When Does History End?

Every era has to locate for itself the boundary between past and present or between "history" and "current affairs." In schools and universities, courses on the Cold War, decolonization, and the civil rights movement are now commonplace, even if the European age of dictatorship looms largest. But this still leaves the question of how to treat that awkward stretch of time that is no longer "now" but not yet "then." In the postwar era, it acquired a name and became an established field: "contemporary history," a subject rapidly institutionalized through the creation of journals and university programs across Western Europe.

In the 1950s and 1960s, this field's greatest intellectual imperative was to make sense of the catastrophes of the recent past and to work toward new national histories for a postwar world. Not coincidentally, the pioneering effort came in West Germany with the founding by Hans Rothfels of the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte in 1953. Yet the notion of "the contemporary" is inherently fluid and not a little ambiguous. National context matters a great deal. For French scholars, the période contemporaine stretches back to 1789. In Germany, Zeitgeschichte for a long time meant the study of Nazism, but since the 1990s the German Democratic Republic has taken center stage. In Russia, noveishaia istoriia can refer to the post-Stalin era (as in the State Archive for Contemporary History, RGANI), but the term is also applied to the entire post-1917 period or, conversely, to the post-Soviet era.¹ The British Journal of Contemporary History (founded in 1966) has long taken World War I as a rule-of-thumb divide between the contemporary and the rest, while the journal's thematic center of gravity has traditionally been World War II (its causes, course, and consequences).

Now, however, this periodization seems somewhat dated.² These days it is hard to regard anything before 1945 as "contemporary," while the modern Europeanist's eye is drawn to dates like 1968 and 1989 as points of departure for understanding recent times. But even that does not resolve the matter of principle: what exactly is contemporary about contemporary history? Is it a particular kind of relationship to the present? Does this have to be history within living memory? Is it distinguished by a particular kind of source base—does contemporary history operate in the phase before the archival corpus has hardened and while interview material is still obtainable?

Another definition of the contemporary takes the end of the Cold War as its key point of reference: in this reading of history, 1991 (or at least the phase of communist decline that preceded it) would mark the divide between "then" and "now." For obvious reasons, this is where most Russia specialists intuitively place the end of "their" history. Even now, the vast majority of tenured academics in our field were trained in the Soviet era. After 1991, the country they studied became almost unrecognizable; the divide between past and present, usually a blurry demarcation, suddenly extended to a chasm. Study of contemporary Russia was turned over to economists and social scientists, who produced an extraordinary outpouring of new research in the 1990s. Historians, conversely, could settle for a "short 20th century" ending in 1991.

Yet handing over the 1990s to the social scientists no longer seems very satisfactory. One reason is that the social scientists have themselves moved on—to the new contemporary world of the early 21st century. There are also fewer of them, and they have less institutional clout than in their early post-Soviet heyday: Russia specialists may have seemed at the disciplinary cutting edge in the phase of "transition" and "democratization," but now they are a much tougher sell to politics and social-science departments in an English-speaking world that has much else to preoccupy it. But the main reason why it seems timely for historians of Russia to pay more attention to the very recent past is that the events on either side of 1991 raise a number of pre-eminently historical questions of continuity and change. When did the Soviet decline begin? What exactly changed in 1991? How important does...