From the editor: Thank you Publisher European University in St. Petersburg for the opportunity to publish a fragment from the book of the historian Ivan Kurilla "History, or the Past in the Present" (St. Petersburg, 2017).

Let's now talk about historical science - how much does it suffer from violent storms in the historical consciousness of society?

History as scientific discipline experiences overload from different sides: the state of the historical consciousness of society is an external challenge, while the accumulated problems within science, calling into question the methodological foundations of the discipline and its institutional structure, represent internal pressure.

Plurality of subjects ("History in fragments")

Already in the 19th century, history began to fragment according to the subject of research: in addition to political history the history of culture, economics appeared, and later social history, the history of ideas and many directions studying various aspects of the past were added to them.

Finally, the most uncontrollable process was the fragmentation of history according to the subject of historical questioning. It can be said that the process of fragmentation of history is driven by the identity politics described above. In Russia, the fragmentation of history by social and gender groups was slower than by ethnic and regional variants.

Together with the fragmentation of the methodology used by historians, this situation led to the fragmentation of not only historical consciousness in general, but also the field of historical science itself, which by the end of the century was, in the words of the Moscow historian M. Boytsov (in the sensational professional environment in the 1990s article), a pile of "fragments". Historians have come to the conclusion that it is impossible to unite not only historical narrative, but also historical science.

The reader has already understood, of course, that the notion of the possibility of the only true historical narrative, the only correct and final version of history is opposed to the modern view of the essence of history. You can often hear questions addressed to historians: well, how was it in reality, what is the truth? After all, if one historian writes about some event in this way, and another - in a different way, does it mean that one of them is mistaken? Can they come to a compromise and understand how it was "really"? There is a demand for such a story in society (from such expectations, probably, the recent attempt by the popular writer Boris Akunin to become the “new Karamzin”, and, to some extent, disputes about the “single textbook” of history grow). Society, as it were, requires historians to agree, finally, to write a single textbook in which “the whole truth” will be stated.

Indeed, there are problems in history that can be compromised, but there are also problems where this is impossible: it is, as a rule, a story told by “different voices”, associated with the identity of a particular social group. The history of an authoritarian state and the history of the victims of some kind of “great turn” is unlikely to ever create a “compromise option”. An analysis of the interests of the state will help to understand why certain decisions were made, and this will be a logical explanation. But his logic will in no way “balance” the history of those people who, as a result of these decisions, lost their fortune, health, and sometimes life - and this story will also be true about the past. These two views on history can be presented in different chapters of the same textbook, but there are many more such points of view than two: it is difficult, for example, to reconcile the history of different regions in a large multinational country. Moreover, the past provides historians with the opportunity to create many narratives, and carriers different systems values (as well as different social groups) can write their own "history textbook", in which they can describe history in terms of nationalism or internationalism, statism or anarchy, liberalism or traditionalism. Each of these stories will be internally consistent (although, probably, in each such story there will be silence about some aspects of the past that are important for other authors).

Modern historians have a problem with this many narratives, many stories about the past that are produced by different social groups, different regions, ideologists and states. Some of these narratives are confrontational and potentially carry the germ of social conflicts, but the choice between them has to be made not on the basis of their scientific nature, but on the basis of ethical principles, thereby establishing a new connection between history and morality. One of the newest tasks of historical science is to work on the seams between these narratives. The modern idea of history as a whole looks more like not a single stream, but a blanket sewn from different patches. We are doomed to live at the same time with different interpretations and be able to establish a conversation about a common past, maintaining differences, or rather polyphony.

historical sources

Any historian will agree with the thesis formulated by the positivists that reliance on sources is the main feature of historical science. This remains as true for modern historians as it was for Langlois and Segnobos. It is the methods of searching and processing sources that are taught to students at historical faculties. However, in a little over a hundred years, the content of this concept has changed, and the main professional practice of historians has been challenged.

In order to understand the difference in attitude towards the sources of historical science and the practice preceding it, we must recall that what we call the falsification of documents was not uncommon in the Middle Ages and was not condemned at all. The whole culture was built on respect for authority, and if something was attributed to authority that was not said by him, but certainly good, then there was no reason to doubt it. Thus, the main criterion for the truth of a document was the good that this document provided.

Lorenzo Valla, who first proved the forgery of the “correct document”, did not dare to publish his “Reflection on the fictitious and false donation of Constantine” - the work was published only half a century after the author’s death, when the Reformation had already begun in Europe.

Over the course of several centuries, historians have developed ever more subtle ways of determining the authenticity of a document, its authorship, and dating in order to exclude the use of fakes in their work.

The "past", as we found out, is a problematic concept, but the texts of the sources are real, they can be literally touched, re-read, and checked the logic of predecessors. The questions formulated by historians are addressed precisely to these sources. The first sources were living people with their stories, and this kind of sources (limited by time and space) is still important to this day when working with recent and modern history: projects of "oral history" of the XX century have brought significant results.

The next type of sources were official documents left over from the day-to-day activities of various kinds of bureaucracy, including legislation and international treaties, but also numerous registration papers. Leopold von Ranke preferred diplomatic documents from the state archives to other types of documents. Statistics - state and commercial - allows you to apply quantitative methods in the analysis of the past. Personal memories and memoirs traditionally attract readers and are also traditionally considered very unreliable: memoirists, for obvious reasons, tell the version of events they need. However, given the interest of the author and after comparison with other sources, these texts can give a lot to understand the events, motives of behavior and details of the past. From the moment of its appearance, the materials of the periodical press have been used by historians: no other source allows us to understand the synchronism of various events, from politics and economics to culture and local news, like the pages of newspapers. Finally, the Annales school proved that any object that bears traces of human influence can become a source for the historian; a garden or a park laid out according to a certain plan, or varieties of plants and animal breeds bred by man, will not be left aside. The accumulation of significant amounts of information and the development of mathematical methods for its processing promises great breakthroughs in the research of the past with the beginning of the use of Big Data processing tools by historians.

However, it is important to understand that in and of themselves, until the historian's field of interest, a text, information, or material object is not a source. Only the question asked by the historian makes them so.

In the last third of the twentieth century, however, this practice was challenged. By postulating the inaccessibility of the past, postmodernists have reduced the work of historians to the transformation of some texts into others. And in this situation, the question of the truth of this or that text faded into the background. Much more importance was given to the problem of what role the text plays in culture and society. "Konstantin's gift" determined state-political relations in Europe for many centuries and was exposed only when it had already lost its real influence. So what does it matter if it was a fake?

