Russia's Twentieth Century in History and Historiography

Discussions of Russian history have frequently been marked by a preoccupation with the question of Russian 'backwardness', or, during the Soviet period from 1917 to 1991, with its obverse: the claim of the Soviet Union to play a vanguard role in world history. This paper offers a critical survey of twentieth-century Russian and Soviet history, and of its often highly politicised historiography, in the light of these debates. The extent to which the Soviet 'building of socialism' represented a project of modernisation will be considered, along with differing interpretations of this project by both Western and post-Soviet Russian historians. While the work of the new generation of post-Soviet historians promises substantive advances in our knowledge of the Soviet past, it is suggested here that debates on Russia's past are once again being overshadowed by old concerns about Russia's backwardness vis-à-vis the West.