Soviet historiography has always exercised a particular fascination for Western specialists in Russian history. In part this is because more is written on Russian history in the Soviet Union than anywhere else, but at least as important is interest in understanding the evolution of the Soviet Union itself: historiographic investigation provides illuminating insights into the interplay between scholarship and the Soviet political system. While earlier syntheses emphasized the distortion of history in the service of Stalinism, the cultural abominations of the Zhdanovshchina, and the animosities of the Cold War,l recent studies