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Article: Russia's Twentieth Century in History and Historiography(*).
- Article from:
- The Australian Journal of Politics and History
- Article date:
- September 1, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 University of Queensland Press. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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In the early 1990s, Russians often spoke of the seventy-four years of Soviet power that ended in 1991 as a blank space in their history, a mistake, a detour, something that essentially hadn't happened. Now 1991 is referred to as the "collapse" or "falling-apart" (raspad), a word with almost purely negative connotations, even though people also tell opinion-pollers that they would not want to go back to the old order. Clearly what we have here is a high degree of disorientation and intellectual confusion, both about the present and the past. I will be focussing mainly on Russia's recent past -- the Soviet era, from 1917 to 1991. My main interest here is the different ways ...