The Book and the Epoch: A Pair of Brushstrokes on the History of the International Historiography of the 1917 Revolution and the Constructivists’ Discussions with Essentialists and Each Other in the 1990s and 2020s

Abstract

The essay analyses the second edition of Boris Kolonitskii’s book “Symbols of Power and the Struggle for Power: Towards a Study of the Political Culture of the Russian Revolution of 1917” in the context of the emergence of international Russian studies in the 1990s and 2000s. The essay begins with a brief sketch of the burgeoning historiography of the Russian-Soviet past without borders and the feelings and hopes associated with it. Then the academic biography of B. I. Kolonitskii and the place of the analysed book in his work are outlined. Then the research question, historiographical scholarship, source base, methodological guidelines and main ideas of the author of the mono- graph are characterised. The last part of the essay is devoted to the discussion that B. I. Kolonitsky conducts on the pages of the book, as well as the scientific disputes between historians, which are conducted out- side the text of the book, but are directly related to it. The criticism of the Soviet legacy in the study of the Russian Revolution is interpreted in the essay as a constructivist speech against the essentialists, relevant even today against the backdrop of a renewed flourishing of positivism in Russian historical science. In addition, two texts on the constructivist approach in the study of the 1917 Revolution from the mid-1990s and the early 2020s are examined, in which cultural-historical approaches (including in Kolonitskii’s book) are criticised from different positions. These examples will be used as part of considerations on further perspectives for research into the Russian Revolution. They can be seen, among other things, in the creation of tools for a comprehensive study of the experience of historical actors from the other side of the “society” – “culture” dichotomy.