Ancient history and new publicism: about searching for a narrative in the Soviet historiography of the Stalin time

The article discusses the features of the genesis and functioning of a special type of historical narrative in Soviet scholarship, which gained particular strength in the 1930s and gradually exhausted by the late 1940s. For convenience of characterization, the author focuses on Soviet works about ancient history and analyzes the main attitudes of their authors (“old” Marxists, scholars who coverted to Marxism, and the Soviet generation of historians), and the reasons and features of their appeal to the genre of historical and journalistic narratives about the past eras. This type of narrative is therefore associated with the formation and flowering of the Stalinist regime. The changes of the 1930s are all the more remarkable as we can compare the style of historians who wrote before and after this time. Using the examples of A. Tyumenev or B. Bogaevsky, the reader can see how respectful and loyal attitude to foreign scholarship was replaced by loud criticism of the limitations of “bourgeois” historians, in whose works Soviet historians certainly found features of “reactionary”. On the example of the books by N.I. Nedelsky and A.V. Mishulin, the author shows how historians who did not engage in scholarship before the revolution took the same path. In conclusion, the author gives the general characteristics of the genre, as well as an explanation of why it was doomed to gradual self-exhaustion, not only because it depended on external (political) but also because it was influenced by internal reasons.