Western and Russian Historiography: Recent Views, edited by Henry Kozicki, St Martin's Press, New York, 1993

• Main Author: Andrew L. Christenson
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ubiquity Press 1994-05-01
• Series: Bulletin of the History of Archaeology
• Online Access: http://www.archaeologybulletin.org/article/view/397

This collection illustrates the transition occurring in Russian historiography from a government-directed monolith to a more diverse discipline looking to internationalize and gain new directions. Although focused upon a Russian perspective, the volume includes discussions of issues such as history as science and history as narra­tive that are of major concern to many Western historians. Readers interested in a more Western focus on these and related topics should see another volume by the same editor and publisher, Developments in Modem Historiography (1993). Although neither the history of archaeology or even the history of science is a topic in this volume a reader interested in these areas is led to wonder how this great political/intellectual change will effect archaeology.The history of Soviet archaeology is virtually unKnown in the West and I am uncertain if the topic was pursued very much in the former Soviet Union. A brief, politically-correct, post-Stalinist summary is provided by Mongait (1961), but the book by Miller (1956) provides a more likely and more distressing view of Stalinist archaeology, including the observation that Soviet archaeologists had life-spans one-half that of their bourgeois counterparts!