It's a biased reddit response but fundamentally not inaccurate. Parenti basically got started doing good poli sci work, got tenure, then went off and started writing what are essentially pop history books but for a left audience. Lots of professors do that, but it's important to keep in mind they are not history. His Rome book especially he really doesn't know Roman historiography and basically just cites a couple outdated histories to craft a huge narrative, and his Yugoslavia book is just wrong. It's not history. His Tibet article that gets tossed around has similar problems. Take a work of soviet history like Getty or Moshe Lewin, who both pushed back hard against the totalitarian school led by Conquest (a school of soviet history which basically died in academia with the archive openings, most of them recanted and moved on with the field to the social historian school or left to pursue non academic ideological work like Conquest), a few pages of one of their works will contain perhaps a dozen citations, detail what the consensus view is in the field on that topic, and then carefully detail how and way they are moving away from it. This is the problem with constantly recommending Parenti to people as a work of history, it's just not doing the work that history needs to do. It's a polemic, one that I don't particularly agree with on a good few points, but okay to read if it is recognized for what it is. This is the problem when people take it as history, showing them the truth from lies they previously believed, it does some of that certainly, but it doesn't give you a picture of what the historical consensus, and what underlays that consensus, and what debates go on in that consensus (which has changed a lot even in the last 15 years) is.
On Furr, he's really weird, also not a historian. He often cites real documents but poorly translates them or fails to coherently analyze a set of documents (like this document says x, this says y contradicting x, what can be drawn from that) and draws conclusions from that make little sense off the evidence given, or he'll also cite unauthenticated/isolated documents and draw wild conclusions from them. He also does not engage at all with historians, even socialist ones. He'll also selectively cite a well known historian like Getty, and then take them out of context to support whatever is in the rest of his passage. J. Arch Getty once told Russian historian Sean Guillory (as said by Sean on this rebuttal to Furr and some other really bad history of the soviet union made on an episode of rev left radio) that "Furr actually knows the documents, he just draws strange conclusions from them".
For soviet history without digging in journals, one of the best sources is Sean's Russia Blog, which does interviews every week with Russian studies and soviet studies professors and PhD students on their work, often plugging new books or new dissertations coming out. They recently did a really good episode on the possibilities and limits that the USSR was for black radicals in the 1920s and 30s.
For a book on the period that I really like (even though some changes have happened since of course) is the soviet century by Moshe Lewin (who also did political history but is still in the social school). Moshe is also a really interesting historian as he lived in and fought (not sure if he saw combat or was just in officer training school) for the USSR during world War 2 yet became a historian in his 30s and continued historical work all the way up to his death in 2010. He fled nazis in 1941, became a collective farm worker and then a blast furnace operator, then enlisted in the soviet army. He was a treasure the soviet studies field and dearly mourned. He was in the social history school along with people like Getty and Fitzpatrick (which has now somewhat been replaced by the the cultural school, but the social school is not wrong in the way the old totalitarian one was).
Sure. The totalitarian school was a school of historians that couched everything done in the soviet union as part of a political theory of totalitarianism in a high modernist state ala Arendt (which was a misfire to begin with as her writing really only made sense for Nazi Germany). These historians were writing at the height of the cold war and had both ideology and lack of documents causing them to make poor decisions. They obsessively read all soviet propaganda, got hearsay accounts from defectors and one off survivors, etc. They tried to trace everything done into ideological boxes deriving from Lenin, Stalin, etc. and most egregiously Marx. This could not explain or accurately describe soviet policy, nor were they engaging well with the theoretical texts. In the best interpretation of these people, they didn't have anything else to go off of. This is Robert Conquest's school, and he's not read anymore because it's not accurate (and Conquest is not respected because he never owned up to his errors and changed his mind).
The social school was going on at the same time but less popular and it also had lack of sources. It tries to analyze the soviet union as social processes, mostly ignoring ideology. They tried to analyze soviet society as a society driven by material processes like any other. These people were often socialists like Moshe Lewin, or at least of the left. They had some trouble due to lack of sources and stats data you need to do this analysis before the archives opened, but were largely vindicated and grew to be dominant in the 1990s.
