United States were then dominated by political scientists whose Country Email List favorite model was that of totalitarianism. It was a highly politicized field in the Cold War, and the "totalitarianism model" – based Country Email List on the idea of ​​the essential similarity between the Soviet system and that of Nazi Germany – served not only academic Country Email List but also political ends. My decision to make "history from below" came not during my first research period in the Soviet.

Union, but after I moved to the USA .. That reflected, first of all, what was happening Country Email List in professional historiography as a whole. They were all heading toward social history, which had been quantitative, but was now becoming more qualitative. Doing social history then was like doing cultural history in the 1990s: everyone Country Email List was drawn to it. In the Soviet case, there was an additional issue. If history was written considering that Country Email List everything came "from above", making history was very easy:

you could read all the official declarations, the resolutions of the Central Committee, Country Email List the laws of the Council of Ministers and say: "Perfect, this is what has passed". If, for example, someone was interested in Country Email List the peasantry, he could read all the laws and resolutions relating to the peasantry and deduce the real situation.ussr . As I rather cynically realized later, laws and instructions were often more useful to the social historian because Country Email List of a kind of reverse reading: they told you how the authorities wanted things to be, not how they were; and his prohibition lists were often an excellent guide to the kinds of practices that were common in real life. I thought that making history from below was also an especially interesting challenge in Soviet history because no one had tried to do it before.