Athens and Apocalypse: Writing History in Soviet Russia

This chapter traces the early emergence of official Marxist historiography in the USSR under the leadership of M. N. Pokrovskii, and its 1930s’ Stalinization. The late 1930s had a formative impact on the Soviet historical profession. It was then that the official academic culture of research and teaching took shape, definitive scholarly works and textbooks were published, and important subterranean intellectual currents emerged. These years also ineradicably affected historians’ lives, thoughts, and memories. They marked the peak of mass arrests and executions, when history professors and students disappeared overnight without trace. Moreover, in the late 1930s, the Soviet historical profession was going through a conservative shift, under Joseph Stalin’s close supervision. Instead of theorizing, students were to study history in chronological sequence, learning names, dates, and events. The chapter then examines the further development of history-writing in the post-war era, before the Soviet experiment came to an abrupt end in the early 1990s.