Modernization or Modernity? Conflicting Visions of the Soviet Experience

The dominant paradigm for understanding Soviet history from the 1960s through the 1980s was based on the modernization paradigm of progress through the intervention of a transformative state, an alternative to capitalist modernization.  With the fall of the USSR and the "Cultural Turn," a more negative assessment of "progress" and the Enlightenment influenced a new generation of scholars to revive what some have called a "neo-totalitarian" vision of a state and society that strictly supervised societal development based on a relatively fixed and defined ideology. This presentation examines these two paradigms and raises questions about their explanatory power.