| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Roger D. Markwick. Rewriting History in the Soviet Russia: The Politics of Revisionist Historiography, 1956–1974. Foreword by Donald J. Raleigh. New York: Palgrave. 2001. Pp.xx, 327.

As is well known, perestroika and the collapse of the USSR swept away decades of dogma in Soviet history writing. Roger D. Markwick's densely argued monograph looks at the harbinger of that profound crisis in Russian historical scholarship. It examines the relationship between "revisionist" trends in Soviet history writing that were beginning to appear a few years after Joseph Stalin's death and the rise of a new generation of the Russian intelligentsia in the 1960s. What happened, avers the author, is that the two began to merge: revisionist historians became not only advocates of new (and sometimes not so new) historiographical theories but also the embodiment of an intelligentsia tradition that proclaimed itself the conscience of the nation by adopting a critical stance to the status quo. In situating revisionist historians squarely within the context of the intelligentsia, Markwick suggests that revisionism represented a kind of legalized (if not legitimized) dissent—a form of dissent that, by challenging established readings of the past, ultimately threatened the legitimacy of the party elite. The political elite's crushing of this revisionist-intelligentsia cohort under Leonid Brezhnev contributed to the explosion of discontent and disillusionment in the 1980s and the subsequent collapse of the party-state. . . .

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