Thirty years after the disappearance of the USSR, its history is a work in progress. Two historians, Sabine Dullin and Alain Blum, each sign a synthesis of knowledge in this area.
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On 26 December 1991, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) officially ceased to exist. Thirty years later, how do historians approach this long attempt to implement “real communism”, born with the taking of power by the Bolsheviques in 1917? Sabine Dullin, a professor of contemporary history at Sciences Po, has just published the irony of destiny. Alain Blum, Historian and Demographer, Study Director at the School of Higher Social Sciences and Research Director at the National Institute of Demographic Studies, co-written, with Françoise Daçé, Marc Elie and Isabelle Ohayon, the Soviet age. Two syntheses based on some of the most recent developments in research, which emerges at the same time intimate and distance, complex and tragic of what was the Soviet reality, but also of its memory, as it continues to haunt Europe. And polarize it, at a time when Vladimir Putin makes it an instrument of power.
Thirty years since the end of the USSR were first marked, for historians, by the opening of the Soviet archives. How did you live?
Alain Blum: It was an extraordinary moment. If only because we realized that there were many more than we imagined it. I was attending the archives of the statistics, and I discovered that, on the great famines of the early 1930s, all the data were there. The word “famine” was not used, but the explosion of mortality appeared clearly. The dominant idea, until then, was that the Soviet authorities destroyed the compromising documents. It was nothing.
Sabine Dullin: What was emerging, it was a huge mass of documents. This is what Nicolas Werth called the “Civilization of the Report”. The archives were sometimes barely visible, the foreign policy archives, for example, in which I worked. But we had the impression of being pioneers with a continent to explore, treasure researchers. It was quite exhilarating. Soviet history then attracted, especially since the atmosphere was, in all areas, at the opening.
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