Voprosy Istorii Research Articles

Hronika Velikoj Pobedy (1941–1945) 22 iyunya 1941 g.

“Voprosy Istorii” history journal presents documents within our Chronicle of the Great Victory (19411945). The current issue contains documents related to the situation on the Southwestern Front on June 22,1941. This is the operational summary No. 01 on the situation at 22:00. It was signed by the Chief of Staff of the Southwestern Front, Lieutenant General M.A. Purkaev and the head of the operational department of the Southwestern Front, Major General I.Kh. Bagramyan. The second document is an operational summary of the Air Force Headquarters on the situation in the area of responsibility of the Air Force Command. It was signed by the Chief of Staff of the Front Air Force, Colonel N.A. Tygrebert and the head of the operational department of the Front Air Force Headquarters, Major S.A. Vladimirov. The documents are contained in Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.

Hronika Velikoj Pobedy (1941–1945) 22 iyunya 1941 g. «Protivniku udalos' na otdel'nyh napravleniyah dostich' chastnogo uspekha…»

“Voprosy Istorii" history journal presents two documents within our Chronicle of the Great Victory (1941-1945). The first one is operational summary No. 01 on 22.06.1941 of the Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army, Army General G.K. Zhukov. In it, he reported the position of the troops at 10:00 a.m. on the first day of the Great Patriotic War on the Northern, Northwestern, Western, Southwestern fronts and on the Soviet-Romanian border. The second one is operational summary No. 01 of the Chief of Staff of the 9th Army, Major General MV Zakharov, on the situation on the Soviet-Romanian border at 9 a.m. on June 22. The documents are contained in Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.

Stanovlenie diplomaticheskoj sluzhby Velikogo knyazhestva Moskovskogo XV v.: k harakteristike otechestvennoj i zarubezhnoj istoriografii nauchnoj problemy

In the publication, the author presents an analysis of the domestic and foreign historiography of the topic from the 18th century - the period of awakening interest in the formation of Russian statehood in Russian science - to the present, which is generalizing. It is a logical continuation of the author's publication “The formation of the diplomatic service of the Grand Duchy of Moscow in the XV century: to characterize the sources of a scientific problem” (Voprosy Istorii. 2024. No. 1).

P.B. Umansky as a Scholar and Pedagogue: The Origins of American Studies in Kazan

Petr Borisovich Umansky (1930–1993), a distinguished scholar and Kazan University lecturer in the latter half of the 20th century, stands out as a key figure in the Kazan school of world history and American studies in Russia. After graduating from university in 1952, he was mentored by another famous Soviet historian, G.R. Levin. In 1962, he defended his Сandidate’s dissertation titled “F. Douglas and the abolitionist movement in the United States between the 1830s and 1850s” at the Leningrad State Pedagogical Institute. He later became widely recognized as the founder of the study of American historiography of the War of Independence. His works were featured in the publications of Kazan University and major central journals like “Novaya i Noveishaya Istoriya”, “Voprosy Istorii”, and “Istoriya i Istoriki”. He also actively participated in various scientific gatherings, such as the First All-Union Historiographical Conference and the First Symposium of Americanists in Moscow. At Kazan University, P.B. Umansky played a vital role in shaping the school of researchers specializing in American studies. Many of his former students now teach at his alma mater and continue to pass down their knowledge to new generations of historians. With a career spanning from the 1950s until his death, P.B. Umansky was widely hailed as one of the top international lecturers in Tatarstan. The article is supplemented with the memoirs of the historian’s son, E.P. Umansky.

Eshche raz o rannej etnicheskoj istorii moldavan

The purpose of this article is to supplement our two previous publications on the early ethnogenesis of Moldovans (Voprosy Istorii. 2020. No. 1; 2021. No. 6-1). Continuing the study of this topic we found several more works that introduce significant refinements to the previously cited works. The introduction of fragments of these books and articles into scientific circulation allows to expand the historiographical study of the problem.

