Cultural Revolution Revisited

SHEILA FITZPATRICK
FITZPA

I read Michael David-Foxs article What is Cultural Revolution? with pleasure. In the
first place, it is an intriguing combination of interpretive essay and Begriffsgeschichte, not
a common genre in our field, whose subject made me think again about issues that have
not been in the forefront of my scholarly agenda in recent years. In the second place, he
begins with an expression of surprise that the Cultural Revolution paradigm put forward
in my 1974 and 1978 articles and the 1978 edited volume has been so unreflectingly
accepted and little problematized.1 That same thing has puzzled me for years. Moreover,
whenever I see the term Cultural Revolution used routinely, like any other standard cat-
egory of Soviet history, I have to suppress irritation at seeing it unfootnoted as well as
proprietorial pride. It is as if the Soviet Cultural Revolution of 192831 were one of the
eternal verities. But in fact there was no Soviet Cultural Revolution, historiographically
speaking, until that 1978 volume appeared. It was my discovery or, if you prefer, my
invention.2
I came to the topic of cultural revolution in a very different way from Michael David-
Fox. He sets out to trace the history of a concept, which in part means tracing the usages
of a term. I, on the other hand, had encountered a historical phenomenon in the course of
my empirical research and needed to find a name for it. This naming gave me a good deal
of trouble, though settling on cultural revolution was certainly not as agonizing as de-
ciding on the term vydvizhentsy for the beneficiaries of Soviet affirmative action in the
1920s and 1930s. I was aware, of course, that Lenin (and, following him, generations of
Soviet historians) had used the term in a different sense than the one I proposed, but I did
not feel constrained by terminological pietyrather the contrary. The name Cultural
Revolution seemed appropriate to me, in the first place because it was the term most
used by contemporary participants and, in the second place, because it suggested an anal-
ogy to the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
Although David-Fox has taken 1978, the publication date of Cultural Revolution, as
the date of the historiographical discovery, the conference on which this volume was

1
Cultural Revolution in Russia, 19281932, Journal of Contemporary History 9:1 (1974); Cultural Revolu-
tion as Class War, in Cultural Revolution in Russia, 19281931, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (Bloomington, 1978). I
will capitalize cultural revolution when speaking of the time-specific, class-war phenomenon that was the subject
of my articles and edited book, and leave it in lower case when discussing other usages.
2
I call it my rather than our invention, despite the fact that it was a collective work, because I was the
original formulator of the concept, and my essay (I cannot now remember whether it was the article published in
1974 or an early draft of the one published in 1978) was circulated in advance to participants in the Cultural
Revolution conference held in New York in 1974. But of course the development and refinement of the concept
owed a great deal to others, especially to Fred Starr and Loren Graham, who encouraged me to organize the
conference in the first place, and, at a later stage, Jerry Hough.