The professional practice of historians also came into conflict with the instrumental approach to history that is spreading in society: if the past is not recognized as an independent value and the past should work for the present, then the sources are not important. The conflict that broke out in the summer of 2015 between the director State Archive Russian Federation Sergey Mironenko, who presented documentary evidence of the composition of the "feat of 28 Panfilov" in the battle for Moscow in 1941, and the Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation Vladimir Medinsky, who protected the "correct myth" from its verification by sources.

“Any historical event, having ended, becomes a myth - positive or negative. The same can be attributed to historical figures. Our heads of state archives should conduct their research, but life is such that people operate not with archival information, but with myths. References can strengthen these myths, destroy them, turn them upside down. Well, the public mass consciousness always operates with myths, including in relation to history, so this must be treated with reverence, care, and caution.
Vladimir Medinsky

In fact, politicians not only express their claims to control history, but also deny the right of historians to expert judgment about the past, equating professional knowledge based on documents with “ mass consciousness based on myths. The conflict between the archivist and the minister could be classified as a curiosity if it did not fit into the logic of the development of the historical consciousness of modern society, which led to the dominance of presentism.

Thus, having parted with positivism, we suddenly found ourselves in the face of a new Middle Ages, in which a “good purpose” justifies the falsification of sources (or their biased selection).

Laws of history

IN late XIX century, the debate about the scientific nature of history focused on its ability to discover the laws human development. Throughout the 20th century, the very concept of science has evolved. Today, science is often defined as "a field human activity aimed at developing and systematizing objective knowledge about reality” or as “description with the help of concepts”. History certainly fits into these definitions. In addition, various sciences use historical method or a historical approach to phenomena. Finally, one must understand that this is a conversation about the correlation of concepts developed by European civilization itself, and these concepts are historical, i.e. change over time.

And yet - are there historical laws, "laws of history"? If we talk about the laws of development of society, then this question should obviously be redirected to sociology, which studies the laws of human development. Laws of development human societies, certainly exist. Some of them are statistical in nature, some allow you to see causal relationships in a repeating sequence. historical events. It is precisely this kind of laws that are most often declared by supporters of the status of history as "rigorous science" as "the laws of history."

However, these "laws of history" were most often developed ("discovered") not by historians, but by scientists involved in related sciences of society - sociologists and economists. Moreover, many researchers single out a separate field of knowledge - macrosociology and historical sociology, who consider "their" classics such scientists as Karl Marx (economist) and Max Weber (sociologist), Immanuel Wallerstein and Randall Collins (macrosociologists), Perry Anderson and even Fernand Braudel (historians also consider only the last of the list to be their classic). In addition, historians themselves very rarely in their writings offer formulas for the laws of history or somehow refer to such laws. At the same time, questions posed within the framework of macro-sociological, as well as economic, political science, philology and other social science and humanitarian disciplines, historians with great pleasure ask the past, thus transferring the theories of related sciences to the material of the past.

It's easier to talk about historical discoveries. There are two types of discoveries in history: the discovery of new sources, archives, memoirs, or the staging new problem, question, approach, turning into sources what was not previously considered sources, or allowing to find new in old sources. Thus, a discovery in history can be not only a birch bark found during excavations, but also a new research question.

Let's dwell on this point in a little more detail. Since the days of the Annales school, historians have begun their work by posing a research question - this requirement seems to be common to all sciences today. In practice historical research, however, there is constantly repeated clarification and reformulation of the question in the process of working on it.

The historian, in accordance with the model of the hermeneutic circle, constantly refines his research question on the basis of the data he receives from sources. The final formulation of the historian's research question becomes the formula of the relation of the present to the past, established by scientists. It turns out that the research question itself is not only the starting point, but also one of the most important results of the study.

This description well illustrates the idea of history as a science of the interaction of modernity with the past: the right question determines the “potential difference”, maintaining tension and establishing a connection between modernity and the period under study (unlike those social sciences that seek to find an answer precisely to the originally posed question).

Examples of the laws of history would be the repetitive patterns of using the past in contemporary debates (the selection in the past of stories and issues that help solve today's problems or in the struggle for a group vision of the future; the limitations of such selection, the influence scientific papers and journalism on the formation of the historical consciousness of society), as well as ways of setting goals and obtaining historical knowledge.

Notes

1. Cliometry is a direction in historical science based on the systematic application of quantitative methods. The heyday of cliometry came in the 1960s and 70s. Published in 1974, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery by Stanley Engerman and Robert Vogel ( Fogel R.W., Engerman S.L. Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. Boston; Toronto: Little, Brown, and Company, 1974) was the cause of fierce controversy (the conclusions about the economic efficiency of slavery in the southern United States were perceived by some critics as a justification for slavery) and showed the possibilities of cliometry. In 1993, one of the authors of the book, Robert Vogel, was awarded Nobel Prize in economics, including for this study.

6. Monuments cultural heritage- strategic priority of Russia // Izvestia. Nov 22, 2016

7. The hermeneutic circle was described by G.-G. Gadamer: “It is possible to understand something only thanks to pre-existing assumptions about it, and not when it is presented to us as something absolutely mysterious. The fact that anticipations can be a source of errors in interpretation and that prejudices that promote understanding can also lead to misunderstanding, is only an indication of the finitude of such a being as man, and the manifestation of this finitude of him. Gadamer G.-G. About the circle of understanding // The relevance of the beautiful. M.: Art, 1991).

ABC of concepts

Modern man is accustomed to think historically, think about the origin of things and problems, look for his place on the "axis of time" and distinguish today from the past and from the future. But these mental procedures familiar to us were not characteristic of all societies of the past. The European civilization leads the tradition of historical reflection from the ancient Greek author Herodotus from Halicarnassus, i.e. it is almost two and a half thousand years old.

The attitude towards history in this tradition, however, is constantly changing, and ideas about the content of this concept and its place in the public consciousness, as well as the possibility of interacting with history, are changing - somehow influencing it or using it as a tool. influence. The question "What is history?" became the title of a small book by the English scholar E. H. Carr, which was used by several generations of historians. However, today this question can no longer sound like there is a clear and unambiguous answer to it.

