Shaping the past and comprehending the present: The World of Russian émigré textbooks in the 1920s – 1930s

Abstract

Russian emigration after the 1917 revolution gave birth to a special culture of memory and a specific historical consciousness. These processes were greatly influenced by the dramatic events of the recent past (the First World War, the Revolution of 1917, the Civil War and the Exodus), which took on the character of historical trauma. The article focuses on how Russian émigré scholars tried to interpret complex issues of the Russian past and present in history textbooks. In this article, the textbooks by three historians (E. F. Shmurlo, L. M. Sukhotin and R. Yu. Wipper) are analyzed. The author of the article attempts to understand how these scholars assessed the Russian imperial past, including expansion, and how they explained the reasons for the Revolution and the collapse of statehood in 1917.