The Russian Review 58 (April 1999): 2029

Copyright 1999 The Russian Review
 Cultural Revolution Revisited 203

based took place four years earlier, and my own thinking about the topic began earlier
still, when I was doing my dissertation research in Moscow in 196667. That was the
peak year of Chinese cultural revolution, and, having little access to any newspapers
except Soviet ones, I followed it in the Soviet press. Soviet reporting on this issue was
unusually lively and pointed; and, as always with good Soviet journalism, there were
Aesopian elementsthe inevitable subtext of reference to situations that were not Chi-
nese at all but Soviet. I too started to read the Chinese Cultural Revolution in terms of
Soviet historical experience, specifically the eponymous cultural-political upheaval in
Russia in 192831 that I was currently encountering in my research. (I offer this as a
datum for the Begriffsgeschichte of Cultural Revolution rather than in a spirit of insistence
on the Chinese parallel, though to my mind the analogy is intriguing enough to deserve
more investigation.3)
Cultural Revolution was at first a very controversial book, but more for political than
intellectual reasons. There was a major conflict between those (mainly political scien-
tists) who believed that everything in the Soviet Union was instigated from the top and
those (mainly social historians) who thought that some initiative might occasionally come
from the society too. Cultural Revolution was seen as a revisionist manifesto and con-
sequently severely attacked by anti-revisionists. There were also revisionist critics like
Stephen Cohen, who treated Stalinism as an aberration from the democratic spirit of origi-
nal Bolshevism and the revolution and regarded all from below hypotheses about
Stalinism as ideologically suspect. But all the arguments were about ideology (with the
exception of David Joravskys, in the book itself4), and once they died down, that seemed
to be the end of it.
In revisiting the Cultural Revolution paradigm, I will first briefly consider the impact
of new data, then turn to David-Foxs critique, and finally offer some reflections of my
own. Like all pre-1991 work, Cultural Revolution has now been exposed to the test of the
opened archives. I have not seen anything that requires a basic change to the picture, but
I will note a few interesting details. The first is a negative finding. I always imagined
that, in the unlikely event that we would ever see into the party archives, it would become
clear whether or not Stalin and the other leaders believed the accusations of wrecking and
sabotage made in the Shakhty trial that got the ball of Cultural Revolution rolling. Now at
least some archival data on this have emerged, and what they basically tell us is that the
leaders used the same language in private that they used in public;5 in other words, some
puzzles remain puzzles, even when missing pieces are supplied.
The second point has to do with Stalins relations with the Young Turks of Cultural
RevolutionAverbakh and the RAPPists, Mitin and Iudin from the Communist Acad-
emy. Now that we have the record of Stalins appointments over the years, the frequency
of these contacts suggests a even higher degree of involvement on Stalins partwhether

3
Sinologists tended to shy off the analogy because it implies a Communist systems rather than Chinese-
roots-and-culture approach. But see the very belated review of Cultural Revolution by Suzanne Pepper drawing
her colleagues attention to the striking parallels (China Quarterly 103 [September 1985]: 53437).
4
Joravsky, The Construction of the Stalinist Psyche, in Cultural Revolution, 10520.
5
See, for example, Stalins letter to Menzhinskii (ca. 1930) in Revelations from the Russian Archives: Docu-
ments in English Translation, ed. Diane Koenker and Ronald D. Bachman (Washington, DC, 1997), 243.
204 Sheila Fitzpatrick

as mentor, moderator, or criticin the literary-philosophical aspects of the Cultural Revo-

lution than was previously evident.6 At no other period in his public life did Stalin spend
much time with any group of people from the cultural world, perhaps suggesting an effort
to create his own group of young disciples, analogous to Bukharins much-maligned shkolka,
that ultimately went sour.7
David-Foxs critique, like Joravskys original criticism, is in large part methodologi-
cal. In his view, the phenomena I identify as Cultural Revolution are more usefully seen
as recurring motifs in Stalinist (or Soviet, or Bolshevik) cultureelements of the Zeit-
geistthan as something limited to a particular time period. He suggests, in other words,
that I could have treated Cultural Revolution as a mentalit, not as an episode; and he also
suggests that a multidimensional approach, including not only the militant Cultural
Revolution mentalit but all the other notions of revolutionary cultural transformation
that were current in early twentieth-century Russia and the socialist movement generally,
would produce a richer picture.
I will not address the latter suggestion except to point out that there is often a trade-
off to be made between richness and analytical clarity. The more multidimensional you
get, the greater the danger of losing track of just what it is you are talking about. On the
other hand, the more precise, discrete, and sharply defined are the boundaries with which
you mark your topic, the greater the danger of reification, on the one hand, and discovery
that your definitions have excluded half the interesting data, on the other. With regard to
the first suggestion, the mentalit approach certainly was and remains an option. Un-
doubtedly the militant mentalit of Cultural Revolution was part of the Bolshevik cultural
mix in the 1920s: indeed, that is a key point in the argument of my Soft Line article, a
companion piece to Cultural Revolution as Class War.8 There are echoes of Cultural
Revolution in the Great Purges. Though I didnt know this in the 1970s, something very
like a Cultural Revolution mentalit is observable in the cultural faction-fighting of the
postwar period, for example, in the attacks on Kapitsa and other members of the Western-
ized, non-Communist establishment in physics made by made by a group of young
Communist physicists in 194546.9
There were several reasons why I didnt take the mentalit route. The first was that
in the 1970s I regarded Soviet history as a thing yet to be createdand, if possible, to be
created with more scholarly rigor and less political prejudice than was the current norm in
Sovietology. I was inclined to see mentalit studies as soft scholarship, impressionistic
and hence particularly vulnerable to authorial prejudice, and thought that what was ur-

