Vadim Rogovin

Vadim Zakharovich Rogovin (Russian: Вади́м Заха́рович Рого́вин) (10 May 1937, Moscow – 25 September 1998, Moscow) was a Russian Marxist (Trotskyist) historian and sociologist, Ph.D. in philosophy, Leading Researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the author of Was There An Alternative?, the 7-volume study of Stalin era between 1923 and 1940, with an emphasis on the Trotskyist opposition.

He was considered the leading one among Trotskyist Soviet historians emerging after Perestroika.

In 1998 Vadim Rogovin died of cancer, survived by his wife, Galina Valiuzhenich.

In the introduction to the first volume of the Was There An Alternative? series Rogovin explains his position and the purpose of this work as follows. In the history of the Soviet Union a crucial question was to find out the reason for the emergence of the monstrous phenomenon of Stalinism. Rogovin writes there are basically two diametrically opposed approaches. The first one is that Stalinism with its terror was a logical, unavoidable evolution of Marxism-Leninism within Bolshevism from the Socialist revolution. Another approach is to consider that Stalinism was a historically accidental development and that there was an alternative movement within Bolshevism (Trotskyism), and the major function of Stalinist terror was to suppress this movement.

Rogovin suggests that the first approach has become dominant in historical research for two major reasons. The first one is the coincidence of the goals in this respect of two major historical schools: of the official pro-Soviet school with the tradition of demonizing of Trotsky and Trotskyism and of the anti-Soviet, anti-Communist school, with its tradition of demonizing the whole Communist movement, for which purpose it was convenient to attribute the traits of Stalinism to Communism as a whole. The second reason is that with a few exceptions of émigrés, all Trotskyists were physically eliminated by Stalin so that there are virtually no memoirs, and nearly all documents of the Left Opposition were made inaccessible. Therefore the historical picture has become distorted in this area for both subjective and objective reasons.

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