The Universities of the Russian Empire in the Soviet Historiography

Abstract

The article describes the process of changing the views on the universities of the Russian Empire in the Soviet historiography. In this period there was a significant rethinking of the role of universities. At the same time, the Soviet historiography of the universities of the Russian Empire is not an integral phenomenon. It clearly fixes “turns”, that became the object of the research. If initially the universities were interpreted as an instrument of the policy of the tsarist government, as backward institutions that were in crisis, they later acted as victims of the regime and dynamic ideological centers. Such changes in assessments occurred through the use of new metaphors, the construction of appropriate storylines and the actualization of certain topics. The markers with which the shifts were fixed in the thematic field of the images allow us to identify the “stress points” and thus designate the main element of the historiographic design. Evolution took place not through discussions and repulsion from the previous image, but through the transfer of accents. A key word that reflected a new understanding of the historical role of Russian universities in the Soviet historiography in the second half of the 20th century, became the word “in spite of ”. Thanks to this, the assessments of both the university forms themselves and the results of the activities of Russian pre-revolutionary universities have radically changed. The Soviet historiographic heritage of the second half of the 20th century continues to be widely used by modern historians of Russian universities.