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Re-examining Opposition under Stalin: Evidence and Context--A Reply to Kuromiya

I would like to thank Hiroaki Kuromiya for his detailed and critical engagement with my work. Many of the questions he poses about oral evidence in the Soviet and post-Soviet context, Stalinist sources and the nature of political opposition are very interesting indeed. Unfortunately his belief that ‘the field tends to be divided into those who emphasise resistance and opposition and those who focus on compliance’ prevented him from understanding that my article aimed to transcend the question of existence of resistance by drawing attention to the specific nature of Stalinist opposition. Implicit in my approach to analysing anti-Stalinist activity is an explanation of why Stalinist opposition proves so difficult to pinpoint. Given the rigid dichotomy Kuromiya applies to the question of opposition, it is not surprising that he devotes much of his critique to the exact nature of two of the organisations discussed in my article. Irrelevant to my overall argument, these discussions also contain a host of omissions and errors and are based on the assumption that interviewees, memoirists and documents all lie and all lie in unison. He mixes statements of different Soviet periods, attributing to them all the same importance without regard to their historical context. In the end, Kuromiya refrains from offering an alternative reading of the sources, leaving the question of the evaluation of those he discusses open and dismissing the considerable rest en masse. In the following I will restate the essence of my analysis and highlight those aspects Kuromiya misunderstood, clarify the nature and character of my sources and demonstrate the shortcomings of Kuromiya’s points.