History, Politics and Political Culture: Thoughts on the Role of Historiography in Contemporary Russia

Abstract

This paper considers the roles of professional history and popular historical consciousness in historical change. Firstly, it sketches the evolution of history-writing during the final years of the Soviet Union and the rapidly changing environment of post-Soviet Russia, developing some theoretical perspectives on the destabilisation of the ‘ecological’ balance of political culture, its potential societal consequences, and the processes of structural and cultural adaptation to new environmental conditions. The core of the paper, the second section, concerns itself with the historian’s role in the reconstitution of social memory. A detailed consideration of West German historiographical controversies concerning the interpretation of Nazism helps to elucidate the political and scholarly problematic of re-interpreting Russia’s Soviet past. In brief conclusion, the third section shifts the focus from problems of systemic change to problems of continuity, again referring to the experience of Germany, this time after re-unification, to suggest a set of factors hindering consensual cultural development in post-Soviet Russia.