England and the Northern War in Soviet Historiography: 1935-1950

The middle and late 1930s were years of severe change for the USSR. Stalin, in an effort to destroy any effective political opposition, completed his great purge. The Soviets, seeking to avoid an international conflagration, attempted to build collective security as a bulwark against their avowed ideological enemies, the Nazis. As a consequence of these domestic and international developments and the Party's reaction to them, the historical profession experienced profound changes as well. The State,which had formerly demanded that historians write Marxist history based upon class-struggle and socio-economic analyses exclusively, now ordered historians to produce more traditional and nationalistic interpretations of the past within the context of Marxism.