Stalin and Yezhov: An Extra-Paradigmatic View - by Philip E. Panaggio
Chapter 7: One of Two Studies That Challenge the Totalitarian Paradigm
During the past fifty or so years, incredible as it may sound, only two Western, non-Marxist writers who were not defenders or advocates of Communism or the former Soviet system have produced studies of Stalinist society based on empirical evidence rather than being guided solely by the totalitarian paradigm and the memoirs and agendas of refusniks, propagandists, and glamorous, talented Russian intellectuals who had found a home and a rapt audience in the West. The two deserving credit were Zbigniew Brzezinski and Merle Fainsod. (Note that whether or not one agrees with their conclusions, or whether or not Brzezinski and Fainsod agree with each other, is irrelevant as to whether or not they based their conclusions on empirical evidence rather than being guided by the totalitarian paradigm.) Brzezinski drew upon information gathered in an émigré interview project at Harvard. Fainsod carefully studied the Smolensk Archive, which had been available to Western scholars long before glasnost’ due to having been captured by the Germans in World War II and having subsequently fallen into American hands by the end of the war. This archive is now kept in the U.S. National Archive and has been available for some time on microfilm from the U.S. Government Printing Office. Studying it, however, is something an historian would rather avoid because the archive consists of files that appear to be remnants randomly saved from a fire by German occupation authorities. Much of the material is charred and otherwise difficult to decipher. It is far easier for an historian to speak and write ex cathedra, using the totalitarian model and unverified claims that fit the model, such as was done by the "expert" Timothy J. Naftali, a Research Fellow from the University of Virginia, on a recent CNN broadcast. Sitting on an "expert panel" on this program, Mr. Naftali re-iterated conventional notions that during the Show Trials in Moscow in the late l930’s, Stalin was eliminating Old Bolsheviks that "he couldn’t work with any more," as Mr. Naftali confidently put it. We shall see in what follows in this section that a careful and statistical analysis of new archival material does not bear this out.
As a result of his own scrupulous research into only one (damaged) archive, Fainsod was forced to conclude that in the Smolensk region of the Soviet Union, the political system could only be characterized as "inefficient totalitarianism." He did not thereby mean that the economic or political system was inefficient - whether or not that was the case. What he meant was that the totalitarian model just did not fit what he learned from the Smolensk archive about what was going on in that region. If one wants to know what Fainsod did not find in this region, the totalitarian paradigm proves of great service: all one has to do is go back to the outline of the paradigm given by Getty and Manning above, and put an appropriately inflected negative of the verb given in each phrase. E.g.: "Ideology and violence were [not] monopolies of the ruling elite, which [did not] pass its orders down a pseudo-military chain of command," etc. By concluding "inefficient totalitarianism," Fainsod was being empirically honest yet still aiming to uphold the reigning paradigm. As already mentioned, paradigms are never easily abandoned by anyone trained to practice within them. Model tinkering - not scrapping - seems to be nearer the limit of a previously trained individual adult practitioner’s capabilities during his own lifetime, which is one reason Arthur Koestler described humans as "sleepwalkers." If Koestler is right, training into a professional paradigm gives someone new and desirable capabilities, but it blinds as much as it enlightens.
© Copyright by Philip E. Panaggio P. O. Box 85, Lehigh Acres, FL 33970-0085, USA
