ABSTRACT
For over two decades, Soviet historiography has been in steadily deepening crisis. The Soviet civil war must now be rewritten as if there never had been a war commissar named Leon Trotsky. History has become a "weapon", an arm of propaganda, the essential function of which is the justification of the changing policies of the Soviet government through reference to the "facts" and "documents" of the past. In the 1920s, not a politician but a professional Marxist historian, M. N. Pokrovsky, was the virtual dictator in Soviet historiography. From the beginning of the 1930s, Stalin's policies determined with steadily increasing rigor and detail the character of Soviet historiography. The war ended with the Soviet Union as the only great power astride the Eurasian land mass, with a power vacuum to the west and a power vacuum to the east of it.
