This article was originally written in the late 2000’s when I was a grad student in history. It was meant to be a communist critique of a post modern approach to history writing that denied a criteria of truth in historical narrative and saw history as more akin to literature writing than the social sciences. The article respects the questions posed by the post modern approach, however, it aims to take a more dialectical view in looking at the way language and society impact on one another and how this allows us to glean more plausible truths from historical narrative.
by Nat Winn
The historiography of the Great Purges in the Soviet Union during the period from 1933-1939 offer a great space for exploring some of the general questions that historians have grappled with since the period in Western historiography beginning roughly at the beginning of the 1970s. This essay seeks to look at these questions from two directions. First, it will look at the histories that have been written. It will look at what resources historians have thought were plausible and what political and moral assumptions went into the production of these histories. Second, it will look at the production of the three Moscow Show Trials in 1936, 1937, and 1938 that were considered major moments of the Great Purges. These were trials in which leading members of the Soviet Communist Party were publicly prosecuted for attempting to overthrow the socialist system and restore capitalism. What message were the leaders grouped around Stalin trying to send to the Soviet population? What were the fears and anxieties that burdened the minds of the Stalinist leadership and effected their actions and reactions to the threats that they perceived? Finally, this essay will look at what kind of new histories can be produced that capture more of the nuance of antagonisms in the 1930s Soviet Union and pay more attention specifically to the role of ideas.
The questions around what new type of historiography we should aim for are ultimately of an epistemological nature. They deal with the presence or absence of a “criteria of truth” in historical inquiry and whether historical narratives are invented or found. Do historical narratives as Hayden White suggests, share more in common with their counterparts in literature or do they share more with the social sciences? Do certain methods of historical writing produce more plausible historical accounts than others? In his book Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge, George Iggers points to two poles within the framework of the new post modernity questions around historiography. Iggers points out:
There is therefore a difference between a theory that denies any claim to reality in historical accounts and a historiography that is fully conscious of the complexity of historical knowledge but still assumes that real people had real thoughts and feelings that led to real actions that, within limits, can be known and reconstructed.
There are considerable stakes for how the contradiction between these two approaches to historical writing is resolved. This paper assumes that history can be relatively reconstructed and some historical accounts can be judged more reflective of “what happened” than others based on the historical methods that are applied. The historiography of the Great Purges of the 1930s in the Soviet Union written by Western scholars and Soviet dissidents provide a unique example of what these stakes are. While it is entirely possible to write another paper that examines how Soviet leaders understood and created their own criteria of truth, in order to affect and rule over their citizens, it is more controversial and necessary to look more closely at the ways in which Western scholars became a partner with their governments in framing the ways in which citizens of the West would look at understand what was happening in the Soviet Union during this time. What is more is that these scholars worked to paint a picture and create a criterion of truth in regard to studying the Soviet Union during the 1930s that ignored important primary resources and generally did not live up to ordinary academic standards. In this sense, the question over methodology in historical writing becomes all the more significant and the necessity for standards of plausibility become clearer, even while historians recognize the limits of their resources and the complexity of the past they examine. After looking at the historiography of the Great Purges in the Soviet Union and how the above questions play out concretely, we will return to George Iggers, Hayden White and the questions mentioned above in their own right.
In his well known book on the historiography of the great purges in the Soviet Union, J. Arch Getty makes the claim, “To ever understand why something happened, it is first of all necessary to know what happened.” Getty felt the histories written on the great purges in the 1930s in the Soviet Union were lacking in their use of the resources that were available to them to understand what happened in the Soviet Union during this time. He writes of the way in which Soviet citizens were taught about the Soviet Union in the 1930s according to the official Stalinist view. He then goes deep into the explanations of Western specialists and Soviet dissidents on this historical period and calls their interpretations “ultimately as Manichean as the Stalinist story.”
