JOHN L. H. KEEP

The Rehabilitation of M. N. Pokrovskii

Some years ago a Soviet historical journal published an article with the somewhat sensational title “Who Killed Rasputin and How?”¹ It was the sequel to a documentary series on the court of Nicholas II introduced by the late A. L. Sidorov, a leading Soviet historian. Although the article contained little that would have surprised those familiar with relevant sources published in the West, the choice of theme and the manner of its presentation constituted a sharp break with a tradition that dominated historical writing under Stalin, and to some extent survives today. Soviet historians have responded to recent changes in the political climate, although more reluctantly than their colleagues in fields such as economics, or creative intellectuals outside the academic world. Progress was slow until the Twenty-second Party Congress in 1961. Since then there has been vigorous activity, although the pace has diminished markedly since 1966. Today, despite the limitations that have been reimposed upon the choice and treatment of sensitive themes, several schools or trends of thought can be identified, all operating within a common ideological framework, but competing with one another for the allegiance of professional historians and the interested public.²

One significant aspect of these changes has been the rehabilitation of Mikhail Nikolaevich Pokrovskii (1868-1932), the leading Marxist historian in the early years of the Soviet regime. The purpose of this article is to examine the way in which this reform was carried through and to assess its significance for the evolution of Soviet historical thought. The problem is as much political as historiographical, for reasons that will be clarified below.

I

Pokrovskii, who was of middle-class background, studied history at Moscow University under Pavel Vinogradov and Vasilii Kliuchevskii, and took up a teaching career. His first works were influenced by the “ legal Marxist” ideas much in vogue at the turn of the century, but his political affiliation was to the liberal constitutionalists. In 1904 he turned to the Social Democrats, largely, it seems, under the influence of the errant Bolshevik, A. A. Bogdanov, with whom he collaborated on the non-party legal journal Pravda. He was drawn to Bolshevism because it seemed to him the most activist of the many left-wing groups then competing for the support of progressive-minded intellectuals. In 1905 he engaged in propaganda work under the aegis of the Bolshevik-oriented Moscow Committee of the RSDRP and made a trip to Geneva, where he met Lenin; later he played a modest and nonviolent part in the Moscow insurrection. He was able to continue his journalistic activities, although a pamphlet which he wrote on Economic Materialism was impounded by the censor. In December, 1907, after the collapse of the first Russian revolution, he moved to the relative security of Finland, and in 1909 to Paris, where he lived until 1917. He joined Bogdanov and Lunacharskii in the Vpered group which opposed Lenin’s leadership of the Bolshevik faction, and he later associated with the Trotskyists. When World War I broke out he became an Internationalist and in 1915, as a member of Trotsky’s Nashe slovo group, attempted without success to bring together those Mensheviks and Bolsheviks who shared this point of view. Like Bukharin, Pokrovskii believed that the nation-state had outlived its day and that the coming revolution would be international in scope. This view led him to oppose Lenin over national self-determination. ³

Although an emigre, he could still publish his work legally in prewar Russia, and it was at this time that he established his reputation as an historian. His four-volume History of Russia from Ancient Times (published between 1910 and 1912), was not well received by the critics. It was an obvious effort to produce a Marxist alternative to the work of Kliuchevskii, then at the height of his fame. Whereas his former master had illuminated Russia’s social and economic history with erudition and profound knowledge of the primary sources, Pokrovskii operated with schematic sociological formulas and displayed a militant partisanship. The political aim of his work was painfully clear: to discredit both Russia’s “ruling class” in all phases of its history, and the state which, he believed, acted merely in the interests of that class. He selected his facts to “prove” the theses, commonly accepted by Russian Marxists of the day, that economic causes were “basic” and all others derivative; that the class struggle was the motive force of history; that progress resulted, not from the will of individuals, but from “objective” socioeconomic forces, operating in accordance with scientifically-determinable “regularities” (zakonomernosti, Gesetzmässigkeiten); and that the regular succession of “formations” which Marx had identified in Western European history was equally valid for Russia. In common with nearly all his party colleagues at this time, Pokrovskii was first and foremost a European. It was to the West that he looked for capitalist progress and proletarian revolution, which would bring emancipation to backward agrarian Russia. In Russia modern social classes were still in the process of development; feudal relics in economic life went hand in hand with an autocratic political system disguised in quasi-constitutional forms. He criticized without equivocation the aggressive imperialist foreign and colonial policies of the tsarist regime. Despite his obvious bias, superficiality, and intellectual arrogance, his writing at this time gave evidence of sincerity and an independent questing spirit. He was sympathetic to the long-suffering Russian masses and applied the Marxist historical method in an original way: although he treated factual evidence arbitrarily, he did not distort it beyond all recognition. A fruitful dialogue between a historian of his ilk and non-Marxist scholars was still possible.

The February Revolution surprised him at his studies in the Bibliothèque Nationale. It was some months before arrangements could be made for the return of Russian political emigres in France. When Pokrovskii got back to Moscow in August Trotsky’s mezhraiontsy group, with which he had most in common, had just joined the Bolsheviks. Pokrovskii does not seem to have followed their example. In his unpublished memoirs he states vaguely that he “formulated his relations” with the Bolsheviks in September;⁴ his position at this time can best be described as that of an enthusiastic sympathizer whom the local Bolshevik committee found very useful but did not completely trust. He joined the Moscow Soviet and represented it at the Democratic Conference, in which the Bolsheviks participated contrary to Lenin’s express wishes. In October he wrote first-hand reports for the Moscow Committee on the fierce fighting that took place in the city. Pokrovskii believed, somewhat naively, that the Bolshevik Revolution would establish a more democratic system of government, resting on autonomous local soviets. It was in this idealistic spirit that he assumed the title of “People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs” in the Moscow Soviet, an office which, had it carried any power, would have directly challenged the authority of the new government in Petrograd. As the dictatorial nature of the “Soviet” regime became apparent, however, he had to modify his views. At Brest-Litovsk, where he participated in the peace negotiations, he did his best to resist German pretensions and, when his efforts failed, joined Bukharin and other leading Bolsheviks in calling for a “revolutionary war” against the invader. But Lenin overruled this “leftist” opposition; Pokrovskii lost his post on the Moscow Soviet (he had in the meantime become its chairman) and was transferred to the cultural field, where his deviant political opinions could do the party less harm.