The Development of Russian History of Technology in the 20th Century

On the 28th of February, 1932, the General Assembly of the USSR Academy of Sciences adopted a resolution on the reorganization of the History of Knowledge Commission (KIZ) into the Institute for the History of Science and Technology (IINT) of the USSR Academy of Sciences. The past 90 years have demonstrated scientific and practical importance of the new discipline, history of science and technology. Its history-of-technology component has played an important role in the development of this discipline. The article analyzes the path traveled by the history of technology as well as the most important results in engineering and technology, obtained both by the IHST researchers and their colleagues from other research and educational institutions. Considerable attention in the article is given to the early period of formation of the history of science. The impact of difficult Soviet prewar realities on science in general and on the tragic fate of IINT (the arrest of its director, N. I. Bukharin, invectives addressed to the Institute, and its shutting down) is analyzed. The author emphasizes that, during the period under study, the history of technology community continued with their research, and points out to the works of B. L. Bogoslovskii, V. V. Danilevskii (also spelled Danilevsky), A. A. Radtsig, S. T. Strumilin, and others. The organizational and administrative revival of the history of technology dates back to 1942 and is reviewed in the context of historical meeting of V. L. Komarov, President of the USSR Academy of Sciences, with I. V. Stalin, the head of state, during which it was deemed advisable to reinstate the Institute for the History of Science (IIE). What distinguished the history of technology in the second half of the 20th century was its steady, systemic development. Everything was changing: the configuration and balance of research priorities, methodological toolkit and the forms of studies, standards and themes of scientific work, staff, social context, and funding. The collective and individual monographs alternated as predominant forms of scientific output. The diversity of genres correlated closely with staff dynamics. The author focuses on the important role of paternalism of the foremost Soviet scientists in the history of technology. One of the main factors of disciplinary stability was the pursuit of new knowledge. In this context, the main theme clusters and their ideologists were: factographic, including field, studies (V. V. Danilevskii); current scientific and technological revolution (S. V. Shukhardin); technical sciences (Yu. S. Meleshchenko); and theoretical and methodological matrix of the technical world (I. Ya. Konfederatov). The author writes about today’s marketplace realities with undisguised worry for the future of the discipline. The sources used in this article are collective and individual monographs on the history of machines and technical sciences, publications in the journal “Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki” (Studies in the History of Science and Technology), as well as the written and audio archive of the author who has been working at S. I. Vavilov Institute for the History of Science and Technology of the USSR (Russian) Academy of Sciences since 1971.

Party Political Course and Ukrainian History in the USSR

This article offers contextual analysis of unpublished editorials from one of the issues of Voprosy Istorii academic journal, published in 1955. The issue focuses on the problems of studying the history of Ukraine and was written by N. L. Rubinstein, an outstanding Soviet historian and historiographer. The historian discusses the problems related to the history of Ukraine between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the formulation of the academic heritage of pre-revolutionary historians and the “school” of M. S. Grushevsky. The need to overcome a dependence on the conceptual heritage of “Ukrainian bourgeois-nationalist historiography”, which, according to the historian, practically leveled the achievements of Ukrainian scholars, is a red thread through the article. A kind of “familiar track effect” caused significant gaps in the study of Ukrainian 17th- and 18th-century history, as well as the dominance of negative assessments in understanding the process of integration of Ukraine into the Russian state. For the first time in Soviet historical science, the unpublished editorial voiced the need to overcome the monopoly on the study of Ukrainian history held exclusively by institutions of the Ukrainian SSR. In this regard, Rubinstein paid special attention to the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences, which, in his view, had to be transformed into a key organisational centre for future research. All this suggests a potential divide in the academic study of Ukrainian history in the USSR and its conceptual rethinking, since Rubinstein was highlighting existing research issues. Via the case study of the unpublished Rubinstein editorial, the author demonstrates how the production of academic texts and regulation of research in the USSR were closely intertwined with administrative academic positions and personal connections of Moscow academics and Ukrainian historians (sometimes informally). Under these conditions, the directives of the party leadership at the centre and in the provinces fell into a certain dependence on the internal organsation of the academic community. Existing personal connections opened the way for a kind of academic lobbyism. This kind of lobbying paved the way for the entry of controversial ideas, interpretations, and conceptions that did not fit into the existing ideological framework in the difficult political conditions of the day.

Prakticheskij opyt pervogo rossijskogo massovogo pereseleniya krest'yan v Ussurijskij kraj morskim putem (1882—1883 gg.)

This article is a continuation of the material devoted to the first parties of displaced persons and published in the journal “Voprosy Istorii” No. 1 of 2020. The authors focus on the practical implementation of the project of resettlement of peasants, their social and ethnic characteristics. In addition, the problems faced by the project organizers, as well as the degree of adaptation of various groups of migrants to new conditions, are considered.