The cultural school is the newest. It tries to do material social analysis, but also seriously engage with ideology in a way the social school just kinda ignored. These are people like Slava Gerovitch, who wrote a really good book on soviet cybernetics, one that looks at material processes driving soviet science, but also seriously looks at the cultural/ideological shifts in how such processes were justified or changed to justify. So for instance seriously look at how Marx could one day be used to say cybernetics was bourgois, then be used to justify it the next, and the social processes happening in the science institutes at the same time. This school is sometimes called neo-totalitarian, not as a pejoritive, but to mean the reinsertion of looking at ideology (though now in a much more informed and rigorous way). Lars Lih, who wrote a really good book on the context of and new translation of What Is To Be Done is also broadly in this school for instance imo.
Should also say I am not a soviet history student, but took soviet history and history of socialism courses and participate in reading groups as a secondary interest during school.
Do you know of a good source I could cite re: Robert Conquest? I am currently debunking an article a friend sent me that cites him as an authoritative source.
For numbers stuff, the original Getty et al. analysis of NKVD archives on the purges is good. It's available here. There's also a Jacobin article that is an alright retrospective on him. There's also a new book out on the Kazakh famine (which has been criminally understudied in general), available here.
There's also this Askhistorians answer which is pretty good, however one thing is that a lot if it is informal sort of all soviet historians know this but don't write it down always kind of thing since the initial publications debunking him came out. Most social and cultural school books if they were written during the period when Conquest was still active will debunk him in an introduction to a chapter or snarkily do it in footnotes.
For a book on the period that I really like (even though some changes have happened since of course) is the soviet century by Moshe Lewin (who also did political history but is still in the social school).
Ayyy, I just bought that one. I was disappointed to learn that Moshe was a zionist, though.
Yeah he was a Labor Zionist, wanted Israel based in collective farms and urban working class Jews and Arabs. I'm not sure what his opinion on the Palestinian left and the conflict was exactly, there's a box of letters about it at UPenn, but don't know if they are scanned and online. He did join a group dedicated to having Israel be a bi-national state of Arabs and Jews, and not a Jewish nation state at least.
Eh, settler colonialism and supporting a genocidal project are still pretty yikes even if he had an idealistic image of it in his head. Would be good to be able to read what he thought about it afterwards, but regardless it really doesn't make up for fighting in the Israeli military.
He didn't fight for the Israeli military I think. The group I was referring to was a youth group in Lithuania. He emigrated to Israel in 1951 in his thirties, where he worked on a kibbutz, then as a journalist, then he went and became a historian.
Edit: I'm wrong probably, disregard the above. Looks like military service made him quit supporting zionism. He served during Sinai briefly.
After working clandestinely in Paris to facilitate Jewish migration to Palestine, he emigrated to Israel in 1951. As he told the story, he was first shocked by Ariel Sharon’s raid into Jordan in 1953 that ended in a massacre in the village of Qibia; later, while serving in the Israeli army in the 1956 war with Egypt, Lewin concluded that his original Zionist ideals diverged too greatly from the actuality of the state of Israel. He turned to scholarship, first at Tel Aviv University, where he received his BA in 1961, and then at the Sorbonne, where he completed the doctoral thesis under Roger Portal that became his first book: La Paysannerie et le pouvoir soviétique: 1928–1930 (1966).
Nope, I was wrong. Was not aware he was in the army in 56 for Sinai. There's no cite for it though but I think a personal friend probably wrote that obituary so I'd assume it's true.
I also found a quote hobsbawm delivered for his funeral from this obituary : "Since I am unable to come to his funeral, let me, as an old friend and constant admirer of Moshe Lewin, drop a metaphorical handful of earth on his grave from afar. Nobody has made fewer concessions to the intellectual fashions of the times. He recognized the absurdity of Russia even at its darkest moments, and nobody made better jokes about it. They were signs of an indestructible hope. Nobody has taught me more about understanding the USSR and post-Soviet Russia than he. I will miss the insight, the endless curiosity and the moral independence of this man. Farewell, Moshe"
My understanding is that the social school still can't fully explain things without diving into ideology. Like you can write about a social process, but those material forces are reinforced and also influenced by ideology. You can't get rid of it completely, so it needs to be dealt with. The social school didn't deal with it that much mainly because they were at first dedicated to disproving the totalitarians and social history in general started as a movement to remove ideology from historical analysis, but ultimately you can't completely ignore it so there's been a return to looking at it as the explanatory power of social history starts hitting walls.
