Elena Sergeevna Kravtsova,
Candidate of Historical Sciences, Institute of History of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The Bolshevik Power in Search of the Historic Legitimation: Creation the Soviet Concept of Renaissance
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2021-6-3
The article examines the stages of the formation Soviet concept of the Renaissance in the context of interaction of Bolsheviks and intellectuals in the USSR in the first half of the 20th century. The article, on the materials of publications edited during the second half the 1920s – first half the 1930s, shows how scientists from the academic environment adapted the Marxist method to their research and adjusted Burckhardt’s conception of the Renaissance as the period of discovery of man and the world in the ideology of cultural construction of socialism. In the second half 1920s, A.V. Lunacharsky, an ideologist of the proletarian revolution, and A.K. Dzhivelegov, a positivist historian, connected modernity and the Renaissance in the context of social history. They concluded that a social group of the intelligentsia appeared during the Renaissance. Its professional duty remained unchanged: to create an ideology formalized in culture and legitimize the ruling class. In the first half of the 1930s, editions of the publishing house “Academia”, where Lunacharsky and Dzhivelegov worked together, offered the opportunity to build a parallel between the culture of the Renaissance and the culture of the Soviet Union. The era of Socialist construction was the next principal period after the Renaissance, when a new type of man emerged as a result of bolsheviks cultural politics. At this time, M.A. Gukovsky, a historian from the cultural and historical school of I.M. Grevs, under the protection of N.I. Bukharin, combined the concept of J. Burckhardt, the thesis of F. Engels about the Renaissance as one the most crucial stages in the history of science and the doctrine of K. Marx of socio-economic formations. He assumed that the socio-economic processes that determined the transitional essence of the Renaissance initiated a fundamental revolution in scientific knowledge at the end of the era. He declared the scientific and “technical” intelligentsia of the USSR as the ideological heir of the technicians of the Renaissance. The author concludes that A.K. Dzhivelegov and M.A. Gukovsky, on the one hand, and Bolsheviks, on the other hand, created conceptions of the Renaissance that legitimized the politics of the Bolsheviks. It was positioned as a natural result of the historical development of the “socio-economic basis”. Only in the second half 1950s, S.D. Skazkin revised this approach. He included the “ideological superstructure” in the field of historical research and opened up the opportunity for historians to study the culture of the Renaissance as a self-sufficient phenomenon.
Publishing: 28/12/2021
The article has been received by the editor on 15.03.2021
How to cite: Kravtsova E.S. The Bolshevik Power in Search of the Historic Legitimation: Creation the Soviet Concept of Renaissance // Historical Courier, 2021, No. 6 (20), pp. 41–58. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2021/ISTKURIER-2021-6-03.pdf]
Links: Issue 6 2021
Keywords: Medieval Studies and Renaissance Studies in USSR; the New Soviet Man; A.V. Lunacharsky; A.K. Dzhivelegov; M.A. Goukowski