As deputy to his old friend and associate Lunacharskii, the first People’s Commissar for Education, and head of the State Council on Scholarship (GUS), Pokrovskii was entrusted with wide supervisory powers over the country’s academic life, in so far as it continued at all at this time. The civil war and economic chaos almost totally disrupted the working of universities and other institutions of learning; scholars and teachers fled, were arrested, or eked out a precarious existence under the constant threat of denunciation. Pokrovskii brought the handful that were sympathetic to the new regime together in a Socialist (later Communist) Academy of Social Sciences, visualized as a body that would rival and supplant the prestigious Academy of Sciences. Other institutions of learning were reformed in such a way as to transfer effective power from the established administrative or academic authorities to the more militant elements of the student body, loosely supervised by the local party committee.

In few fields of learning were the changes more fundamental than in history, a subject to which the new regime, for obvious ideological reasons, attached the utmost importance. It was no coincidence that Pokrovskii, an historian, should have been given such broad responsibilities over all the social sciences, or that the borderline between history (and politics) and other subjects should have been deliberately blurred. Pokrovskii’s inadequate understanding of historical materialism or Leninist doctrine was overlooked. He was virtually the only pro-Bolshevik scholar of any standing, as well as a man of immense energy, able and willing to impose his views. He saw it as his duty to permeate Russian intellectual life with Marxist ideas, and to ensure that all institutions of learning complied with the party’s requirements. Lenin appreciated the practical value of his services and gave him more or less a free hand. Soon he acquired an impressive variety of functions which taxed even his tremendous strength.

The transition to NEP brought a change of perspective. The class struggle against bourgeois tendencies, in the cultural as in the economic sphere, was now seen as extending over a more prolonged, but indeterminate, period of time. In February, 1921, Pokrovskii formed the Institute of Red Professors (IKP) to train cadres of Marxist teachers and research workers in social-science subjects, and became director of this institute, at first situated incongruously in a former Moscow monastery. Most of the entrants were men of middle-class origin who had been educated under the old regime, so that their training consisted largely of political indoctrination. Until newly-trained Marxists could take over key posts, teaching and research were carried on by “bourgeois” elements under Pokrovskii’s watchful eye. At first they continued to work at the universities to which they belonged and supervision was fairly lax. In 1924 six local bodies were brought together to form the Russian Association of Institutes for Scholarly Research in the Social Sciences (RANION). Pokrovskii was the most prominent member of its directing board, which was nominally headed by a leading non-Marxist scholar, the medievalist D. M. Petrushevskii. By the following year the IKP’s cadres had grown sufficiently to permit an organization to be created specifically devoted to historical studies, the Society of Marxist Historians (OIM). This, too, was naturally headed by Pokrovskii. He edited its organ, Istorik-marksist, as well as other well-known journals, notably Krasnyi arkhiv. This was published by the Central Archive Administration of the People’s Commissariat for Education, a body which had as its chief none other than the ubiquitous Mikhail Nikolaevich. Somehow Pokrovskii also found time to preside over seminars and give lectures at the IKP, the Sverdlov University and elsewhere, as well as to write books and articles.

Although he could now draw upon archival sources which had been denied him before the revolution, the quality of his scholarly work deteriorated in the Soviet period. He saw himself chiefly as a propagandist and a popularizer. His condensation of his four-volume work, Russian History in Very Brief Outline, first published in 1920, went through no less than ten editions in the author’s lifetime. It was based on lectures and retained an enviable freshness, laced as it was with rhetorical flourishes; but it was also superficial. Complex problems were grossly simplified or evaded; it did not give a comprehensive Marxist evaluation of all Russian history. Pokrovskii could plead in extenuation that his purpose was to awaken among the semi-educated an interest in history, and more especially a proper positive attitude toward the revolution. To this end he struck a strong moral note and presented the whole of Russia’s pre-revolutionary history as a logical build-up to October (although chronologically his work stopped in 1910). Emphasis was laid upon the succession of historical “formations” and on the masses’ just and heroic struggle against wicked or incompetent rulers. Characteristically Pokrovskii gave a graphic picture of the cruelty and corruption inherent in Russia’s administrative and judicial system prior to the “great reforms” of the 1860s; equally characteristically, he went on to say that matters had been no better in the conservative monarchies of central Europe.⁵ For he still saw Russia’s development as closely bound up with the international revolutionary process. She had lagged in her development because her bourgeoisie had been weaker and less radical than in the more advanced countries; as a result her revolution had been carried out by the proletariat, and had gone beyond “bourgeois democracy” to socialism. The impression he left was that this had been something of a distortion of the proper historical process, and that further proletarian revolutions in the West were essential to rescue Soviet Russia from her dangerous isolation. This could be interpreted—and was-as indicating a lack of faith in Russia’s capacity to build socialism by her own unaided efforts. Although Pokrovskii dutifully accepted Stalin’s thesis of “socialism in one country,” and as early as 1922 joined in the chorus against Trotsky,⁶ he retained ideological affinities with his one-time associate. Indeed, it could hardly be otherwise: he belonged to the “Old Bolshevik” generation, idealistic, romantic, and increasingly out of touch with the harsh practical necessities of power which Stalin understood so well. He could not accept the cynical argument that, to ensure the survival of the dictatorship, “politics must command,” and that the economic interpretation of history he held dear would have to be stood on its head.

For the moment these differences remained latent. Pokrovskii’s career reached its zenith in December, 1928, when he presided over the first All-Union Conference of Marxist Historians. It was a decisive turning-point in Soviet historiography, as it was in the history of the USSR in general. Stalin was launching his all-out drive for industrialization and collectivization of agriculture, which would bring in its train the full panoply of totalitarian rule. In the intellectual field this meant a campaign to eliminate the last remnants of “bourgeois” influence and the creation of a monolithic apparat able to control every expression of opinion. The time for “coexistence” and makeshift devices had passed. Pokrovskii was no longer indispensable. Although he was appointed director of the newly-founded Institute of History in the Communist Academy and elected to the governing body of the USSR Academy of Sciences (now brought under party control), his ramshackle empire was in danger.

Hitherto one major sector of the “historical front” had remained outside his command: the history of the VKP(b) itself, for which he lacked the necessary political qualifications. Stalin’s choice of commanding generaluntil he was ready to take on the job himself—was E. E. Iaroslavskii, an Old Bolshevik of considerable seniority, who had rendered him valuable support in his struggle for power. Iaroslavskii’s Istpart machine was between 1922 and 1928 a department of the Central Committee; it took its line directly from the source of power, and had its own arrangements as regards finance, publication outlets, and the like. After 1928 institutional and personal rivalries developed which Stalin exploited with his customary skill. There is an ironic element in the developments that ensued. Pokrovskii was put in charge of the struggle against bourgeois historiography; but the more he attacked his old enemies, the more he himself came under fire as insufficiently “party-minded.” Some of the cadres he had trained joined in the criticism. It has recently been stated that a “deliberate persecution” of Pokrovskii was organized by L. M. Kaganovich, secretary of the Central Committee.⁷ Whatever the truth of this, the operation must surely have been master-minded by Stalin himself.

