A Historian’s Participant Observation of the End of the Cold War in US Sovietology

• In Event: Sovietology at the End of History: Academics Respond to the Soviet Collapse

Abstract

The field (discipline?) of “Sovietology,” dominated by political scientists and defined largely in terms of the Cold War and the need to “know the enemy,” only peripherally included historians of the Soviet Union such as myself, most of whom focused on the social and cultural rather than political dimension. Nevertheless, the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the effective disestablishment of Sovietology, and the reorganization of institutional and financial-support structures that followed affected historians and literary scholars as well. Now that more than thirty years have passed, it is time to reassess this whole remarkable episode. My paper offers both a personal account and some general thoughts about what such a reassessment might involve.

Author

• Sheila Fitzpatrick, Australian Catholic U (Australia)