According to the views of the Western specialists and Soviet dissidents, in the early thirties Stalin ordered the arrest and execution of oppositionists and dissidents for treason. Moderates in the Soviet Union such as S.M. Kirov and Sergo Ordzhonikidze were opposed to this decision. When Kirov was elevated into the central party leadership in the communist party, it created a rival to Stalin’s leadership. Stalin subsequently had Kirov assassinated. He then used this assassination to “ram through” emergency trials of suspected terrorists. Stalin continued to use the Kirov assassination to conduct a “mounting campaign” of terror and a “rising crescendo” of purges through which most of the old Bolshevik leadership were arrested and executed and many thousands of prominent people disappeared without a trace during the period known as the Ezhovshchina (named after the head of the NKVD). Before looking at the historical explanation pertaining to why Stalin carried out these purges, let us first look at the historical evidence surrounding these events.
Getty holds that the evidence for Stalin’s involvement in the Kirov assassination is “complicated and at least second hand.” He traces the accusation that Stalin killed Kirov to its origin and finds that before the cold war, this assertion did not exist. The first to make such a claim was a KGB defector by the name of Alexander Orlov in what Getty calls his “dubious” 1953 account. Boris Nicolaevsky repeated this accusation in his 1956 essays, however it was not an accusation he made in his 1936 writing Letter of an Old Bolshevik. Kirov was killed on December 1, 1934. Equally interesting to Getty were the people who did not implicate Stalin. Khrushchev, while stating that there was much that was “mysterious’ ‘ about the incident, stopped short of accusing Stalin for Kirov’s murder. Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s great enemy, felt the murder was the work of misguided youth oppositionists. A NKVD defector, G. Liushkov, who outranked Orlov told his Japanese protectors that Stalin was not involved.
Getty finds even more ambiguity surrounding the circumstances of the assassination. While Getty cites evidence that implicates the police in the assassination such as the fact that neither Kirov’s bodyguard nor anyone else was with him at the time of the murder, that his bodyguard was killed in an automobile accident before he could be questioned by Stalin and the Politburo, who had rushed to Leningrad to conduct an investigation, and that the assassin had been previously detained and then released by the local NKVD even though he carried a revolver and a map of Kirov’s route to work. Further, the reaction of Stalin and the Politburo to the assassination suggested panic and unpreparedness. Getty spells out a timeline of the Soviet leadership’s response that makes it appear “confused and mindless,” with “unfocused rage.” Here is Getty’s layout of the sequence of events:
In the days after the killing, the government identified (Leonid) Nikolaev as a lone assassin, a tool of a White Guard conspiracy, and finally a follower of the Zinoviev-Kamenev oppositions in Moscow and Leningrad. It was not until December 18 that the regime hinted that the Zinoviev opposition might be involved. Five days later, the secret police announced that Zinoviev, Kamenev, and thirteen of their associates had, indeed been arrested on December 16. But “in the absence of sufficient evidence to put them on trial,” they were to be administratively exiled within the USSR. It was not until a month later, on January 16, that an official announcement said that Zinoviev and Kamenev were to be tried for maintaining a secret oppositionist “center” that had indirectly influenced the assassin to commit the crime. The changes and contradictions in the official characterization of the assassin suggest that no story was ready to hand and that the authorities were reacting to events in a confused way.
Here again we can look at resources and how they are used by historians to reconstruct the past. What were the resources that Getty used to reach his conclusions? Getty’s footnotes come from primary sources that many Western scholars have deemed unreliable for historical purposes due to the ideological and prejudiced nature of their content. Getty cites five issues of the Russian communist newspaper Pravda and an issue of the Leningradskaia Pravda to support his argument. He also makes an argument for what historians can glean from this resource in spite of its politically prejudiced content. Getty attempts to write a scholarly work that “systematically fit the existing “cycles” of Soviet primary sources (national and local) into a coherent narrative.” He articulates the usefulness of Soviet documents for historians by explaining:
Such study involves no willing suspension of disbelief nor any blind acceptance of official cant, but only the common contemporary recognition that although Soviet documents are often devilishly selective and full of omissions, they are important indicators of what the leaders believed to be the problems and of what they wanted done – considerations of no little importance in such a mystery story.
