Post-Soviet Russian Historiography on the Emergence of the Soviet Bloc

The Russian historiographical tradition—like its Western counterparts—is a complicated product of time and place; individual historians and their networks of collaborators, teachers, and students; pride in nation and fear of its insufficiencies. The politics of history are unmistakable, even if historians try as best they can to overcome their individual political involvements and points of view. It is in the nature of the enterprise that the choice of subject matter, the form of presentation, and the strength of the conclusions reflect historians' personal proclivities. This is neither good nor bad, simply a facet of the historical enterprise that cannot be ignored.

Post-Soviet Russian historiography is no different in this sense from its Soviet or late imperial forebears. To be sure, the strictures of Marxist-Leninist precepts—sometimes fiercely imposed on the work of Russian historians of the Soviet period, especially when the subject was the Soviet period, and sometimes relegated to ritualistic remarks at the start and end of works on the medieval or imperial periods—have been removed. In the post-Soviet period, the constant hammering of ideological demands has been replaced by political and epistemological chaos in everyday life, leaving Russian historiography groping for meaning. The tendency is often to hang fiercely on to facts and to produce histories that make the empiricism of the von Ranke school in German historiography seem mild in comparison. This is as true, by the way, for much of post-1989 historiography in Poland and Czechoslovakia as for Russia. It is especially true for those fields, like Soviet history or postwar East European history, in which Soviet-era scholarship was dominated by ideology and politics and in which serious archival research was almost impossible.

Even with the pervasiveness of heavy-handed "factology," Russian historiography remains as susceptible as any other to the influence of contemporary politics and social issues, as well as to the understanding of individual historians of the Soviet past and their relationship to it. In this essay, I would like to explore these problems from the fairly narrow perspective of recent Russian historiography of postwar Eastern Europe, the establishment of "People's Democracies," and the emergence of the Soviet bloc. In some cases, this historiography also overlaps with what has been called in the West the "new Cold War historiography," which is also being written from the Russian perspective.

Most of the new work on postwar Eastern Europe has been produced by two major centers, the Institute of Slavic Studies (Institut slavianovedeniia) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, under the direction of V. K. Volkov, a Balkan specialist and corresponding member of the academy, and, to a lesser extent, by the Institute of World History (Institut vseobshchei istorii) , also of the Russian Academy of Sciences, under the direction of Academician A. O. Chubar´ian. As a consequence, the work on postwar Eastern Europe produced in Russia is, with few exceptions, being carried out in Moscow. Part of the reason for this is that the major archives dealing with the Soviet role in postwar Eastern Europe are also located in Moscow, and here I mean primarily the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI, the pre-1953 party archives) and the Foreign Policy Archive of the Russian Federation (AVPRF, the Foreign Ministry archives). In addition to Moscow, Kyiv and Lwiw remain important centers for studying Eastern Europe. But there is little contact between academic centers in Russia and Ukraine. There is even less interaction with Moldovan scholars working on Romanian history or with scholars in the Baltic countries who write about Eastern Europe.

Russian East Europeanists did produce some scholarship on the postwar period during Soviet times, but only during perestroika did they have the opportunity to use archival sources, and then only episodically. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian historians, sometimes prompted by the aggressive work of their East European colleagues, began to investigate seriously the problems of the postwar era. The interest and resources of the Cold War International History Project, located at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, helped free up new...