Имя П. А. Столыпи на и его реформы в периодической печати в конце 80-х — начале 90-х годов ХХ века

The article analyzes the currents of view on the Stolypin agrarian reform that appeared in periodicals during the era of “perestroika”. These articles, published in 1990, were published in the journals “Voprosy Economiki” and “Voprosy istorii”, where the authors describe the activities of P. A. Stolypin and his agrarian reform. In the journal “Voprosy ekonomiki” the authors consider the economic concept of P. A. Stolypin and the periods of its formation, as well as the goals and results of the Stolypin agrarian reform. As a result, the authors of the articles positively assess the agricultural transformations of P. A. Stolypin and set him up as an example for modern reformers. In the journal Voprosy istorii, the authors are professional historians, they give a detailed description of the events in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century and therefore their assessment of the activities of P. A. Stolypin’s are more objective and less enthusiastic. It is noted that in the era of “perestroika” in public opinion, the name of P. A. Stolypin became popular, as many believed that, relying on the experience and practice of the Stolypin transformations, it is possible to overcome the crisis phenomena that had accumulated in the country by the mid-80s of the twentieth century.

The Concept of a ‘Peasant War’ in Soviet and Western Historiography of the ‘Troubles’ in Early 17th-Century and Early 20th-Century Russia

The concept of ‘peasant wars’ in 17th- and 18th-century Russia was borrowed by Soviet historians from Friedrich Engels’ work on the Peasant War in Germany. The four peasant wars of the early modern period were identified as the uprisings led by Ivan Bolotnikov (1606-1607), Sten’ka Razin (1667-1671), Kondratiy Bulavin (1707-1708) and Emel’ian Pugachev (1773-1775). Following a debate in the journal Voprosy istorii in 1958-1961, the ‘first peasant war’ was generally considered to encompass the period c.1603-1614 rather than simply 1606- 1607. This approach recognised the continuities in the events of the early 17th century, and it meant that the chronological span of the ‘first peasant war’ was virtually identical to that of the older concept of the ‘Time of Troubles’. By the 1970s the term, ‘civil wars of the feudal period’ (based on a quotation from Lenin) was sometimes used to define ‘peasant wars’. It was recognised by Soviet historians that these civil wars were very complex in their social composition, and that the insurgents did not exclusively (or even primarily) comprise peasants, with Cossacks playing a particularly significant role. Nevertheless the general character of the uprisings was seen as ‘anti-feudal’. From the 1980s, however, R.G. Skrynnikov and A.L. Stanislavskiy discarded the view that the events of the ‘Time of Troubles’ constituted an anti-feudal peasant war. They preferred the term ‘civil war’, and stressed vertical rather than horizontal divisions between the two armed camps. Western historians, with the notable exception of the American historian Paul Avrich, generally rejected the application of the term ‘peasant wars’ to the Russian uprisings of the early modern period, regarding them as primarily Cossack-led revolts. From the 1960s, however, Western scholars such as Teodor Shanin (following the American anthropologist Eric Wolf) began to use the term ‘peasant wars’ in relation to the role played by peasants in 20th-century revolutionary events such as those in Russia and China. Some of these Western historians, including Avrich and Wolf, used the term not only for peasant actions in the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, but also for peasant rebellions against the new Bolshevik regime (such as the Makhnovshchina and the Antonovshchina) that Soviet scholars considered to be counter-revolutionary banditry. The author argues that, in relation to the ‘Time of Troubles’ in early 20th-century Russia, the term ‘peasant war’ is not entirely suitable to describe peasant actions against the agrarian relations of the old regime in 1905 and 1917, since these were generally orderly and non-violent. The term is more appropriate for the anti-Bolshevik uprisings of armed peasant bands in 1918-1921, as suggested by the British historian Orlando Figes.