We can compare this to some of the other assertions surrounding the Kirov assassination and their basis for accuracy. In footnote number three of her chapter on “Totalitarianism in Power” in her classic book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt concludes that one can “suspect” that Kirov’s murder was “carefully planned and executed by Stalin himself.” Her claim of what one can “suspect” comes from no other citation than the very speeches of Khrushchev on Stalin that Getty uses as one of the reasons for why Stalin probably was not involved in Kirov’s murder. Arendt uses Khrushchev’s characterization of Kirov’s death as “inexplicable and mysterious” to make her assertions of what one can “suspect” Stalin was responsible for. Here there is no sequence given of Stalin and the Soviet leaders’ characterizations of the assassin’s background, no attempt to look at what the Soviet leadership was thinking about. There is only a vague notion of what we can “suspect” supported by a vague quote by a historical actor who was an adversary of Stalinism when he made the quote. Can this be considered rigorous academic work? Is this argument as plausible as the doubts raised by Getty?
Similarly we can look at Richard Pipes who is described on the back of his short book Communism: A History of the Intellectual and Political Movement, as “the greatest living historian on modern Russia.” This book claims that “circumstantial evidence points to Stalin as the instigator of the murder.” There is no mention of any sources for this claim, not one, only a short half paragraph explanation of what the advantages were for Stalin, namely that he was provided a rationale for “instigating a vast campaign against alleged anti-Soviet conspirators.” It should be noted that while this is a book written for newcomers to the subject, it was written in 2001, sixteen years after the criticisms of the very kind of problems in Soviet historiography that Getty’s book speaks to.
These examples point to the problems that are associated with looking at historical writing as fundamentally synonymous with literary writing. This type of methodology, if taken to its full logical conclusion, ignores the fact that as the quote by Iggers above infers ‘real people had real thoughts that led to real actions.’ In place of this, Arendt and Pipes and many other Western scholars ignored the thoughts of Soviet leaders during this period and relied on second hand sources or victims who were not close to the leaders themselves. From these sources Western scholars theorized about the motives and even the psyches of leaders such as Stalin. These histories indeed resembled literary texts, precisely because they ignored the writings and speeches of Soviet leaders as a valuable source of at least what these leaders wanted their subjects to think. In this way the Western scholars were able to influence the way that Western citizens thought about the Soviet Union, without rigorously trying to understand how the Soviet Union presented itself.
Here we can go back to the question of epistemology. Is there any criterion for truth here or can a historian make any claim about the past and justify it due to the “political contamination” of language and interpretation. It seems obvious to me that there is a need for standards of plausibility here. There are standards and methods for coming up with a more historically “accurate” account of what happened in the past and what evidence we use to support historical claims. An analysis of the above histories points to the validity of this assertion. This question around plausibility and a criterion of truth in historical writing is ultimately a question around what we can understand. If it is assumed that we can understand things about the past, that we can relatively separate what was real or credible from that which is false or erroneous than there is a need for certain standards, even while the need for a conscious understanding of the limitations of historical resources and the complexity of the past remains.
In 1985 Getty proclaimed that a “weak tradition of source criticism and a developing historiography on related problems both suggest the need to reevaluate the thirties.” Getty goes on to ponder that:
In their writings on the Great Purges, scholars and journalists have traditionally relied rather heavily on the memoirs of émigrés and defectors from the Soviet Union, as well as on the personal accounts of victims of terror … Even if one should take a liberal attitude to the use of memoirs in principle, it is not clear what the Great Purges memoirs can reveal about why the terror happened, or even exactly what happened…None of them (writers of memoirs) were close enough to the seat of power (some were not close at all) to know inner-leadership disputes and alignments, much less Stalin’s aim and methods … Yet reliance on this class of evidence has been pervasive and of long standing. The inaccessibility of archival sources on the Great Purges has led to a willing suspension of disbelief and to something less than rigorous methodology. For no other period or topic have historians been so eager to write and accept history-by-anecdote. General analytical generalizations have come from secondhand bits of overheard corridor gossip.
This analysis of the histories of this period speaks loudly to the questions raised by Hayden White that we will examine more below. Especially the last two sentences speak to real problems that are witnessed in the above historical assertions made by Arendt and Pipes. Here we can see much more clearly that without claiming to be able to reconstruct an exact model of the past, there are methods that historians can critique for there plausibility and relative correctness and these constitute criteria of truth that White finds lacking. In their own way scholars such as Arendt and Pipes created plausibility in Western scholarship regarding how the Great Purges could be written about and understood. If it can be shown that their scholarship on this period was wanting, then the way people look at this history can begin to change. Using the methodology of White which questions that there can be any ‘single correct original description of anything,’ this kind of revisionist Soviet historiography, along the lines of that history written by Getty is not possible. While it is true that no written history should be touted as the single correct version and that history can be looked at from many angles and different perspectives, the necessity of standards of plausibility within the craft of history writing can work to protect the distortion of historical writing for political ends even while any historical writing is ultimately guided by some subjectivity and political thought of the author.