A major point of criticism concerned Pokrovskii’s ideas on commercial capitalism, which he saw as the dominant force in the Russian economy, and the power behind the throne, from the mid-sixteenth to the nineteenth century. This chronology had enabled him to depict Russia as a relatively advanced European state, and therefore as less immature for socialism than the Mensheviks (and Trotsky) implied. But in 1931 he was obliged to admit that Russia had known only “commercial capital,” not “commercial capitalism”; that “feudal” elements had survived longer than he had previously thought; and that the autocratic state had rested upon an alliance of landlords and capitalists rather than simply upon the latter. “In the first editions of my scheme,” he confessed, “insufficient attention was paid to the relative independence of the political superstructure from the economic basis.” But he still held to his general scheme, and contended that in nineteenth-century Russia the main conflict had been between commercial and industrial capital—more specifically, between small-scale merchant producers and large-scale manufacturers. The final picture was confused and contradictory, the more so since Pokrovskii did not adjust his views on tsarist foreign or colonial policy.

These revisions were due to political pressure. The reasons for the change in the party’s ideological line at this time are fairly familiar.⁸ Stalin’s desperate attempt to construct “socialism” at a dizzying pace, relying on mass enthusiasm and terror, required that historians should stress Russia’s uniqueness, her backwardness vis-à-vis the West; in this way the achievements of the Five-Year Plan would stand out in a still more glorious light. Related to this was the need to cultivate feelings of patriotism among the apparatchiki and the broad mass of the population, now that proletarian revolution abroad would clearly be postponed to the Roman kalends (or, to put it more precisely, that indigenous communist forces would have to be helped to power artificially by intervention on the part of a strong socialist state). Stalin realized that in totalitarian conditions national sentiment could serve as a useful means of binding the masses to their rulers. The internationalism of the Old Bolsheviks had become an archaic embarrassment. Equally awkward was their “objectivism”—i.e., their stress on the need to shape policy in accordance with environmental factors—which could only hinder the regime in its efforts to mobilize the masses for its purposes.

Pokrovskii never really grasped the measure of the men and forces that opposed him. Although he put up a valiant rearguard action, his days were clearly numbered. With some of his critics he dealt harshly, banishing them to minor provincial posts by administrative fiat. S. M. Dubrovskii, one of his pupils, was charged with “right-wing opportunism” on the grounds that he had presented the transition from feudalism to serfdom as a peaceful, gradual change. The actual cause of Dubrovskii’s fall, however, seems to have been a work disputing the relevance of the Asiatic mode of production, which may have been written at Stalin’s behest to aid the latter in his struggle against Trotsky over policy in China.⁹ On the other hand, Pokrovskii was willing to adjust his views where he felt his opponents had a case. In 1929 only certain aspects of his work, such as the commercial capitalism theory, were under attack; by the winter of 1930-31 it was being said that his entire “historical conception” was un-Marxist. Thereupon, we are now told, “after careful preparation, on February 5, 1931, he sent a letter to the secretaries of the Central Committee of the VKP(b), in which he dissected and refuted the charges levelled against him.”¹⁰ The rather elementary exposition of his views which he gave makes painful reading today. The response which this petition evoked has not been revealed. It may be that at this moment Stalin was angry with Iaroslavskii for having mentioned in his party history Stalin’s tactical errors in 1917, and that he took Pokrovskii’s part. In any case in November, 1931, he dispatched his celebrated letters to the editors of Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, the main Istpart organ, condemning them for tolerating Trotskyist tendencies. This was the signal for a violent press campaign in which, however, Pokrovskii was spared; instead he “was singled out as the one Bolshevik historian correctly applying the Marxist conception of history.”¹¹ But he could draw little comfort from this praise. Stricken with cancer, he had entered the Kremlin hospital in the summer of 1931. Bravely he continued writing to the last, but his strength was ebbing and on April 10, 1932, he died. He was buried with full honors, Stalin himself acting as one of the pallbearers.

Hardly had his ashes been laid to rest in the Kremlin wall than the attack on his legacy began. Already on March 15 the Central Committee had ordered a reorganization of scholarly work that would “place first the elaboration of key concrete problems connected with the party’s current tasks and the class struggle of the world proletariat at the present stage.” Istorik-marksist, the OIM organ, had to suspend publication for several months while organizational changes were carried through. In August, 1932, an official pronouncement criticized inadequacies in the teaching of history and other social sciences and ordered the preparation of new textbooks. In May, 1934, a decree set up a special commission to produce more acceptable versions, in which there should be “due emphasis . . . on important historical facts, the names of historical persons, and chronological dates,” in place of the “abstract sociological schemes” that had hitherto prevailed. Several of Pokrovskii’s works were published in posthumous editions, but in 1934 the body charged with this task, headed by the party historian A. S. Bubnov, unobtrusively ceased its labors. The universities reverted to what seemed to be a more conventional administrative structure; faculties of history, compulsory attendance at lectures, and regular curricula were restored; the earlier periods of history again became respectable. In 1936 Stalin demanded that historians shake off “the erroneous views characteristic of the so-called Pokrovskii ‘school’” and portray the Russian past in a way that reflected credit on its national traditions; a new textbook compiled in conformity with these instructions finally received official sanction. Some of Pokrovskii’s old associates, such as N. M. Lukin, P. O. Gorin, and S. A. Piontkovskii, were liquidated in the purges.¹² A few historians whom Pokrovskii had discredited as “bourgeois,” notably E. V. Tarle¹³ and R. Iu. Vipper, returned to positions of authority; other leading posts were filled by former RANION graduates such as M. V. Nechkina, N. M. Druzhinin, and V. M. Khvostov.

