This book is aimed at understanding the political & academic environment in which the Soviet history was composed. It traces the regime control on the writing of Soviet history. How the Russian Revolution of 1917 triggered a shift in policy towards historians & the publication of history textbooks for schools. In 1985, the Soviet past was again summoned for polemical revision as part and parcel of an attitude of openness (glasnost').

It surveys the abundance of writing the Russian Revolution generated & the divergent approaches to the history of the period.

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Introduction: Inherited Traditions of Historical Scholarship 1. The Histories of History in the Soviet Union 2. The Impact of Glasnost' on the Writing of History 3. Histories of the Communist Party as Histories of the Soviet Union 4. Depictions and Revisions: The Russian Revolution in History 5. The Historical Archive 6. History in Russian Schools

Arup Banerji taught Russian, Soviet and West European History at the Department of History, University of Delhi. He has published a study of private trade and traders during the 1920s, Merchants and Markets in Revolutionary Russia, 1917-30, and has written on politics and economic issues in the Russian federation as well as on the silk routes.