Weber in the context of current events in Russia

Abstract

The past does not exist without the present. Historical science is not so much an accumulation of new data as a process of re-interpreting or re-reading the past by placing it in a different context. In many cases the new context is a change in the paradigms social scientists find significant. And today the collapse of the USSR and the resulting instability that has spread throughout most of Eurasia requires placing the Russian Revolution and Soviet regime in a different context, with a new point of departure. Here there are two types of interpretation. Both interpretations are interdependent, and it is not always easy to make out the differences be tween them. Yet the differences do exist. The first would look at the Rus sian Revolution and resulting Soviet regime as a distinct historical phenomenon, more or less separated from the Russian past. This segment of Russian history is taken from the Russian past and given international significance. And therein the collapse of the USSR is regarded as one of the most exciting and dramatic events in global history, acquiring the sig nificance of the Fall of the Roman Empire. Yet, one might suggest (and this was my personal feeling when I walked the streets of Moscow during the summer of 1995) that since the Soviet collapse, the Russian national "spirit," with its sense of tragedy and grandeur, its sense of being the mighty Third Rome, has become foreign to the nation which produced it and would, perhaps, find a more receptive environment in a different culture. Viewed from this perspective, the Russian Revolution (a term used broadly to include the incipient stages of the 1905 upheaval to the 1991 demise of the Soviet regime) is now seen as finally complete. In his work on the French Revolution Francois Furet, a leading contemporary French historian, has made explicit the differences between the French and Russian