Issues of interpretation

Studying the Soviet Union is not quite like studying any other country in the world. While historians within the Soviet Union are compelled to portray their nation's past with the requisite degree of heroism and inexorable progress, in the West their colleagues face serious limitations of access to sources, the absence of basic works on aspects of Soviet history, and a variety of personal and political biases that inevitably influence the outcome of their research. Soviet historians write under the “guidance” of a political orthodoxy dictated by the party and colored in the language of Marxism-Leninism. Their Western counter-parts attempt a cool objectivity, usually by dismissing the relevance of Marxism as an analytical tool and cloaking themselves in an ostensibly “value-free” social science. International rivalries, conflicting social values, and the more mundane exigencies of forging a professional career in a competitive marketplace determine the political and cultural contexts in which histories of the USSR are written. Nevertheless, many historians on both sides of the barricades seek freedom from bias, and in recent years more and more interesting work has appeared on Russia's history, both in the West and in the Soviet Union, which prompts a reconsideration of significant parts of that experience. After nearly seventy years of studying 1917, is it possible to come to some consensus on the contours and meaning of the 1917 Revolution?