Russian terror/ism and revisionist historiography.: An article from: The Australian Journal of Politics and History

This digital document is an article from The Australian Journal of Politics and History, published by Thomson Gale on March 1, 2007. The length of the article is 8828 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

From the author: Interest in the violence of the Soviet regime has been a concern primarily of more conservative historians, while those on the Left have either been discomforted by the excessive brutality of the Russian Civil War and Stalinism or have looked for rationalizations for the necessity of violence. One tendency in the historiography has been to see violence as deeply embedded in the Bolshevik project, part of the Marxist or Leninist effort to transform the world or perfect the human being. Revolutionary and Stalinist violence are seen as similar or intimately linked, and differences between them have been largely effaced. This essay argues that the violence and terror of the Civil War years is best understood as part of wartime exigencies as well as choices made by the Bolsheviks and their enemies, while Stalinist violence was much more the product of the will of Stalin and his closest collaborators in their consolidation of autocratic power, and was far more gratuitous and irrational than the violence of the fledgling Soviet regime.

Citation Details
Title: Russian terror/ism and revisionist historiography.
Author: Ronald Grigor Suny
Publication:The Australian Journal of Politics and History (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 1, 2007
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 53 Issue: 1 Page: 5(15)

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