[6] Matt Lenoe describes the "revisionist school" as representing those who "insisted that the old image of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state bent on world domination was oversimplified or just plain wrong.
[1] This perspective emerged significantly from ideas of neo-Freudian psychoanalysis, evaluating Stalin as a deeply paranoid tyrant and in the process creating a more tsarist-type government.
[13] One example was David Brandenberger's concept of National Bolshevism to describe the Stalinist regime's turn against internationalism, with Russian cultural hegemony and xenophobia becoming the main ideological currents from the 1930s.
[15] Norman Markowitz, a prominent "revisionist", referred to traditionalists as "reactionaries", "right-wing romantics", and "triumphalist" who belong to the "HUAC school of CPUSA scholarship.
"[16] Haynes and Klehr criticize some "revisionists" for characterizing "traditionalists" as "lowercase" ideological anticommunists (communism in general) rather than anti-Communists (the historically established Communist parties).
[15] In Communist studies, post-Soviet access to archives, including Eastern Bloc archives and the Venona project's decrypts, also bolstered traditionalists' view on Cold War intelligence that the CPUSA was subsidized by the Soviet Union, and particularly before the 1950s aiding it in espionage, as well as the knowledge that extensive operations were conducted by atomic spies for the Soviet Union.
[22] J. Arch Getty's Origins of Great Purges, a book published in 1985 in which Getty posits that the Soviet political system was not completely controlled from the center and that Stalin only responded to political events as they arose,[6] was a challenge to works by Robert Conquest and part of the debates between the "totalitarian model" and "revisionist school" of the Soviet Union.
In an appendix to the book, Getty also questioned the previously published findings that Stalin organized himself the murder of Sergey Kirov to justify his campaign of Great Purge.
Now, whereas a new generation of academics considers sometimes as self evident that the totalitarian model was completely erroneous and harmful, it is perhaps more useful to show than there were certain things about the Soviet company that it explained very well.
"[25] Hannah Arendt, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Conquest, and Carl Joachim Friedrich were prominent advocates of applying the totalitarian concept to a comparison of Nazism and Stalinism.
[27] Henry Rousso defends the work of Friedrich et al. while noting the concept is both useful and descriptive rather than analytical, with the conclusion the regimes described as totalitarian do not have a common origin and did not arise in similar ways.
It must be shared by the tens of thousands of activists and officials who carried out the policy and by the peasants who chose to slaughter animals, burn fields, and boycott cultivation in protest.
[36] Vladimir N. Brovkin describes it as a challenge to the "revisionist school" of historians, while Alexander Nove states "Conquest seems prone to accept the Ukrainian nationalist myth.
'"[41] This subgroup of revisionists sought to recapitulate a "relatively pure" communism in the Soviet Union and explain all of its policies, such as the nationality operations of the NKVD and deportations of Koreans, as a reflection of Marxism.
Getty writes that the "overwhelming weight of opinion among scholars working in the new archives is that the terrible famine of the 1930s was the result of Stalinist bungling and rigidity rather than some genocidal plan.
The historiography of strictly communist studies is also changing, with some different models of its aims as well as the major shift caused by access to archives.
[19][20][21] Printed journals include Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung (Yearbook for Historical Communist Studies) and Slavic Review.