Traces of the “New Direction” in the Soviet Historical Studies on the Pages of Samizdat

Abstract

In the chronicle of the Historical Faculty of Gorky Ural State University (now Ural Federal University), which is going to celebrate its 80 th anniversary in 2018, there is a dramatic page, confirming the modern theory of “mental pluralism” of Soviet people. In this case, it concerns ideas that gave rise to a “new direction” in historical studies in the 1960s and 1970s. Scholarly discussions about the peculiarities of the multi-structural nature of the socioeconomic structure of pre-revolutionary Russia based on the studies of Moscow scholars (A. L. Sidorov, I. F. Gindin, K. N. Tarnovsky, L. M. Ivanov, P. V. Volobuev, M. Ya. Gefter, etc.) and Ural scholars (V. V. Adamov, T. K. Guskova, P. A. Vagina, L. V. Olkhovaya, etc.) faced harsh criticism and accusations of academic inconsistency ignoring the Leninist analysis of the said issues, and the understatement of Russia’s readiness for a proletarian revolution. Found in the Open Society Archive (Budapest, Hungary) whose collection of Soviet samizdat amounts to several thousand items, the document published below reflects the reaction of dissident society to this historiographical situation unusual for the late Soviet research. An article entitled Issues of Capitalist Russia was published in 1974 in the Zemlya , a journal imbued with Russian national ideology. The main character of the article is Head of the Department of the USSR History of the Pre-Soviet Period, Ural State University, Vladimir V. Adamov, the inspirer and editor of the disgraced collection of articles Issues of the History of Capitalist Russia. Problems of Multi-Structurality , which was published in Sverdlovsk in 1972.