6
See Posetiteli kremlevskogo kabineta I. V. Stalina: Zhurnaly (tetradi) zapisi lits, priniatykh pervym gensekom,
19241953 gg. (publication of A. V. Korotkov, A. D. Chernev, A. A. Chernobaev), Istoricheskii arkhiv, 1994, no.
6; and 1995, nos. 2, 3, and 4.
7
In his memoirs, the Indian socialist M. N. Roy says that he was one of Stalins young men in the second half
of the 1920s (M. N. Roy, Memoirs [Bombay, 1964], 538). It would be natural if Stalin had tried to gather such a
group around him, as Bukharin obviously did, and it is strange that nobody has thought to investigate the topic.
8
Originally published in Slavic Review 33:2 (1974); reprinted in Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power
and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, 1992).
9
See, for example, the anti-Kapitsa arguments offered in a memo from MGU party secretary V. F. Nozdrev and
Shcherbakovs memo on the faction-fighting in physics to Malenkov, Rossiiskii tsentr khraneniia i izucheniia
dokumentov noveishei istorii, Moscow, f. 17, op. 125, d. 361, ll. 1963.
 Cultural Revolution Revisited 205

gently needed was more of the hard historical scholarship of, for example, Joravskys
Lysenko Affair.10 The second reason was that at that point it seemed very important to
establish sequence and development in Soviet history. Stalinism (totalitarianism) was
currently treated as a black hole, something evil and impenetrable and without internal
development that Russia fell into, either in October 1917 (the traditional view) or in 1929
(the Cohen-revisionist point of view). Thus, it interested me much more that Cultural
Revolution came to a boil at a particular timethe same time as collectivization, the
elimination of urban private trade, and the First Five-Year Planthan that there were
stray Cultural Revolutionary phenomena floating around before and after.
I have often denied being an ideologist or crusader for a cause, but in fact in the
1970s I was a one-woman crusade to establish the discipline of history in the study of the
Soviet past. The word discipline should here be taken in its broad as well as narrow
meaning: I thought American Sovietologists needed the discipline (even the punishment?)
of data and primary sources to make honest scholars out of them. (It seems unsurprising,
looking back, that this amazing arrogance often annoyed people.) Given this basic predis-
position, I was much less sympathetic then than I am now to attempts to make sense of the
Soviet past using nonhistorical methodologiesfor example, Vladimir Papernyis in
Kultura dva or Katerina Clarks in Petersburg (both works that I esteem), where ques-
tions of chronology and temporality are secondary to, if not incompatible with, the search
for underlying cultural structures and ecosystems.11
There are different ways of knowing, traditionally distinguished in the world of schol-
arship by disciplinary boundaries. It is characteristic of the historians trade to pay a lot of
attention to temporal location and chronological sequence. From my standpoint, at any
rate, a cultural revolutionary spirit that floats around without a fixed location seems less
interestingor less promising as an object of analysisthan one that has anchored itself
somewhere and is doing something. Beyond that general proposition (or trade prejudice),
however, I think there were great advantages in focusing on a temporally located Cultural
Revolution. This was a transformative episode; and in analyzing transformations, chro-
nology matters. I thought in the 1970s, and still think, that the origins, nature, and inter-
nal development of Stalinism is one of the crucial issues in Soviet history. Cultural Revo-
lution was not just an important process of the Great Break period, along with collectiv-
ization and forced-pace industrialization. It also, in highlighting a particular militant and
utopian mentalit, provided a key to the dynamics of the other processes.
Nevertheless, no methodological choices are right all the time; some topics are al-
ways going to get shortchanged. A case in point is the transformation of everyday life, a
topic that is central to David-Foxs Bolshevik cultural project and more peripheral in
Cultural Revolution. David-Fox is quite right to suggest that it was shortchanged in my
volume, and that recent developments in scholarship have made this defect more glaring.
Without denying the justice of this charge, I will explain my reasoning as I remember it.
The transformation-of-byt packagespreading literacy, introducing hygiene, abolish-

