it would be difficult to name any stage in the history of the Ukrainian people in the Soviet period when serious deviations from historical truth were not committed in the service of the cult of Stalin’s personality or to please his henchmen, like Kaganovich,
and called for historical science to be ‘purged’ of the ‘deposits’ left by Stalinism.83 V.G. Trukhanovsky distinguished among (Western) Sovietologists ‘honest scholars’ with whom ‘we need to talk in a different language from that which we use with falsifiers.’84 It was clear that many Western scholars were honestly trying to get at the truth about the events of the revolution at a time when Soviet historians were distorting it. I.M. Maisky said that ‘the period of the personality cult’, as he called it, ‘simply killed off the memoir genre.’85
A re-examination of the Stalinist schemas of history was begun. Thus, after 1961, theories which depicted the conquest by Tsarist Russia of the ‘border peoples’ of Central Asia, Caucasia and other parts of the present Soviet Union as historical good luck — almost a boon — for these peoples were condemned. It was officially recognized that such an interpretation of events was mistaken.86 It was at last permitted to curse tyrants like Ivan the Terrible, Stalin’s favourite hero. In the symposium
The start thus made looked very promising. However, while there were many anti-Stalin declarations, not much actual work was done. V. Danilov, Party organizer at the Institute of History at that time, spoke frankly about this at the historians’ conference. He recalled that the ‘filling-in of the gaps’ had only begun, that ‘the most important archives’ were still closed, and so on.88 Danilov’s speech struck a discordant note, because he did not so much expose the accursed past as talk of ‘serious difficulties’ in the present.89 He himself tried to overcome these difficulties — that is, the obstacles presented by the censorship and the official ideology — by intensified study of particular problems of socioeconomic history. He was mainly interested in the fate of the Russian peasantry. The starting point of Danilov’s reflections was a critique of Stalin’s ideas, according to which the relations of production among the Russian peasants before collectivization were capitalist. It was on the basis of this theory that the case for collectivization was argued, as a necessary stage on the road to socialism in the USSR. Danilov doubted the correctness of this idea, which was usually not supported by any facts. ‘In works on the class struggle,’ he wrote, ‘we cannot find any serious scientific account of the social forces in the countryside and their distribution.’90
After closer study of the question, he came to the conclusion that the relations of production prevailing in Russia’s countryside in the 1920s could not be called capitalist. Stalin spoke of ‘capitalism’ in the villages on the grounds that private property existed there. Danilov based himself on Marx’s idea that ‘according to whether these private individuals (who own property) are workers or non-workers, private property has a different character.’91 The petty peasant production that existed in Soviet Russia in the 1920s was therefore not capitalist. But in any case, could one speak of ‘private property’ in relation to that period? ‘The nationalization of the land meant that one of the basic means of production in agriculture had been brought under state-social ownership and this was therefore an important step on the road to socialism.’92 Danilov also mentioned the growth of co-operation and the decline in the relative importance of private trade. Thus in the circumstances of the post-revolutionary society of the 1920s, in the countryside, ‘socioeconomic relations of a new type which could not be regarded as bourgeois’ were beginning to arise.93