It's also not a complete replacement like the totalitarians going away was, like social historians in many parts of history academia are still around and doing good work.
It's a biased reddit response but fundamentally not inaccurate. Parenti basically got started doing good poli sci work, got tenure, then went off and started writing what are essentially pop history books but for a left audience. Lots of professors do that, but it's important to keep in mind they are not history. His Rome book especially he really doesn't know Roman historiography and basically just cites a couple outdated histories to craft a huge narrative, and his Yugoslavia book is just wrong. It's not history. His Tibet article that gets tossed around has similar problems. Take a work of soviet history like Getty or Moshe Lewin, who both pushed back hard against the totalitarian school led by Conquest (a school of soviet history which basically died in academia with the archive openings, most of them recanted and moved on with the field to the social historian school or left to pursue non academic ideological work like Conquest), a few pages of one of their works will contain perhaps a dozen citations, detail what the consensus view is in the field on that topic, and then carefully detail how and way they are moving away from it. This is the problem with constantly recommending Parenti to people as a work of history, it's just not doing the work that history needs to do. It's a polemic, one that I don't particularly agree with on a good few points, but okay to read if it is recognized for what it is. This is the problem when people take it as history, showing them the truth from lies they previously believed, it does some of that certainly, but it doesn't give you a picture of what the historical consensus, and what underlays that consensus, and what debates go on in that consensus (which has changed a lot even in the last 15 years) is.
On Furr, he's really weird, also not a historian. He often cites real documents but poorly translates them or fails to coherently analyze a set of documents (like this document says x, this says y contradicting x, what can be drawn from that) and draws conclusions from that make little sense off the evidence given, or he'll also cite unauthenticated/isolated documents and draw wild conclusions from them. He also does not engage at all with historians, even socialist ones. He'll also selectively cite a well known historian like Getty, and then take them out of context to support whatever is in the rest of his passage. J. Arch Getty once told Russian historian Sean Guillory (as said by Sean on this rebuttal to Furr and some other really bad history of the soviet union made on an episode of rev left radio) that "Furr actually knows the documents, he just draws strange conclusions from them".
For soviet history without digging in journals, one of the best sources is Sean's Russia Blog, which does interviews every week with Russian studies and soviet studies professors and PhD students on their work, often plugging new books or new dissertations coming out. They recently did a really good episode on the possibilities and limits that the USSR was for black radicals in the 1920s and 30s.
For a book on the period that I really like (even though some changes have happened since of course) is the soviet century by Moshe Lewin (who also did political history but is still in the social school). Moshe is also a really interesting historian as he lived in and fought (not sure if he saw combat or was just in officer training school) for the USSR during world War 2 yet became a historian in his 30s and continued historical work all the way up to his death in 2010. He fled nazis in 1941, became a collective farm worker and then a blast furnace operator, then enlisted in the soviet army. He was a treasure the soviet studies field and dearly mourned. He was in the social history school along with people like Getty and Fitzpatrick (which has now somewhat been replaced by the the cultural school, but the social school is not wrong in the way the old totalitarian one was).
Can you outline the "totalitarian", "social" and "cultural" schools for us?
Sure. The totalitarian school was a school of historians that couched everything done in the soviet union as part of a political theory of totalitarianism in a high modernist state ala Arendt (which was a misfire to begin with as her writing really only made sense for Nazi Germany). These historians were writing at the height of the cold war and had both ideology and lack of documents causing them to make poor decisions. They obsessively read all soviet propaganda, got hearsay accounts from defectors and one off survivors, etc. They tried to trace everything done into ideological boxes deriving from Lenin, Stalin, etc. and most egregiously Marx. This could not explain or accurately describe soviet policy, nor were they engaging well with the theoretical texts. In the best interpretation of these people, they didn't have anything else to go off of. This is Robert Conquest's school, and he's not read anymore because it's not accurate (and Conquest is not respected because he never owned up to his errors and changed his mind).