Beyond the humanities: a comparison of two bibliometric crises in the domain of Soviet biological periodicals (1917–1950)

A bibliometric crisis is defined as a more or less marked decline of basic bibliometric indicators interrupting a preceding period of stable growth or stagnation. The crises of 1930–1931 and 1941–1942 revealed from previous studies [Kozhevnikov, A. B., & Petrosova, A. G. (1991). Nauchnaia periodika v SSSR (1917–1949): kolichestvennyi analiz [Scientific periodicals in the USSR (1917–1949): A quantitative analysis]. Voprosy istorii yestestvoznaniya i tekhniki (4), 44–50] were analyzed in depth on the basis of data on the publication of biological serials in the USSR from 1917 through 1949. A set of more detailed data on selected journals covering the period from 1921 through 1958 are also analyzed. It is shown that even though the scale of the decline in 1930–1931 was comparable to that of 1941–1942, the fine structure of the two crises and their impact on the continuity of the corpus of biological serials were different. The application of the logistic growth model to the analysis of the publication of scholarly serials is discussed. It is argued that, for the purposes of our analysis, momentary data are more indicative than cumulative ones. The analytic framework developed within this project can be applied to other domains of the system of scholarly and scientific periodicals as more data sets will be compiled.

От Пикуля до “Круглого Стола”

SUMMARY: In his essay Evgenii Anisimov recalls his participation in perestroika. In particular, he discusses the way in which history was politicized and drawn into public debates, and the way in which professional historians attempted to cope with this situation. The narrative covers the time from the upsurge of interest in the works of Soviet writer Valentin Pikul’ to the roundtable in Voprosy Istorii in 1988.

The Bolshevik Rejection of the “Revolutionary Christ” and Dem′ian Bednyi’s The Flawless New Testament of the Evangelist Dem′ian

The Bolshevik Rejection of the “Revolutionary Christ” and Dem′ian Bednyi’s The Flawless New Testament of the Evangelist Dem′ian Avram Brown (bio) Avram Brown Dept. of Russian University of California at Davis One Shields Avenue Davis, CA 95616 USA avbrown@msn.com Avram Brown Avram Brown is Lecturer in Russian at the University of California at Davis. He received his Ph.D. in 1998 from the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California at Berkeley with a dissertation on “Modernist Apocrypha: Contexts of the Gospel Plot in Russian Modernism.” One of his primary research interests is the theme of “theology by other means” in cultural history. He is currently working on a study of Viktor Pelevin. Footnotes 1. Wilhelm Dilthey, Hermeneutics and the Study of History, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 252. 2. Nikolai Nikolaevich Fatov, “Evangelie ot Dem′iana,” Molodaia gvardiia, no. 1 (1926), 247. 3. “O sovetskoi obshchestvennosti,” editorial in Pravda, 2 July 1924, 1. 4. The phrase is from Andrei Platonovich Platonov, Chevengur (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1988), 216. 5. Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972), 14: 64. 6. See the survey by John C. Cort, Christian Socialism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988). 7. James H. Billington, Mikhailovsky and Russian Populism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 120. See also Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia, trans. Francis Haskell (New York: Knopf, 1960); Boris Samuilovich Itenberg, “Revoliutsionnye narodniki i voprosy religii,” Voprosy istorii religii i ateizma 11 (Moscow: Izdatel′stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1963), 293–305. A “Christian” belief system of populism – especially as a Feuerbachian, allegorical construct – is foregrounded by Billington and (with regard to certain figures) Venturi, while Itenberg favors a model of atheists propagandizing “under a religious shell” as a mere tactic. Adam B. Ulam presents interesting considerations of religious and psychological motivations of populist revolutionaries in his In the Name of the People: Prophets and Conspirators in Pre-Revolutionary Russia (New York: Viking Press, 1977). 8. The underground publisher Aleksandr Vasil′evich Dolgushin (1848–85), for example, organized his proclamation “Russkomu narodu” (1873) as a virtual sermon, anathematizing the tax system as a violation of Matthew 17: 24–26 and threatening “woe to the scribes and Pharisees” (the land-owners). Al′fred Al′fredovich Kunkl′, Dolgushintsy (Moscow: Vsesoiuznoe obshchestvo politkatorzhan, 1932), 217–19. 9. During his four-year incarceration in the Peter and Paul Fortress, the future Narodnaia volia executive committee member Lev Aleksandrovich Tikhomirov (1852–1923), echoing Paul imprisoned at Rome, penned a free translation of 2 Timothy 4 (“Iz apostola Pavla”). Similarly, in her prison lyric “My byli tam. Ego raspiali,” the labor organizer Sofiia Illarionovna Bardina (1853–83) held out the example of the disciples’ retreat from danger as something that must not be repeated by herself or her comrades. These lyrics are available in Solomon Abramovich Reiser, ed., Vol′naia russkaia poeziia vtoroi poloviny deviatnadtsatogo veka (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1959), 333, 299. 10. Vera Nikolaevna Figner, “Studencheskie gody,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Glavlit, 1929), 5: 98. 11. Anon., Mogila russkikh bortsov: Shliussel′burgskaia krepost′ (Carouge-Geneve: M. Elpidine, 1900), 17. 12. Vera Nikolaevna Figner, Zap echatlen nyi trud: vospominaniia (Moscow: Mysl′, 1964), 2: 37. 13. Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, Oeuvres, ed. James Guillaume (Paris: P.-V. Stock, 1895), 3: 43, 114–15. Bakunin’s Jesus seems inspired by his mentor, the French anarchist/socialist Pierre J. Proudhon (1809–65). In his What Is Property? (1840), Proudhon hailed the “Word of God,” who confronted Rome, “went about proclaiming everywhere that the end of the existing society was at hand,” and “open[ed] the abyss of revolutions,” but whose revolutionary “truth … did not survive the age of the apostles.” Proudhon, What is Property? trans. Benjamin R. Tucker (New York: Dover, 1970), 28–30. 14. Friedrich Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” (1880) in Karl F. H. Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, trans. Richard Dixon, et al. (New York: International Publishers, 1975–), 24: 297, 306, 305. I hasten to add that I am aware of the voluntarist reading of Marxism, and that Marx and Engels themselves can be read...

