Russian Terror/ism and Revisionist Historiography

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.