Ural historians (the 1950s up to the 1980s) telling about political conflicts in the bolshevik party in the early years of the soviet system

About the author:

Valeriy M. Kruzhinov, Dr. Sci. (Hist.), Professor, Department of National History, Institute of History and Political Sciences, Tyumen State University; vm.kruzhinov@mail.ru

Abstract:

This article analyzes the controversial process of political conflicts in the Bolshevik Party in the early years of Soviet system as exemplified by the Ural historiography between mid-1950’s and mid-1980’s. It demonstrates that the criticism of the “personality cult” at the XX Communist Party Congress didn’t affect the Stalinist scheme of history of the inner struggle, and generalizations and conclusions of historians, which were different in a set of specific facts and arguments, resulted in absolutization of the destructive origin in the political conflict and interpreting it as a pathological deviation from the imaginary normal development. In these circumstances any oppositions of the Communists to the official orientation were connected with the “alien ideology” and emergence of “opportunistic” and “counter-revolutionary” groups, the defeat of which was associated with the victory of “Lenin orientation”. It has been specified that this version of inner-party struggle had deep social roots. Responding to the interests of the party-state elite, it allowed native historians to portray the development of the Soviet society as a forward movement, but increasingly found itself at odds with the real life.

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