ABSTRACT
Can historical studies be fitted into a paradigm? In my opinion this broader question should precede the one I was asked to consider here. The notion of paradigm in the sense popularized by Thomas Kuhn in his groundbreaking work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions implies that, given the proper procedures and conceptual framework, we can formulate laws or regularities about natural phenomena. But are there any laws and regularities (zakonomernosti in Russian) in history, and can one formulate relatively accurate explanatory schemes of historical development? Alongside Western positivist scholars, Russian professional historians, whose rise and circumstances are so well described in the present volume, firmly believed that a positive answer was possible. And since the presence of a seemingly overweening institution-the imperial centralized government-shaped their personal as well as professional existence, it is not surprising that the origins, character, and evolution of the imperial polity provided the basic framework for their research and interpretations of Russia's history. One may even add that to the extent that the monarch symbolized the Russian empire the "pragmatic" historians (that is, those who wrote history that offered political and moral lessons) and dynastic historians of the eighteenth century, whose work culminated in the literary and public triumph of N .M. Kararnzin, partook of a similar intellectual inspiration. At the end of the nineteenth century the "scientific" aspiration of Marxism only served to reinforce this philosophic orientation. In short, Russian historiography claimed to be a "science" to which Kuhn's notion of paradigm could be applied.
