themselves felt nevertheless. The revolution was redefined as an authoritarian form of modernization in which the state would mobilize the human and material resources of an impoverished country to industrialize, modernize agriculture, and raise the cultural level of the people. This required, in particular, breaking the passive resistance of the peasantry in order to provide capital for what Preobrazhensky called 'primitive socialist accumulation'. Ideology adapted to these deeper structural and cultural constraints as much as it inspired the drive to escape them.
This is to paint a rather bleak picture, since it implies that the vicious circle of economic backwardness and international isolation could not have been broken without the use of coercion by the state. This did not
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mean, however, that the Bolsheviks were deprived of political agency: they faced real choices at each turning-point. It is ironic that those most inclined to depict the Bolsheviks as conscious architects of tyranny- i.e. who ascribe to them a large degree of agency - attach so little importance to the actual choices they made. Yet logically, if the relationship of agency to circumstances was skewed so heavily in favour of the former, then opting for Bukharin's course or Trotsky's course, instead of Stalin's, should have had a marked impact on future developments. However, such analysts deny that there was much at stake in the inner-party struggle. Even if, as has been argued, Bukharin and Trotsky were engaged in fundamentally the same enterprise as Stalin - socialism as it was understood in 1917 having long ceased to be on the cards - it is still quite reasonable to insist that if either had defeated Stalin, the horror and bloodshed of the 1930s could have been avoided.
This raises the central question of the relationship of Leninism to Stalinism. Were the horrors of Stalinism inscribed in the logic of Leninism? No less a person than the young Trotsky warned in 1904 of the logic of Lenin's views on party organization:
The party apparatus at first substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the apparatus; and finally a single 'dictator' substitutes himself for the Central Committee.
Yet in later life Trotsky vehemently denied that there were continuities between Leninism and Stalinism, insisting that a whole 'river of blood' separated the two. It is beyond question that there was much in Leninist theory and practice that adumbrated Stalinism. Lenin was architect of the party's absolute monopoly on power; it was he who ruthlessly subordinated the Soviets and trade unions. It was he who refused to give any quarter to those who thought differently, who eliminated a free press, who crushed the socialist opposition, who banned the right of party members to form factions. He even went so far as to suggest
that the will of the proletariat 'may sometimes be carried out by a dictator'. Lenin, in other words, must bear considerable responsibility for the institutions, the climate of intolerance, and the legal and moral nihilism that allowed Stalin to come to power. But this argument has suggested that while there was a logic at work, it was not the inexorable logic of an unfolding idea, but one inscribed in the interaction of certain ideological goals and organizational principles with structural and circumstantial pressures.
If many of the features typical of Stalinism can be traced back to before 1928, the so-called 'Great Break', instituted by the First Five-Year Plan and forced collectivization, was exactly that - a break in policy that unleashed devastating and wrenching change upon society. Living under Stalin was a very different experience from living under NEP, and to deny any element of discontinuity is to fail imaginatively to ? appreciate the murderous nature of Stalinism. The institutions of rule g may not have changed, but personal dictatorship, the unrestrained use e of force, the cult of power, endemic fear, a stifling conformism, paranoia jg about encirclement and internal wreckers, the unleashing of terror used
A related question concerns the extent to which Stalinism represented the resurgence of deeply rooted elements in Russia's political culture. The cultural continuity argument is central to Richard Pipes's influential account of the Russian Revolution. It rests on the idea that tsarism was a patrimonial regime in which the tsar's absolute and unconstrained
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authority derived from his ownership of the country's resources, including the lives of his subjects. Undertsarism the peasantry, Pipes avers, were politically passive, accepting of autocracy, and lacking a sense of civic responsibility. The preceding account has emphasized that the revolution released a flood of change that massively destabilized cultural norms and practices. Yet it has endorsed elements of the cultural continuity argument, pointing to how in the 1920s a 'return of the repressed' was in operation. The similarity between taken- for-granted orientations to politics undertsarism and Stalinism is striking -the primacy of the state vis-a-vis society, the personalized relationship between people and ruler, the lack of legal restraints on power, the absence of institutions mediating between rulers and ruled, clientelism as away of building social and political relationships, and mistrust towards the outside world. Moshe Lewin has argued that there is a 'contamination effect' of tradition, whereby the quicker customary patterns are broken, the more likely they are to reassert themselves in the longer term. At the same time, and contra Pipes, one must be cautious about interpreting Russia's political culture as a monolithic system. Culture is a contested field of relatively empowered norms and practices. In 1917 democracy - of a very particular kind - flourished, so one has to explain why this gave way to impulses to authoritarianism. Moreover, rather than treat political culture as a causal factor explaining the rise of Stalinism, it is better to view it as a conditioning context, in which norms and practices shape political action negatively by providing few resources to counter the reimposition of authoritarian rule. Finally, Stalinism was never traditional authoritarianism writ large: it synthesized many elements of the Russian national tradition with Leninism, its character as a mobilizing party- state making it very much a creature of the 20th century.
Nor should the 'return of the repressed' be read as signifying that the impact of the revolution was shallow. A theme of the book has been that an antagonistic perception of the social order bit deep into popular culture, that commitment to equality was widespread, and that the
ideal of soviet power was hugely popular. What motivated much resistance to the Bolsheviks was precisely the sense that they were betraying those ideals. The revolution, however, always meant different things to different people and different things to the same people at different times. It could mean being forcibly conscripted into the Red Army, unimaginable hardship for cold and hungry townspeople, outsiders coming into one's village and seizing grain, or upstarts from one's own village behaving corruptly as representatives of soviet power. Alternatively, it could mean the chance to learn to read, not losing one's child to disease, increasing the size of one's household plot, getting a divorce from a drunken husband, or being schooled in one's native tongue.
Social identities remained fractured and unsettled, yet they had undergone profound transformation as a result of the revolution. Class ? had provided the dominant language through which political g allegiances were constituted in 1Q17 and it continued to be dominant in
e the new order. One is struck by the speed with which peasants took up jg the language of class - eagerly seeking to prove, for example, that they