Национальный вопрос во внутренней политике царизма (XIX-начало XX вв.) по В. С. Дякин (review)

Рецензии 568 to address a wide range of issues that may have contributed to the failure of Ukraine to achieve economic growth. Among many other things, the author examines the overall state of economic affairs, tests the validity of the argument that Ukraine suffered from Russian exploitation, and assesses the degree of rent-seeking in Ukraine. The article expands dramatically the narrow conceptual focus of the book by bringing to reader’s attention such issues as the quality of state administration, nature of Ukraine’s ruling elite and rentseeking mechanisms developed in Ukraine. The book may be of interest for scholars, policymakers and development practitioners who may benefit from the experiences of Ukraine’s complex way of reforms. Seymour BECKER В. С. Дякин. Национальный вопрос во внутренней политике царизма (XIX-начало XX вв.). Санкт-Петербург: ЛИСС, 1998. 1042 с. Предментный и именной указатели. Valentin Semenovich Diakin (1930-1994) is an historian well known in the West, the Soviet Union , and today's Russia for his many scholarly monographs, published over three decades, on the relationships between the autocracy, the bourgeoisie, and the nobility, particularly in the period between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. The volume under review is an unusual one, lying somewhere between an author's notes and a book – the book that Diakin was unable to complete before his untimely death. I. V. Lukoianov, one of the volume 's editors, describes it as an “analytic abstract of archival materials , primarily from the fondy of the Russian State Historical Archive ... mainly intra- and interdepartmental correspondence, journals of meetings, memoranda, certificates , draft laws... most of all, documents representing the views of central, and partly local, authorities on various aspects of nationality policy... practically nothing on the history of relations among natio- Ab Imperio, 3/2001 569 nalities, and little on the history of national movements.” (p. 11) The extracts from such documents that constitute the volume are characterized by Lukoianov as an “intermediate link between a mere abstract and an author's first draft. Often found in them are the author's evaluations , remarks, establishment of linkages among separate facts, and exposure of hidden tendencies in policy.” (Ibid.) All abstracts contain full citations (fond, opis', delo, and list); unless labeled as from GARF, the documents abstracted are from RGIA. Excerpts from the originals are in quotation marks. The volume will consequently serve as a very useful guide to the archives for future researchers. The number of pages devoted to various geographic regions varies as follows: Caucasus 39% (mostly on general matters and Georgia, little on Armenia or Azerbaidzhan specifically ), Western gubernii including Ukraine 16%, Central Asia 13% (much more on Turkestan than the Steppe oblasti), Poland 11%, Volga region 4%, Siberia 2%. General questions on nationality policy occupy 15% (more than half of this concerns Muslims and Jews). Chronologically , the documents range from the 1860s to 1916, but only a minority are from the period before the latter 1890s. Diakin's fifty-page overview of his topic, “The Nationalities Question in Tsarism's Domestic Policy in the 19th and Beginning of the 20th Centuries (Formulating the Problem ),” written in December 1993 for discussion in the Section on Modern Russian History, Institute of Russian History, St. Petersburg, is an appropriate and welcome introduction to the volume. The text of this essay, according to the editors, is closer to the author's original than that published in Voprosy Istorii, 1995, No. 9 and 1996, Nos. 11-12. Diakin's essay offers a rather pessimistic, as well as deterministic, view of Russia's nationalities problem . In his view, Ivan IV's conquest of Kazan was a “tragedy not only for the Tatar but also for the Russian people.” Without the incorporation of Kazan, Muscovy “would have remained more or less mononational and free from ethnic contradictions , and the energy of the Russian people would have been employed not for extensive colonization of huge expanses... but for the intensive mastery of their own lands. In that case the Russian state's economic, and consequently its social and political, development would have proceeded more rapidly , with a greater probability of escaping a revolution on the scale of 1917.” (p. 14) Surely this is too heavy a burden to be placed on one example of empire -building. Would not Russia's expansion to the west...

