Bridging the Gap: The Legacy of the Soviet “Revisionist Turn” 

Stan Vassilenko

Historian Sheila Fitzpatrick before the Moskva River during her first visit to Moscow in 1969. Image courtesy of Sheila Fitzpatrick.

Academia continues to face a knowledge gap between scholarship and the public sphere, a fact that is especially prevalent when it comes to how we talk about Russia. In today’s world where headlines and social media tend to be people’s chief information suppliers, the resurgence of Cold War narratives of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian monolith or an autocracy by tradition colour Russia’s identity in public discourse, especially since the invasion of Ukraine. This suggests that changes in disciplinary perspectives occur separately from popular opinion, which calls on the historian to modify their tactics for writing history in the public eye. 

As historian Anna Krylova reminds us, it has become academic commonplace to conceive of historical subjects as agents who actively shape or subvert their environments.^[1] This sense, however, is markedly subdued in public media, which neglects tomes of historical debate that have complicated how scholars understand the spaces of resistance and nonpolitical everyday life under oppressive regimes.

For example, consider the broad development of Soviet studies over the last century. The field’s dominant methodology between the October Revolution and the early Cold War was the “totalitarian model,” which contended that the Soviet Union was to be understood in toto as a centralized state typified by mass repression and indoctrination (not unlike the fascist regimes of Hitler and Mussolini).^[2] The scholarly heuristic suggested that people were either terror-ridden and quietly acquiescent to the status quo or were “brainwashed” to begin with. Against the backdrop of the Soviet Union’s annexations of Poland, Hungary, Romania, and other East European states, which exacerbated Western fears of global communist takeover, the rule of thumb for academics was to designate the Communist Party and Marxist-Leninist ideology as sweeping emblems for describing all levels of Soviet living.^[3]

This changed beginning in the 1970s with the emergence of a “revisionist” school of historians who went beyond the totalitarian model by shifting their attention to civil society. Revisionists showed that the model effectively replicated the regime’s self-representation as a one-party state with total control. New social histories, on topics ranging from social mobility to anti-Party resistance, eventually replaced “totalitarian scholarship” as the dominant analytical lens. However, as historian Sheila Fitzpatrick notes, this radical shift in disciplinary thinking did little to reshape optics: to the general public writ large, the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc remained nothing more than despotic police states.^[4]

Crucially, what came to be called the “revisionist turn” was not so much triggered by the introduction to new research data or the gradual opening of archives under the late Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev as by an attitudinal change toward long-held beliefs. Philosopher Thomas Kuhn at this time proposed what he termed the “paradigm shift,” or a major recasting of the traditional worldviews and practices that undergird an area of study.^[5]  Such an epistemic change is less likely to occur among a public whose limited familiarity with scholarly developments tends to limit engagement with underlying historical attitudes that, at first glance, seem to have no bearing on perceptions of global actors and geopolitical affairs. This discrepancy, therefore, calls not for greater public exposure to uncovered primary sources and documentation, but for more inclusive scholarship that is attuned to public sensibilities. How can this be done? 

For starters, public media is notably less dialogic than scholarship, with the result that, once ingrained, ways of thinking can harden into public orthodoxy. Provided the high number of Canadians regularly in contact with the news, it is worth questioning the general public’s critical aptitude to assess the historical credibility of the various ideas and opinions they may encounter. Indeed, familiar Cold War narratives that scholars have revised decades ago continue to feature in contemporary media.

Early into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, The Carnegie Endowment identified Russia as a political space where Vladimir Putin’s propaganda led to a general “evisceration of civil society.” The Atlantic has also promoted the idea that Putin’s regime is a continuation of an ancient autocratic order that is Russia’s apparent historical destiny. This is significant, as even early scholars of the totalitarian model such as Merle Fainsod have cautioned against adopting such viewpoints in the study of Soviet-Russian history.^[6]

The enduring conception of post-Soviet Russia as a totalitarian monolith has equally been entertained in the popular psyche. Anglophone shows such as Stranger Things draw on Gen X Cold War nostalgia by representing Russians as the “bad guys” to advance a newer “Cold War II” narrative for its much younger audience.^[7] Likewise, HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl counterfactually shows the KGB forcing Soviet scientists to assess the nuclear reactor’s radiation levels under threat of death, ascribing repression to a Soviet Union that, by the disaster, had long ceased the use of terror as an instrument of power.^[8]

However, despite Putinist legislation such as the “foreign agent” law undeniably reflecting the centralization of Russia’s political structure, there remain plentiful examples of an active and robust civil society in the country today.^[9]

Up until 2022, Memorial, an organization operating in Russia, investigated human rights violations committed during Joseph Stalin’s purge of Party officials and citizens throughout his leadership from 1928 to 1953. Likewise, until its founder’s recent immigration to Iceland, the feminist punk band Pussy Riot was a well-known dissident group, noted for public acts such as their “punk prayer” following Putin’s 2012 re-election. Today, Pussy Riot continues to hold curated exhibitions of its protests abroad. 

