Introduction

It is traditional to assert that the basic historiographical divide in Soviet history lies between the totalitarian or counter-communist school on the one hand, and the “revisionist” school on the other. The totalitarian interpretation, arising out of the polemics of the cold war, looked to establish the origins of the Stalinist terror and dictatorship in the ideology of Marxism-Leninism and in the theory and practice of the Bolshevik party before and after 1917. Derived from the writings of Leonard Schapiro, Martin Malia, Robert Conquest, Richard Pipes and others, this approach identified a clear continuity between Marxism, Leninism and the Stalinist period. Transposed to the debate about the role of ideology, the totalitarian viewpoint asserted that there was a profound degree of ideological continuity between Lenin and Stalin, and that these ideas fundamentally shaped the nature of the Stalinist system.