From this point of view, one can assess the sense in which the concept of "history" is used in modern society what is invested in it and what is expected from history. So, today's society is trying to instrumentalize the past, making it just one of the arguments in the modern struggle for ideas, in building a desired future by a particular social group, or one of the resources that can provide status and income. But such an understanding of history is subject to fierce controversy. Much of this book is devoted to discussions on this subject. These disputes have already led to the transformation of the very concept of history,

As a result, the definitions given to the subject half a century ago require rethinking and clarification. The concept about which will be discussed in our book, goes back to the ancient Greek (Ionian) word /agora/a, meaning “research”, “questioning”, or “research by means of inquiries”. This is how Herodotus and Thucydides collected information about the world around them. This word is in the majority European languages to refer to similar concepts.

Since then, the understanding of history has evolved, accumulated shades of meanings and results of use in different contexts, lost and gained weight in the coordinate systems of European and world civilization.

Ivan Kurilla - History - or the Past in the Present

History, or the Past in the Present / Ivan Kurilla. - St. Petersburg:

Publishing House of the European University in St. Petersburg, 2017. - 168 p. : ill.

[ABC of concepts; issue 5].

ISBN 978-5-94380-236-2

Ivan Kurilla - History - or the Past in the Present - Contents

Introduction

1. Research through questioning
2. Questions of history

I. Contexts

1. History and time
2. History and past
"Markup" history
Are there "historical facts"?
3. History and memory
4. History and morality

II. past history

1. From antiquity to modern times
History of Greek Wars
Roman histories of the republic and empire
History as a language for describing politics
History in the Middle Ages - one of God's creations
Titans of the Renaissance and Doubt in Authority
The Beginning of the New Age, the Age of Enlightenment
2. History as a science: XIX century
Historical-critical school and positivism in history
Philosophy of history, philosophers about history
3. History of Russia
Start
Professionalization
4. History in the 20th century
The first formulas of presentism
History is a hostage of ideology
Annales School and new history
Related disciplines and historical science in the XX century.

III. Present history

1. History in modern society
Disappearing distance between today and yesterday
2. Who owns the history?
Business?
State?
Politicians?
Memorial Laws
Historical landscape of modern Russia
Contested Memory
3. Modern historical science
Plurality of subjects ("History in fragments").
historical sources
Laws of history
4. Who are historians?
What is expected of a historian today?
The Importance of Historical Narratives
Where to look for historians?

Conclusion

The future of history, or the present in the past

Thanks

Summary

Ivan Kurilla - History - or the Past in the present - History and time

Time is a key concept for history; changes in time are the essence and content of history. Ideas about time have changed throughout the development of mankind, and at the same time the meaning of history and ideas about its purpose have changed. The cyclical time of a traditional society knows no history. Everything is repeated day after day and year after year, in the memory of the society it is fixed by not changing the repetition, which allows you to prepare for the next cycle.

1. Antique time flows from the future into the past: people follow their ancestors along the path leading to the past. This idea is connected with the ideas of the Golden Age in the past and the gradual "corruption of morals" from generation to generation. During the period of dominance of ancient times, innovations are not approved - as a deviation from the wisdom of the ancestors. History in this era is important as a map of movement through life; she is a "teacher of life", which shows the paths and roads laid by the fathers, along which

Descendants must go to avoid mistakes. Descendants in such a society “come after us”, are successors and followers, that is, literally “following in the footsteps” of their predecessors (yes, the Russian language suggests that such an idea of time existed in Rus', obviously, before the advent of the New Age ). Precisely because each generation goes a little astray, humanity is moving further and further away from the Golden Age.

2. Medieval Christian time "exists" between the point of creation of the world and the Last Judgment. Connected with this notion is the idea of history as a predetermined segment that includes the past, present, and future. This is not the cyclical time of traditional society, but also not the endless road of antiquity, leading to the ancestors. The history of Christians has already been "told", and people live in the finished "story", but due to their insignificance they do not know their true place in it.

Nevertheless, history is one of the languages in which God communicates with man and mankind, therefore God's plan for mankind can be comprehended by studying historical events. The concept of history in such an epoch does not correspond to the past. History includes the entire time of the existence of mankind - from the creation of the world to the Last Judgment (and this is precisely the framework of medieval stories).

3. Modern times turned out to be subdued by the idea of progress, according to which all mankind is gradually improving: scientific knowledge is developing, dependence on natural forces is weakening, inequality and oppression in society are decreasing. Thus there was a complete reversal from the ancient idea of a permanent retreat from the Golden Age; it was associated with a change in the direction of movement along the time scale - now the future was ahead of humanity.

The time of modernity encourages innovation, while the past and its artifacts are left behind and cease to be interesting. The past in this time does not mean the Golden Age, but "the childhood of mankind." The idea of the constant development of mankind gave a negative meaning to the past and its remnants, the concept of “obsolescence” of things and institutions, the abusive words “retrograde” and “reactionary” appeared. Obsolete things and institutions had to be destroyed to make room for the new. Thus, the time of progress opened the way for revolutions, and the reverse side of progress was destruction, including - during the period of large-scale social experiments of the 20th century -

entire social groups. That is why the significance of history at the beginning of modern times was called into question: history itself was of no interest - a story about the Middle Ages was needed to show where prejudices and ignorance lead people. The main justification for the existence of history was that it helps the movement of mankind along the path of progress, fixing changes. With the spread of ideas about time as one of the dimensions of the physical world, along with spatial coordinates, history began to be considered as a description of this dimension, an analogue geographical map describing the territory.

Historians of the late 18th-19th centuries, who aimed to identify as much as possible more"facts" of the past, were a kind of navigators of the era of the Great geographical discoveries. In the 20th century, the concept of time has become more complex - both in physics and in history, the role of the observer and the choice of his place in relation to the object of observation turned out to be much more important than it seemed a little earlier, but we have not yet fully realized all the consequences of these changes. Nevertheless, as the most obvious result - after periods of dominance of the past (the cult of the Golden Age) and the future (orientation towards progress and development in modern times)

We are witnessing the coming to the fore of the present, which becomes self-sufficient and “creates”, constructs such a past and future that it needs. The French historian François Artaugh proposed to call three types of relation to time “historicity regimes”, and the last of them, based on the present, is “presentism”.

