The “critical” version of the Russian historical events at the beginning of twentieth century in the modern native historiography

Abstract

In the article an attempt is made to study works of the modern Russian historians published in the process of preparing and holding the 100th anniversary of the Great Russian Revolution of 1917. The focus of the article is on clarifying the concept of a “critical” version of modern historiography as a revision of relevant ideas about historical events in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, which traditionally existed in Soviet historiography. The author of the article aims to identify the theoretical and methodological as well as the factual basis for reconstructing the historical events of the early twentieth century in the texts of renown modern Russian historians. She concentrates her attention on the question of increment of scientific knowledge in historiographical sources selected for a historiographical analysis. To that end, the article investigates the justification and productivity of using the intellectual instrumentarium of the new political history and psychological history to solve the questions formulated by the authors of analyzed historiographical sources. It is the author's opinion that the “critical” version of the modern historiography is outlining the productive approaches to redefining the meanings of Russian historical events of the early twentieth century. So far that is only the initial intellectual drawing of the new theoretical and methodological mechanisms in the modern historiography, but it is obvious, that with all the apparent provocativeness of the proposed approaches, it is a necessary step to create a new image of the past in response to the challenges of our time.