The nadir was reached in 1939 when a Pravda article by Iaroslavskii, one of the few Old Bolsheviks to survive the holocaust, inaugurated a further campaign against Pokrovskii’s memory. The Institute of History rallied its leading collaborators to help compile a two-volume collection of essays, which exposed his erroneous treatment of various historical themes and put the worst construction on his early political deviations.¹⁴ These outpourings reflected Stalin’s paranoid fears for the security of the party leadership which he had purged into trembling docility. “It is with a heavy heart,” writes the Soviet historian E. A. Lutskii, “that the author of this article now recalls this collection.”¹⁵ During World War II exponents of official “Soviet patriotism” such as Tarle attacked Pokrovskii for his cosmopolitan opinions, which he said had contributed to “the moral disarmament of the Russian people.”¹⁶ In the years that followed Pokrovskii’s name was mentioned rarely, and then as a term of abuse. His works had long since been withdrawn from libraries and bookshops, and to the postwar generation of Soviet scholars he was less familiar than certain conservative historians of the nineteenth century. To all intents and purposes he had become “unpersoned.”

II

The partial demolition of the Stalin myth at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 unleashed a ferment in Soviet intellectual life and created conditions in which Pokrovskii’s ideas and achievements could be reassessed. Before discussing this matter one important point needs to be made. The drive for his rehabilitation was not the work of those younger historians who objected most strongly to the frauds and injustices perpetrated under the shield of the “personality cult,” but of older men who had begun their careers in the 1920s and had in many cases suffered hardship on account of their association with Pokrovskii. Politically, these scholars identified themselves with the mild revisionism of Khrushchev; they welcomed such relaxations as the party permitted, but did not actively press for further concessions which might imperil the regime’s stability. As thoroughly loyal elements, they cannot be regarded as sympathetic to “bourgeois” Western liberal values or modes of thought. Yet it is an elementary lesson of history that reforms often lead to results neither anticipated nor desired by those who initiate them. By casting doubt on previously accepted assumptions, the revisionists stimulate critical thought, which may become more radical as it meets resistance from conservative elements. This pattern could be illustrated from many aspects of Soviet intellectual life since Stalin’s death.

One should perhaps enter a caveat here against the tendency to personalize intellectual conflicts of this kind, and say that the struggle is as much one within men’s minds as one between individuals. For Soviet historians the tension is between their professional interest in elucidating the truth and their political interest in bolstering the official ideology, with its immutable and sanctified precepts.

The first indications of impending changes came in January, 1956, when Pokrovskii’s name received favorable mention in an official statement: he was credited with important services in the struggle against bourgeois historiography, although he had also been guilty of “vulgarizing errors” which had been justly condemned.¹⁷ The authorities seem to have planned a gradual revision of their line, carried out under close party control, but events moved too fast for them. E. N. Burdzhalov, editor of Voprosy istorii, provoked a crisis by questioning the legitimacy of the October Revolution. Not until this affair had been settled by his dismissal and a reconstitution of the journal’s editorial board was it safe to take further steps towards Pokrovskii’s rehabilitation. The revisionists (as we may call them) hoped that, by presenting him as a loyal Leninist who had been unjustly victimized by Stalin, they could improve their own image in the eyes of younger and more skeptically-minded historians. But it was not easy to overcome the conservatism of those brought up in the Stalin mold, who feared, not unreasonably, that any rethinking would encourage heretical ideas. Late in 1957 M. E. Naidenov could write that, although Pokrovskii had played a positive role in Soviet historiography during the 1920s, “his views upon a whole number of important questions concerning the October Revolution differed radically from the precepts of Lenin. He understood neither Lenin’s teaching on imperialism nor his theory that the revolution could grow over from the bourgeois-democratic to the proletarian-socialist phase.”¹⁸

The nettle was not grasped firmly until the following summer, when, apparently without any preliminary announcement in the press, a meeting was held at the Museum of the Revolution in Moscow to celebrate the ninetieth anniversary of Pokrovskii’s birth. The main report was delivered by S. M. Dubrovskii, who thirty years earlier had been one of his fledglings. Later he had suffered under Stalin: an acknowledged authority on prerevolutionary agrarian conditions, he published little or nothing between the late 1920s and 1956. The text of his report appears to have been circulated na pravakh rukopisi, as is the usual practice with politically sensitive documents, but its tenor can be reconstructed fairly well from materials published subsequently. In the autumn of 1958 a conference was held in the editorial offices of Voprosy istorii, the proceedings of which likewise remained in manuscript. Among those present was a lady who had once attended Pokrovskii’s seminar in the IKP and now recalled sympathetically his efforts to correct his mistakes. ¹⁹

The next phase in Pokrovskii’s rehabilitation came in 1960-61, when the journal Istoriia SSSR began a lethargic and scholastic discussion on “the periodization of Soviet historiography.” The participants labored under the hindrance of being unable to mention explicitly the role played by individual historians or politicians. The revisionists, led by the formidable M. V. Nechkina, drew heavily upon Pokrovskii’s published writings as well as other materials of the 1920s, which had now evidently been made available again, at least to approved scholars. They also used some unpublished material, notably from Pokrovskii’s personal archive, preserved in the Institute of History.

Their arguments can be summarized as follows. First, Pokrovskii had made a notable contribution to the struggle against “bourgeois” historians and deviant communists (e.g., Trotsky) in difficult conditions. Secondly, he deserved credit for his endeavors to acquire a wholly orthodox Leninist Weltanschauung; it was necessary to view his work “dialectically,” in its process of development, rather than “statically” and dogmatically. Third, it was implied-but not clearly stated-that his political vacillations were not really relevant to his work as a historian, and that they were in some way offset by the political “mistakes” committed by his Stalinist critics. Finally, Pokrovskii’s best-known work, his Brief History, had been approved by Lenin in a letter of 1920,²⁰ and indeed actually “commissioned” by him. (This letter had been frequently referred to when Pokrovskii’s career was at its height, but had since either been passed over in silence or else cited selectively-a procedure that aroused much indignation.) An element of special pleading was involved here, since the relationship between party leader and scholar in Lenin’s day was very different from what it was to become later, and the Bolshevik leader’s attitude to Pokrovskii had actually been equivocal. But the maneuver was necessary because it at once indicated to potential critics that they should move cautiously.²¹

Had logic been given its due in this discussion, the conservatives might well have pointed to the inconsistencies in the revisionist position: it was still said that Pokrovskii’s methodology and his erroneous views on periodization had “caused tremendous harm to historical science,” yet the overall evaluation was positive. But they preferred more devious tactics. They argued, for example, that the early period of Soviet historiography ought rightfully to be named after Lenin rather than Pokrovskii, and that the real turning-point in its development had come in the mid-1930s.²² Naidenov now admitted that Pokrovskii’s role had been “indubitably progressive,” but complained that Nechkina was divorcing the development of Soviet historiography from the political struggle in the country at large (which, however, neither of them could discuss frankly), and drew attention to Pokrovskii’s sympathies for “Bogdanovism” and his “national nihilism.”²³ The debate was inconclusive, and had to be settled at a higher level. In the summer of 1961 a hint was given in Kommunist that the Central Committee was about to intervene. ²⁴

