ABSTRACT
Not long ago V.A. Kitaev, a well-known historian of Russian social thought, claimed that in light of the state's indisputably "leading role" in modern Russian history, post-Soviet scholars should reevaluate the contributions of the "state school" (gosudarstvennaia shkola) of historiography to Russian national self-understanding. Until the late 1980s, he wrote, Soviet specialists on historiography had viewed the state school from the jaundiced perspective of Marxism, which demanded the "decisive rejection of the methodological and conceptual baggage of Russian historical scholarship of the second half of the nineteenth century." However, the dramatic events of M.S. Gorbachev's perestroika occasioned the rejection of Marxism for the sake of a "new synthesis" of Russian history. Contemporary historians now found themselves "overtly returning to the ideas of the state school or spontaneously gravitating toward them."\ Under the circumstances, Kitaev concluded, the time was ripe for a new, positive evaluation of the state school.
