Hannah Boller I recently found myself conversing with someone who believed it was their job to point out that the topic for my master’s thesis was totally useless. “Food is not worth studying, and history even less valuable. I’m not sure why you would go to school to study that.” Most people eat three times a day, maybe have a… Read more »
Perhaps the principal legacy of revisionism, then, is the light that it shed on the quotidian experiences “from below” that were occluded by earlier, state-centric ideas of repressive regimes. One role of historians in the present is to bridge the gap between inherited simplifications and more nuanced understandings; by advancing academic arguments in more accessible forms historians can foster more meaningful public engagements with history and its uses in the present. When we look at Russia today, we cannot turn away from its suppression of free speech nor its persecution of political critics, but we should also acknowledge the limits of this vision. We must consider, to invoke a Russian concept, that individual and independent “existence” (byt) are also aspects of Russian life.
