Radically Changing the Historical Profession

The American cultural revolution of the 1960’s deeply affected our historical profession in much the same way as the earlier Russian cultural revolution altered their traditional institutions. The rigid cultural Marxism and speech codes predominant at American universities today appears related to the Russian pattern.

Bernhard Thuersam, Director

Cape Fear Historical Institute

www.cfhi.net

“It is also well known that Stalin in 1931 personally intervened in the historical debate with his letter to the editors of Proletarskaia revoliutsiia…the writing of Party history constituted a form of power. The history of the Party was too important to be left entirely in the hands of historians.

[There emerged] efforts of rival groups of Marxist historians to win a mandate from the Party Central Committee to guide historical research and publication, to control the staffing of institutions, and to enforce professional norms.

But in the field of history, a local factor was also involved: the militance of the Marxist students. Almost simultaneously with this student campaign came a political fight within the Party organization of the Institute of Red Professors. In the course of 1928, an increasingly vituperative public campaign was mounted against non-Marxist historiography. By the beginning of 1929….[attacks began] on the institutional base of non-Marxist historians.

At the First All-Union Conference of Marxist Historians…a proposal to liquidate [the] Institute of History [was made] and create in its place a new institute under the Communist Academy. [Thus came the] Society of Marxist Historians, the forum for Marxist discussion in the profession and source of many of the attacks on “bourgeois historians.”

[After Stalin criticized many historians commitment to Marxism]…The Society of Marxist Historians demanded a review of all existing historical literature, and students of the Institute of Red Professors were formed into brigades preparing assessments of large portions of the existing literature for publication in the press. [Then], extermination of cadres of historians began. Many historians were slandered, then repressed. Many were compelled to admit “errors.”

The [Russian] cultural revolution…radically changed the historical profession. From the mid-thirties, all historians had to pay lip service to Marxism, just as they did (despite the contradiction involved) to the glories of the Russian national tradition. The old factions [of traditional historians] were dissolved, or went underground.

(Marxist Historians During the Cultural Revolution, George M. Enteen: Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Indiana University Press, 1984, pp. 154-168)