| Titre | From divided consensus to creative disorder : Soviet history in Britain and North America* | |
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| Auteur | David Shearer | |
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Revue | Cahiers du monde russe |
| Numéro | volume 39, no 4, octobre-décembre 1998 | |
| Rubrique / Thématique | L'écriture de l'histoire |
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| Page | 559-591 | |
| Résumé anglais |
David Shearer, From divided consensus to creative disorder: Soviet history in Britain and North America. This article examines changes in the field of Soviet history in Great Britain and North America since the end of the Second World War. In the early decades of the Cold War, which followed the end of World War II, public opinion and historical writing about the Soviet Union were dominated by scholars who based their work on the political philosophy of nineteenth- century liberalism and historical positivism. These scholars equated Soviet socialism with German National Socialism as the archetypes of twentieth-century totalitarian dictatorships. Scholarly arguments of totalitarianism underpinned American Cold War policies of containment against the USSR.
In the 1970s and 1980s, a new generation of historians challenged Cold War liberal interpretations. Revisionist criticism grew out of social history and political radicalism in the history profession and on university campuses. Revisionism also had close ties to older leftist intellectual traditions. Since the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War in the early 1990s, new kinds of history have emerged in the field of Soviet studies, and both liberal and revisionist interpretations have declined in importance. New historical trends have been shaped by a combination of influences - the end of Soviet socialism, the revolution in archive access in the former USSR, and especially the interpretive and methodological revolution in the history profession. This article assesses the effect of these influences on new directions in research in Soviet history. Source : Éditeur (via Persée) |
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| Article en ligne | http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/cmr_1252-6576_1998_num_39_4_2541 |
