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Russia's Twentieth Century in History and Historiography
Author(s) -
Fitzpatrick Sheila
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
australian journal of politics and history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.123
H-Index - 23
eISSN - 1467-8497
pISSN - 0004-9522
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8497.00103
Subject(s) - backwardness , historiography , russian history , vanguard , soviet union , modernization theory , socialism , political science , russian studies , economic history , history , period (music) , world history , ancient history , law , politics , communism , philosophy , economic growth , economics , aesthetics
Discussions of Russian history have frequently been marked by a preoccupation with the question of Russian ‘backwardness’, or, during the Soviet period from 1917 to 1991, with its obverse: the claim of the Soviet Union to play a vanguard role in world history. This paper offers a critical survey of twentieth‐century Russian and Soviet history, and of its often highly politicised historiography, in the light of these debates. The extent to which the Soviet ‘building of socialism’ represented a project of modernisation will be considered, along with differing interpretations of this project by both Western and post‐Soviet Russian historians. While the work of the new generation of post‐Soviet historians promises substantive advances in our knowledge of the Soviet past, it is suggested here that debates on Russia's past are once again being overshadowed by old concerns about Russia's backwardness vis‐à‐vis the West.