However, you took a different Country Email List stance, focusing on a « story from below » , which served and centered on everyday life. What were your criticisms or objections to this paradigm and why did you choose to approach Soviet history from a Country Email List societal perspective ? My first negative encounters with the "totalitarian model" came from my 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 Country Email List Cold War, and the "totalitarianism model" – based on the idea of the essential similarity between the Soviet system and that of Nazi Germany – served not only academic but also political ends. My Country Email List 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 in professional Country Email List 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 Country Email List 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 Country Email List very easy: you could read all the official declarations, the resolutions of the Central Committee, the laws of the Council of Ministers and say: "Perfect, this is what has passed". If, for example, someone Country Email List was interested in the peasantry.