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The Resistance Debate in Russian and Soviet History
Articles originally published in the journal Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. A portion of the editors' introduction
Just as resistance as a historical phenomenon can appear in a wide variety of historical circumstances, resistance as a methodological tool can appear in very different kinds of historiographical approaches. The essays in this volume provide ample illustration of these assertions. At the same time, it can also be said that resistance is a concept that assumes special importance, and is accompanied by special controversy, in conditions of oppression and dictatorship. This is true not only because people resist especially when they are oppressed, or even because dictatorial states, especially modern ones, are particularly concerned with registering and stamping out resistance as well as other forms of real and imagined dissent. It is also because historians tend to become more fascinated by resistance-or, to put it another way, the political stakes in studying resistance are raised- particularly when the concept serves, implicitly or explicitly, to separate or distance groups or people from a regime or system. It is thus not surprising that resistance-centered scholarship has been prominent in subaltern studies, histories of colonialism, the history of Nazi German, and more recently, in Soviet history and the history of Stalinism. In this volume, historians in the Russian and Soviet fields put resistance as both a phenomenon and a concept under the microscope, and they stake out a number of quite different positions.
Just as resistance as a historical phenomenon can appear in a wide variety of historical circumstances, resistance as a methodological tool can appear in very different kinds of historiographical approaches. The essays in this volume provide ample illustration of these assertions. At the same time, it can also be said that resistance is a concept that assumes special importance, and is accompanied by special controversy, in conditions of oppression and dictatorship. This is true not only because people resist especially when they are oppressed, or even because dictatorial states, especially modern ones, are particularly concerned with registering and stamping out resistance as well as other forms of real and imagined dissent. It is also because historians tend to become more fascinated by resistance-or, to put it another way, the political stakes in studying resistance are raised- particularly when the concept serves, implicitly or explicitly, to separate or distance groups or people from a regime or system. It is thus not surprising that resistance-centered scholarship has been prominent in subaltern studies, histories of colonialism, the history of Nazi German, and more recently, in Soviet history and the history of Stalinism. In this volume, historians in the Russian and Soviet fields put resistance as both a phenomenon and a concept under the microscope, and they stake out a number of quite different positions.
238 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2003
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About the author
Michael David-Fox
17 books1 followerA historian of modern Russia and the Soviet Union, Michael David-Fox is professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
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November 13, 2014
The Resistance Debate is a collection of six major essays regarding the nature of resistance in Russian and Soviet society, with specific attention paid to past and present historiographical concerns, and three shorter “reaction” essays that respond to them. While the “reaction” essays are brief and somewhat difficult to follow, the other six works contain an excellent summary of the debates regarding the nature of resistance in Russia and the Soviet Union and are well-written, easily intelligible pieces that remain mostly accessible to even academics outside of the field. Their intent is to address some of the major contemporary historiographical questions: how does one define resistance? Does intent matter? What are the connections between the Soviet era and the late imperial one? How do non-Russians fit in? How does resistance to the regime intertwine with conformity to it? All of these are subsets of the broader question, which is whether or not Soviet society can be considered to have been characterized by “resistance”. The “reaction” essays read more like a series of book reviews about the other six and, for that reason, this review will focus on the first two-thirds of the collection.
The first essay, penned by Richard Hellie, is the only one that focuses on pre-Soviet Russia and tries to uncover why the imperial elite never rose up against the tsar. After arguing that “the elite was oppressed, understood this at least occasionally, and […] only rebelled when there was no legitimate Riurikid or Romanov march”, the author demonstrates that there were multiple reasons for the elite’s failure to “resist” the tsar’s autocracy including its “understanding of monarchical authority; its social and economic dependence on the state; its lack of social and political cohesion; the absence of ‘traditional’ institutional restraints on royal power; and, finally, positive governmental measures aimed at squelching opposition”. The second essay, by Paul W. Werth, begins with the idea that western scholarship often searches for resistance in the Soviet Union to confirm the regime’s illegitimacy. Examining the status of non-Russians, he argues that many of them lived among Russians without suffering from judicial discrimination, that the lines between the alleged “colonizers” and “colonized” are not clear (the Russians were often not the majority under the regime and in some cases actually had less autonomy than non-Russians or engaged in joint-Russian and non-Russian resistance), and that there are assumptions made that the “consciousness of subalterns [was] undivided and fully formed” (non-Russians often had axes of conflict amongst themselves). His analysis leads him to suggest that resistance makes the most sense when talking about early imperial rule or state-driven transformative campaigns, and should focus on the concept of subversions, which are “smaller manifestations of opposition that may complicate significantly the exercise of power even as they themselves are engendered and structured by that power”. He concludes with the claim that conformity and resistance are often intertwined and rarely autonomous, since accommodation could often transform into something subversive, and that meaning is often found in the dialectic between these two facets. Similarly, resistance might cause the state to retreat, but also reinforce facets of its domination in ways that are perceived to be beneficial.
