Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2015 in the subject History Europe - Germany - Postwar Period, Cold War, grade: 9, University of Amsterdam, course: 20th Century Russian and Soviet History, language: English, abstract: Academic research does not operate in a vacuum. As much as the social, cultural, academic and historical circumstances are decisive to the object of research, it is just as much fundamental for the formation of the research itself. Without the trauma of WW II and the Red Army's and Stalin's cruel legacy, it is unlikely that Arendt would have developed her monumental Origins of Totalitarianism. And without the changes in the approaches and theories academics use and are influenced by, both Fitzpatrick and Kotkin would assumedly not have revised their predecessor's argumentation. Equally both Kotkin and Hellbeck could have never developed their arguments without the opening up and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. Concerning the debate on Soviet subjectivity itself all scholars have deepened our understanding on the subject. As the use of the term already indicates, the totalitarian model assumes an almost total control of society by the regime. And although the consecutive scholars do not explicitly fight the term, they implicitly fight it broadside by tackling the idea of Stalinist authoritarian control of society. Each of the scholars mentioned respectively nuanced and toned down further on Stalin's supposed authoritarian control on society and grants the Soviet subject more own will and autonomy. Fitzpatrick and Kotkin were correct in taking on the totalitarian model, but did so without being sensitive to the subject's intrinsic ideological beliefs and convictions. In its criticism of the state-society dichotomy Hellbeck does a very important thing: He is the first to strip the Soviet subject from its mechanical appearance and 'humanizes' the Soviet subject, making it an individual made from flesh and blood and with inner struggles and personal aspirations interacting with the revolutionary ideology, shifting the focus towards the Soviet subject itself, and definitively abandoning the old paradigm built on the state-society dichotomy, the debate was stuck in for decades.