The USSR – Czechoslovakia Commission of Historians: Particularities of Creation and Activities in the 1960s

Abstract

In the article, the authors examine the history of the establishment and early years of the USSR – Czechoslovakia Commission of Historians. The relevance of the subject in question is conditioned, on the one hand, by the growing interest in the problem of the formation and functioning of “socialist science” in Russian and international historiography and, on the other hand, by the study of the methods and instruments by which the Soviet leadership reacted to the liberalisation of the political regime in Czechoslovakia and the search for ways to influence its intellectual elite. The authors draw on the archive collections of the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History, the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Archive of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In addition, they draw on sources of personal origin, contrasting official party documents with curious evaluative sketches. On the basis of these sources, the authors construct a study in two dimensions. The authors conclude that the creation of the commission was a political and ideological project, a circumstance which determined both the composition of the Soviet section of the institution and the topics chosen for joint studies. The Commission was established far too late to become an effective instrument for maintaining the prestige and authority of the Soviet Union even among Czechoslovak intellectuals, let alone the population at large.