A stage complete? 1937 in the history of Russia: Retrospective reflections

Abstract

© 2017, Ab Imperio. All rights reserved.The article offers a historiographic survey of Russian studies of Stalin’s Great Terror during the first fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991. After that, a new trend gradually became dominant, characterized by declining public interest in the topic, the state policy of Stalinism’s normalization, and increased restrictions on access to archives. The author argues that the initial impetus for studies of the Great Terror was the opening of Soviet archives in the early 1990s. The influences of this factor and the historiographic debates it engendered have lost their momentum, while state politics of history and historical memory prevent Russian historians from taking their research of the topic to a new level.