Soviet Historiography edit

History is generally held to be "an account of facts, particularly of facts respecting nations or states; a narration of events in the order in which they happened, with their causes and effects."[1] The defined role of the historian is to examine the past, then to arrive at as an objective, factual, and informative analysis and recounting as possible. []


For the Soviets, history was not an end, but a means to an end. sov hist journal quote http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7162(196605)365%3C147%3ASRDITH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-V (get article)

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delves into its organization around unifying symbols and founding values. The role of the historian is not the validation of those

values.

The role of historians is not the validation of social values Translated Sunday 15 January 2006, by Pedro author Le rôle des historiens n’est pas de valider les valeurs sociales Par Claude Mazauric, historien.

There is no human community that isn’t organized around unifying symbols and founding values.

Revolutions, either generalized or focalized, take place precisely when the system built from these

values and symbols ends up rejected by the community that it unified. Communal memory, the

recollection of a near past , or the remembrance of a distant, even mythical, past, contribute

without a doubt to the moulding of collective identities, to the marking, for those depending on it,

of the border between the sacred and the profane, the legal and the illegal, the reprehensible and

the acceptable. It is to the representative organisms of these living communities, even more so

when these organisms are held to be democratic, that falls the responsibility to shape and give

authority to the expression of these values, beliefs or community symbols, and, at the same time,

to be accountable before their constituents for any failure.

History, as a means towards knowledge, has no other purpose than to establish the truth of past

events by repositioning them in the network in which the historian finds them and to give them at

least clarity, if not an explanation. That is why history is, indissolubly, establishment of facts and

interpretation of recontextualised movement of which facts, in their singularity, are the

materialisation. Among those who make a living of writing and teaching history, there is a

consensual minimum on which they agree without too much difficulty: refusing to submit to

religious, political or moral precepts, recognizing that the product of their work is identical to neither

the practice nor the “duty” of memory, neither to a legal purpose, nor evidently to a naturally

intangible dogma. Society and the State, at least in France, seem to share this point of view. Which

is a good thing!



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www.oah.org/reports/tradhist.html

ED278044 - Fact, Fiction and History: The Role of Historian, Writer, Teacher and Reader. http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?

_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED278044&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=eric_ac

cno&accno=ED278044


Counterfactual History MARTIN BUNZL http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/109.3/bunzl.html (causation)

For the Soviets, history was not an end, but a means to an end. sov hist journal quote http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7162(196605)365%3C147%3ASRDITH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-V (get article)

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  1. ^ Webster's 1828 edition