Postwar Historical Research in the Soviet Union

AREPORT on the progress of research in social studies under a totalitarian regime is bound to be a story of ever watchful political guidance and control which strangles the scholar's initiative, a story of ceaseless conflict between free choice and prescribed approach, between independent interpretation of factual sources and findings laid down in advance by state and party authorities interested not in the facts per se but in bolstering the political foundations of the regime. And developments and trends in the field of historical studies in the Soviet Union before and after the recent war have proved to be no exception. History is politics projected into the past; this pointed remark of Michael Pokrovsky, the leading historian of the earlier period of the Soviet regime, since denounced by the party as an anti-Marxist, is still characteristic of the attitude toward historical research prevailing in Soviet Russia

Economic history · Political science · Politics · Soviet union · History · Korean Peninsula Historical and Political Studies · Law · Russia and Soviet political economy · Soviet and Russian History

• Stalinism and the Russian Cultural Heritage

  Open Access•Frederick Barghoorn•The Review of Politics•1952

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