Illuminator Award

Zimin Foundation

"History, or the Past in the Present"

We continue to present you the participants of the award of popular science literature "Enlightener" 2017. Professor of the European University at St. Petersburg Ivan Kurilla in 2017 published a book called "History, or the Past in the Present", in which he invites readers to reflect on the questions of what historical knowledge is, where it comes from and what it is used for. We publish a fragment from this book and remind you that the summing up of the award will take place on November 16 in Moscow. Shortly before that, we will start voting in the public VK "Educator" so that readers can choose the editions they like most from the shortlist of the Enlightener.

3. Modern historical science

Let's now talk about historical science - how much does it suffer from violent storms in the historical consciousness of society? History as a scientific discipline is experiencing overload from different sides: the state of the historical consciousness of society is an external challenge, while the accumulated problems within science, calling into question the methodological foundations of the discipline and its institutional structure, represent internal pressure.

Plurality of subjects ("History in fragments")

Already in the 19th century, history began to fragment according to the subject of study: in addition to political history, the history of culture, economics appeared, and later social history, the history of ideas and many areas that study various aspects of the past were added to them.

The heyday of cliometry came in the 1960s and 70s. Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery by Stanley Engerman and Robert Fogel (1974) ) became the cause of fierce controversy (the conclusions about the economic efficiency of slavery in the US South were perceived by some critics as a justification for slavery) and showed the possibilities of cliometry. In 1993, one of the authors of the book, Robert Fogel, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, including for this research.

Together with the fragmentation of the methodology used by historians, this situation led to the fragmentation of not only historical consciousness in general, but also the field of historical science itself, which by the end of the century was, in the words of the Moscow historian M. Boytsov (in the sensational professional environment in the 1990s article), a pile of "fragments" (see: Boytsov M.A. Onward to Herodotus! // Case. Individual and unique in history. Issue. 2. Moscow: RGGU, 1999, pp. 17–41). Historians have come to the conclusion that it is impossible to unite not only historical narrative, but also historical science.

Indeed, there are problems in history that can be compromised, but there are also problems where this is impossible: it is, as a rule, a story told by “different voices”, associated with the identity of a particular social group. The history of an authoritarian state and the history of the victims of some kind of “great turn” is unlikely to ever create a “compromise option”. An analysis of the interests of the state will help to understand why certain decisions were made, and this will be a logical explanation. But his logic will in no way “balance” the history of those people who, as a result of these decisions, lost their fortune, health, and sometimes life - and this story will also be true about the past. These two views on history can be presented in different chapters of the same textbook, but there are many more such points of view than two: it is difficult, for example, to reconcile the history of different regions in a large multinational country. Moreover, the past provides historians with the opportunity to create many narratives, and the bearers of different value systems (as well as different social groups) can write their own “history textbook”, in which they can describe history in terms of nationalism or internationalism, statism or anarchy, liberalism or traditionalism. Each of these stories will be internally consistent (although, probably, in each such story there will be silence about some aspects of the past that are important for other authors).

It is apparently impossible to create a single and consistent story about history that unites all points of view - and this is one of the most important axioms of historical science. If historians put an end to the “unity of history” quite a long time ago, then the awareness of the immanent inconsistency of history as a text is a relatively new phenomenon. It is connected with the above-mentioned disappearance of the gap between the present and the recent past, with the interference of memory in the process of historical reflection of modern society. Modern historians face a problem with this multitude of narratives, the multitude of stories about the past, which are produced by different social groups, different regions, ideologists and states. Some of these narratives are confrontational and potentially contain the germ of social conflict, but the choice between them has to be made not on the basis of their scientific nature, but on the basis of ethical principles, thereby establishing a new connection between history and morality. One of the newest tasks of historical science is to work on the seams between these narratives. The modern idea of history as a whole looks more like not a single stream, but a blanket sewn from different patches. We are doomed to live at the same time with different interpretations and be able to establish a conversation about a common past, maintaining differences, or rather polyphony.

historical sources

Sources are documents, language data and social institutions, but also material remains, things and even nature in which man interfered (for example, parks, reservoirs, etc.) - that is, everything that bears the imprint of human activity , the study of which can help restore the actions and thoughts of people, forms of social interaction and other social reality of past eras. It is not out of place to repeat that they become sources only at the moment the historian turns to them for information about the past.

In modern humanities Increasingly, the word "texts" is used to refer to roughly the same concept, but historians prefer to talk about "historical sources".

The “past”, as we found out, is a problematic concept, but the texts of the sources are real, they can be literally touched, re-read, and checked the logic of predecessors. The questions formulated by historians are addressed precisely to these sources. The first sources were living people with their stories, and this type of source (limited by time and space) is still important when working with recent and modern history: twentieth-century "oral history" projects have brought significant results.

The next type of sources were official documents left over from the day-to-day activities of various kinds of bureaucracy, including legislation and international treaties, but also numerous registration papers. Leopold von Ranke preferred diplomatic documents from the state archives to other types of documents. Statistics - state and commercial - allows you to apply quantitative methods in the analysis of the past. Personal memories and memoirs traditionally attract readers and are also traditionally considered very unreliable: memoirists, for obvious reasons, tell the version of events they need. Nevertheless, given the interest of the author and after comparison with other sources, these texts can give a lot to understand the events, motives of behavior and details of the past. From the moment of its appearance, the materials of the periodical press have been used by historians: no other source allows us to understand the synchronism of various events, from politics and economics to culture and local news, like the pages of newspapers. Finally, the Annales school proved that any object that bears traces of human influence can become a source for the historian; a garden or a park laid out according to a certain plan, or varieties of plants and animal breeds bred by man, will not be left aside. The accumulation of significant amounts of information and the development of mathematical methods for its processing promise great breakthroughs in the study of the past with the beginning of the use of processing tools by historians. big data.

The professional practice of historians also came into conflict with the instrumental approach to history that is spreading in society: if the past is not recognized as an independent value and the past should work for the present, then the sources are not important. The conflict that broke out in the summer of 2015 between the director of the State Archives of the Russian Federation Sergey Mironenko, who presented documentary evidence of the composition of the “feat of 28 Panfilov’s men” in the battle for Moscow in 1941, and the Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation Vladimir Medinsky, who defended the “correct myth” from its verification by sources, is indicative.

In fact, politicians not only express their claims to control history, but also deny the right of historians to expert judgment about the past, equating professional knowledge based on documents with "mass consciousness" based on myths. The conflict between the archivist and the minister could be classified as a curiosity if it did not fit into the logic of the development of the historical consciousness of modern society, which led to the dominance of presentism.