Lynne Viola’s essay attempts to deconstruct the meaning of resistance and looks at its active and passive forms, as well as elements of deviance such as crime and the black market that can be difficult to qualify as “resistance”, all of which could express varying degrees of loyalty to the system and ideology. The author argues that any analysis of resistance must take into account that perspective, the nature of sources (many of which come from security apparatuses whose existence depended on its ability to uncover “resistance”), and motivation all contribute to the determination of meaning. It is also prudent, she suggests, to examine the types of behavior that the regime did not classify as “resistance”, such as that of women. This is part of her larger argument, which is that “resistance” need not teach us merely about dissent, but the multifarious ways in which individuals reacted to state initiatives. Jochen Hellbeck, meanwhile, begins in a similar fashion to Viola, arguing that most studies have emphasized the distance between state values and society because scholars want to correct the obviously mistaken regime perception of cohesion. This leads people to project their own values onto their subjects, assume that genuine agency can only come from resisting the state, emphasize resistance over compliance, and ignore sources that report on those who conformed. To correct this, he postulates, scholars must recognize the power of the revolutionary narrative, which gave people a way to express themselves. He also highlights the idea that the separation of public and private speech had different meanings in Soviet discourse and that what was stated publically was often more important than what was said privately and was not always merely a mask to cover their true feelings. Hellback contends that private sources were sometimes a way of clearing out conflicting thoughts in one’s head that were distracting their desire to live “proper” and public Soviet lives. These private sources, then, might not be accurate reflections of what their authors truly felt. The drive to cleanse private thought was ongoing and many people used the private sphere for self-analysis and to try and prevent themselves from becoming “bad” revolutionaries. Some people, he suggests, actually suffered when they were punished and kicked out of the aegis of the regime.
Daniel Peris’ chapter focuses on the religious revival in unoccupied Soviet lands that took place during World War II when the regime, which continued to conceptualize religious belief in a quantitative fashion (in terms of the number of churches, for example), had to halt its persecution in order to foster the kind of unity it needed to win the war. In his attempt to examine the degree to which this was a genuine revival rather than the state simply retreating from a losing battle again religion, the author argues that most of those petitioning to the state were actually loyal to the regime and that it was the local officials with whom they clashed who were the true force of “resistance” in this scenario, because they disobeyed or otherwise circumvented explicit central government orders. In fact the religious individuals often appealed to the state in the hopes of getting the local authorities in line with the regime’s directives. Most individuals, official or otherwise, simply accepted the new initiative because they conceptualized the regime as one of binaries, where something was either accepted or not and that one was to follow the orders of the day.
