Mentalite or Cultural System: A Reply to Sheila Fitzpatrick

Mentalité or Cultural System: A Reply to Sheila Fitzpatrick Sheila Fitzpatrick’s response is at once an autobiographical statement that says much about the discipline of Soviet history and a characterization of my work within a broader historiographical panorama. Her openness to new work that departs from her own pathbreaking scholarship appears both rare and refreshing. I would like to pursue several issues raised in her vigorous defense of her cultural revolution “paradigm.” Fitzpatrick’s recollection holds considerable implications for the emergence of Soviet social and cultural history: she approached cultural revolution as a discrete episode in part because she regarded study of mentalities and recurring cultural motifs as “soft,” impressionistic, and associated with the primacy of the ideological (pp. 204–5). There are considerable hints, however, that even today she harbors doubts about my analysis of the concept of cultural revolution for precisely the same reasons. For example, she associates it with Clark and Papernyi’s estimable non-histories and a “cultural revolutionary spirit that floats around without a fixed location” (p. 205). Yet the term mentalité is introduced by Fitzpatrick, not by me; the imprecise Zeitgeist is also not my category. While the accent in my article is certainly on language and ideas, I would maintain that the totalizing aspirations of the new regime and the ubiquitous Bolshevik conflation of “cultural” with other kinds of transformations demands a move toward a more “total” history, rather than an artificial division into social, cultural, political history, and so on. Thus my discussion of an “inner cultural revolution” of NEP proceeds from a rethinking of early Soviet cultural policy, the dualistic institutional structures of the party-state, and a nascent party disciplinary regime; it moves on to ideology, discourse, and political culture (pp. 196–98). In this reading, entire party milieus (and not just a fringe proletarianizing minority opposed to an official “soft line”) intensely pursued cultural revolution in the 1920s, conditioning the 1928–29 turn. Here I try to suggest how the mutation of the concept of cultural revolution itself in 1928 was closely bound up with this concrete process. The attempt to integrate language and ideas with institutions and politics can be seen as a move toward the analysis of a communist cultural system, the evolution of which can be traced chronologically—whether it be over the course of two decades or three years. I would hardly deny that the Great Break, as the term implies, was a specific episode in Soviet history and cultural politics, and for understanding it we are indebted to Fitzpatrick’s work. It is only that this is now my premise, not my conclusion. No doubt this point was understated in my article, in part because I was unable to include a lengthy section on the early 1930s. But if we ask how the Soviet cultural polity navigated the great and ostensibly drastic turning points to and from such subperiods—such as 1920– 21, 1928–29, 1931–32, and 1948—we become attuned to the ways in which certain previously restricted elements of the cultural system grow greatly in importance, even as other strands diminish or are concealed. We still do not often associate étatist, utilitarian, hier-

A Reply to Sheila Fitzpatrick

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archical cultural values, or, for that matter, civilizing, culturalist initiatives with the upheaval of the Great Break. Indeed, this is the point: the dominant definition of cultural revolution prompts us to look for radicalism and class war to the exclusion of such features.1 Yet these more “conservative” elements, or others that might not fit Bolshevik or other conceptions of “radical” and “militant,” comprised integral undercurrents in the grand offensive of that era. Many were brought out by the coincidence of the cultural upheaval with the industrialization drive.2 Recognition that cultural revolution encompassed militancy and enlightenment, class war and “civilization,” leads to a different view of the Great Break as well as the sharp, almost nautical tacking back and forth between periods of offensive and retrenchment, crackdown and thaw within the communist cultural system. This what I attempted to show in the realm of Begriffsgeschichte by distinguishing “positive” and “negative” strands of the cultural revolution concept. Indeed, something similar is noted by Fitzpatrick herself in her recognition of imperial undertones to five-year-plan developmentalism (p. 208). Some historiographical traditions raise periodization to a fine art. I wonder, however, whether preoccupation with the particularity of five-year-plan radicalism (and, by extension, the so-called Great Retreat from that radicalism later in the 1930s) would generate variations, however interesting, on what are nonetheless well-worn questions—continuity versus change, the nature of Stalinism, the “end” of the revolution. I attempted to raise a set of less explored problems, such as the incorporation into revolutionary Bolshevism of broader prerevolutionary intelligentsia and modern civilizing missions; the implications of considering historical actors’ understandings of key concepts within the Soviet ideological system; and, most prominently, the internal-external problematique, suggesting how party and individual self-transformations were linked to the mass initiatives of “Sovietization.” I find Fitzpatrick’s remarks on forced collectivization as a massive attempt to transform everyday life to be a fresh and useful example of bridging rather than erecting boundaries. If we extend her insight to industrialization, as suggested above, it becomes another reason to reconceive a Great Break that can encompass the interrelated drives and campaigns of that period. Mic hael Da vid-F ox Michael David-F vid-Fo

1 I explore the above points for a case which might on the surface seem the quintessence of an unprecedented, radical, class-war episode. See my “The Assault on the Universities and the Dynamics of Stalin’s ‘Great Break,’” in Academia in Upheaval: The Origins, Transformations and Demise of the Communist Academic Regime in Russia and East Central Europe, ed. Michael David-Fox and György Péteri, forthcoming. 2 Any comparison should keep in mind not only that the Chinese episode, unlike the Soviet, was initiated in politics and constituted in memory as the Cultural Revolution; in China, unlike the USSR, successive mass movements of collectivization, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution took place years apart. The implications of this are emphasized by Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, vol. 3, The Coming of the Cataclysm, 1961–1966 (Oxford, 1997), 466–71. The Cultural Revolution does present fascinating parallels with the Soviet experience, but not only with the Great Break; it can be linked to other aspects of Stalinism, such as the Great Purges. For an argument see Andrew G. Walder, “Cultural Revolution Radicalism: Variations on a Stalinist Theme,” in New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution, ed. William A. Joseph et al. (Cambridge, MA, 1991).