“Any historical event, having ended, becomes a myth - positive or negative. The same can be attributed to historical figures. Our heads of state archives should conduct their research, but life is such that people operate not with archival information, but with myths. References can strengthen these myths, destroy them, turn them upside down. Well, the public mass consciousness always operates with myths, including in relation to history, so you need to treat this reverently, carefully, and prudently.

Vladimir Medinsky. Monuments of cultural heritage - a strategic priority of Russia // Izvestia. Nov 22, 2016

Thus, having parted with positivism, we suddenly found ourselves in the face of a new Middle Ages, in which a “good purpose” justifies the falsification of sources (or their biased selection).

Laws of history

At the end of the 19th century, the debate about the scientific nature of history focused on its ability to discover the laws of human development. Throughout the 20th century, the very concept of science has evolved. Today, science is often defined as "a field of human activity aimed at developing and systematizing objective knowledge about reality" or as "description with the help of concepts." History certainly fits into these definitions. In addition, various sciences use the historical method or historical approach to phenomena. Finally, one must understand that this is a conversation about the correlation of concepts developed by European civilization itself, and these concepts are historical, that is, they change over time.

And yet - are there historical laws, "laws of history"? If we talk about the laws of development of society, then this question should obviously be redirected to sociology, which studies the laws of human development. The laws of development of human societies certainly exist. Some of them are statistical in nature, some allow you to see causal relationships in a repeating sequence of historical events. It is precisely this kind of laws that are most often declared by supporters of the status of history as "rigorous science" as "the laws of history."

It's easier to talk about historical discoveries. Discoveries in history are of two types: the discovery of new sources, archives, memoirs, or the posing of a new problem, question, approach, turning into sources what was not previously considered sources or allowing to find new in old sources. Thus, a discovery in history can be not only a birch bark found during excavations, but also a new research question.

“First I get interested in the problem and start reading about it. This reading makes me redefine the issue. Redefining the problem forces me to change the direction of my reading. The new reading, in turn, changes the formulation of the problem even further and changes the direction of what I read even further. So I keep moving back and forth until I feel everything is in order - at this moment I write down what I got and send it to the publisher.

William McNeil Cited. Quoted from: Gaddis J. L. The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. P. 48.

William McNeil (1917–2016) – American historian, author of many works in the field of transnational history Translated into Russian: McNeil W. Rise of the West. History of the human community. Moscow: Starklight, 2004; McNeil U. In pursuit of power. Technology, military force and society in the XI-XX centuries. M.: Territory of the future, 2008.

Let's dwell on this point in a little more detail. Since the days of the Annales school, historians have begun their work by posing a research question - this requirement seems to be common to all sciences today. In the practice of historical research, however, there is constantly repeated clarification and reformulation of the question in the process of working on it.

The hermeneutic circle was described by G.-G. Gadamer: “It is possible to understand something only thanks to pre-existing assumptions about it, and not when it is presented to us as something absolutely mysterious. The fact that anticipations can be a source of errors in interpretation and that prejudices that promote understanding can also lead to misunderstanding, is only an indication of the finitude of such a being as man, and the manifestation of this finitude of him. Gadamer G.-G. About the circle of understanding // The relevance of the beautiful. M.: Art, 1991).

Examples of the laws of history can be the repetitive patterns of using the past in modern debates (the selection in the past of plots and problems that help in solving today's problems or in the struggle for a group vision of the future; the limitations of such selection, the influence of scientific works and journalism on the formation of the historical consciousness of society), and also ways of setting goals and obtaining historical knowledge.

Read more:
Kurilla Ivan. History, or the Past in the Present. - St. Petersburg: Publishing House of the European University in St. Petersburg, 2017. - 176 p.

In which Ivan Kurilla, a professor at the European University at St. Petersburg, tries to figure out what meaning was put into the word "history" in different times and what happens when politics interferes with historical science. T&P publishes an excerpt about why the society needs a single history textbook, why historians cannot have one version, and how history becomes part of modernity.

Plurality of subjects ("History in fragments")

* Cliometry flourished in the 1960s and 70s. Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery by Stanley Engerman and Robert Fogel (1974) ) became the cause of fierce controversy (the conclusions about the economic efficiency of slavery in the US South were perceived by some critics as a justification for slavery) and showed the possibilities of cliometry. In 1993, one of the authors of the book, Robert Fogel, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, including for this research.

Indeed, there are problems in history that can be compromised, but there are also problems where this is impossible: it is, as a rule, a story told by “different voices”, associated with the identity of a particular social group. The history of an authoritarian state and the history of the victims of some kind of “great turn” is unlikely to ever create a “compromise option”. An analysis of the interests of the state will help to understand why certain decisions were made, and this will be a logical explanation. But his logic will in no way “balance” the history of those people who, as a result of these decisions, lost their fortune, health, and sometimes life - and this story will also be true about the past. These two views on history can be presented in different chapters of the same textbook, but there are many more such points of view than two: it is difficult, for example, to reconcile the history of different regions in a large multinational country. Moreover, the past provides historians with the opportunity to create many narratives, and the bearers of different value systems (as well as different social groups) can write their own “history textbook”, in which they can describe history in terms of nationalism or internationalism, statism or anarchy, liberalism or traditionalism. Each of these stories will be internally consistent (although, probably, in each such story there will be silence about some aspects of the past that are important for other authors).

Modern historians face a problem with this multitude of narratives, the multitude of stories about the past, which are produced by different social groups, different regions, ideologists and states. Some of these narratives are confrontational and potentially contain the germ of social conflict, but the choice between them has to be made not on the basis of their scientific nature, but on the basis of ethical principles, thereby establishing a new connection between history and morality. One of the newest tasks of historical science is to work on the seams between these narratives. The modern idea of history as a whole looks more like not a single stream, but a blanket sewn from different patches. We are doomed to live at the same time with different interpretations and be able to establish a conversation about a common past, maintaining differences, or rather polyphony.

historical sources

In modern humanities, the word “texts” is increasingly used to refer to approximately the same concept, but historians prefer to talk about “historical sources”.

