The Trouble with Revisionism: Or Communist History with the History Left in (Controversy/Polemique) (Essay‪)‬

WHATEVER ONE MAKES OF IT, communism was one of the key political forces of the 20th century. At once a party, an international, a social movement and a system of government, to say nothing of a major pole of ideological and cultural attraction, the global extension of its influence helped define the "short" 20th century and was one of its characteristic expressions. The editors of the recent survey Le siecle des communismes characterize it in terms of diversity held together by a common project. (1) Even restricting ourselves to the period of the Comintern and Cominform (1919-56), and to oppositional communist parties in Europe and North America, striking variations in political effectiveness and social implantation are immediately apparent. Intersecting with different national cultures, which even in their purely legal aspects ranged from tolerance to terror, these can be grouped according to no single periodization or line of determination. Among the historiographical tools which this distinctively transnational phenomenon demands, those of the comparative historian promise particular insight and illumination. (2) As yet they have been only fitfully employed. John Manley's comparison of the Canadian, British, and American communist parties is therefore especially to be welcomed. (3) Comparative studies even of two communist parties are rare. To range with assurance across three is an achievement commanding respect. Distancing himself from more polemical exchanges, Manley's measured treatment has the virtue of encouraging reflection on substantive issues. In this spirit, I want in this article to take up one of the central premises of his argument, namely the conceptualization of Comintern historiography in terms of a debate between "traditionalists" and "revisionists." (4) My argument here is that this traditionalist-revisionist dichotomy, even when sensitively presented, tends to reduce complex issues to a single historiographical cleavage defined by communist parties' relations with Moscow. Scholarship irreducible to this set of arguments may be oversimplified or misrepresented. Disproportionate attention is accorded issues that in reality are largely settled. Trivial differences are exaggerated, energies consumed that might better be channelled elsewhere, and conclusions offered adding little to what is already well established. Even sophisticated and mostly convincing narratives, like Manley's, come packaged with generalizations suggestive of the impasse in which this tradition of scholarship has become mired.