Getty looks at the Great Purges history against the grain, challenging totalitarian assumptions and drawing a picture of a fragmented Soviet communist party that often made its decisions on the fly. While the previous histories told a story of an “efficient and obedient” bureaucratic machine, Getty uses Soviet documents from the thirties that indicate disorganization in the provinces, unsuccessful attempts by the party to reform party membership practices, and “attempts by party radicals and ideologists to revive party organizations with populist agitation” along with parallel attempts to solve the party’s problems through “rooting out enemies of the people.” Getty claims that the previous portrayals of this period that relied on secondhand sources shared an “interpretive assumption” that the Soviet bureaucracy was grimly efficient, “totalitarian to Western writers, monolithic or solidly united to Stalinists.” He lays out the sources for the historical plausibility of his argument on pages seven and eight of his book, a study containing solely primary sources. He argues against the notion that events known by the West as the Great Purges that went on from 1933-1939 were part of one planned “crescendo of terror” and constituted a single phenomenon or process. He argues that a study of the parties can help to avoid such “reductionist fallacies.” He suggests that political decision making seemed “incremental, confused, and more contradictory than consistent.” For making these arguments some critics accused Getty of being “soft” on Stalin.
There is a connection here between Getty’s arguments about Soviet documents and the analysis of the archives in a new book by Ann Laura Stoler appropriately titled Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Stoler describes the attitude of author Pramoedya Ananta Toer in Pranmoedya’s novel House of Glass. Praemoedya looks at the archives as what Stoler describes as the “bitter aftertaste of empire” which had “barely a living pulse.” Praemoedya’s attitude to the archives is analogous to the historians that Getty criticizes in Origins. To these historians, the Soviet archive and other Soviet documents were dead. They contained nothing but lies and misinformation and thus the story of the victims were the only stories to be told, the only place from which to acquire any portion of the truth.
Stoler saw something in the archives that the Great Purges historians failed to see, yet it was something that Getty seemed to be getting at. She pursues what she sees as the “epistemic anxieties and affective tremors” within the archives. In conducting research on the Dutch East Indies the archives revealed to her the fears and trepidation of the ruling elite. The archives revealed the ways in which the colonizers sought to train their subjects to be loyal to the regime. The archives revealed the multitudes of scenarios of colonial revolt that the ruling regime tried to prepare for and prevent. Stoler sees the archives as “condensed sites of epistemological and political anxiety rather than as skewed and biased sources.” The archives could teach us how the colonial rulers thought the knowledge of its subjects could be produced in ways that would preserve the status quo that consolidated their status as rulers. Stoler writes that, “Colonial governance entailed a constant assessing and recapping of what colonial agents could know and how they could know it.” This is similar to the lessons that Getty argued could be gleaned from Soviet documents.
The aim here is different from Stoler’s book, however it agrees that the archives and the actual writings and speeches of the historical actors, particularly leaders and governments in history are a strong, if not the strongest way of digging into how these leaders wanted their subjects to think. This paper deals with the way in which scholars themselves can become a part of creating standards of plausibility that affect and can help governments affect the views of its citizens regarding a particular enemy or antagonistic movement. In this case, despite poor academic standards, Western historiography of the Soviet Union during the 1930s that painted the Soviets with a totalitarian brush was promoted to influence its citizen’s views and attitudes toward communism.
Stoler’s argument about epistemic anxieties leads us into a chapter in the book Stalin: A New History by historian William Chase titled “Stalin as producer: the Moscow show trials and the construction of mortal threats.” This chapter reflects some of the new history written about Stalin that does take his actual thinking seriously. It looks into the ways the trials were used by Stalin, consciously to educate Soviet citizens and officials. Chase uses the Russian State Archive of Socio –Political History and also the transcripts of the three major show trials in 1936, 1937, and 1938 in his writing.