The next type of sources were official documents left over from the day-to-day activities of various kinds of bureaucracy, including legislation and international treaties, but also numerous registration papers. Leopold von Ranke preferred diplomatic documents from the state archives to other types of documents. Statistics - state and commercial - allows you to apply quantitative methods in the analysis of the past. Personal memories and memoirs traditionally attract readers and are also traditionally considered very unreliable: memoirists, for obvious reasons, tell the version of events they need. Nevertheless, given the interest of the author and after comparison with other sources, these texts can give a lot to understand the events, motives of behavior and details of the past. From the moment of its appearance, the materials of the periodical press have been used by historians: no other source allows us to understand the synchronism of various events, from politics and economics to culture and local news, like the pages of newspapers. Finally, the Annales school proved that any object that bears traces of human influence can become a source for the historian; a garden or a park laid out according to a certain plan, or varieties of plants and animal breeds bred by man, will not be left aside. The accumulation of significant amounts of information and the development of mathematical methods for its processing promises great breakthroughs in the research of the past with the beginning of the use of Big Data processing tools by historians.

The professional practice of historians also came into conflict with the instrumental approach to history that is spreading in society: if the past is not recognized as an independent value and the past should work for the present, then the sources are not important. The conflict that broke out in the summer of 2015 between the director of the State Archives of the Russian Federation Sergey Mironenko, who presented documentary evidence of the composition of the “feat of 28 Panfilov’s men” in the battle for Moscow in 1941, and the Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation Vladimir Medinsky, who defended the “correct myth” from its verification by sources, is indicative.

Any historical event, having ended, becomes a myth - positive or negative. The same can be attributed to historical figures. Our heads of state archives should conduct their research, but life is such that people operate not with archival information, but with myths. References can strengthen these myths, destroy them, turn them upside down. Well, the public mass consciousness always operates with myths, including in relation to history, so this must be treated with reverence, care, and caution.

Vladimir Medinsky

In fact, politicians not only express their claims to control history, but also deny the right of historians to expert judgment about the past, equating professional knowledge based on documents with "mass consciousness" based on myths. The conflict between the archivist and the minister could be classified as a curiosity if it did not fit into the logic of the development of the historical consciousness of modern society, which led to the dominance of presentism.

Thus, having parted with positivism, we suddenly found ourselves in the face of a new Middle Ages, in which a “good purpose” justifies the falsification of sources (or their biased selection).

Laws of history

And yet - are there historical laws, "laws of history"? If we talk about the laws of development of society, then this question should obviously be redirected to sociology, which studies the laws of human development. The laws of development of human societies certainly exist. Some of them are statistical in nature, some allow you to see causal relationships in a repeating sequence of historical events. It is precisely this kind of laws that are most often declared by supporters of the status of history as "rigorous science" as "the laws of history."

Let's dwell on this point in a little more detail. Since the days of the Annales school, historians have begun their work by posing a research question - this requirement seems to be common to all sciences today. In the practice of historical research, however, there is constantly repeated clarification and reformulation of the question in the process of working on it.

First I get interested in the problem and start reading about it. This reading makes me redefine the issue. Redefining the problem forces me to change the direction of my reading. The new reading, in turn, changes the formulation of the problem even further and changes the direction of what I read even further. So I keep moving back and forth until I feel everything is in order - at this point I write down what I got and send it to the publisher.

William McNeil

The historian, in accordance with the model of the hermeneutic circle*, constantly refines his research question on the basis of the data he receives from sources. The final formulation of the historian's research question becomes the formula of the relation of the present to the past, established by scientists. It turns out that the research question itself is not only the starting point, but also one of the most important results of the study.

Who are historians?

If historians could once consider that they are writing for distant descendants, then today's understanding of historical science does not leave them such an opportunity. Reader - consumer historical knowledge, the main audience of the historian - is in modern times. By formulating a research question, the historian establishes a connection between modernity and the society of the past he studies. Any historian may be faced with the fact that his research questions, relevant today and interesting to him, will not excite people in twenty or forty years - simply because they will become obsolete on their own. There are, of course, exceptions - historians who were ahead of their time and got into the pain points of the next generations with their questions. However, in its usual state, history is part of a modern dialogue with the past, and therefore writing on the table is a very dangerous and unproductive exercise.

What do historians do, and how does their work differ from the constant use of history by members of other professions? Technically, the answer is simple: the “craft” of a historian for several generations has consisted of several stages, from the formulation (and reformulation) of a question (research task) through the search and criticism of sources to their analysis and creation of the final text (articles, monographs, dissertations). However, from what we have learned about history, it becomes clear that such an answer will be incomplete - it will not clarify for us the content and goals of this work.

There are two traditional responses to the role of the historian.

According to the first, the historian is a wise, impartial "Nestor the chronicler", a scientist in an ivory tower, a person who "without anger and predilection" is engaged in describing the past (here it must be clarified that the chroniclers described not so much the past as their own present or very recent past for them).

The second, also already traditional, view of the historian is the idea that appeared in the 19th century that the historian is the ideologist of the creation of a nation, the ideologist of "nation-building". The historian is the conductor of "identity politics", the one who helps the nation to realize itself, dig out its roots, show the community of people what unites them, and thus create, strengthen the nation. Both of these ideas continue to exist in society, and many historians try them on themselves and even try to comply with one or another approach.

Nevertheless, the modern view of the place of the historian in modern society requires significant additions.

What is expected of a historian today?

Historians are professionals in the dialogue of modernity with the past, understanding its rules and limitations. The fact that the study of history requires special qualifications is not always obvious, but it is true: not every question can be asked of the past, not every explanation of historical events can be confirmed by sources. The results of their work are verifiable and socially significant. Thus, historians perform a very important social function of the dialogue between the present and the past.

IN early XXI century, the concept of history has changed. History is more and more beginning to be understood not as a science about the past, or about the behavior of people in the past, or about past social reality, but as a science about the interaction of people with time, past and future, with changes in the social order. Thus, the change in views on history and the public demand for historians changes the idea of the activities of historians and the object of history as a science - now it is not the past "in itself", but the use of this past in modern times and to manipulate the future.

Of course, the historian of the Sumerian civilization may not feel the direct connection of his work with the surrounding social reality - it affects him indirectly, through the ethos and changing approaches of historical science. After all, the historian is socialized not just in society, but also in the profession, and his personal modernity includes the experience accumulated by generations of predecessors, the corpus of texts of historical science. That is why questions about the past formulated by historians incorporate the results of previous historiography - history is cumulative knowledge. The past known to us sets the form and imposes restrictions on new questions to itself. In other words, in order to correctly formulate a question, you need to know a good half of the answer to it.

