Rewriting History in Soviet Russia The Politics of Revisionist Historiography, 1956-1974

by Markwick, Roger D.

• ISBN13: 9780333792094
• ISBN10: 0333792092
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-04-14
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Stalin's death and denunciation at the 1956 Twentieth Party Congress unleashed a furor among soviet historians. Despite attempts of Stalinist apparatchiks to stem the tide of historical revision, in the 1960s a small group of anti-Stalinist historians continued to fight for historical truth, setting them on a collision course with the party political elite. Using intensive interviews and original manuscript material, Markwick provides a unique, insiders' account of the battle for the Soviet past in the 1960s which paved the way for the dramatic upheavel in Soviet historical writing occcasioned by perestroika.

Author Biography

Roger D. Markwick is Senior Research Associate in the Department of Government, University of Sydney.

Table of Contents

Foreword	ix
Preface	xiii
Acknowledgements	xvi
List of Abbreviations and Russian Terms	xviii
PART I THE CONTEXT OF THE DISCUSSIONS
A Resurgent Intelligentsia	3	(35)
Totalitarian theory	5	(3)
A civil society in embryo	8	(3)
Paradigm shift	11	(2)
Historians as intellectuals	13	(7)
The conscience of society	20	(11)
Intellectuals, the state and civil society	31	(7)
The Twentieth Party Congress and History	38	(37)
The Short Course paradigm	42	(5)
Unmasking the `cult of the personality'	47	(4)
The Burdzhalov affair	51	(11)
The production of historical science	62	(13)
PART II SOME MAJOR DISCUSSIONS
The New Direction Historians	75	(36)
Russian imperialism under the tsars	76	(8)
Rural Russia: capitalist or feudal?	84	(5)
Russia's `multistructuredness'	89	(8)
Towards a paradigm shift	97	(5)
Crypto-Trotskyism?	102	(3)
Russian absolutism	105	(6)
Writing and Rewriting the History of Collectivization	111	(44)
Rural Russia in the 1920s	115	(4)
Archival sources	119	(5)
An unpublished manuscript	124	(10)
Censorship at work	134	(11)
The famine	145	(4)
Revisionism on the retreat	149	(6)
The `Hour of Methodology'	155	(44)
History and sociology	156	(8)
The Sector of Methodology	164	(9)
Precapitalist societies	173	(6)
A paradigm in crisis	179	(4)
History and the present	183	(16)
PART III THE POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES
Collision Course	199	(35)
The Trapeznikov offensive	200	(1)
The `democratic' partkom	201	(8)
The Nekrich affair	209	(10)
Volobuev appointed director	219	(10)
Coup de grace: Volobuev dismissed	229	(5)
From Zastoi to Perestroika	234	(14)
Notes	248	(53)
Bibliography	301	(14)
Index	315