Chase argues that the Bolsheviks had understood the didactic qualities of the show trial since the times of Lenin. Lenin had spoken of the educational significance of the courts in 1922 and many Soviet artists heeded his advice, producing films and dramas of both fictional and real show trials.
Chase uses the archives to explain who the audience was for each trial and what the Stalinist leadership wanted the audience to know. Like Getty, Chase argues that each individual trial presented a new type of threat to the socialist state, although unlike Getty, Chase sees continuity in the nature of the threats and an escalation of what the Soviet leadership perceived or articulated to be the nature of the conspiracy against them. Chase argues that Stalin played an “active and direct role in the formulation and execution of the show trials,” but plays down the “great man” theory present in much of the old thirties historiography making it clear that show trials were “complex undertakings” whose success depended on “a large cast of devoted or compliant characters to be successful.”
In theorizing the purpose of a show trial Chase explains that the aim of a show trial is to construct a serious and credible threat that will fan and direct society’s fear. Thus, the show trial plays a “mobilizational narrative” for society. He argues that while the defendants confessing and disgracing themselves politically became the main characteristic of the three trials, that this was only a means to a particular end, namely the “construction and legitimization” of serious threats to Soviet society that needed to be crushed.
In moving into the analysis of the trials Chase describes the importance that Stalin placed on the trials, and the vital messages that Stalin felt he could convey through their dissemination and translation into several languages. Chase explains the story of the transcripts and what they help historians to understand. Chase explains:
The format of the published ‘transcripts’ changed over time. The publication for the August 1936 trial was not a transcript but rather ‘a report of court proceedings’ that included lengthy quotations from the court transcript. Transcripts were published for the January 1937 and March 1938 trials. Why the format changed is unclear. Nonetheless, these documents provide a consistent body of evidence that allow one to chart the ways in which the nature of the threat evolved over the course of the three trials.
The nature of the perceived threat as articulated through the transcripts of the first trial consisted of a Trotskyite-Zinovievite terrorist center with no coherent political platform whose main objective was to seize power. The main defendants were mainly oppositionists who were no longer part of the party. There were other defendants who were party members who were discovered to be terrorist center agents. The terrorist center planned to achieve their goals through criminal and “terrorist” activity. The prosecutors said they uncovered who had murdered Kirov and why and that they had thwarted plans to assassinate Stalin and other key members of the Soviet regime. The main defendants included leading Zinovievites including Zinoviev, Kamenev, Yevdokimov, and Bakayev and leading Trotskyites including I.N. Smirnov, Ter-Vaganyan, and Mrachkovsky, and also oppositionists from foreign communist parties living in the USSR including members of the German Communist Party. The leaders of the terrorist centre were not proven to be directly responsible for the murder of Kirov, however they had “inspired” those who committed the murder.
While the audience for the 1936 trial was generally for the Soviet public and it was extensively reported on in the Soviet press, Chase argues that the main audience for the trial was the Soviet ‘nomenclatura’. For Chase the transcripts reveal two lessons that Stalin wanted to convey. One was that the former oppositionists were more than just unrepentant; they had become criminals serving foreign masters. Second, was the danger of double dealers. Double dealers refer to oppositionists who had been kicked out of the party, apologized, and had been reinstated a number of times. These double dealers said one thing but did something else. They formed conspiratorial centers to murder leading members of the party while they were considered trusted members of the party. The message to the party membership was clear. The Trotskyite-Zinovievite threat did not come from a separate party, it was a problem and a conspiracy that was inside the party itself. There was a call for vigilance among party members and calls for a “thorough review of Party membership rolls.”
The threats of the 1937 trial were different from the threats of the 1936 trial. The Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre was a parallel center operating within the Soviet Communist Party. This parallel center’s main objective was to destroy socialism and to restore capitalism. This center aimed to “partially dismember” the Soviet Union. Their methods were basically those of sabotage. According to the prosecution, and the confessions of the defendants, the center felt that the only way they could accomplish their goals was if the Soviet Union was weakened by war. They thus set out to use their positions within the Soviet party to weaken the economy while at the same time hastening a war between Germany and the USSR. The center would then adopt a defeatist attitude during the war. This parallel center was “acting on orders from an in concert with Trotsky,” and these leaders were direct agents of German Fascism and Japanese imperialism.