At the Twenty-Second Party Congress in October, 1961, L. F. Ilyichov, the chief ideologist, stated authoritatively:

In the period of the personality cult some quite inexplicable things occurred, such as suppressing the names of leading scholars. This was the fate of the eminent Marxist historian and Old Bolshevik M. N. Pokrovskii. In his scholarly and political activity there were no few mistakes. This is true and account should be taken of it. But it is well known that he defended Marxism and made a great contribution to the writing of Russian history.²⁵

He proceeded to quote (in full) Lenin’s familiar letter and to contrast his gentle paternalism with the brutal attitude of Stalin. So began the third phase in the rehabilitation process. The leading historians now fell into line, although some of them put up a kind of smoke screen to cover their retreat. At a meeting held in December, 1961, to discuss the implications of the party congress decisions, the man chosen to deliver the report was, significantly, Dubrovskii. He ended on a note of self-vindication:

The decisions of the Twentieth and Twenty-Second Congresses, the exposure of the personality cult, . . . the crushing of the anti-party group of Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov and co. have created favorable conditions for . . . an objective assessment of our historiographical legacy, including Pokrovskii’s works.²⁶

I. I. Mints, whose position was somewhat delicate since he had succeeded Pokrovskii as head of the IKP, made the point that Dubrovskii had been the first to criticize Pokrovskii’s entire conception of history in the 1920s-a remark which might be thought to imply that Dubrovskii was something of a weathercock.²⁷ M. P. Kim repeated the Stalinist argument that Pokrovskii had tried to build up for himself a monopoly position in the field of historical studies. On the other hand, A. L. Sidorov broke new ground by making the first public criticism of the two-volume critique of Pokrovskii, which he had helped to edit. Summing up the discussion, the chairman held out the prospect of a thorough investigation into Pokrovskii’s work. One of the questions that needed to be answered was: “what were the consequences for Soviet historical scholarship of the struggle against Pokrovskii during the period of the cult?”²⁸

One year later another conference was held to discuss the general subject of history teaching.²⁹ The debate had now broadened out into a general indictment of Stalinist methods-something of much greater significance than the question of Pokrovskii’s merits or demerits, which were scarcely discussed at all. One of the few references to him was by Burdzhalov, the enfant terrible of 1956, who made a strong attack on Sidorov for having criticized Pokrovskii as late as 1955.³⁰ One might think that this was scarcely fair: after all, at that time such articles were quite in order, and in the last few years Sidorov had changed his line as fast as anyone else. But the radicals were playing the game by different rules; their main objection was precisely to what they felt was a hypocritical readiness on the part of leading historians to adjust their views to the political koniunktura. Burdzhalov was probably paying off an old personal score as well. In any case Sidorov did his best to make amends. In March, 1964, he published a revealing memoir in which he recalled his experiences as a member of Pokrovskii’s seminar in the 1920s.³¹ He mentioned that in 1929, “with the best of intentions and a clear conscience,” he had rashly suggested to the great man that he make certain alterations in his Brief History, whereupon he had been sent to do practical work in Nizhnii Novgorod (now Gorky).³² He had taken it in good heart and did not hold Pokrovskii himself responsible so much as his associates Gorin and Friedland. He had now been asked to give some advice to young scholars. “I should prefer that young people, reading my story, should draw from it the conclusions they think useful.”³³ He ended by warning his colleagues against concentrating too heavily on collective works, which could inhibit them from expressing individual ideas; they should study the technique and methodology of bourgeois writers-as Pokrovskii had recommended.

Since 1962 Soviet historians have indeed tried to grapple with the legacy of the 1920s, although a thoroughgoing Bewältigung der Vergangenheit remains to be accomplished. A valuable but brief sketch of Pokrovskii’s career has been given by E. A. Lutskii, and L. V. Danilova has discussed the contribution which he and other early Soviet scholars made to the study of feudalism.³⁴ O. L. Vainshtein has described, a little drily for one of his experience, the general historiographical scene in the 1920s.³⁵ Pokrovskii’s selected works have appeared in a four-volume edition.³⁶ The first three volumes comprise his two major historical works; the last contains a rather uninspiring choice of his articles and book reviews, devoted mainly to such topics as Lenin, the Russian revolutionary movement, historiography, archive administration, and scholastic organization. Volume IV of the new official history of Russian historiography, published in 1966 under the chief editorship of M. V. Nechkina, contains an authoritative assessment, by L. V. Cherepnin, of Pokrovskii’s position in Soviet scholarship as the revisionists see it. It is not calculated to stimulate any intellectual interest in the Old Bolshevik’s ideas. Cherepnin states unequivocally:

Pokrovskii belongs to history. It is not a matter of restoring his conclusions, or idealizing his works or conceptions, but of establishing in an objective scientific way his role in the establishment and development of science.³⁷

No comprehensive systematic study has been made, or is in present circumstances likely to be made, of Pokrovskii’s thought and its implications for the contemporary Soviet historian.

In what way, then, if at all, one may ask, is his rehabilitation likely to change such historians’ image of the world?

III

At first sight it may seem that the positive developments in Soviet historical writing during recent years represent a return to the relative freedom of the 1920s. Such a conclusion would, however, be superficial.³⁸ There are a number of common features between the Pokrovskii era and the present: greater variety in the institutional pattern, a more tolerant intellectual climate, increased contact with other countries and greater attention to combating “bourgeois ideology.” But the historian’s function today is still basically what it was in the Stalin era: to provide an intellectual legitimation for the existing regime and the order of society it has established. A great deal of scholarly effort is devoted to expounding fictions which substantiate the party’s claims to be the authoritative interpreter of “the logical process of mankind’s movement toward communism” (N. E. Fedoseev). The Soviet historian is not simply required to eulogize his political masters: he must adopt enthusiastically a Weltanschauung centered upon the collective experience of party and people in the “building of socialism and communism.” When assessing any historical event, idea, or problem, however remote in time or space, he is to take as his criterion its “progressiveness”-meaning in effect the contribution it made to the events that led to the current might of the USSR and world communism. This creed governs his perception of historical facts, as well as his manner of interpreting them.