Current Problems of Historical Theory

The purpose of this round table is to enable the specialists gathered here to discuss freely their opinions on current problems in the theory and methodology of historical research. This is not our first attempt along these lines (the last was held on 29 October 1991; see Voprosy istorii, 1992, nos. 8-9). However, time in its onward rush is drawing historiography, too, into its vortex: traditional conceptions and assessments are dying, methodological paradigms that only recently seemed unshakable have fallen apart, and theories of the historical process that used to be rejected as unsound now appear in a new light. One feels an urgent need to return periodically to the discussion and interpretation of many theoretical-methodological problems that only yesterday were considered completely resolved.

Perestroika of the History of Technology and Science in the USSR: Changes in the Discourse

Perestroika of the History of Technology and Science in the USSR: Changes in the Discourse SLAVA GEROVITCH A great social reconstruction of Soviet society (perestroika) ended with the disappearance of the reconstructed object—the Soviet Union—in December 1991. Something else, however, was recon­ structed: people’s thinking—their attitude to socialism, to their his­ tory, and to themselves. Remarkable changes also emerged in Soviet research on the history of technology and science, both reshaping the thematic discourse and altering the methodological profile. Soviet scholarship in the history of technology and science evolved along the lines of the political and social evolution of Soviet society: from sincere and enthusiastic belief in Marxism to degeneration of the Marxist theoretical framework into an instrument of rhetoric. By the mid-1980s, the time of perestroika, this evolution had resulted in an internalist methodology of research, ideological servility, limita­ tions imposed on the sphere of discussion, and a scarcity of imagina­ tive analysis. The policy of openness (glasnost') led to the weakening of ideologi­ cal censorship and opened the doors of some previously inaccessible archives. New opportunities caused a drastic shift in the interests of Soviet scholars toward the recent history of Soviet technology and science. At the same time, the role of Marxist rhetoric began to de­ crease. Changes in research methodology developed more slowly, for they were touching deeper layers of the discourse. The process of Dr. Gerovitch received his Ph.D. from the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1992. He is currently working on his second doctorate in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, specializing in the his­ tory of cybernetics and artificial intelligence in Russia and the United States. He is very grateful to Professor Loren R. Graham, Professor Deborah K. Fitzgerald, Dr. Nikolai L. Krementsov, Dr. Robert C. Post, Dr. John M. Staudenmaier, and the refer­ ees of Technology and Culture for their helpful suggestions and constructive criticisms. He also expresses his thanks to Gregory Crowe and Gregory Clancey for their assis­ tance in the preparation of this article.© 1996 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040- 165X/96/3701-0005$01.00 102 History of Technology and Science in the USSR 103 revising dogmas and reevaluating historical attainments provoked a sharp methodological debate over fundamental issues concerning re­ lations of technology and science to a sociopolitical context. For some Soviet historians, mostly of the older generation, perestroika con­ sisted of merely changing heroes to villains and vice versa, while pre­ serving the traditional image of technology and science as a largely autonomous enterprise. For others, mostly young historians, technol­ ogy and science were seen as social activities deeply woven into the fabric of politics and culture. This difference stirred up traditional methodological presuppositions and caused an ongoing debate among proponents of internalist, externalist, and contextual styles. In this article, I will examine methodological, thematic, temporal, geographic, and disciplinary changes in the discourse of Soviet histo­ rians of technology and science, basing my study on a quantitative analysis of the content of the journal Voprosy Istorii Estestvoznaniia i Tekhniki (Problems in the History of Science and Technology, hereaf­ ter VIET] during the perestroika period, 1986-91. VIET is the major (and the only academic) Russian journal in this area.1 It is published in Moscow by the Institut Istorii Estestvoznaniia i Tekhniki (Institute for the History of Science and Technology, hereafter IIET), the lead­ ing Soviet (now Russian) institution in this held. A number of popular magazines publish articles on the history of technology and science as well, but they largely reflect the interests of the audience rather than the preferences of academics.1 2 The methodology and criteria of my study are similar to those used by John Staudenmaier in his analysis of the discourse of American historians of technology based on the content of Technology and Cul­ ture (hereafter T&C) from 1959 to 1980.3 For each article published in VIET for the period 1986—91,1 have recorded the same character­ istics Staudenmaier did for T&C: time and place references; method­ ological style (internalist, externalist, contextual); and function of hypotheses in argumentation (a priori, a posteriori). The...

