Collecting History Imprints from Russia in the Age of the New Official Historiographic Agenda
The selection and acquisition of contemporary research-quality Russian and Soviet history imprints from Russia is presenting increasingly formidable challenges for institutions with mandates to collect and preserve this category of material. This situation promises to worsen, as, increasingly, the administration of the Russian Federation appears to be preparing to enforce an official historiographic agenda. The agenda, inferred over the past several years by many professional observers and interpreters of the Russian administration’s words and deeds, is to promote a view of the country’s twentieth-century history which reactivates World War II-era nationalist narratives, justifies a centralized authoritarian model of government, and cultivates a sense of estrangement from the West. Anticipating that high-level historical scholarship on particular aspects of Russian history might become an endangered genre in the Russian publishing arena—and that such publications might become increasingly difficult to ide...