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.
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.