• DOI:10.1177/003200949803300108
• Corpus ID: 157937639

Valerii Chkalov: Soviet Pilot as New Soviet Man

@article{Bergman1998ValeriiCS,
  title={Valerii Chkalov: Soviet Pilot as New Soviet Man},
  author={Jay Bergman},
  journal={Journal of Contemporary History},
  year={1998},
  volume={33},
  pages={135 - 152}
}

• Jay Bergman
• Published 1 January 1998
• History
• Journal of Contemporary History

Historians in the West have written a great deal about Stalin and Stalinism. In the first two decades after Stalin's death in 1953, when the survival of the Soviet Union appeared certain, and its potential for further growth quite considerable, western historians writing about Stalin generally emphasized how adept he was at mobilizing the coercive institutions he inherited from Lenin to modernize Russia's economy; the fact that Stalin was able to preserve his own political security at the same time seemed further proof of his superiority as a politician, and of the durability of the Soviet system as a whole.' Largely because Soviet power in the 1950s and 1960s was so much greater than it had been when the Bolsheviks originally came to power, it seemed only natural to stress the emergence of the Soviet Union as a global power, and to ascribe to Stalin primary responsibility for the policies, principally industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture, that made this transformation possible. However, as the Soviet Union in the 1970s began to stagnate, and thus to resemble a more 'western' political system than it appeared to be when it was engaged in these vast projects of social engineering, many historians in the West interpreted Brezhnev's regime, and even Stalin's, in terms of categories and concepts borrowed from western political science and sociology; by describing the Soviet system as a collection of competing interest groups, and collectivization and the Terror as a consequence of pressures from constituencies within and outside the Communist Party, these historians significantly diminished Stalin's role in these events, and in Soviet history generally.2 But in the late 1980s, even as historians in the West still stressed the 'pluralism' in Soviet society, their counterparts in the Soviet Union uncovered all sorts of