Revisionism in Stalinist Historiography

What are the (relative) advantages of the revisionist interpretations of Stalinism?
I think one of the most important advantages of the a revisionist interpretation of Stalinism is that it becomes easier through one to understand how and why Stalin undertook the mass repressions that he did. For instance, although the "traditional" historians and revisionists both agree that Stalin ordered mass repression, e.g., in the Great Terror, it is only the revisionist version that engages the social science underlying how a dictator who was geographically quite distant from the scenes of actual violence could order murder and actually have it carried out. Some of the "credit," of course goes to the sequence of secret police chiefs upon whom Stalin relied, but even they ultimately needed to be able to exploit some aspect of the executioners' situation. Whereas the scholarship on Nazi Germany has considered this sort of question for more than twenty years (i.e., Täterforschung), I had not seen such considerations in the literature on Stalin until I read Arch Getty's two books on the Great Terror.[1] Having done so, I can see how the expansive bureaucracy of Stalin's USSR lent itself to the kind of manipulation that, in Germany, culminated in the Holocaust. This to some extent explains the how of Stalin owing to revisionism.

The why is more complex, but again, it is a question I had not seen seriously considered until I read revisionist historians. Here, the emphasis is on going beyond the ascription of mere insanity to Stalin and understanding more completely why he ordered mass violence. Here, although I'm unsure whether she would be correctly identified as a revisionist, given her political conservatism (although I assume she at least relies on revisionists), Anne Applebaum's essay is helpful in undersatnding the actual political motivations: "[Stalin's] violence was not the product of his subconscious but of the Bolshevik engagement with Marxist-Leninist ideology."[2] If we consider Stalin from this vantage, rather than as a crazy person, and if we consider Stalin additionally as building on basic concepts inherited from Lenin, then it becomes much easier to understand his thinking and – perhaps more importantly – the interior logic of that thinking.

====

[1] J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 1999); and J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938 (New York: Cambridge UP, 1985).
[2] Anne Applebaum, "Understanding Stalin," The Atlantic, November 2014, available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/11/understanding-stalin/380786/