The story of western academic historiography is you had the Totalitarian cold warrior model of the 1950s, and then the revisionists who challenged it in the 60s and 70s, Stephen F Cohen being the best representative, and since 1991 its a mixture of neo-totalitarians who feel the Soviet archives proved them right, and social historians who focus mostly on the lived experience of communism is very niche specialized areas. And of course all 3 schools have existed across all periods and in the present. So I don't think one has to openly defend a pro-Communist position, but both the revisionist and social-cultural history approaches offer the chance to both sympathetically and objectively explore the facts of Soviet life.
Just some recent academic books
Soviet Orientalism and the Creation of Central Asian Nations
The Heritage of Soviet Oriental Studies
Film and Television of the Late Soviet Era
Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World
Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945–1970
Classics for the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity under Lenin and Stalin
Inside the Apparat - Perspectives on the Soviet Union from Former Functionaries
Soviet Influences on Postwar Yugoslav Gender Policies
A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism
Opposing Jim Crow: African Americans and the Soviet Indictment of U.S. Racism, 1928-1937
Small comrades. Revolutionizing childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932
Socialist Senses: Film, Feeling, and the Soviet Subject, 1917–1940
Its just a random sampling of the most recent academic literature on the USSR, but it shows the author doesn't have to love or hate the USSR, the empirical research will largely be the same. If anything its the Robert Conquest totalitarian types who show more partiinost against academic objectivity.
Quote:Finally, I must say that I have a personal reason for supporting your aspirations, heiss93. In the last 20 years a lot of great stuff has come out in Russian on precisely the topics you're talking about (the Soviet experience, its successes, failings, etc.). I have a whole stack of books on the collapse alone, and more and more are released all the time. If I were wealthy I would like to set up a miniature version of Progress Publishers, overseeing the translation of a small collection of the best works on these subjects, to create a better balance at the university level between Western academics writing on the USSR, and actual (former) Soviets, who tend to have better access to archives and just tend to be more intimately acquainted with the subject matter. Heck, Yuri Zhukov, probably the greatest living Russian academic on the Stalin period at the moment, practically lives in the archives, and his books are absolutely packed with nothing but archival citations.
And yes this is exactly the type of western-Russian cooperation that could help bring education on Soviet civilization to the West, especially with the help of western academic university institutions behind it. Its not pro or anti Soviet, but simply recording and analyzing what was. Studying it like the lost civilization of the Roman Empire. Ideally it could be applied not just to the USSR, but to all communist states, as well as communist parties that did not take power. And an oral history of those who did participate in the world communist movement.
There were some very good western journals during the Cold War period that consisted entirely of translations from Soviet and Chinese journals in topics like philosophy, economics, law, politics, culture, anthropology, sociology. The editors were not Cold Warrior sovietologists, but somewhat sympathetic, like John Somerville of Soviet Studies in Philosophy and Nick Knight in Chinese Studies in Philosophy. They were mostly published by ME Sharpe. I got the 1st hand discussions of the Liberman reforms and mathematical economics of the 70s. As well as a book by a French Sovietologist which was a good middle ground between Progress Publishers and US Cold Warrior Sovietology. A non-polemical study of both the good and bad in Soviet-style economics, which acknowledged it had a higher growth rate than the west at time of writing in 1970.
Actually I think this is something Grover Furr was very good at, in that he included the direct Soviet quotes for any footnotes in his books, on his webpage. So its not the same thing as translating whole works, but at least we can see important primary source passages 1st hand.
This is just a sample from his most recent book on Trotsky
https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/res ... pendix.pdfI don't know what the future of neo-communism holds, but it would be a shame to leave the story and narrative of the 1st wave of communism entirely in the hands of its enemies. I assume that at least part of the reason we all participate in S-E is we believe that the history of communism has a value, besides just the daily political battles of current events.