Finally, Anna Krylova argues that the problem with scholarship since the opening of the Soviet archives is that it has been focused on reinterpreting old scholarship rather than engaging it in dialog, despite what she sees as its continuities with the totalitarianism discourse of the 1940s and 1950s. This discourse postulated that conditions of totalitarianism transformed the liberal man, who could only exist under free market conditions, and this binary led to the idea that the Soviet man was either indoctrinated or an opportunist. The idea of “non-believers” grew and eventually scholars began to wonder about the lack of resistance, thus beginning a search for it. As people escaped and dissented, the idea that only those who fled the regime had the power to resist, but Vera Dunham shifted this conceptualization by suggesting that the Soviet man was merely a liberal forced to live in a Stalinist world, and that Stalin was unable to transform the man, just the new order in which he had to live. This man was neither “inside” nor “outside” the regime and was the victim of such heavily transformative circumstances that even he was unable to grasp his own identity. Sheila Fitzpatrick was the first to argue that identification with the system was possible, thus restoring agency to the Soviet man, and helped create “a conceptual paradox: a chaotic, fluid society and a unitary, self-centered, Soviet superman negotiating through history”. The Soviet man was either an opportunist or a dissident until the 1990s, when the historiographical journey was complete and he was now considered an individual who was always resisting and manipulating his own identity as needed. Thus, in Krylova’s conception, Soviet historiography from 1940 to 1990 has been one long process of historians investigating the degree of liberalness in the Soviet man, beginning from the search of its remnants under totalitarian discourse and ending with the idea of the perpetual resister who survived by mastering the system and his own identity.
Overall, The Resistance Debate is a multifaceted collection that raises many important questions about the nature of “resistance” scholarship and challenges researchers to conceptualize their studies of the period in new ways. All of the essays are accessible and pose important and pragmatic questions about the nature of resistance as it has been explicated in contemporary publications. The only drawback is that nowhere are the main topics, questions, and ideas summarized strongly and intelligibly for readers to review the broad themes that might help them with their own analyses, as the introduction is somewhat stilted and a concluding section is replaced by the “reaction” one, which is focused more on criticizing the essays rather than summarizing them. Nevertheless, this work is invaluable for any scholar of the Soviet Union, regardless of their interest in “resistance”, as it raises fundamental issues about the way this era has been studied in the past and offers new insight into the inner workings of the society.
The first essay, penned by Richard Hellie, is the only one that focuses on pre-Soviet Russia and tries to uncover why the imperial elite never rose up against the tsar. After arguing that “the elite was oppressed, understood this at least occasionally, and […] only rebelled when there was no legitimate Riurikid or Romanov march”, the author demonstrates that there were multiple reasons for the elite’s failure to “resist” the tsar’s autocracy including its “understanding of monarchical authority; its social and economic dependence on the state; its lack of social and political cohesion; the absence of ‘traditional’ institutional restraints on royal power; and, finally, positive governmental measures aimed at squelching opposition”. The second essay, by Paul W. Werth, begins with the idea that western scholarship often searches for resistance in the Soviet Union to confirm the regime’s illegitimacy. Examining the status of non-Russians, he argues that many of them lived among Russians without suffering from judicial discrimination, that the lines between the alleged “colonizers” and “colonized” are not clear (the Russians were often not the majority under the regime and in some cases actually had less autonomy than non-Russians or engaged in joint-Russian and non-Russian resistance), and that there are assumptions made that the “consciousness of subalterns [was] undivided and fully formed” (non-Russians often had axes of conflict amongst themselves). His analysis leads him to suggest that resistance makes the most sense when talking about early imperial rule or state-driven transformative campaigns, and should focus on the concept of subversions, which are “smaller manifestations of opposition that may complicate significantly the exercise of power even as they themselves are engendered and structured by that power”. He concludes with the claim that conformity and resistance are often intertwined and rarely autonomous, since accommodation could often transform into something subversive, and that meaning is often found in the dialectic between these two facets. Similarly, resistance might cause the state to retreat, but also reinforce facets of its domination in ways that are perceived to be beneficial.
