Stratification Without Class (Critical Essay‪)‬

I read Mark Edele's text with great pleasure for the simple reason that it does not place the different generations of scholars at odds with one another, but instead insists on their continuity. Less concerned with revision at all cost, the piece in this way opens the path to a cumulative history that relies more on the truths of past research. Since the debate on revisionism in 1986-87, we have become accustomed to considering that social history is by definition incompatible with the theory of totalitarianism and that social historians must reject the heritage of the Sovietology of the 1950s. Edele, however, convincingly demonstrates that in the Harvard Interview Project, adhesion to the notion of totalitarianism did not prevent the description of a living Soviet society, which the state by no means destroyed: let us consider, for example, what Bauer, Inkeles, and Kluckhohn write about the peasant, the "angry man" of Soviet society. (1) The same proposition could be demonstrated with respect to the classic text by Merle Fainsod on Smolensk, which contains more than one chapter on social history in the most classic sense of the term--for example, on criminality, peasant protests against collectivization, or the complaints of industrial workers. (2)