Chris Ward

What is History? The Case of Late Stalinism

The first part of this article examines the construction of the history of the high politics of Late Stalinism by reviewing five episodes in the period c.1946 to 1953. I suggest that these episodes are usually narrated as examples of either ‘monolithic orthodoxy’ or ‘neo-pluralism’, and conclude that a third narrative structure could be added: ‘pressured elites’. The second part of the article analyses these three narratives as cultural artefacts, and avers that they depend for their effect on a variety of rhetorical and literary devices which tell us as much, if not more, about the construction of history as they do about the past. The article concludes with a consideration of how non-narrative histories of Late Stalinism might be imagined.

Impressions of the Somme: An experiment

Abstract Impressions of the Somme uses one of the major battles of the First World War to explore the difficulties of representation in the context of the following problems: the historians motivation; the constitution evidence; the relationship of evidence to experience; the ascription of meaning, whether by historians, commentators, writers or participants. The article tries to avoid the ‘cause‐event‐consequence’ of much academic history and adopts instead a variety of techniques and voices ‐poetry, prose, listings, imaginary conversations, raw quotations, distortions of chronology. These are designed not only to focus the readers attention on the event itself, but also to display overtly the ways in which the historians motivation shapes historical explanation and writing.

Lenin's death in the British press

This article draws on British press reports on Lenin in the ten days or so after his death on 21 January 1924 and shows how the texts—almost universally hostile in their appraisals—are saturated with gender, class and power distinctions and tropes of race, class, family, climate and geography. These are deployed to explain character or advanced as causative agents. In addition, physiognomic explanations predominate, and supposed binary opposites of mind/body, self/others, emotion/intellect and personal/political inform the ways in which journalists and pundits construct Lenin. The press advances a narrative of Revolution and Soviet power, which suggests that communism has already failed in Russia and that capitalism is being restored. Most writers predict the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union. But the purpose of the article is not to explain or examine these representations in a conventional manner. It is to conduct an experiment in getting to grips with the problem of how to engage with past moments by recycling and reordering material from the press with a minimum of authorial comment, analysis and contextualization.

Stalin through seventeenth-century eyes:

The article examines twentieth-century representations of Stalin. It suggests that none is entirely satisfactory and proposes that a fruitful approach to the problem of representation is to compare representations of Stalin with representations of other historical figures. Comparison with Hitler, a commonplace of modern history writing, is avoided because both are twentieth-century figures and both, therefore, have only a limited range of representations. Instead, a comparison with texts on Cromwell is essayed. Parallels are drawn with texts on Stalin and a classification for types of representation proposed. The article concludes that there is no development or progress in biographical writing over time, and that comparing representations of Stalin and Cromwell alerts us to the possibility that different views of Stalin are more likely to emerge if researches look first at the forms biography has taken.

Reviews : Soviet Workers and the Collapse of Perestroika: The Soviet Labour Process and Gorbachev's Reforms, 1985-1991. By Donald Filtzer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xv + 295. £30.00

What role was played by Gorbachev’s glasnost’ and perestroika? Questions like these will doubtless puzzle historians well into the twenty-first century. Donald Filtzer provides some answers for what’s left of our century. His book is divided into two parts: ’Labour policy under perestroika’ and ’Perestroika and the industrial enterprise’. Part one examines the attempt to create a labour market, the role of economic incentives, enterprise democratization and the emergence of labour protest. In part two the focus shifts to