The Decolonization of the History of USSR’s Peoples in Soviet Historiography (1920–1930)

Abstract

This article analyses the anti-colonial discourse in the Soviet historical science of the 1920s and 1930s. The work is based on both published materials and documents from the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It is demonstrated that the anti-colonial discourse was built as an antithesis to the pre-revolutionary state-national historical narrative and was based on a radical and critical class analysis. In the 1920s, a kind of “historiographical sweep” took place, when, using class analysis, the students of M. N. Pokrovsky revealed the “great power” and “colonial” ideologems of the classics of Russian historical science and their followers. The anti-colonial vector of Soviet historiography was embodied in the historiographical concept of the “history of the peoples of the USSR”. It was assumed that all the peoples of the USSR were to receive a full-fledged place in history. However, since the mid‑1930s, there has been a drift from radical revolutionary anti-colonialism towards a more statesmanlike ideology and the development of consolidating concepts. The turning point was the meeting of historians with Stalin in March 1934, after which the process of transition from the concept of “the history of the peoples of the USSR” to “the history of the USSR” was launched, which was fixed in the Short Course of the History of the USSR (1937) edited by A. V. Shestakov. The international context also played a significant role in curtailing anticolonial rhetoric, since there were fears that foreign policy opponents would use this to divide the peoples of the USSR. Historians of the “old school”, who advocated the return to the concepts of pre-revolutionary historiography, also played a certain role in the correction. In turn, these concepts fit better into the current ideological situation and found support in the Central Committee of the CPSU(b). The marginalization of anti-colonial discourse occurs during the war and postwar period.