The spirit of official thinking is thus closer to that of the 1930s than the 1920s. Stalin’s arbitrary despotism has gone, but the substance of his system remains. The party still sees itself as engaged upon a worldwide struggle which necessitates the consolidation and extension of its power at home and abroad. The revolutionary internationalism of the early Bolsheviks, to which Pokrovskii and even Lenin were committed, has little relevance to the position of post-Stalinist Russia.

There is thus an artificial quality about the rehabilitation of Pokrovskii: it is his reputation that is being salvaged rather than his ideas. The prime motive of the revisionists is to present a politically acceptable image of Soviet historiography, from Lenin to the present, as monolithically united in a relentless struggle against hostile ideas. But some Soviet historians with strong professional loyalties pursue a rather different aim: to right a tragic injustice, and so to arrive at a closer approximation to actual truth. The tension between these two purposes may be illustrated by reference to several specific problems.

The first is that of methodology. It is not surprising that the official revisionists should have said little favorable about Pokrovskii’s historiographical technique, although this aspect of his work is probably of the greatest interest to the professionals. Stalin had indicted him in the first instance for methodological errors: for making broad generalizations unsupported by facts, for disregarding or confusing chronological details, and for a naive understanding of Marxism. But Stalin’s own disciples had then substituted even crasser simplifications, had been even more selective in their choice of factual evidence, and had forbidden creative Marxist thought altogether. With almost diabolical cunning they accused Pokrovskii of the very sins that they were themselves committing on a far grander scale. He was said to have preached the necessity of “projecting politics into the past,”³⁹ although they themselves molded the historical record unashamedly in accordance with political expediency.

Two charges were fundamental in the Stalinist indictment. The first was that Pokrovskii retained, as the legacy of his early academic upbringing, a non-partisan respect for factual evidence. Wherever possible, he had based his more specialized work upon research in the primary sources; he set high standards for his pupils in this regard; and the collections of documents which he edited by and large conformed to normal scholarly standards. Naturally this respect for observed fact had its limits: he was not prepared to question the fundamental dogmas of Marx or Lenin, but he sincerely believed that scholarly analysis of objective evidence would validate the Marxian scheme. Such faith his Stalinist successors conspicuously lacked.

The second major point of criticism was that he made no secret of his political bias. He took the crude but intellectually honest view that all historical interpretation was politically motivated. The class struggle, which determined men’s political beliefs, made non-partisan historiography impossible; one had to take one’s stand on one side of the barricades or the other. This simple formula was inappropriate to totalitarian conditions. Intellectuals were now required to pretend that their Weltanschauung was truly scientific, while at the same time suspending all critical judgment in regard to the central core of their beliefs, loyalty to the party (partiinost’). Various formulas have been evolved in an attempt to reconcile the contradictory strains, one scientific and the other fideistic,⁴⁰ in Stalinist and post-Stalinist thought. It is argued, for instance, that true objectivity (as distinct from “bourgeois objectivism”) can be attained only by partisanship, the two principles being allegedly “related dialectically”: the party, intervening in the historical process, influences its objective regularities, to which its own actions naturally conform.⁴¹

The valiant efforts recently made by Soviet philosophers and historians to enrich their stock of theory have not brought its inherent contradictions any nearer solution, but have helped crystallize two points of view. The conservatives take a classic utilitarian stand. In effect they see it as the historian’s job to provide evidence that will substantiate the current official analysis of the speed and direction of the historical process. They emphasize the general at the expense of the particular and are suspicious of mere “factography.” The revisionists are more interested in the way that general regularities work themselves out in specific concrete conditions, and are more willing to let the facts speak for themselves. They would like to refine the concept of regularity in such a way as to distinguish between those laws that are applicable to broad sociological processes, e.g. the succession of socio-economic formations, and those laws that govern their implementation within a narrower frame of reference.⁴² The revisionists emphasize the distinction between the social and natural sciences and come close to recognizing history’s claims as an autonomous discipline, in which factual description and narrative have an important part to play. Thus the philosopher A. V. Gulyga argues:

In branches of learning which pursue descriptive aims as well as that of generalization, factual material plays a special role, different from that in purely theoretical disciplines. The latter utilize factual data simply as an aid to generalization. These sciences go through the stage of accumulating empirical material, but their aim is always to establish a law, and when this has been done the empirical material loses its importance. Historical research also begins with the collection of facts. Here, too, facts are to an even greater degree the air which the scholar breathes . . . . Without a firm, assured groundwork of fact no historical generalization is possible. At the same time the historical fact is not simply material for generalization; it is not just an example which can be dropped or replaced, to illustrate the operation of a social law. Historical generalization is no substitute for fact. To a certain extent facts in history have a value in themselves.⁴³

A provincial historian from Kalinin, A. Iu. Gurevich, has pleaded for a more sophisticated interpretation of the concept of regularity in the historical as distinct from the sociological context; quoting Sir Isaiah Berlin (although in a critical sense), he suggests that the laws of social development should be seen merely as trends (zakony-tendentsii). ⁴⁴ Gurevich, in common with several other writers, also points to the role of probability and chance in interrupting or diverting the logical flow of events: a number of options are available to the decision-maker, and a given situation may have several possible outcomes. This new flexibility seems to reflect recent trends in mathematics. It certainly shows that some Soviet historians are dissatisfied with conventional doctrine, which asserts that “historical necessity makes its way through an endless multiplicity of fortuitous events,” but does not explain how it does so.

Other revisionist writers have stressed the aesthetic aspects of the historian’s craft, and held up for emulation the more sensitive approach of literary and other cultural historians. Excessive concentration on the typical, they point out, is liable to bore the reader, who is naturally interested in whatever is individual and unique. Such study is perfectly permissible, they maintain, since even the unique is socially conditioned and derives ultimately from the operation of general laws; the typical and the individual are not diametrically opposed categories, but are dialectically linked.

Truly the conservatives face an unenviable task in trying to stop all the loopholes in the official philosophy of history, which can be readily exploited by ingenious critics. Pokrovskii’s legacy in this field could strengthen the revisionists’ hand, by giving them an officially sanctioned example of creative Marxist thought. In a speech of 1928, for example, he too distinguished between sociological and historical interpretations of events.⁴⁵ This was not directly quoted by any participant in the recent discussion on methodology, but it is not surprising to find one leading historian complaining that his colleagues were still thrashing out the problems of thirty-five years ago.

