ABSTRACT
"Diamat," the Comintern, the denigration of Russian history, proletarian internationalism, can be regarded as novelities, lacking any roots in national culture. History of the Pokrovsky type was denounced, the new histories that were published after 1935 were of a type that older Russian nationalists could find acceptable. Films like "Alexander Nevsky" and "Ivan the Terrible" were consciously devised to reconnect Stalin's Soviet Union with traditional Russia. In Preobrazhensky's mind it was an adaptation of Marx's "primitive capitalist accumulation" to the situation of the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Yet if its purposes were explained to Peter—to mobilize capital to modernize and strengthen Russia—he would surely have understood. The priority of "world revolution" was all the more present in Lenin's mind because he, like most of his comrades, believed that the fate of Soviet Russia depended on revolutions in Western Europe.
