My first negative encounters with the "totalitarian model" came from my Country Email List archival work in the ussr . That was before I went to the United States, in the early 1970s. However, when I settled there, the question became more important to me because Soviet studies in the Country Email List United States were then dominated by political scientists whose favorite model was that of totalitarianism. It was a highly politicized field in the Cold War, and the "totalitarianism model" – based on the idea of the essential similarity between the Soviet system and that of Nazi Germany – Country Email List served not only academic 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 Country Email List moved to the USA .. That reflected, first of all, what was happening in professional historiography as a whole. They were all heading toward social history, which had been quantitative, but was now Country Email List becoming more qualitative. Doing social history then was like doing cultural history in the 1990s: everyone was drawn to it. In the Soviet case, there was an additional issue. If history was written considering that everything came "from above", making history was very easy:
You could read all the official declarations, the resolutions of the Central Country Email List Committee, the laws of the Council of Ministers and say: "Perfect, this is what has passed". If, for example, someone was interested in the peasantry, he could read all the laws and resolutions relating to the Country Email List peasantry and deduce the real situation.ussr . As I rather cynically realized later, laws and instructions were often more useful to Country Email List the social historian because of a kind Country Email List 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.