Perhaps the most telling example is Aleksei Navalny, whose domestic popularity as an unofficial Opposition figure to Putin shows that a significant proportion of Russians are not subjugated to the system and seek political alternatives. Having led an anti-corruption campaign and devised a voting app to outvote the President’s United Russia party – among two of his endeavours – his local imprisonment and unspecified death triggered a broad civil reaction based on suspicions of Putin’s involvement, including furiously vocal demonstrations and solemn occasions of mournful tribute. 

Granted, these are all instances of specifically political defiance rather than cases from daily life, but they do nevertheless suggest the problems with reducing Russia to its uppermost leadership. While scholars are not currently in the position to produce extensive socio-cultural accounts of the current regime, this does not mean that we must be limited to a “top-down” ontology. Neither, though, should we overplay agency; as Krylova notes, understanding the historical subject as completely autonomous from its repressive conditions places it into an absolutist framework not unlike the totalitarian model.^[10]

While issues of exposure and accessibility do create a certain sense of invisibility concerning Russian civil society, it is imperative to realize that invisibility is deceptive and cannot excuse the ongoing reductionism in the collective gaze. We must seek balance, and remember that history, always and everywhere, is shaped at once by macro and micro forces. 

Perhaps the principal legacy of revisionism, then, is the light that it shed on the quotidian experiences “from below” that were occluded by earlier, state-centric ideas of repressive regimes. One role of historians in the present is to bridge the gap between inherited simplifications and more nuanced understandings; by advancing academic arguments in more accessible forms historians can foster more meaningful public engagements with history and its uses in the present. When we look at Russia today, we cannot turn away from its suppression of free speech nor its persecution of political critics, but we should also acknowledge the limits of this vision. We must consider, to invoke a Russian concept, that individual and independent “existence” (byt) are also aspects of Russian life. Obscured in media representation, but surely there, is a complex and imperfect Russian civil society, just like anywhere. All we must do is scratch beneath the surface.

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^[1] Anna Krylova, “Foucault, Post-structuralism, and the Fixed ‘Openness of History,’” Modern Intellectual History 21, no. 3 (2024): 707, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244324000088.

^[2] Enzo Traverso, “Totalitarianism Between History and Theory,” History and Theory 56, no. 4 (2018): 99; Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Revisionism in Soviet History,” History and Theory 46, no. 4 (2007): 80. Indeed, the assumed synonymity of communism and fascism is a key legacy of the totalitarian interpretation.

^[3] Fitzpatrick, 80.

^[4] Fitzpatrick, 79.

^[5] Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edition (University of Chicago Press, 1970), as quoted in Fitzpatrick, 78–79; Fitzpatrick, 82, 89.

^[6] Merle Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled (Harvard University Press, 1953), 3.

^[7] Erica L. Fraser and Danielle C. Kinsley, “The Strawpeople of Russian, Eastern European, and Soviet History in English-Language TV and Film,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 50, no. 2 (2024): 2, 9, https://doi.org/10.3167/hrrh.2024.500201.

^[8] Stephen E. Hanson, “The Brezhnev Era,” in Ronald G. Suny, ed., The Cambridge History of Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 299.

^[9] Fitzpatrick, 80.

^[10] Krylova, 706–708.

Further Resources:

Black Sheep Society. “Remembering Revisionism – Black Sheep Society Webinar (May 2, 2025).” Posted May 5, 2025. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=L9pLh1T5RbI.

Schneider, Christopher J. Doing Public Scholarship: A Practical Guide to Media Engagement. Routledge, 2024.

Stites, Richard. Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900. Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Waterlow, Jonathon. “The Real Story of the CIA’s Secret Treasure Trove of Soviet Jokes.” Medium, October 10, 2018. https://medium.com/jon-waterlow/the-real-story-of-the-cias-secret-treasure-trove-of-soviet-jokes-233c70e7e198.

Stan Vassilenko is a third-year undergraduate student pursuing an Honours B.A. in History at Carleton University, Ottawa. His current research interests include film history, narrative-making, history as popular representations, and historical theory.