Official ‘istmat’ (historical materialism), as M. Markus and A. Hegedüs observed,
constantly proclaimed its scientific character, but in reality it rejected science to the extent that it refused to confront theory with social reality, and did not recognize the necessity for social theory to develop any further.100
The most important problems of Marxism — alienation, for example — were simply omitted from the official textbooks. What was needed, however, was not merely to restore Marx’s original theory of history but also to renew it. Accumulated experience does not permit one just to ‘go back to Marx’. Marc Rakovski noted that in so far as most East European Marxists characterize societies of the Soviet type as ‘sui generis class societies existing alongside capitalism’,101 it is necessary to take a fresh look at all the traditional schemas of history:
Within the traditional structure of historical materialism there is no place for a modern social system which has an evolutionary trajectory other than capitalism and which is not simply an earlier or later stage along the same route.102
Since Kautsky’s time Marxists had perceived history as a kind of unilinear process in which social formations replace each other in strict order of succession. Marx must be given credit for never having said this, but Kautsky’s interpretation of his ideas could be considered quite admissible from the standpoint of the inner logic of Marx’s materialism (which does not mean that Kautsky’s version was the only one possible). Experience in our century has compelled us to start thinking once more about the limitedness of such a conception of history, and Gurevich’s book Problemy genezisa feodalizma v Zapadnoy Evrope (1970) was the most interesting and strikingly successful attempt to overcome the unilinearity of ‘classical’ Marxism. Gurevich showed that feudalism was by no means the inevitable outcome of the development of slave-owning society, but arose in concrete and highly specific historico-social circumstances. Thereby he raised the question of the possibility that more than one mode of production can exist on the basis of the same level of development of the productive forces.103 Naturally, this book was furiously attacked by the dogmatists, who charged it with all the mortal sins. Some of them were particularly angry about those passages in it where they perceived hints at our own time, such as: ‘The present-day conception of freedom presumes independence from anybody whatsoever.’104 The accusation was brought against Gurevich that ‘essentially, he is unwilling to take account of the Marxist-Leninist teaching on socioeconomic formations.’105 Although the book had been written as a textbook for students, it was not accorded that honourable status. However, it was not withdrawn from the libraries, and despite all warnings it became classical material on which a new generation of Marxist historians was raised. Thus problems of medieval history can, with us, prove topical and even politically pointed.
To the pragmatic, utilitarian and conjunctural approach to history,’ declared the contributors to Gefter’s symposium,
we oppose not pretended neutrality and hypocritical indifference, but concern to obtain scientific truth and serve the cause of progress, the twofold task which constitutes the heart and meaning of the historical form of mankind’s cognition of itself: the extraction of experience, and learning from the lessons of the near and distant past.106
In his writings Gefter has done much to show the specific character of Russian capitalism — namely, its barbarousness. He has examined in detail the question of the presence of several different economic structures in Russia. This was not merely a matter of technological backwardness and insufficient development of industry, but of the specifics of the structure of Russian capitalism itself — of its barbarousness. It was not a poorly developed capitalist structure but a structure which, in its own way, was even highly developed, but of a different type from elsewhere. As a result of his study of this phenomenon Gefter came to the conclusion: as the capitalism was, so was the revolution. Socialist revolution was impossible where what still needed to be done was the ‘clearing’ of society by putting an end to the multiplicity of economic structures within it. Further conclusions inevitably follow. Stalinism fulfilled this function very well indeed. Not only was the country industrialized but a comparatively more up-to-date social structure was created, with an advanced degree of proletarianization of the population and the predominance of wage-labour relations, and without patriarchal forms of exploitation. Stalinism was a modernizing despotism — and here we come back to Vodolazov’s problem of the ‘simple’ totalitarian solution. True, variety of economic structures has been re-established at a new level in the form of the contradiction between the state-run economy and the black market, but that is another question…
Legal Marxism in the USSR has come to the same conclusion as the Western Marxism personified in Deutscher, which was banned in our country. History has become politics. Soviet historians are confronted with a serious problem to which they continually address themselves in one way or another. On the one hand, morality in historical science means objectivity, impartiality. On the other, the position of someone who is looking at history from the standpoint of the interests of the future, thinking about the emancipation of society, cannot but be moral. Does the adjective ‘impartial’ apply to him? His is a ‘passionate’ [strastnaya] position — even, if you like, a ‘partial’ [pristrastnaya] one. The matter is further complicated by the fact that man, by his very nature, cannot be absolutely objective: in so far as he is an individual, he is a subjective being.
However, reality, which has set us this problem, has also created the conditions for solving it. In combating the official ideology, left-wing historians see their task as restoring historical truth. In this their partiality finds expression, their engagement — their ‘partisanship’ [partiynost], if you care to put it that way.
The problems of methodological principle were presented in Ya.S. Drabkin’s lecture on ‘Unsolved Problems in the Study of Social Revolutions’.107 The title speaks for itself. In a comparatively brief talk, Drabkin tried to formulate — or at least to enumerate — the fundamental problems which twentieth-century experience has set before Marxists (and, indeed, before all serious thinkers on social matters). On the plane of general theory this means: the problem of the dialectics of reform and revolution, which later confronted the Western Left — no less than the Soviet socialists — in a very acute form: the problem of ‘peaceful evolution’ from one mode of production to another — examples might be the transition to capitalism in Sweden, or the problem of the ‘socialist’ Thermidor.
All these are very serious problems — that is, of course, if they are to be solved not ‘ideologically’, disposed of with general phrases, but scientifically. As for Thermidor, this problem now arose for the first time for legal Soviet historiography. Drabkin recalled that Lenin did not deny the possibility of a Soviet Thermidor,108 but naturally the lecturer left the question open. Of course, all these important problems could be examined in the lecture only in an extremely abstract way, on the plane of general methodology, deliberately ‘without coming to any conclusions’. Besides, Drabkin could not have given any answers, even if he had them. The censorship allows (though not always) questions to be put, but disallows answers. Consequently, Drabkin considered that his task was merely to ‘focus attention on the most acute unsolved problems of research’.109