Lev Kertman's «laws of historical events»

The article is devoted to the analysis of a theoretical hypothesis of a Perm historian, which concerns the laws of historical development. The author of the article published in 1971 in a journal Voprosy Istorii («History Issues») put forward a new approach to historical process understanding, which is quite contrary to the traditional in Soviet historiography approach - progressive development of society. Kertman's underlying idea is that history possesses «flexible» regularities: capabilities arisen from the typologically similar historical events. The subjects of a historical action (classes, as Kertman called it) have at their disposal several options. The choice of option and the way the future events will be developed completely depend on the classes behavior: their purposefulness, their own interests understanding, and, more importantly, correlations of social powers. Following Kertman's way of thinking it should be noted that in that case historical process development could be described just as a retrospection which brought the course of history back, it is a result of teleological reality perception. Kertman's idea was conceptually closer to the criticism of K. Popper's historicism than to any school of Marxist historical thought. At the same time L. Kertman implemented a system of arguments, which is recognized in a classical Soviet historiography. A great number of quotations was a tool to prove that V. I. Lenin was the person who introduced the idea of «laws of historical events» and that in his article L. Kertman reconstructed Lenin's ideas remained unnoticed by his contemporaries. One may suggest that at that time of ideological reaction came from the followers of Stalin's canon it was more a necessary ploy, than an actual methodological principle. Tactic success turned into tactic failure. The key ideas remained unnoticed.