Another fruitful field which they may wish to explore is Pokrovskii’s concept of the role of the individual in history. Although he is usually regarded, not without reason, as a crass economic determinist, his attitude was really much more subtle. It is true that Pokrovskii minimized the role of Russian rulers, generals and saints, some of whom Stalin later resurrected and even glorified. But he was also willing to recognize that revolutionary leaders and elites could decisively alter the shape of events, and he regarded the October Revolution as a supreme example of this. We shall come back to this point in a moment.

Turning now from methodology to particular problems of Russian history, one may identify three fields in which, if and when the political climate again improves, Pokrovskii’s rehabilitation may serve to accelerate the movement of opinion away from Stalinist traditions.

The first is the problem of pre-revolutionary Russian colonial and foreign policy. As a consistent internationalist, Pokrovskii emphasized the imperialist nature of tsarist diplomacy, particularly in regard to the Balkans and Near East; he even exaggerated the aggressiveness of Russia’s drive for control of the Straits. In a popular sketch of 1926 he suggested-on the basis of very dubious evidence—that the Entente, not the Central Powers, was responsible for the outbreak of World War I.⁴⁶ In his Brief History he argued that the Russian state had been built up by the conquest of successive native peoples, from the Finns of the northern forests in Kievan days to the Moslems of Central Asia in the nineteenth century. Stalin, of course, changed all this and introduced into Soviet historiography a strident patriotic note. Emphasis was laid upon the positive effects of absorption into the Russian Empire for the minorities concerned. Parallels were drawn between the German invasion of 1941 and Napoleon’s campaign of 1812, a subject which Pokrovskii had neglected: looking at it in a European perspective, he had roundly condemned the Russian role as reactionary and shown more sympathy for the relics of the Grande Armée than for the peasant guerrillas.

In recent years some of the worst nationalistic distortions have been discarded. Among the keenest advocates of revision, of course, are historians from the non-Russian (and especially non-Slavic) republics. The conservatives have their principal stronghold among military historians, who currently occupy an almost privileged semi-autonomous position.

The ramifications of this argument cannot be discussed in detail here.⁴⁷ In general it may be said that any thorough-going revision of historical doctrine on this issue is exceedingly unlikely. Characteristically, in the new edition of Pokrovskii’s history virtually the only passages selected for editorial comment are those in which the author expressed his internationalist viewpoint. For example, where he criticizes Alexander II’s government for seeking to liberate “brother Slavs” (the author’s inverted commas!) in the Balkans, a discreet footnote refers the reader to a remark by the Bulgarian communist leader Dimitrov on the “liberation” of Bulgaria by “the Russian people” in the war of 1877-78.⁴⁸

The party leaders know that national feeling, in its guise of Soviet patriotism, is a more important prop than ever. If spokesmen for the minorities go too far, they can easily be discredited as “bourgeois nationalists.” They cannot look to Pokrovskii for support, since he took little direct interest in minority problems, but they may benefit if some other historians of the 1920s again become respectable. Russian revisionist historians have little incentive to recall Pokrovskii’s views. Dubrovskii has pointed out in his defense that Pokrovskii had to combat the chauvinistic and nationalistic sentiments so widespread under the old regime. But Fedoseev, warning that Pokrovskii’s rehabilitation should not be pressed too far, specifically mentioned his error in “not always indicating the significance of national traditions and permitting wrong evaluations in this regard.”⁴⁹ To illustrate his point he referred to Pokrovskii’s positive assessment of the thirteenth-century Tatar invaders of Rus’—which his percipient audience will have construed as a blow against certain pro-Chinese historians who have endeavored to rehabilitate Ghenghis Khan. The present moment is scarcely opportune for anyone to probe deeply into this aspect of Pokrovskii’s legacy.

A related problem is that of the Russian revolutionary tradition. For Pokrovskii-as indeed for Lenin-Bolshevism was intimately linked with international left-wing socialism and “revolutionary Marxism.” In the Stalin era, when the Comintern and all that it stood for lost importance, these connections were played down. Instead, emphasis was laid upon antecedents of Bolshevism in the Russian past-in the “men of the 1860s,” the Decembrists, and even the peasant uprisings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One link in the chain, however, was conspicuously missing: the revolutionary populists, who were influenced either by Bakunin’s anarchism or the “Blanquist” Jacobinism of Zaichnevskii, Nechaev and Tkachev. The populists were presented as reactionary and anti-Marxist. One reason for this was that during the 1920s a number of writers, some former Mensheviks, had sought the antecedents of Leninism among these radical populists, and for this had been sharply condemned. For example, in 1925 the journal Katorga i ssylka published an article by S. Mitskevich on “the roots of Bolshevism,” which had been rejected by the more orthodox Proletarskaia revoliutsiia; six years later, after Stalin reproved the latter journal for its laxity, the editors of Katorga i ssylka apologized for having “granted a rostrum to those who had no right to it.”⁵⁰ Pokrovskii did not go quite so far as Mitskevich. But in a course of lectures delivered in 1923-24 he stated that Tkachev “undoubtedly had a Marxist concept of history” and, referring to Nechaev, went on:

. . . already at the end of the 1860s there was formed in Russian revolutionary circles a plan which the Mensheviks later mocked so greatly and which was put into effect almost literally on October 25, 1917-the plan for an appointed revolution. ⁵¹

Pokrovskii considered the populist Jacobins both naive and “petty-bourgeois,” but saw a continuity between them and the Bolsheviks in that both had built up a conspiratorial party with the deliberate object of seizing power.

In recent years Soviet historians, following the initiative of the late B. P. Kozmin, a distinguished authority on the period, have sought to present populism in a truer perspective. The artificial and illogical distinction between the radicals of the 1860s and of the 1870s has been discarded. V. A. Tvardovskaia has criticized those historians, of whom Nechkina was the doyenne, who exaggerated the revolutionary role of the peasantry in post-reform Russia.⁵² A noteworthy feature of this rehabilitation is that it concentrates on the narodovol’tsy at the expense of those identified with anarchism or Jacobinism.⁵³ One party historian has angrily rebutted the suggestion of a link between Tkachev and Lenin.⁵⁴ The specific problem of Bolshevik antecedents has been gingerly taken up by V. V. Shirokova,⁵⁵ but her article seems to have evoked no response.

