Official discourse of Soviet history. The 1920s – the first half of the 1980s

Abstract

Basing on the use of a substantial set of published sources, the article considers the major approaches of the official power structures to understanding and representing the Soviet past.

In the first half of the 1930s, the Party Central Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars paid a special attention to the issue of upgrading historical education, first in the Communist Academy and then in the country’s schools. It was The History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks): Short Course, published in 1938, that turned out to be the ideological “peak” of the research in assessing the Soviet period of history.

During the Great Patriotic War, all the ideological constructions of the party and state apparatus, pertaining to the Soviet subject matter, passed the strength test.

After Stalin’s death, already at the 20th Congress of the USSR Communist Party, important theoretical conclusions, based on historical experience, were drawn on the transformation of socialism into a world system, the possibility of preventing world wars, and others.

Later, the Party discourse of Soviet history was built up with regard to the thesis about the entry of the Soviet Union into the period of the extensive construction of a communist society. However, that strategy set out in the third-Party Program has never been implemented.

That largely determined the elaboration and widespread propaganda of the developed socialism concept in the Soviet society of the 1970s. The article analyses the documents which characterize the concept. Since the country’s development has degraded over the years, after L.I. Brezhnev’s death that concept was removed from the official political discourse.