New Thinking about the Old Empire: Post-Soviet Reflections
Author(s)
Engelstein, Laura
Abstract
The writing of Soviet history has always been governed by the obvious questions: What kind of event was 1917 and what kind of political and social system emerged in its wake? Students of the Imperial era have often projected these same questions backwards, probing the character of the old regime for the causes of what followed. Reading the future in the tea leaves of pre-Soviet Russia inclined them to look for certain things and ignore others. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, if nothing else, changed the ending of the story. Russians had entered and exited the Communist era, just as Germans had produced their Nazi past and then put it behind them. Communism seemed less fated, less of a genetic flaw, since the same DNA had caused the bloody system to collapse without bloodshed. The final chapters, moreover, were yet to be written.