Chase explains how this trial was meant more for the Soviet public, to mobilize them against the perceived threats. He writes:
Vigilance took on a new form as Stalin called on the ‘little people’, the party rank and file, workers, and collective farmers, to unmask enemies regardless of their rank. And the ‘little people’ responded, in many cases by denouncing their superiors in public and private. More so than the 1936 and 1938 trials, the 1937 trial provided a rationale and opportunity for popular participation in the repression … In this way the January 1937 trial significantly transformed the roles of the audience, which henceforth was cast in the role of victim and avenger.
In the third trial of March 1938, the perceived threats to the Soviet Union were escalated again. The 1938 trial was against the Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites. This was truly a show trial meant for the audience of the whole international communist movement and those sympathetic toward it. In a March 1938 directive to communist parties around the world ‘On carrying out a campaign of enlightenment in connection with the trial of the Bloc Rights and Trotskyites’, it was declared that the purpose of the trial was to prove that “there is a world conspiracy of reaction and fascism directed at the Land of Socialism.” Chase claims that it was “a vast conspiracy indeed, a conspiracy that united parties and groups that represented very different ideologies and had fought each other for many years.” Chase seems to be saying with this sentence that the message that the Stalinists meant to send was successfully transmitted internationally.
Similar to the 1937 trial, the 1938 trial of the Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites exposed leaders who aimed to overthrow socialism and restore capitalism. The prosecutor Vyshinsky said that the Soviets had proved that defendants had been foreign agents of a number of countries for many years. The Soviets had claimed to uncover that unlike earlier defendants, or maybe this hadn’t been “uncovered” yet, that these defendants sought the large-scale dismemberment of the USSR. It was even spelled out which pieces of the country would go to what foreign countries. “Germany was to get Ukraine, Poland was to get Belorussia, England was to get the Central Asian Republics, and Japan was to get the Maritime region, and so on.” Like in the other trials all of the defendants confessed to having been long standing spies and double dealers. The trial served other didactic purposes for the Soviet government. It became an explanation for the mass arrests that had “engulfed” the country since the middle of 1937.
Chase uses the transcripts of the three Moscow show trials along with other Soviet and Comintern documents to construct a plausible interpretation of what Stalin wanted to tell both the Soviet society and the international public through the trials and how that message changed over time. He also explains the real international events that brought alarm to the Soviets and led them to single out England, Japan, Germany, and Poland as their major international antagonists. He points to how Stalin looked at these contradictions and interpreted them as a world conspiracy. Thus according to Chase, Stalin used his role as the main “producer” of these trials to push the idea of “politics as conspiracy” to center stage. There is no attempt here to look at the personality of Stalin or to assume the sincerity or insincerity of Stalin and those who followed him. There was an attempt to look at the ideas of the Soviets, led by Stalin through their own documents and to interpret through those documents what the Soviet leadership wanted the public to think and how they wanted it to act. It also looks at the idea of conspiracy as politics as characteristic of how Stalin and the Soviets interpreted the evidence and confessions they received, undoubtedly through torture. In this sense Chase was able to use the archives and the Show Trial transcripts to interpret how Stalin understood the evidence he received and also how he wanted the Soviet citizenry to understand things. The importance of this method is that it takes the ideas of political actors seriously in trying to determine what they thought and how they wanted others to think. This is a standard for historical writing that protects the sincerity of the historical text.
George Iggers’s quote at the beginning of this essay about history as fiction alludes to the ideas articulated most powerfully by Hayden White. In response to the kind of characterization of White’s views that are described by Iggers, White responds that “the nature of the kind of events with which historians and imaginative writers are concerned is not the issue.” White says that what we should be interested in is “the extent to which the discourses of the historian and that of the imaginative writer overlap, resemble, or correspond with each other.” To this end, White concludes, that like the fictional narrative the:
The plot structure of a historical narrative (how things turned out as they did) and the formal argument or explanation of why things happened or turned out as they did are prefigured by the original descriptions (of the “facts” to be explained) in a given dominant modality of language use…
White continues:
The issue of ideology points to the fact that there is no value-neutral mode of emplotment, explanation, or even description of any field of events, whether imaginary or real, and suggests that the very use of language itself implies or entails a specific posture before the world which is ethical, ideological, or more generally political: not only all interpretation, but also all language is politically contaminated.
