The academic field after
World War II and during the
Cold War was dominated by the "totalitarian model" of the
Soviet Union, One example was David Brandenberger's concept of
National Bolshevism to describe the Stalinist regime's turn against internationalism, with Russian
cultural hegemony and xenophobia becoming the main ideological currents from the 1930s. Nikolai Mitrokhin highlighted the
ethnocentrism and antisemitism of the
CPSU and Moscow administration of the Soviet era. According to
John Earl Haynes and
Harvey Klehr, the historiography is characterized by a split between traditionalists and revisionists. "Traditionalists" characterize themselves as objective reporters of what they see as a "totalitarian nature" of
communism and
communist states. They are criticized by their opponents as being
anti-communist in their eagerness on continuing to focus on the issues of the
Cold War. Alternative characterizations for traditionalists include "anti-Communist", "conservative", "Draperite" (after
Theodore Draper), "orthodox", and "right-wing"; Haynes and Klehr argue that "revisionists" categorize all "traditionalists" as conservative to undermine liberal forms of this study, despite the liberal or even left background of many of the founding members of this view on communism, such as Draper and the
Cold War liberals. Norman Markowitz, a prominent "revisionist", referred to traditionalists as "reactionaries", "right-wing romantics", and "triumphalist" who belong to the "
HUAC school of
CPUSA scholarship." Haynes and Klehr criticize some "revisionists" for characterizing "traditionalists" as "lowercase" ideological
anticommunists (communism in general) rather than
anti-Communists (the historically established Communist parties). In their view, "revisionists" such as
Joel Kovel imply that "traditionalists" in Communist studies are foremost opposing the establishment of an "ideal" Marxist society, when in practice, traditionalists have criticized the form of "
real socialism" that existed in the Soviet system at the time, a form also criticized by many revisionists. Kovel wrote that the "Soviet system while nominally communist was, given its hierarchy, exploitation and lack of democracy, neither communist nor even authentically socialist." "Revisionists", characterized by Haynes and Klehr as
historical revisionists, are more numerous and dominate academic institutions and learned journals. A suggested alternative formulation is "new historians of American communism", but that has not caught on because these historians would describe themselves as unbiased and scholarly and contrast their work to the work of anti-communist "traditionalists", whom they would term biased and unscholarly. In Communist studies, post-Soviet access to archives, including
Eastern Bloc archives and the
Venona project's decrypts, also bolstered traditionalists' view on Cold War intelligence that the CPUSA was subsidized by the Soviet Union, and particularly before the 1950s
aiding it in espionage, as well as the knowledge that extensive operations were conducted by
atomic spies for the Soviet Union.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a United States Senator for the Democratic Party who led the
Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy, played a major role in publicizing the Venona evidence. Archives have also shed new light on inter-communist rivalries during the Cold War, such as the "Soviet Chinese spy wars" during the
Sino–Soviet split. == Notable debates ==