International congress of historical sciences in Oslo as a communicative platform for soviet and emigrant scientists

The VI International Congress of Historical Sciences was opened in the Norwegian capital in August 1928. Soviet and emigrant scientists took part in the work of it. The forum in Oslo was the first experience of direct communication between the representatives of the national historical science school who found themselves on different sides of the state border. Researchers have touched this topic either as fixation of the fact of the participation of Russian historians in forums, or in biographical narratives as the context of the activity of a specific representative of the historical community, or as an illustration in the works devoted to studying the procedure for organizing overseas business trips to the USSR. Purpose of the present paper is to analyze the scientific communication of soviet and emigrant scholarly historians at the Congress in Oslo. As sources in this study, a congress program was used the programme of that forum incliding information on the organizing committee, the composition and number of delegations, reports at plenary and sectional meetings, “informal” events; articles in soviet and emigre publications dedicated to the forum; documentary of soviet scientific institutions; documents of personal origin of the participants of the event. The author of the article established the communication actors of this forum. They are soviet delegation that was represented both “Marxist” (M.N. Pokrovsky, M.N. Lukin, V.V. Adoratsky, S.M. Dubrovsky, etc.), and “bourgeois” historians (E.A. Kosminsky, V.I. Picheta). Emigrants were “dissolved” in US delegations (M.I. Rostovtsev), Poland (F.F. Zelinsky), Yugoslavia (A.K. Elachich), Germany (E.M. Kulisher), Czechoslovakia (P.N. Savitsky) and France (A.M. Kulisher, P.P. Gronsky). Furthermore the author detailed such communicative events as the “protest” of M.I. Rostovtsev in the Norwegian edition “Aftenpost”, as well as its evaluation by soviet and emigrant scientists, a debate on the reports of soviet scientists, etc. The factors that influenced the communication process were installed. There are the methodological and political attitudes of actors, their emotional willingness to communicate; reformatting the communicative field as a world science, in connection with a change in foreign policy factors; events in the Academy of Sciences of the USSR; organization of the congress and established academic standards of communication. Despite the fact that in scientific terms the interaction of soviet and emigrant scientists was unproductive, the less the results of this study are important for further study of the institutional aspect of the Russian historiographic process in the 1920s-1930s.

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