Lynne Viola’s essay attempts to deconstruct the meaning of resistance and looks at its active and passive forms, as well as elements of deviance such as crime and the black market that can be difficult to qualify as “resistance”, all of which could express varying degrees of loyalty to the system and ideology. The author argues that any analysis of resistance must take into account that perspective, the nature of sources (many of which come from security apparatuses whose existence depended on its ability to uncover “resistance”), and motivation all contribute to the determination of meaning. It is also prudent, she suggests, to examine the types of behavior that the regime did not classify as “resistance”, such as that of women. This is part of her larger argument, which is that “resistance” need not teach us merely about dissent, but the multifarious ways in which individuals reacted to state initiatives. Jochen Hellbeck, meanwhile, begins in a similar fashion to Viola, arguing that most studies have emphasized the distance between state values and society because scholars want to correct the obviously mistaken regime perception of cohesion. This leads people to project their own values onto their subjects, assume that genuine agency can only come from resisting the state, emphasize resistance over compliance, and ignore sources that report on those who conformed. To correct this, he postulates, scholars must recognize the power of the revolutionary narrative, which gave people a way to express themselves. He also highlights the idea that the separation of public and private speech had different meanings in Soviet discourse and that what was stated publically was often more important than what was said privately and was not always merely a mask to cover their true feelings. Hellback contends that private sources were sometimes a way of clearing out conflicting thoughts in one’s head that were distracting their desire to live “proper” and public Soviet lives. These private sources, then, might not be accurate reflections of what their authors truly felt. The drive to cleanse private thought was ongoing and many people used the private sphere for self-analysis and to try and prevent themselves from becoming “bad” revolutionaries. Some people, he suggests, actually suffered when they were punished and kicked out of the aegis of the regime.
Daniel Peris’ chapter focuses on the religious revival in unoccupied Soviet lands that took place during World War II when the regime, which continued to conceptualize religious belief in a quantitative fashion (in terms of the number of churches, for example), had to halt its persecution in order to foster the kind of unity it needed to win the war. In his attempt to examine the degree to which this was a genuine revival rather than the state simply retreating from a losing battle again religion, the author argues that most of those petitioning to the state were actually loyal to the regime and that it was the local officials with whom they clashed who were the true force of “resistance” in this scenario, because they disobeyed or otherwise circumvented explicit central government orders. In fact the religious individuals often appealed to the state in the hopes of getting the local authorities in line with the regime’s directives. Most individuals, official or otherwise, simply accepted the new initiative because they conceptualized the regime as one of binaries, where something was either accepted or not and that one was to follow the orders of the day.
Finally, Anna Krylova argues that the problem with scholarship since the opening of the Soviet archives is that it has been focused on reinterpreting old scholarship rather than engaging it in dialog, despite what she sees as its continuities with the totalitarianism discourse of the 1940s and 1950s. This discourse postulated that conditions of totalitarianism transformed the liberal man, who could only exist under free market conditions, and this binary led to the idea that the Soviet man was either indoctrinated or an opportunist. The idea of “non-believers” grew and eventually scholars began to wonder about the lack of resistance, thus beginning a search for it. As people escaped and dissented, the idea that only those who fled the regime had the power to resist, but Vera Dunham shifted this conceptualization by suggesting that the Soviet man was merely a liberal forced to live in a Stalinist world, and that Stalin was unable to transform the man, just the new order in which he had to live. This man was neither “inside” nor “outside” the regime and was the victim of such heavily transformative circumstances that even he was unable to grasp his own identity. Sheila Fitzpatrick was the first to argue that identification with the system was possible, thus restoring agency to the Soviet man, and helped create “a conceptual paradox: a chaotic, fluid society and a unitary, self-centered, Soviet superman negotiating through history”. The Soviet man was either an opportunist or a dissident until the 1990s, when the historiographical journey was complete and he was now considered an individual who was always resisting and manipulating his own identity as needed. Thus, in Krylova’s conception, Soviet historiography from 1940 to 1990 has been one long process of historians investigating the degree of liberalness in the Soviet man, beginning from the search of its remnants under totalitarian discourse and ending with the idea of the perpetual resister who survived by mastering the system and his own identity.
Overall, The Resistance Debate is a multifaceted collection that raises many important questions about the nature of “resistance” scholarship and challenges researchers to conceptualize their studies of the period in new ways. All of the essays are accessible and pose important and pragmatic questions about the nature of resistance as it has been explicated in contemporary publications. The only drawback is that nowhere are the main topics, questions, and ideas summarized strongly and intelligibly for readers to review the broad themes that might help them with their own analyses, as the introduction is somewhat stilted and a concluding section is replaced by the “reaction” one, which is focused more on criticizing the essays rather than summarizing them. Nevertheless, this work is invaluable for any scholar of the Soviet Union, regardless of their interest in “resistance”, as it raises fundamental issues about the way this era has been studied in the past and offers new insight into the inner workings of the society.
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