tone for the whole conference. A.K. Kasimenko said that
it would be difficult to name any stage in the history of the Ukrainian people in the Soviet period when serious deviations from historical truth were not committed in the service of the cult of Stalin’s personality or to please his henchmen, like Kaganovich,
and called for historical science to be ‘purged’ of the ‘deposits’ left by Stalinism.83 V.G. Trukhanovsky distinguished among (Western) Sovietologists ‘honest scholars’ with whom ‘we need to talk in a different language from that which we use with falsifiers.’84 It was clear that many Western scholars were honestly trying to get at the truth about the events of the revolution at a time when Soviet historians were distorting it. I.M. Maisky said that ‘the period of the personality cult’, as he called it, ‘simply killed off the memoir genre.’85
A re-examination of the Stalinist schemas of history was begun. Thus, after 1961, theories which depicted the conquest by Tsarist Russia of the ‘border peoples’ of Central Asia, Caucasia and other parts of the present Soviet Union as historical good luck — almost a boon — for these peoples were condemned. It was officially recognized that such an interpretation of events was mistaken.86 It was at last permitted to curse tyrants like Ivan the Terrible, Stalin’s favourite hero. In the symposium Evropa v novoe i noveyshee vremya V.A. Dunaevsky criticized Stalin’s famous letter to the editors of the journal Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya, in which he accused the journal of following an incorrect line on the history of Bolshevism. For many years this letter was regarded as a basic document of Party history. Now it was itself declared wrong. Dunaevsky mentioned that Stalin put an end to discussion about the history of the revolution at the very moment ‘when Soviet historiography was beginning to arrive at a number of constructive solutions.’87
The start thus made looked very promising. However, while there were many anti-Stalin declarations, not much actual work was done. V. Danilov, Party organizer at the Institute of History at that time, spoke frankly about this at the historians’ conference. He recalled that the ‘filling-in of the gaps’ had only begun, that ‘the most important archives’ were still closed, and so on.88 Danilov’s speech struck a discordant note, because he did not so much expose the accursed past as talk of ‘serious difficulties’ in the present.89 He himself tried to overcome these difficulties — that is, the obstacles presented by the censorship and the official ideology — by intensified study of particular problems of socioeconomic history. He was mainly interested in the fate of the Russian peasantry. The starting point of Danilov’s reflections was a critique of Stalin’s ideas, according to which the relations of production among the Russian peasants before collectivization were capitalist. It was on the basis of this theory that the case for collectivization was argued, as a necessary stage on the road to socialism in the USSR. Danilov doubted the correctness of this idea, which was usually not supported by any facts. ‘In works on the class struggle,’ he wrote, ‘we cannot find any serious scientific account of the social forces in the countryside and their distribution.’90