10
Cambridge, MA, 1970.
11
Vladimir Papernyi, Kultura dva (Ann Arbor, 1985); Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revo-
lution (Cambridge, MA, 1995).
206 Sheila Fitzpatrick

ing superstition, encouraging a rational scientific view of the world, discouraging drink-
ing and wife-beatingwas, of course, the core of all discussions of (lower-case) cultural
revolution. In fact, these were its motherhood and apple-pie topics: no participant in
the discussion could be against them. During the period of militant Cultural Revolution,
those who emphasized the importance of these familiar, gradualist tasks of cultural trans-
formation, such as Lunacharsky and Krupskaia, were often offering a between-the-lines
criticism of militants who preferred to spend their time in more exciting activities like
kicking alien children out of school and blowing up churches. Bearing this in mind, I
tended to marginalize the topic of transformation of byt in my analysis of Cultural Revo-
lution, including only such aspects of transformation of byt as involved urgency, coercion
or suddenly ascendant utopian visions, like the plan for mobile housing modules so memo-
rably reported by Fred Starr.12
In the 1990s, there has been an explosion of byt studieswork by Yuri Slezkine,
Stephen Kotkin, Svetlana Boym, Julie Hessler, Elena Osokina, and Vadim Volkov,13 my
own Everyday Stalinism,14 and the volumes edited by Kelly and Shepherd, Kiaer and
Naiman, and Siegelbaum and Sokolov.15 The notion of a mission civilatrice that had both
a domestic aspect (the kulturnost theme) and a quasi-imperial thrust has recently entered
the scholarship and promises to be very fruitful.16 The mission civilatrice is often dis-
cussed in the context of high Stalinism, but it had its part in Cultural Revolution too (see
below, pp. 2078). If I were redoing Cultural Revolution today, one work I would find it
imperative to include would be Slezkines chapter on Cultural Revolution and the small
peoples of the north, where we find a beautiful example of the mutationunder the pres-

12
See S. Frederick Starr, Visionary Town Planning during the Cultural Revolution, in Cultural Revolution,
21517.
13
Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995); Svetlana Boym, Common
Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA, 1994); Julie Hessler, Culture of Shortages: A
Social History of Soviet Trade, 19171953 (Ph.D dissertation, University of Chicago, 1996); E. A. Osokina,
Ierarkhiia potrebleniia: O zhizni liudei v usloviiakh stalinskogo snabzheniia 19281935 gg. (Moscow, 1993);
idem., Za fasadom stalinskogo izobiliia: Raspredelenie i rynok v snabzhenii naseleniia v gody industrializatsii,
19271941 (Moscow, 1998; forthcoming as Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in
Stalins Russia, 19271941, ed. and trans. Kate S. Transchel and Greta Bucher [Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe,
1999]); Vadim Volkov, The Concept of Kulturnost: Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing Process, forthcoming in
Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London: Routledge, 1999); and Kiaer and Naiman, Everyday
Subjects (see note 15, below), earlier version (with Catriona Kelly) in Constructing Russian Culture (see note 15,
below).
14
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s
(New York, 1999).
15
Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd, eds., Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution: 18811940
(Oxford, 1998); Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman, eds., Everyday Subjects: Formations of Identity in Early Soviet
Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, forthcoming); Obshchestvo i vlast: 1930-e gody: Povestvovanie v
dokumentakh, ed. A. K. Sokolov (Moscow, 1998; forthcoming as Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Documentary
Narrative, ed. L. Siegelbaum and A. Sokolov [New Haven: Yale University Press]).
16
For example, Jrg Baberowski, Stalinismus als imperiales Phnomen: die islamischen Regionen der
Sowjetunion, 19211941, in Stalinismus: neue Forschungen und Konzepte, ed. Stefan Plaggenborg (Berlin, 1998);
and idem., Kolonialismus and zivilisatorische Mission im Zarenreich und in der Sowjetunion, 18001941, forth-
coming in Jahrbcher fr Geschichte Osteuropas. See also the work of Slezkine and Terry D. Martin (below,
notes 17 and 23).
 Cultural Revolution Revisited 207

