Intimate Enemies: Demonizing the Bolshevik Opposition, 1918-1928

摘要

In a recent essay, Sheila Fitzpatrick (Journal of European Studies, 37, 2007) has documented shifts in the historiography of the USSR from the Cold War totalitarian model, through the work of the revisionist social historians of the 1970s and 80s, to the preoccupation with ideology and subjectivity that characterizes more recent writings. Halfin's Intimate Enemies is unambiguously a work of the latter sort. Halfin shows how the dominant Bolshevik talk about Party members who opposed the Party's official line gradually shifted from a relatively good-humored language of debate and comradely contestation to the full-blown discourse of demonization that emerged in the late 1920s with the majority's crushing of the United Opposition. According to Halfin, this othering of opponents as irremediably evil set the discursive stage for the murderous purges of the 1930s.