The Second World War was an unprecedented cataclysm that rocked the entire European continent. It shook institutions, identities, and convictions that, until then, appeared to be solidly entrenched. Social origin no longer served as the dominant criterion of socio-political status, as former class enemies were allowed to redeem themselves through wartime exploits.
According to Hayes (1992) the Second World War affected every European individual, family, and community. The sheer magnitude of this unprecedented cataclysm touched all, whether at the front or in evacuation, anti-German resistance or collaboration. It is no surprise that participants from all walks of life set out to record their experience. One community, however, seemed determined to avoid the subject of the war. Among the voluminous writings on the October Revolution, the civil war, the Great Break, the Terror, and the cold war, the few social and political histories of the European reflected a reading of Second World War event as an inexplicable intrusion on more important processes that shaped the Revolution.
King, (1992) asserted that the highlighted impact of the Second World War on the makeup of political and social institutions. According to King, (1992) the study of the war and its consequences appeared to be off to a promising start, followed by several seminal monographs that have stood the test of time, and all written, not incidentally, by a now practically extinct school of political scientist-historians. The impact of the war and its emerging cult were too powerful to be ignored by scholars. Remarkably enough, however, they soon were. When the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end was commemorated in 1995, the dearth of publications by Western scholars about the European theatre stood in glaring contrast to the avalanche of monographs and memoirs on practically all other theatres of the war. This disparity was only magnified by the fact that some of the best of these few works were written by outsiders to the European field, British specialists in German and European wartime history who do not even command any non-European languages.
An effort to recover the war as a central theme in European history requires an inquiry into the reasons it was relegated to the margins of historiography. Lack of sources could hardly account for this drought in the study of the war and its aftermath. On the contrary, the European societies as well as minor communities have produced a multitude of histories and memoirs of the war, and the contemporary Soviet press and government decrees were available to Western researchers. The same types of sources that furnished the voluminous literature on the first two decades of the Revolution were there for interested scholars, and in a much greater number. Moreover, the Germans left voluminous and meticulous documentation of the society under their occupation, ranging from an analysis of local power structures and politics to populations, moods, and reactions to power, their own policies, and wartime changes. (Purgh, 1999)
The dominant voices in Western historiography have argued for the primacy of socioeconomic structures and have subscribed to the view that the experiences of the 1920s and early 1930s constituted the formative and enduring moments in the European polity. Within the dichotomy drawn between socioeconomic structures and political-ideological domains, the war was accorded the status of a mere event in the long duration It was thus relegated to studies of military operations devoid of social, political, or ideological context, and to a handful of monographs mainly by students of high politics, science, and literature. In this light, it was not surprising that the 1985 publication of a collection of essays on the impact of the war on Europe society and politics hardly made an impact on Europe historiography largely because of the interpretive thrust of some of the contributors’ other writings. (Shapiro, 1990)
A case study of soviet society
A great study on soviet society reveals that Reluctant to accept the legitimacy of the Stalinist claim of having enacted the fundamentals of the revolutionary premise–the abolition of the market, the establishment of partocracy, and the destruction of alien classes–historians followed Trotsky’s footsteps in declaring the Revolution over by the mid-1930s, when the Stalinist regime enacted a series of policies in favour of consolidation and stability at the expense of radical experiments on both the domestic and international fronts. The Revolution was pronounced dead, too young and innocent to bear the responsibility for the atrocities that were later committed in its name. (King, 1992)
According to Shapiro,(1990) the Soviets were informed by foreign scholars that the Revolution was over at the very time it was gathering momentum and consequently that the impact of the war the Soviets were so keen to highlight actually amounted to nothing. Nor did the turn to ”cultural” history or the rediscovery of ideology, both of which extended the chronological boundaries of Soviet historiography, encourage a re-evaluation of the war and its legacy. The war has still been viewed as an isolated event, albeit interesting, bereft of any long-standing impact on the structures of Soviet life and irrelevant to the evolution of socialist ideology.
Nevertheless, when read closely, the Thermidorian framework is critical to the reintegration of the war into the history of the Revolution. Thermidor in history has gained a dual meaning. For French contemporaries, it meant merely the end of the revolutionary terror. Not surprisingly, the renunciation of mass terror as an alien phenomenon to France’s original cause in 1793 and that of the Soviet Union in 1953 were literally identical. “This cannibal horde / which hell vomits from its womb / Preaches murder and carnage! It is covered with your blood!” proclaimed a Thermidorian song in France. “A meat-mincer, butchery, and blood bath,” echoed Nikita Khrushchev, referring to the terror of 1937. (Shapiro, 1990)
In both representations the terror was excised from the revolutionary myth, hand in hand with the reaffirmation of the rest of the revolutionary principles. The removal of the terror was the ultimate affirmation of the just Revolution. Neither the French nor the Soviets advocated a return to the pre revolutionary world; instead, both claimed to salvage the Revolution and continue its progress, only on a more popular and civil basis. In neither case, however, was a pluralistic political arena imagined. The mythology of a homogenized socio-political and national body, the most acclaimed achievement of the terror, continued to be the pillar for the post-terror order. For contemporaries, in a word, ending the terror did not imply the end of the Revolution. (Berghahn, 1990)
The war, in this light, was not only a part of the revolutionary era but, in more ways than one, the post-war and the post-Stalin eras epitomized the undiminished impetus for revolutionary transformation. These decades were marked by grandiose plans to transform nature and to abolish the last residues of market relations in the national economy. Khrushchev, in turn, launched the Virgin Lands campaign in 1954-56, revived the late Stalinist concept of “communism in our lifetime,” advanced communal surveillance to an unprecedented degree, and set out to convince the collective farm peasants to give up their household plots. The war and its aftermath could not be distinguished from the Revolution at large. As long as the revolutionary ethos retained its viability, it was the prism through which Soviet contemporaries made sense of the cataclysmic events that shaped their lives. (Hayes, 1992)
The Revolution, as experienced by contemporaries, members of the political elite, and ordinary citizens alike, was a constantly unfolding enterprise with the imposition of a linear evolution toward the ultimate goal of communism. The road to communism was punctuated by a series of traumatic events that both shaped and were shaped by the revolutionary project. Within this chain of cataclysms, the war was universally perceived as the Armageddon of the Revolution, the ultimate clash dreaded yet expected by the first generation to live in a socialist society, the event that would either vindicate or bring down the system, depending on one’s views and expectations. (Berghahn, 1990)
Reference
Berghahn, V.R (1990): Europe in the era of two world wars: from militarian and genocide to society, 1900-1950.
Hayes, P. (1992): Themes in Modern European History 1890-1945. London: Routledge.
King, J, (1992): Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: a local history of bohemian politics, 1848-1948.
Pugh, M. (1999): State and Society: A Social and Political History of Britain 1870-1997. London: Arnold Publishers.
Shapiro. T (1990): A larger sense of purpose: Higher education and society. London press.