sure of a specific temporal and geographical settingof a lower-case cultural revolution-

ary ethos of hygiene and literacy into Cultural Revolutionary aggression and coercion.17
The two major lacunae in Cultural Revolution, in my view, are religion and nation-
alities. The volume gives short shrift to the great drive against religion of 192930, an
egregious example of violent cultural transformation that was the one of the most impor-
tant aspects of Cultural Revolution in Russia and elsewhere. I left it out of the book for
the simple reason that I could not find anyone to write about it; in retrospect, however, it
seems to me that the topic was so important that I should just have researched and written
the article myself.18 Though several studies of the antireligious movement have since
appeared, none of them are specifically interested in it as a Cultural Revolutionary phe-
nomenon.19 Yet this was quintessential Cultural Revolution, the most flagrant example of
a sudden, brutal, utopian effort to change the way people lived, abolish their old supersti-
tious culture (by blowing up churches, melting down churchbells, and so on), and force
them out of backwardness.20 No other aspect of Cultural Revolution aroused such en-
thusiasm in its protagonists or such outrage on the part of such a large segment of the
population. It is all the more important in the general scheme of Cultural Revolution
because peasants and rural churches were major targets and the antireligious campaign in
the countryside was launched simultaneously with all-out collectivizationa reminder
that collectivization itself was a transformation-of-byt project carried out in the spirit of
Cultural Revolution.
The second big lacuna is nationalities. The omission of this topic was also partly
happenstance: I tried to get Gregory Massell to write a paper for the conference on the
unveiling campaign in Uzbekistan, but was unsuccessful. However, it was not specifi-
cally the nationalities aspect that interested me at that time but the fact that unveiling was
a violent cultural-transformation campaign that predated Cultural Revolution in Russia
by half a decade. I was not sure what to make of this time discrepancy (though I remem-
ber considering the rather nonrevisionist hypothesis of an out-of-town try-out for Cultural
Revolution), and Im still not sure, despite the appearance of several interesting new stud-
ies of Central Asian unveiling.21 It would never have occurred to me then that on cultural-
transformation issues the periphery might be the tail wagging the dog, as Jrg Baberowski

17
Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, 1994), chap. 7.
18
I finally did this, but much too late for the volume. The working title of this essay-in-progress on the urban
and rural antireligious campaigns of 192930 is The Flames of Gorlovka. This is the only aspect of Cultural
Revolution that has been part of my research agenda in the 1990s.
19
Daniel Peris, Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless (Ithaca, NY, 1998); Glennys
Young, Power and the Sacred in Revolutionary Russia: Religious Activists in the Village (University Park, PA,
1997); William B. Husband, Soviet Atheism and Russian Orthodox Strategies of Resistance, 19171932, Jour-
nal of Modern History 70 (March 1998): 74107; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalins Peasants: Resistance and Survival in
the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York, 1994), 3337, 5962.
20
I am a little skeptical, however, of David-Foxs claim (p. 199) that when collectivizers stripped the clothes
from peasants backs they were expressing a collectivist ethos associated with the student communes of the 1920s.
More common motives were surely personal gain (there were local peasants on the collectivization brigades as
well as urban students) and the desire to humiliate the victims (q.v. the frequent reports of peasant womens plaits
being cut off by ardent collectivizers). Humiliation may, of course, be considered part of the Cultural Revolution
syndrome.
21
See Douglas Northrup, Uzbek Women and the Veil: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ph.D. diss.,
208 Sheila Fitzpatrick

