The Historiography of the Former Soviet Bloc: Historians’ parallel concerns with the totalitarianism framework and their varied normative commitments

Abstract

Recent historiography of the former soviet bloc has been torn between adopting, albeit with revisions, versus outright contesting the conceptual apparatus introduced by supporters of the totalitarianism theory. This major axis of debates about how to interpret and explain actors’ actions or events in the former Soviet bloc has been quite apparent in investigations led by the Potsdam school of historiography, interested, after the German unification, in capturing people’s lives in the former GDR (Kocka 1999, Lindenberger 2022). Analogous methodological queries on the limits of totalitarianism theory emerged independently in the historiography of the former USSR, in the works of Fitzpatrick (1986), David-Fox (2004) or Edele (2007). And recent historiography of former satellites of the USSR have also examined the legacy of the totalitarianism framework, while keeping its application fairly confined to respective national approaches (Apor and Iordachi 2013).

I find the parallel evolution of the historiography for the Soviet Bloc in recent decades striking, and a rich, fertile ground for exploration in the philosophy of historiography. Despite their different settings and the multifarious types of data they attempt to accommodate, historians raise analogous sets of questions, and propose novel social theories in their respective answers.

I argue that characterizations of various normative orders in social ontology help us highlight that historians’ inquiries are not about which is the correct interpretation of the former Soviet bloc institutions (totalitarian or not). Rather, their concern is about what has to be true of their background institutions, e.g., those whose norms emerge and/or are designed spontaneously by actors, in order for these to play a role in explaining events and situations. An appeal to the notion of institutions presented in social ontology also helps recast normative commitments behind historiographic inquiries, in contrast to those in political science, or wider still, in political philosophy (Brännmark 2019).