Between Organisational Difficulties and Conceptual Contradictions: The Preparation of World History by Soviet Researchers of the Late 1940s — Early 1960s

Abstract

The author of this article considers the specific challenges faced by Soviet historians when working on World History, a multi-author ten-volume publication that was supposed to showcase the Soviet historiography of the 1950s and present the history of humanity from the primitive age to modernity. The author of this article analyses several historical sources: office documents of the USSR Academy of Sciences, periodicals, scholarly texts on history, etc. The analysis of these documents makes it possible to reconstruct the main mechanisms of organising work on the multi-author publication and present the “construction” and “assembly” of the finalised text. The author divides the World History project development into two stages: the 1930s–1940s and the 1950s–1960s. In the 1930s–1940s, the organisational difficulties and conceptual differences hindered the finalisation of the book before the war. In early postwar years, this project was irrelevant, and the work was resumed in 1950. However, initially, the historians faced considerable obstacles when organising the process of work on the book. Certain changes took place after a special section was established at the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences which was responsible for the work on World History and carrying out special discussions meant to solve the problems in relating history. Therefore, in 1955–1965, all the ten volumes of this edition were published, and they received overall positive feedback from colleagues. However, the publication soon came to be entitled “irrelevant classics” and failed to spread far and wide among the Soviet population.

Keywords

• «всемирная история»
• советская историография
• институт истории академии наук ссср
• коллективные труды
• научное планирование