History between Politics and Public: Historiography, Collective Memory, and the “Archival Revolution” in Russia

Practices of collective memory were a major social force leading to the demise of the former USSR and the birth of the Russian Federation. Memory came to play such an important role because "filling in the blank spots" in the regulated and ideologized official versions of the Soviet past became both a cultural frame and a motivational impulse to political opposition. In this review essay, I address the relationship between different societal spheres, each confronted with the Soviet past, that had once been more or less mingled into one hegemonically controlled party-state complex: historiography, politics, and the public sphere. I argue that in the Russian Federation today, as in the Soviet Union under communism, historiographical discourse is decisively shaped by extra-scholarly forces. Since the late 1980s, a deregulated public sphere has taken the place of politics as the main influence on the historical profession. The dynamics of both politics and the emergent public sphere have put serious obstacles in the way of a historiographical andpublic reckoning with a difficult and ambiguous Soviet past.

When approaching these issues, it is helpful not only to consider the processes and events of the last 15 years, but also to take a look at Soviet historiography as it developed from Stalin until Gorbachev. This is done in Joachim Hösler's nuanced account of the Soviet historical discipline. Hösler has written a history of the methodology and the organizational structures of the Soviet historical profession as they were embedded in the "sociopolitical landscape" (5). In order to describe changes in the organizational features of Soviet historiography, Hösler pays close attention to changes in staff of the editorial boards of Voprosy istoriiand Istoriia SSSR. Furthermore, Hösler's approach implies not only tracing the impact of the party on historians, historical publications, and institutions in the post-Stalin period, but also considering the interaction between academic and public discourse during perestroika. Hösler bases his monograph primarily on major historical journals, but, less systematically, he also relies on other publications, written and oral statements by historians, and archival materials.

The author's treatment of three major periods in the development of Soviet historical scholarship – destalinization (1953–1970), "routine and retardation" (1970–1986), and upheaval (1987–1991) – makes a significant contribution to the literature on the politics of history after Stalin. ¹The major contention of the first section of Hösler's book is that destalinization in Soviet historiography began as early as 1953 and met with major obstruction after Khrushchev's secret speech in 1956 (15). The very early, if vague, signs of destalinization provoked opposition from conservatives, and it was this reaction that led to a forced change in the publication politics of Voprosy istoriiafter 1957. Hösler links this development to the political crises in Poland and Hungary, which equipped conservative Soviet historians with accusations (flouting the "principle of partiality" in evaluations of political developments) against their more liberal colleagues (48). The historical debates of the 1960s foreshadowed a final split between Marxist and non-Marxist (dissident) historians in the 1970s and 1980s. On the one hand, history was strengthened as a scholarly discipline with its own internal rules and practices; on the other hand, the individual historian was now expected to be a good "Soviet" historian as a matter of personal conviction (156–61). The result was structural pressure on historians, which only increased after Khrushchev's dismissal in 1964, to act as partisan Marxist-Leninists without obeying the direct commands of party and academic...