Post-Revisionism: The Continuing Debate on Stalinism

摘要

One of the most influential historians of Stalinism, Sheila Fitzpatrick, recently argued that Soviet history has moved through several paradigms since the 1960s, employing Thomas Kuhn's concept that at any given time there is a dominant way of doing science (in this case, history) involving assumptions about relevant areas of research, theory and methodology, and that paradigm shifts occur more due to wider pressures than the accumulation of knowledge. Fitzpatrick contended that the 'totalitarian' model that dominated the 1960s and 1970s was replaced by the 'revisionist' model in the late 1970s and 1980s, which is being replaced by a 'post-revisionist' model that emerged in the mid-1990s.1 The first two paradigms are clear.