The classical historian, “discovering the past” in an archival document, is still engaged in historical science, but the understanding of the purpose of this process by society has changed: now a new story about the past is expected from the historian, a new narrative that can influence the present. If he does not write such a story himself, concentrating on studying "what really happened", then he will obviously create material for his colleagues, but until one of them uses this material in communication with society, the mission of the historian not fully implemented.

If in the last century history ended at a prudent distance from modernity, historians refused to take part in the conversation about recent events, and Benedetto Croce’s already quoted aphorism that “all history is modern” meant only the relevance of the issues studied by historians, now society expects from the history of attention, first of all, to such a past, which has not yet “completely ended” and affects the present. History is now considered a full part of modernity. Professional alignment of the distance between the present and the past is in conflict with the demand for modern history.

That is why, among the new tasks of history, “the stitching together of contradictory narratives” appears, therefore “places of memory” occupy a more important place in the understanding of history than archives, therefore new area"public history", as a result, historians increasingly have to enter into disputes with politicians and business, and their presence in public debates about today becomes more and more important.

In other words, in current situation- in a society of triumphant presentism - historians of necessity become professionals in the question of how modernity copes with the presence of the past in it. This applies to the settlement of conflicts stretching from the past, and to, and to the changing attitude of modern generations to the historical heritage.

The Importance of Historical Narratives

The real purpose of history is to help society understand something about itself. The role of historians in this context cannot be reduced to intra-shop development - shutting themselves off from society, they lose the meaning of the existence of their science.

Many historians who identify themselves with the "new historical science" look down on historical narratives. However, modern historical science understands that history exists in the historian's presentation, that this presentation takes on the character of a literary text - and in many cases it is to a large extent a narrative text. “Narratives turn the past into history,” says the German historian Jörn Rüsen, “narratives create a field in which history lives a cultural life in the minds of people, telling them who they are and how they and their world change over time.” Moreover, in the teaching of history it is difficult to do without one or another textbook, which is also a narrative story about the events of the past.

It is historical narratives (usually political, but there are exceptions) that are required by politicians - "nation builders" - or any other community; it is a coherent story about the past that the reader requires from historians historical literature. In general, we can say that what society needs from historians is a narrative based on sources and new questions about the past.

It is likely that the growing popularity of conspiracy texts as "popular history texts" is due to the fact that scientists have abandoned stories about history as a single process leading us from the past to the future.

It follows from this that the compilation of a coherent story about the past should not fall outside the professional competence of historians. By limiting themselves to working in archives and answering research questions, historians as a guild and professional community risk losing their audience and losing the important function of professional intermediaries between the present and the past*.

* Of course, this is not about the personal choice of each scientist, but about the community of historians, in which there should be a place both for armchair scientists who prefer archival studies, and for those who know how to convey the results of their work - their own and colleagues - to an audience outside professional workshop.

Where to look for historians?

The institutional affiliation of historians also turns out to be important, it adds to the historian's own identity of his connection with the community or organization. The majority of historians-researchers teach at universities, a significant part of them work in research centers (in Russia - in the structures of the Academy of Sciences), and some - in archives and museums.

As a rule, historians also belong to professional organizations, united according to the principle of a common theme, period or research method. In addition, there are national organizations of historians, often acting as defenders of the professional claims of scientists to the monopoly of interpretation of the past from the encroachment of the state and other groups. The forums of such organizations sometimes become a space for discussing the most important problems of the profession - from methodology to the position of historians in society.

During recent years Three societies were created in Russia, to one degree or another declaring themselves as a national organization of historians. In the summer of 2012, the Russian Historical Society was created (official documents insist on the wording “recreated”, since the RIO claims continuity in relation to the Imperial RIO that existed before the 1917 revolution). The following winter, the Military Historical Society appeared in Russia. If the leadership of RIO turned out to be made up of politicians of the first echelon (the then speaker State Duma Russian Federation Sergey Naryshkin), then the RVIO turned out to be under the leadership of the less influential, but more active in the public sphere, Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky. In the leadership of both these societies, "generals" from history are represented, but people who have nothing to do with science dominate there - politicians.

This is partly why, at the end of the winter of 2014, a number of independent historians created the Free Historical Society, which since then has been the spokesman for the opinion of a significant part of the professional community about the manifestations of historical politics and attempts at inaccurate “use of history”.

On November 16, the award in the field of popular science literature "Enlightener" will name the winners of the 10th anniversary season. Eight books made it to the final. Every day will publish a fragment of one of them. The first edition in this list: "History, or the Past in the Present" by Ivan Kurilla. What is history? The past or the entire time of the existence of mankind? The actions of people in the past or our knowledge of them? What is history - science, literature, a form of social consciousness or just a method? Are there "laws of history"? What is the role of history (in all the variety of its meanings) in modern society? What happens when history meets politics? Professor of the European University in St. Petersburg Ivan Kurilla in his book "History, or the Past in the Present" deals with all these issues.

History and memory

IN Greek mythology the muse of history, Clio, was the eldest daughter of the goddess of memory, Mnemosyne. In search of beautiful metaphors, history has sometimes been called the "memory of mankind." However, in the 20th century it became clear that social memory exists not only in the form of history, and perhaps it is also opposite to history as a form of ordering reality.

Social memory - long-term preservation and transfer of knowledge, skills, prohibitions and other social information from generation to generation. It is on it that everyday life, planning and development of society. The new generation must, in the process of learning, transfer some of this experience into their own individual memory in order to use it and then pass it on to their descendants.

Social memory has many forms, including family memory (transmission of family histories and - mainly in a traditional society that retains a social place for members of the same family for generations - professional skills from parents to children), the education system (where the transmission of important intergenerational information carried out by society or the state), as well as, for example, the above-mentioned chronotope in which a person lives (names of cities and streets, established monuments and memorial signs and holidays). Language can be seen as the first form of social memory: it contains structures that convey social experience (the “social construction of reality” takes place primarily in language).

