Stalinism: past or future for Belarus and Russia?

Abstract

Some twenty-five years ago, we witnessed the breakup of the Soviet Union, with the now-former Soviet republics gaining (or regaining) state sovereignty. That marked the end of the history of a country that had been preconceived as a state of a totally new type, hoped to be turned into the “Worldwide Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”. Researchers still use the term ‘post-Soviet’ in relation to those independent states, as to many of them the various issues and achievements of the Soviet past still bear some relevance for this day and age. In Belarus and Russia, the attitude of both the authorities and the public toward the Soviet past and Soviet history has mostly been a complicated one. This array of issues denitely incorporates the history of Stalinism in all its dimensions and ramications. Presently, the objective analysis of the historical experience of the Stalin period of the Soviet history is becoming, afresh, a matter of common civic signicance. It has become the primary objective of national historiographies to “develop new national histories” and alter the paradigms created in the Soviet years. The search for national self-identication is naturally accompanied by criticism of the previous historiographical model, which was intended to provide a historical rationale for co- existence within a single state. It is worth noting, in this regard, that historical science performs the function both of “a policy oriented toward the past” and of a science that shapes the future.