Introduction

This issue of Russian Studies in History (RSH) presents the fourth and final installment of portraits of the Russian tsars, that is, biographical sketches of Russia's emperors and empresses that assess their reigns and place them in historical perspective. Russia's Romanov rulers needed to be rediscovered: for the most part, before the launching of perestroika Soviet historical writing neglected 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). The Gorbachev reform, however, threw open the past to debate and discussion, and in this new climate writers on public affairs, then professional historians reconsidered the lives and reigns of Russia's rulers. To counter the large volume of speculative writing about the past, the journal Voprosy istorii (Problems of History) enlisted 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.

Editor's Introduction

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.

A "Roundtable": The Role of the Orthodox Church in Russian History

In Moscow on November 15, 1989, the editors of the journal Voprosy istorii [Problems of History], the Publications Department of the Moscow Patriarchate, and the Moscow Theological Academy held a roundtable discussion of secular and church historians on the topic "The role of the Russian Orthodox church in Russian history." The leaders of the roundtable were the editor-in-chief of Voprosy istorii, corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences A.A. Iskenderov, and the chairman of the Publications Department of the Moscow Patriarchate, Metropolitan Pitirim of Volokolamsk and Iur'evo.

Chinese studies of Bukharin

ALTHOUGH CHINESE SCHOLARS have been studying Bukharin and his ideas from the beginning of the 1980s it is only recently that this endeavour has been brought to the attention of a wider public even in China itself. It was only with Bukharin's rehabilitation in the USSR that the high degree of Chinese interest in Bukharin began to be revealed. Several articles reviewing Bukharin's career and discussing his significance as a theoretician appeared in the Chinese press following Gorbachev's speech on the 70th anniversary of the October revolution in 1987.1 More recently the Soviet journal Voprosy istorii published a short report by Li Chuanglong on Bukharin studies in China, tracing their development from their origin in the 1920s to the present day. Li divides the history of the Chinese attitudes to Bukharin into three periods. The first period, encompassing the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s, was one in which Bukharin was regarded as an important 'party theoretician', and several of his writings were translated into Chinese. These included The ABC of Communism (written in conjunction with E. A. Preobrazhensky), The Theory of Historical Materialism, The Political Economy of the Leisure Class, Economics of the Transition Period and Imperialism and the World Economy.2 The second period extended from 1938 until the end of the 1970s and witnessed the extinction of Bukharin's popularity in China. The accusations made against him in the USSR were repeated by the Chinese and, as in the USSR, so in China, his writings were consigned to oblivion. According to Li, a new approach to Bukharin began to emerge at the end of the 1970s, and a fresh interest began to be shown in his works. This was prompted by the need to repair the damage caused to the Chinese economy and to Chinese society by the 'cultural revolution' and by the ultra-leftist policies previously pursued. These considerations caused Chinese scholars to look again at the Soviet experience, which had initially supplied them with their model for socialism.3 Many of these scholars, Li stated, had studied Bukharin's ideas 'in connection with elaborating the route to reform in China'.4 It is this link with the economic reforms, attested by Li, which gives the study of Bukharin in China a special importance as a subject for investigation. Li places the beginning of Bukharin's rehabilitation in China in 1980, with an article by the two scholars Ye Shuzong and Fu Jiurong entitled 'Bukharin Was Not the Organiser of the Revolt of the Left SRs'. He goes on to say that in the