Review: The Soviet Union in Post-Soviet Perspective
Author(s)
Daniels, Robert V.
Abstract
Three ways come to mind in which the moving present generates new perceptions of the past. One is the uncovering of new information about bygone events when old documents are discovered or rescued from custodial oblivion, governments’ archival secrets are released, and personal memoirs and recollections become available. A second source of historical renewal is the new perspective conferred by more recent developments. History looks very different when you know the outcome: old events take on a new hue; winners become losers and losers become winners; obscure people, movements, or countries come to center stage, and hitherto dominant features of history may seem to lose their importance. A third element in historical reconsideration is the quest to understand newly unfolding events. The new present demands that explanations be wrung out of a historical record that may have become stereotyped and conventionalized. At the extreme, the philosophy of postmodernism intrudes to contend that all history – like practically all knowledge – is a socially conditioned construct governed by the interests and needs of the new present; so let revisionism roll. nNo sharper instance has ever arisen of the forced reconsideration of history than that prompted by the 1991 collapse of Communist rule in the Soviet Union and the breakup of the Russian Empire. The potential impact of these events on the understanding of Russian history was monumental in all three aspects of historical revision. Oceans of documentary resources poured from once-secret repositories. The whole of the Soviet past came into a new light once its end point was known. And the debacle of 1991 put a new task to history, to support an explanation of that astounding event.nBooks reviewed in this article are
1.Dmitri Volkogonov, Autopsy for an Empire: The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime, ed. and trans. Harold Shukman (New York: Free Press, 1998);
2.Stephane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999);
3.Manfred Hildermeier, Geschichte der Sowjetunion, 1917-1991: Entstehung und Niedergang des ersten sozialistischen Staates (Munchen: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1998);
4.Robert Service, A History of Twentieth-Century Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997);
5.Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
