ABSTRACT
Historical scholarship was more deeply shaken and stirred by the privations and shortages that marked all of life during the revolution and Civil War than obstructive state policies. The literature of the period unanimously speaks of the need to train a new cohort of historians, both professional researchers and school-teachers, to make up for the great shortage of historians. Given the vast breadth of Mikhail Nikolaevich Pokrovskii's achievements, it was natural that a group of historians should nestle around him. A striking feature of Soviet historiography since the 1930s is the contention that Russia experienced a millennial period of feudalism that ended only in the mid-nineteenth century. The world of history in the Soviet Union was convulsed and reshaped in 1931. On 25 June 1934, the Politburo named members of a commission to supervise the creation of new history textbooks for use in primary and secondary schools.