Future writers on this theme will welcome the access now granted to the historical literature of the 1920s. But they will have to go carefully in citing such sources on later stages of revolutionary history, where a conflict is likely with the Leninist canon. Pokrovskii, discussing the events of 1905, minimized the role of the peasants as an active and “conscious” revolutionary force; in his treatment of 1917 he maintained that the February Revolution had already brought the working class to power de facto, and that the Bolsheviks did no more than establish the proletarian dictatorship de jure.⁵⁶ These assertions reflected the Trotskyist affiliations which he had shared at one time. Yet despite the obvious difficulties involved, Soviet historians are today revising their views on the revolution itself, partly as a natural consequence of destalinization, partly in response to recent developments in world politics.

The significance of this will become clear if we turn to our third specific problem, Russia’s social and economic development in the pre-revolutionary period. Pokrovskii, as we have seen, was forced by the Stalinists to modify his views on the chronological dating of Russia’s transition from feudalism to capitalism, and a new doctrine on this point became established in the 1930s. It was somewhat closer to the facts than Pokrovskii’s scheme, and was probably accepted with relief by specialists on this period. They could now give the landowning nobility its due in an epoch when it was dominant, and recognize, at least in part, the achievements of those monarchs, officials, or capitalists who had promoted Russia’s economic advance. But some historians still considered that less than justice was being done to business enterprise among the peasants prior to the Great Reforms, and once discussion again became possible they pressed for the onset of capitalism to be backdated. A long and arid debate ensued, in which the weight of opinion came down in favor of the accepted late dating, approximately in the midnineteenth century. If the issue is raised again, the revisionists will be able to draw upon Pokrovskii’s arguments in support—with their implication that imperial Russian society was closer to that of Western countries than the Stalinists cared to admit.

The same issue is raised by the attempt to fix chronological limits for the supposed “imperialist” phase in Russian history. Pokrovskii first took the view that this could be dated only from 1914, when Russia had entered the “imperialist war,” but later pushed it back to 1890. In his view the main criteria involved were protective tariffs and an expansionist foreign policy; and in the 1890s Russia had had both. The existence of trusts and syndicates he considered a less important characteristic, for these had been much weaker in Russia than in more advanced countries such as Germany or the United States. It was only in the immediate prewar years that Russia had developed a “finance capital” of her own, since previously she had depended heavily upon foreign investment. An economic satellite could hardly be imperialist in the economic sense. Pokrovskii’s views were quite reasonable and in the 1920s the question was debated fairly on the basis of objective evidence. Some of his pupils emphasized the role of native capital more than Pokrovskii did. Others were more inclined to portray Russia as a colony of foreign investors. Pokrovskii had greater sympathy for the latter view, which carried the implication that the revolution had been as much a national anti-imperialist movement as a social one, and which cast doubt upon the existence of any objective basis for socialist construction in the USSR.

Stalin first beat all these historians into silence with the stick of orthodox Leninism, pointing out dogmatically that Lenin had dated imperialism from 1900, and then appropriated their opinions himself. In 1934 he stated that pre-revolutionary Russia had been a “semi-colony” of Western capital. This theme was much stressed in the post-World War II years, when the anticosmopolitan drive was at its height.

Destalinization in this field got under way shortly before the Twenty-Second Party Congress, when a conference for this purpose was held in Leningrad; its sponsor was a body known rather grandly as the Section on Regularities and Particularities of the Development of Russia under Imperialism, a sub-group of the Council on the History of the Russian Revolution.⁵⁷ The “semi-colonial” theory was explicitly discarded, freeing the way for a rehabilitation of native Russian capital.

It seems that there emerged two schools of thought, each of which sought to provide a more up-to-date and credible historical legitimation for the October Revolution. This was no academic issue, for as one historian observes:

. . . the rise and development of the world socialist system after the Great Patriotic War has made particularly topical the problem of the regularity of the transition from capitalism to socialism, which began in October 1917.⁵⁸

One tendency, represented by A. P. Pogrebinskii and Ia. I. Livshin, emphasizes the dominant position of monopolistic trusts and syndicates in Russia’s economic and political life prior to 1917, and especially their responsibility for the outbreak and prolongation of the war. The reader is left with the impression that Russia’s privileged groups formed a powerful and united reactionary bloc, which could be overthrown only by a still mightier union of the popular masses, and that such a national union came about in opposition to the war, into which the people were dragged by domestic and foreign business interests. Seen in this perspective, 1917 appears as the forerunner of the “anti-colonial” revolutions in China and other developing countries. The political implication is that Russia’s historical experience entitles her to a vanguard role in the emergent peoples’ struggle against “Western imperialism,” from which she was the first to emancipate herself.

The second tendency views the revolution in a European rather than an Asian perspective, and is closer to the Western standpoint than to the Chinese. Spokesmen for this tendency are of course totally opposed to the evaluation of Bolshevism given by “bourgeois” scholars. But they do not contest too strongly the argument that the Bolsheviks’ victory was largely a matter of superior leadership and organization. They conceal this deemphasis of the role of the masses behind loud endorsement of the current extravagant cult of Lenin. The implication of this line of thinking is that, but for Lenin and his party, Russia would have had to develop along the road of Western “bourgeois democracy.” The alternative to Bolshevik rule is thus seen as limited progress rather than outright reaction. It is further suggested that Russia had been prepared for such progress by her previous history: her industrial progress prior to 1914 was quite significant; monopolistic restrictions were not all-important; the role of foreign investment was not exclusively negative; the ruling groups were divided among themselves. The chief obstacle to Russia’s advance, it is implied, was not so much the capitalists, native or alien, as the court camarilla and other archaic “feudal” survivals within the privileged elite. Hence Sidorov’s interest in Rasputin. In short, this school inclines toward a more sophisticated-and in Western eyes realistic—understanding of the causes of the Russian Revolution, even though the explanation given might not satisfy non-Marxists.

Among those who have intervened on this side of the debate are the late A. L. Sidorov, I. F. Gindin and V. K. Iatsunskii,⁵⁹ who worked with Pokrovskii in the 1920s. The latter’s rehabilitation should reinforce their position, and may encourage younger, more questing spirits to urge greater frankness in discussing this key problem. How far can the pendulum swing toward a less standardized interpretation of October? Will Soviet historians be able to refine the concept of zakonomernost’ to a point where they can accept Pokrovskii’s view (which many early Bolsheviks would have shared) that it was an “appointed” revolution, carried out in contravention of “narrow economic laws”?

The answer to these questions cannot be given by the historians alone. In the last resort their evaluation of the past depends upon the politicians. In the decade 1956-66 the party permitted a notable advance both in methods of research and in quality of analysis. If and when the present “freeze” is over, these progressive trends may reassert themselves.