The social school was going on at the same time but less popular and it also had lack of sources. It tries to analyze the soviet union as social processes, mostly ignoring ideology. They tried to analyze soviet society as a society driven by material processes like any other. These people were often socialists like Moshe Lewin, or at least of the left. They had some trouble due to lack of sources and stats data you need to do this analysis before the archives opened, but were largely vindicated and grew to be dominant in the 1990s.
The cultural school is the newest. It tries to do material social analysis, but also seriously engage with ideology in a way the social school just kinda ignored. These are people like Slava Gerovitch, who wrote a really good book on soviet cybernetics, one that looks at material processes driving soviet science, but also seriously looks at the cultural/ideological shifts in how such processes were justified or changed to justify. So for instance seriously look at how Marx could one day be used to say cybernetics was bourgois, then be used to justify it the next, and the social processes happening in the science institutes at the same time. This school is sometimes called neo-totalitarian, not as a pejoritive, but to mean the reinsertion of looking at ideology (though now in a much more informed and rigorous way). Lars Lih, who wrote a really good book on the context of and new translation of What Is To Be Done is also broadly in this school for instance imo.
Should also say I am not a soviet history student, but took soviet history and history of socialism courses and participate in reading groups as a secondary interest during school.
Do you know of a good source I could cite re: Robert Conquest? I am currently debunking an article a friend sent me that cites him as an authoritative source.
For numbers stuff, the original Getty et al. analysis of NKVD archives on the purges is good. It's available here. There's also a Jacobin article that is an alright retrospective on him. There's also a new book out on the Kazakh famine (which has been criminally understudied in general), available here.
There's also this Askhistorians answer which is pretty good, however one thing is that a lot if it is informal sort of all soviet historians know this but don't write it down always kind of thing since the initial publications debunking him came out. Most social and cultural school books if they were written during the period when Conquest was still active will debunk him in an introduction to a chapter or snarkily do it in footnotes.
Ayyy, I just bought that one. I was disappointed to learn that Moshe was a zionist, though.
Yeah he was a Labor Zionist, wanted Israel based in collective farms and urban working class Jews and Arabs. I'm not sure what his opinion on the Palestinian left and the conflict was exactly, there's a box of letters about it at UPenn, but don't know if they are scanned and online. He did join a group dedicated to having Israel be a bi-national state of Arabs and Jews, and not a Jewish nation state at least.
Eh, settler colonialism and supporting a genocidal project are still pretty yikes even if he had an idealistic image of it in his head. Would be good to be able to read what he thought about it afterwards, but regardless it really doesn't make up for fighting in the Israeli military.
He didn't fight for the Israeli military I think. The group I was referring to was a youth group in Lithuania. He emigrated to Israel in 1951 in his thirties, where he worked on a kibbutz, then as a journalist, then he went and became a historian.
Edit: I'm wrong probably, disregard the above. Looks like military service made him quit supporting zionism. He served during Sinai briefly.
Is this not accurate?
Nope, I was wrong. Was not aware he was in the army in 56 for Sinai. There's no cite for it though but I think a personal friend probably wrote that obituary so I'd assume it's true.
I also found a quote hobsbawm delivered for his funeral from this obituary : "Since I am unable to come to his funeral, let me, as an old friend and constant admirer of Moshe Lewin, drop a metaphorical handful of earth on his grave from afar. Nobody has made fewer concessions to the intellectual fashions of the times. He recognized the absurdity of Russia even at its darkest moments, and nobody made better jokes about it. They were signs of an indestructible hope. Nobody has taught me more about understanding the USSR and post-Soviet Russia than he. I will miss the insight, the endless curiosity and the moral independence of this man. Farewell, Moshe"
Why?
My understanding is that the social school still can't fully explain things without diving into ideology. Like you can write about a social process, but those material forces are reinforced and also influenced by ideology. You can't get rid of it completely, so it needs to be dealt with. The social school didn't deal with it that much mainly because they were at first dedicated to disproving the totalitarians and social history in general started as a movement to remove ideology from historical analysis, but ultimately you can't completely ignore it so there's been a return to looking at it as the explanatory power of social history starts hitting walls.
It's also not a complete replacement like the totalitarians going away was, like social historians in many parts of history academia are still around and doing good work.
Yeah it seemed kinda weird to me that you said it replaced it, because these sound almost complimentary to me.