After closer study of the question, he came to the conclusion that the relations of production prevailing in Russia’s countryside in the 1920s could not be called capitalist. Stalin spoke of ‘capitalism’ in the villages on the grounds that private property existed there. Danilov based himself on Marx’s idea that ‘according to whether these private individuals (who own property) are workers or non-workers, private property has a different character.’91 The petty peasant production that existed in Soviet Russia in the 1920s was therefore not capitalist. But in any case, could one speak of ‘private property’ in relation to that period? ‘The nationalization of the land meant that one of the basic means of production in agriculture had been brought under state-social ownership and this was therefore an important step on the road to socialism.’92 Danilov also mentioned the growth of co-operation and the decline in the relative importance of private trade. Thus in the circumstances of the post-revolutionary society of the 1920s, in the countryside, ‘socioeconomic relations of a new type which could not be regarded as bourgeois’ were beginning to arise.93
The question consequently arose: Was collectivization really necessary? Soviet historians could not and cannot, of course, discuss that question openly. Under Khrushchev all that was allowed was criticism of particular mistakes, but this criticism went quite a long way and as a result it became possible to draw, if not a complete, then at least a fairly reliable picture of collectivization and to subvert the Stalinist myth of the ‘great turning point’. Soviet historians showed that the process of collectivization proved extremely harmful both to the peasantry and to agriculture as a whole — to such a degree that, as it was agreed to put this, there had been violation of ‘Lenin’s principle of voluntariness in bringing peasants into collective farms and providing material incentives for the peasant masses’.94 This formulation may seem too mild, but it was the most that the censorship allowed. It made possible the setting forth of historical material with comparative accuracy, quoting important facts which had previously been concealed.95 The role played by Stalin, his personal responsibility, was established more or less precisely. This was of particular importance for understanding collectivization, because the question inevitably arose: Where does the boundary run between ‘mistakes’, ‘distortion’ of the Party line and the ‘Party line’ itself? What the historians could not say was said by writers. The years 1964 to 1968 saw the publication of A. Alekseev’s Bread, Noun Substantive, Tendryakov’s Decease, and many other works dealing with the collectivization period. Those books which failed to pass the censor went into samizdat. Works of fiction and works of research complemented each other. Roy Medvedev could quite correctly observe later that the outrages of Stalin’s collectivization ‘have frequently been subjected to critical analysis in our historical, political and fictional literature.’96
The truth was restored bit by bit, like a broken mirror. No question was ‘seditious’ in itself, but the mosaic picture thus assembled formed an integral representation of the past which utterly refuted the statocratic ideology. However, the demand that the knowledge which had been accumulated should be generalized remained largely unfulfilled. The facts had to be thought over in a theoretical way, but the methods employed at the beginning of the sixties for this purpose were not adequate to the task. History had to become theory. The ideological crisis which broke out after 1968 raised this question with particular sharpness, and it was as a result of this that legal Marxism began to develop new ideas.
The role of manifesto of legal Marxism was played by the book published in 1969, under the editorship of M.Ya. Gefter, with the title The Science of History and Some Problems of the Present Day. This symposium began with a preface which dealt with general problems of historiography in the USSR. The writers acknowledged that the initial reaction against Stalinist dogmatism in this sphere had been purely negative. Some of the most offensive conceptions had been cast out (such as that the Roman Empire fell as a result of a ‘revolution of the slaves’), quotations from the works of ‘the friend and teacher’ had been removed, and at a certain moment there had arisen a movement to ‘get back to Lenin’. This constituted a beginning of the transition to working out a positive Marxist theory but, as soon became clear, going ‘back to Lenin’ was not enough by itself. This slogan was replaced by another — forward to Marx. Marx, unlike Lenin, was studied as the founder of a method. From Lenin they tried to find answers to problems of the present day, which, in a certain sense, impelled them back to the past — although, after Stalinism, even this was a huge step forward. From Marx they learned, above all, the culture of historical thought. Paradoxical as it may seem, Soviet historiography discovered Marx not in the fifties but at the end of the sixties.
The ideological legacy of Gramsci was appreciated even later. A three-volume edition of his writings had appeared in Russian translation in 1959, but the importance of his Prison Notebooks actually began to be understood only in the seventies, in connection with a growth of interest in the Italian Communist Party and Eurocommunism. One of the first to popularize Gramsci’s ideas was G. Vodolazov. In 1968 he published in Novy Mir an article on Gramsci’s legacy in the field of aesthetics. In this article he wrote mainly, however, on the historico-philosophical reflections of the author of the Prison Notebooks. Vodolazov was principally interested in Gramsci’s ideas on the destiny of the revolution, which had much in common with the Russian experience. Gramsci observed that ‘a revolution is not proletarian and Communist, even if a wave of popular revolt has placed in power men who call themselves Communists (sincerely too)’.97 If the proletariat as a class is not ready to take power, then the victory of the Communists, despite all the enthusiasm of the worker masses, will not lead to socialism and will require ‘further and even more frightful sacrifices’ in order to ensure the establishment of a democracy of the working people.98
After the events of 1968 the left-wing intelligentsia gradually began to realize how true these views of Gramsci’s were. But it was not possible to look for answers to our present-day problems in the work of a thinker of the past. One had urgently to make up for past neglect, and go forward. ‘Consequently,’ we read in Gefter’s symposium,
if our assimilation of the heritage is to be creative, it cannot be restricted to mobilizing ‘quotations’ directed against particular oversimplified schemas and propositions. It has to be — and the crucial character of our epoch necessitates this with special force — a fresh reading of the historical conceptions of Marx, Engels and Lenin.99
The old Stalinist historiography combined magnificently a bald empiricism with speculative ‘general laws’ — only at best, however, for most often there was mere falsification under both heads. The task of the legal Marxists was to renew theory and develop method through concrete historical research. In a certain sense they had to open afresh the road traversed by Marx in such works as The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The principal problem, on the general plane, which faced historians (and brought them up against the ‘accursed’ questions concerning Russia’s fate in the twentieth century) was that of how the world of today came to be. Here the field of activity was broad, to say the least. It included the origin of socialist ideas, the origin of the revolution in Russia, the formation of nations in modern Europe, the establishment of ‘Faustian civilization’, and so on. In this context even works devoted to medieval subjects (such as A. Gurevich’s notable book on the origin of feudalism in Western Europe) appeared highly topical and far from boringly academic.