“Our Provincial Life Has Its Shady Sides...”: the Conflict over the “New Direction” in Sverdlovsk in the Correspondence of V. Y. Krivonogov and N. M. Druzhinin

Abstract

The publication in 1973 in “Uralsky Rabochiy” of an article by the Sverdlovsk historians F. P. Bystrykh (1902—1976) and V. Y. Krivonogov (1911—1977), in which they severely criticized the collection “Questions of the History of Capitalist Russia. Problems of Multiformity” (1972), was one of the important events connected with the defeat of the so-called “new direction” in Soviet historical science. Historiographers analysing the publication of Bystrykh and Krivonogov establish their motivation primarily by external circumstances. In the present article we propose to turn to the study of ego-documents for the reconstruction of personal motives that may have led a Soviet historian to address the ideological criticism of his academic opponents as well as to identify new circumstances in the history of relations between historians in Sverdlovsk in the 1950s and early 1970s which led to the conflict over the “new direction”. For this purpose, the article analyzes the extensive set of letters from Krivonogov to his teacher Academician N. M. Druzhinin (1886—1986) found in the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences.