| Sumario: | Part of a roundtable discussion on revisionism. It is time to consider why the revisionist challenge to totalitarian thinking provoked such an angry response. Part of the reason has to do with the power of a Cold War consensus that can seem incomprehensible to those too young to remember it. Career as well as beliefs has a stake in the prevailing discourse. Many of the revisionists were trained or employed outside the Harvard and Columbia centers where the prevailing discourse has been defined and defended since World War 2. Social difference may also have been a factor. Revisionist social historians stressed class differences, social support from below, and resentment against privileged people. The revisionist insistence that the Soviet Union could be studied using the usual tools of analysis, including source criticism, social and political history, regional and micro-history, touched a nerve. Revisionists denied that the Soviet Union was a unique or special case, and this aroused the ire of totalitarians.
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