Whither Soviet History?: Some Reflections on Recent Anglophone Historiography

The past decade and a half has been an extraordinarily productive time for the generation of scholarship on Soviet history by Anglophone historians. Much of this period has been dominated by the productive interface between so-called post-revisionist historians whose formative experience was as graduate students at Columbia University and what I refer to as the Chicago School situated around Sheila Fitzpatrick and Ronald Suny. The three main themes to emerge from the work of these historians and others influenced by them have been: (1) empire/nationality/borderlands/regions; (2) identity/subjectivity; and (3) dimensions of state terror and the Gulag previously understudied or unknown.

After providing brief summaries of this literature and the claims made therein, I offer six thematic threads of new work less dependent on or derived from these two schools and primarily situated chronologically and thematically in the post-Stalin era. These threads are: (1) the public and the private; (2) consumption and material culture; (3) Soviet space as transnational or transcultural; (4) migration; (5) youth and youth culture; (6) processing the Brezhnev era. This interpretive reflection on recent Anglophone historiography concludes with some remarks on the blurring of national or linguistic-based distinctions among historiographies but also the survival of their distinctiveness.