Soviet Historical Science and Ideology: Post-Soviet Perception

The article discusses the perception of Soviet historiography in the post-Soviet period. Transformations of Russian society in the early 1990s raised the question of continuity in the relations of Soviet and post-Soviet science. The socio-political transformations associated with forced democratization caused the need to reassess a number of phenomena, which created a situation of internal contradiction in historical science. The conclusions of Soviet historical science on a number of scientific problems were, in fact, declared false, and its approaches unproductive, the scientific value of works published in the Soviet period was often carefully leveled or denied entirely by post-Soviet historians. A closed ideological framework is perceived as a constant in Soviet historical research. Control of party-state bodies over historical science is defined as "pervasive". The leitmotif in the description of works devoted to political history is an indication of their generalizing and superficial nature, schematism, fragmentation, repetition of theoretical positions of the Marxist-Leninist concept of history, and minimal novelty. The result of the "reappraisal of values" in historical science was an entire denial of positions of Soviet historiography. In the perception of historians themselves, history in the Soviet period was a "servant of an ideology". Liberal democracy did not have an apparatus of coercion like Marxism-Leninism had, but it continued to "write history" dictating new ideological guidelines to scholars, which made them critically approach the work of their predecessors. This can hardly be explained by the assumption that historical science got used to be ideologized and that history "seeks" an ideology for itself. Being part of reality, ideology also becomes part of research describing it, which should not be perceived as its flaw. The very fact that ideology had an impact on science in the USSR and the harmful consequences of this impact cannot be denied, but the total ideologization of Soviet historical science today is seen as a cultural myth generated by the Soviet epoch and perceived by the next one. However, this cultural myth had a great methodological importance for historical science. Using the experience of predecessors, post-Soviet historians aspired to objectivity, refused to obviously politicize research, tried to fill the gaps that formed as a result of the ideological vacuum, which became a significant stimulus for the development of science in the transition period.

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