has recently argued in a more general context, though this now seems quite a promising
line of enquiry.22 Like most other people at the time, I was dismissive of nationalities: the
task of getting the Russian part of Soviet history in some kind of order seemed formidable
enough, without adding further complications. (I remember as a graduate student dili-
gently reading the education journals of the 1920s, year after year, more or less cover to
cover, but skipping when I came to articles on nationalities. Mea culpa.)
In his 1996 dissertation, Terry Martin provided the long-missing chapter on what
Cultural Revolution meant in the realm of nationalities policy. In the first instance, he
says, Cultural Revolution meant a resurgence among Communists of the militant, core
Bolshevik [value] of internationalism, discouraged during NEP by the leaderships insis-
tence on the need to preempt nationalist opposition from non-Russians by creating na-
tional territories and encouraging national cultures. Cultural Revolution unleashed a
utopian internationalism opposed to all national cultures and, above all, Russian culture.
The show trials of Ukrainian nationalist intellectuals fell into the first category, the adop-
tion of the Latin alphabet (rather than Cyrillic) for the written form of various non-Slavic
languages into the second. In mid-1930, however, Stalin nipped resurgent international-
ism in the bud, switching the Cultural Revolutionary impulse into new channels, notably
wild and unrealistic acceleration of policies of affirmative action and indigenization in
the backward Eastern regions of the country.23 The end result of all this was to offend
Russian sensibilities and set the stage for a later Great Retreat in nationalities policy
involving assertion of the primacy of things Russian. But there is an added complication
in the story, for, as Martin remarks, notes of assertion of Russianness were sounded even
during the Cultural Revolution, for example, in the drive against Ukrainian nationalism
and in Stalins famous speech of February 1931 about how Russia had been beaten through
the ages because of its backwardness and must make itself strong through industrializa-
tion so that this would never happen again.24
This point could perhaps be made even more strongly: one might argue that there
were imperial undertones in the whole First Five-Year Plan transformational rhetoric of
mastering (osvoenie) the vast underdeveloped regions of the Soviet Union.25 To be sure,
the imperial thrust at this point was not explicitly a Russian one; it was in fact represented
as the opposite of the old Russian imperial treatment of the peripherynot exploitation
but assisted economic and cultural development. Still, its backward targets were often
explicitly identified as non-Russian, and the reality of the situation was that a model from
the (Russian) capitals was being brought, with crusading zeal and sometimes with vio-
lence, to the (largely non-Russian) hinterlands.

Stanford, 1999); and Marianne Kamp, Unveiling Uzbek Women: Liberation, Representation and Discourse, 1906
1929 (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1998).
22
Jrg Baberowski, Stalinismus an der Peripherie: Das Beispiel Azerbajdzan 19201941, in Stalinismus vor
dem zweiten Weltkrieg: Neue Wege der Forschung/Stalinism before the Second World War: New Avenues of Re-
search, ed. Manfred Hildermeier with Elisabeth Mller-Luckner (Munich, 1998), 33435.
23
Terry D. Martin, An Affirmative Action Empire: Ethnicity and the Soviet State, 19231938 (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Chicago, 1996), 38485, 391, 45054.
24
Ibid., 45761.
25
See my Everyday Stalinism, 7980, for examples of this rhetoric.
 Cultural Revolution Revisited 209

When I began thinking again about Cultural Revolution, stimulated by David-Foxs

essay, I was not sure how much vitality there was left in the paradigm. This question,
which relates to the ability of a paradigm to generate new research that goes beyond the
purely illustrative, is different from the question of whether Cultural Revolution is a use-
ful periodization in Soviet history, which I have addressed above. I ended up answering
the vitality question in the affirmative, since the 1990s has produced work like Yuri
Slezkines and Terry Martins that not only engages the paradigm, using new data, but
also develops it. This, of course, does not mean that a multidimensional, non-time-bound
approach to lower-case cultural revolution, of the kind advocated by David-Fox and prac-
tised by Katerina Clark, may not also bring good results, for the two approaches are not
mutually exclusive. Let diversity flourish!