In discussing how parts of White’s conception of history were received by historians, Iggers explains that it has generally been accepted that White was correct in asserting that the narrative form of historical writing shared the qualities of literary texts, however White’s radical conclusion that all history making is, like literature, therefore a “fiction-making” operation has generally not been accepted. Iggers goes onto assert that the development of linguistic theory by intellectuals such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida and the idea that “history taken as a whole contains no immanent unity or coherence” and that “every conception of history is a construct constituted through language” must be taken seriously by historians. Iggers concedes that Derrida and Foucault are justified to point out the “political implications of language and the hierarchical relations of power inherent within it,” though he concludes that the philosophy of language “lends itself better to literary criticism than to historical writing.” Iggers concludes that while linguistic analysis has been an important “supplementary tool” of historians, explaining the way in which language, rhetoric, and symbolic behavior impact political and social consciousness and action, few historians share the extreme view held by Foucault that “reality does not exist, that only language exists.” Iggers invokes Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s assertion that “while linguistic differences structure society, social differences structure language,” and he claims that most historians share this view.
These epistemic debates have very high stakes for history writing. Is all interpretation and all language politically “contaminated” as White suggests? If this is the case is it possible to reconstruct historical moments with any objective clarity or claim of truth? To White the answer is unequivocally no. But I would beg the question, does the political nature of interpretation and writing refute the idea that reality can be understood? Can certain interpretations, even while politically ‘contaminated’ be more accurate than others and if so, how do we set the standards for understanding what is more accurate? If the first question is answered in the affirmative, this does not deny the idea that histories are constructed and constituted through language, whether it holds that there is a dialectical relationship between language and reality; that language reflects what exists in the “real universe” and also plays back and works to transform that universe, that reality. It is a question that rejects the idea that reality cannot be understood and holds to the conception of a relationship between language and reality where each works to transform each other but where language ultimately develops out of an objective reality. For the writing of history there is thus a past reality to understand and there are interpretations of that past reality that are infused with presupposed ideological, ethical, and political postures. There is a relationship between getting at what historical actors intended to accomplish through historical actions and how historians deem the ethical “correctness” of the actions of those historical actors that create and constitute the form of historical narratives. Historians can reconstruct the intentions of historical actors, through what they said and what was written about what they did in the form of the archives, the press, diaries, and other first hand and contemporary sources. While these sources all contain the linguistic prejudices that White claims, they also provide us with a story of what historical actors thought about their world, how they attempted to transform it, and how different historical actors with different intentions engaged, debated, and struggled through each others attempts at negotiating the world in which they lived. In this way, there is a criterion for truth in history writing and there are methods for reconstructing historical moments even while these reconstructions will never be mirror reflections of what actually happened.
The scholarship of Getty and Chase compliment the arguments of Stoler about state archives. Though the archives are controlled by a politicized and content censored authority, there are all kinds of stories residing within them which give historians an idea of what governments thought about the subjects they tried to lead. The archives or transcripts give us glimpses of what dangers rulers perceive, dangers of revolt, dangers of disloyalty, and dangers of loss of regime. Like Stoler articulates, they also tell us how these archives or state documents also reveal the ways in which leaders feel they can educate their subjects to be loyal and obedient citizens.
There are also times in which scholars can serve the interests of the rulers of society through their scholarship. When this happens the writings of scholars can be used, whether intentionally or unintentionally, to promote a certain understanding of the ruler’s enemies or even to promote a positive image of the rulers themselves. The need exists then for all academic scholarship to be held up to certain standards of plausibility. If this necessity were ignored, then it becomes more possible for corrupt rulers to use the work of scholars to create their own standards of plausibility and criteria of truth. A methodology that denies the existence of a criteria of truth or the possibility for ‘relatively accurate’ interpretations of the past cannot prevent the compromising of scholarly work whether in a socialist country like the Soviet Union or a capitalist democracy like the United States. A methodology that takes the words and deeds of historical actors seriously in order to understand more deeply how people thought and how they sought to affect and transform the world they lived in, a methodology that creates certain standards for historical truth claims about what impacted the actions of historical actors, is a methodology that places restraints on those who would distort history writing for their own purposes.