Editor's Introduction

Abstract

This issue of Russian Studies in History continues our presentation of biographical portraits of the Romanov tsars, which we began to publish in the Fall 1991 and Winter 1991-92 numbers of the journal.1 From the 1930s until the outset of glasnost', a complex and mostly unfortunate fate befell biography as a genre of historical writing in the USSR. Unable to break out of the intellectual confines of Stalinist scholarship (sic?), the historical literature tended to neglect serious analysis of the country's past rulers with the exception of tsars Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, study of whom was often motivated by contemporary considerations. Perestroika, however, altered this situation. The reading public's rapidly shifting tastes and interests posed new challenges to practitioners of both popular and scholarly historical writing in Russia. Insatiably hungry for fresh accounts of the country's past, readers demanded answers to topics once taboo or discouraged. As their expectations rose, ferment within the historical profession itself brought about important changes in the country's major historical journals, which RSH has sought to chronicle. For example, in striving to recapture a readership that had lost interest in what professional historians had to say, the journal Voprosy istorii (Problems of History) solicited leading specialists to author historical portraits of both Russian tsars and Soviet commissars whose careers had been distorted and even patently falsified by Soviet historiography.