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.
“It Has Not Only Historical but also Political Interest”: Rossica in the USSR in 1929−1941
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2024-5-1
The article examines the representation of rossica (testimonies of foreign writers about Russia) by historians and Bolshevik ideologists in the socio-political context of the USSR in 1929−1941. Based on the material of archives, periodicals, introductions and prefaces to rossica publications, it is shown how scientists adapted historical material to the authorities’ ideas about the historical process and historical science. In 1929, the Archaeographic Commission began a project on the history of pre-Mongol Rus’, involving the publication of rossica. In 1930, after the Bolsheviks gained control over the Academy of Sciences, the new deputy chairman of the commission, the Bolshevik S.G. Tomsinsky, approved the publication of rossica as part of the History of the Peoples of the USSR project. Published between 1934 and 1937, the rossica monuments demonstrated the historical advantage of the socialist system over the capitalist one, which was based on colonialism and “Great Russian chauvinism”. In 1936, B.D. Grekov, a historian and enthusiast for the publication of rossica, changed his approach to rossica, emphasizing its “political” significance, presenting it as a source of history of Rus/Muscovy/Russia’s foreign policy relations. This led to the authorities using rossica to propagandise their foreign policy, for example, in the “historiographical wars” between the USSR and Nazi Germany in 1935−1939. However, at the turn of the 1930s−1940s, in the context of the “oblivion” of the Soviet-Nazi confrontation, the absence of new ideological paradigms, and the distancing of rossica from the History of the Peoples of the USSR project, S.A. Anninskiy, a Latinist historian specializing in translations of rossica in 1936−1941, experimented with new discourses in which the source could be published: from patriotic to traditional academic. The publication of rossica was interrupted by the Great Patriotic War and the post-war campaigns against “groveling before the West”. It was only after Stalin’s death that rossica began to be published without regard for the socio-political context. Thus, in the early 1930s, the authorities regarded rossica as one of the instruments of the global ideological struggle between the socialist and capitalist worlds. By the end of the decade, they saw it as a political tool for solving the real foreign policy goals of the USSR. This reflects Stalin’s desire to subordinate the humanities to practical tasks. Scientists who had been guided in their choice of sources for publication by constantly changing instructions from above, paradoxically found an opportunity for scientific experiments in the politically “stable” years of 1940−1941.
Publishing: 28/10/2024
The article has been received by the editor on 14/07/2024
How to cite: Kravtsova E.S. “It Has Not Only Historical but also Political Interest”: Rossica in the USSR in 1929−1941 // Historical Courier, 2024, No. 5 (37), pp. 11−29. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2024/ISTKURIER-2024-5-01.pdf]
The article was completed within the framework of the topic of the state assignment of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation “Society and Power in Russia in the 20th − Early 21st Centuries: Political Participation, Communication, Identity of Actors” (FWZM-2024-0008).
Links: Issue 5 2024
Keywords: Rossica; History of the peoples of the USSR; medieval studies and renaissance studies in USSR; B.D. Grekov; S.G. Tomsinskiy; S.A. Anninskiy; V.A. Bystryanskiy