War and historical science: reflecting military themes in Russian historiography of the Stalin age (1930s - the first half of the 1950s)

The article examines the features of the initial stage of the historiography of the Great Patriotic War, the traditions of which were laid down in the 1930s and were directly related to the reformatting of historical science into an ideologically charged instrument of agitation and propaganda. As a result of the reforms of higher education in the 1920s and the repressions against scholars, the continuity of the academic principles of historical research was violated, which led to a split in historical science. Those scholars who studied the events in the modern and recent history of Russia and the USSR, including military history, found themselves in a particularly difficult situation. Military history, which emerged as an independent direction in the 1920s, determined the topics and approaches to the analysis of the events of the Civil War, and later the Great Patriotic War. During the war years, a characteristic of the studies of the Great Patriotic War was their epic nature, focused on the description of the feat of the Soviet people. The conceptual model of the war was detailed in Stalin's speeches and replicated in academic works and textbooks in the post-war period. Responding to the patriotic request of wartime, it retained its significance in the future, shaping the public consciousness and memory of the war of subsequent generations.