148
PARTISAN REVIEW
range of documents as well as other, more elusive sources . They
know all too well that statistics often lie, so they do not limit
themselves to these . They draw widely on contemporary Soviet fic–
tion , diaries , and little-known testimonies . Hence , by combining
detached analytical scholarship with the immediacy of direct wit–
nesses, Heller and Nekrich's book succeeds in conveying the social
atmosphere of Stalinist Russia in a more real and psychologically
significant fashion than the most detailed factual account.
Heller and Nekrich obviously belong to the very influential
"totalitarianism" school of interpretation of Soviet history , and the
title of the book,
Utopia in Power,
gives us a clue to the methodology
its authors choose. The book is "party-centered" in the sense that the
party appears as omnipotent and omnipresent - the true demiurge
of Soviet society. Heller and Nekrich refute the popular idea that
Russian history and the Russian national character are mainly
responsible for the most salient characteristics of Soviet society. The
transformation of pre-October Russia, which was "a country com–
parable in all respects to the other countries of Europe," into the
U .S.S .R. was , they tell us, a sharp break in, rather than a continua–
tion of, Russian history - a conclusion lent considerable support by
a comparison of the histories of, say, West and East Germanies , or
South and North Koreas.
The treatment of the Stalinist period is the most successful and
rewarding part of the book. When Heller and Nekrich published the
Russian-language edition of
Utopia in Power,
their treatment of the
Stalinist terror and the falsification of statistics was seen as con–
troversial, for the book clashed with a newly-emerging school of
"revisionist" Soviet history, whose practitioners try to demonstrate
that the Stalinist terror was simply a means to discipline local ad–
ministrations and that its scale has been greatly exaggerated by its
survivors and by Western scholars . But even the first data on terror
and the falsification of statistics that has appeared in the Soviet
Union during the
glasnost
period show that Heller and Nekrich have
been very careful, even conservative , in their estimates of the extent
of terror and the Big Lie. Their treatment of the Nazi-Soviet pact,
the Second World War, and the final stages of Stalin's rule is es–
pecially original , full of new insights and fresh interpretations.
Utopia in Power
is the best history of Stalinism we have.
The history of the post-Stalin era, particularly the Brezhnev
decades , is covered less satisfactorily , and interpretation of that