Photo: Maria Sibiryakova / RIA Novosti

The preservation and transmission of social memory from generation to generation has been one of the main tasks of mankind since its separation from the natural world (in fact, it can be said that the presence of social memory distinguishes people from animals). Memorization of a large amount of information (not only everyday, like hunting and farming skills, but more general, existing, for example, in the epic and including patterns of behavior, ethical norms and aesthetic rules) was the main part of any training, education, upbringing.

Obviously, in the primitive society, the memory of society was preserved to a large extent in the individual consciousness of its members. And although in the primitive collective, as far as scientists can assume, there was some division of labor, and the task of preserving experience to a greater extent lay with the older generation, as well as with leaders, priests and shamans, nevertheless, each individual person had to keep collective wisdom in memory. , culture and basic cooperative survival skills.

One of the tasks of the state was to maintain the unity of social memory through historical commemoration - the establishment of monuments, the names of streets and cities, teaching and museumification.

Writing made it possible to separate the accumulation of experience from individual memory. The volumes of the transmitted became larger, but the memory began to be fragmented, its different parts were supported by separate (for example, professional) communities. It is no coincidence that the Tartu semiologist and cultural historian called history “one of the by-products of the emergence of writing.”

With the advent of printing and the spread of literacy, the proportion of information stored in individual memory has declined. The advent of the Internet (and electronic devices) amplifies the tendency to release individual memory, transferring to the network a large number of information, facts, technologies. People no longer remember so many dates or facts (which you can look up at any time on Wikipedia).

Social memory thus finally became something external to a particular person, which expanded the possibilities for challenging the dominant version of memory from alternative concepts.

In recent decades, memory research has become a rapidly developing field. Among the scientists dealing with this issue, there are probably more culturologists than historians. Moreover, Maurice Halbwachs, one of the first memory researchers, believed that history and memory are in a state of antagonism. In fact, historians are professionally engaged not in the preservation of memory, but in its destruction, because they turn to the past with questions, they look for something there that is not stored in the "actual memory" of mankind. The task of social memory is to ensure the preservation of tradition, the transfer of information from generation to generation. One of possible tasks history - to deconstruct this tradition, to show its relativity. In addition, history is able to operate on a scale inaccessible to social memory - global processes and times of "long duration", and this also separates memory and history as different ways of relating to the past.

The leading French historian Pierre Nora, the author of the concept of “places of memory” (les lieux de mémoire), which can be monuments, holidays, emblems, celebrations in honor of people or events, as well as books (including works of art and their characters), songs or geographical points that are "surrounded by a symbolic aura". The function of memory places is to preserve the memory of a group of people. There is another point of view: professional history itself is one of the forms of the social memory of society (“successful history is assimilated into the collective memory”). This approach also makes sense, but it levels out the differences in the forms of addressing the past between history and social memory. Some scientists have come to the conclusion that, since both concepts are full of context-dependent meanings, “the attempt to establish a solid conceptual relationship between them is based on erroneous premises.”

And yet, in an obvious way, the study of social memory is important for historical science to the extent that social memory is a "recorded past." In this sense, it is equal not to history as a science, but to its sources, "raw materials" for historical analysis. History can ask its own questions about what constitutes social memory - monuments and oral traditions, traditions and textbooks (in addition, historical science also asks questions about those sources that have fallen out of living social memory, deposited in archives or buried in a layer of soil). The “oral history” that appeared in the middle of the 20th century is precisely aimed at turning (individual) memory into history.

History and morality

From antiquity to modern times, one of the most common types of historical texts were moralizing. Examples from the past helped clarify the basics of right and wrong. correct behavior to consolidate the values and moral principles of society. However, at the beginning of the New Age, such a story ceased to satisfy the exacting taste of an enlightened reader - literature was now engaged in moralizing. Nevertheless, history continued to provide examples for ethical teachings in modern times, especially when they began to be constructed in isolation from Christian ethics. Soon, however, people began to entrust future generations with the functions of moral judgment, and this dramatically changed the concept of history.

In the XVIII century, in the era of the secularization of knowledge, God began to fall out of the explanatory schemes of the structure of the world. In most cases, the divine principle was replaced by the people; this is how the cliché about “the infallibility of the people” and the democratic legitimation of government, which replaced the “divine anointing”, arose. The maintenance of morality and values of correct behavior was largely based on the concept of the Last Judgment, which awaits everyone at the end of time, and the afterlife reward. Secularization came here too: the idea of the Last Judgment was replaced by the concept of the “judgment of descendants”. It was up to the next generations to evaluate the actions and motives of the living generation, and it was to their judgment that the most important decisions were made. This meant, in particular, that historians of the future were seen as judges weighing good and evil and making a final verdict on the virtue of people and evaluating their life as a whole.

The question of morality in history is connected with the dispute about free will that began in the Middle Ages. Indeed, rigidly deterministic conceptions of human history deny free will, but in doing so, cast doubt on the possibility of moral judgment. good example are the views of the famous British historian E. H. Carr, who was a supporter of historical determinism and argued that the idea of free will in history, promoted and was "propaganda cold war”, because its main purpose is to resist the determinism of the Soviet concept of history, which is steadily leading humanity towards communism. He denied the possibility of moral judgments in history, considering it unscientific for a historian to judge people of another time, focusing on the moral values of his own era.

Nevertheless, Carr considered it possible to make assessments of the institutions of the past, and not of individuals: an assessment made by an individual historical figure can be perceived as a removal of responsibility from society. Thus, he considered it wrong to attribute Nazi crimes only to Hitler, and McCarthyism - only to Senator McCarthy. According to Carr, the historian's work should not use the concepts of good and evil; he suggested using the terms "progressive" and "reactionary" instead. As a result of this approach, Carr declared collectivization in the USSR justified (despite the huge sacrifices that accompanied it), since it led to progress - the industrialization of the country.

The well-known American historian of the Cold War, John L. Gaddis, considered Carr's approach not only wrong from a moral point of view, but also contradictory to Carr's own recognition of the impossibility of "objective history". For Gaddis, it seemed fruitful to compare the ethical assessments of the same phenomenon by historians and contemporaries.

So is the purpose of history a moral judgment about the past? It is unlikely that historians really want to act as judges of the kingdom beyond the grave; however, moral evaluation, of course, turns out to be one of the forms of historical questioning. If history is a constantly maintained dialogue between the present and the past, then the content of this dialogue can be, among other things, moral, and moreover, evaluating actions. historical figures not only from the point of view of morality that prevailed in their era, but also from the modern historian's understanding of morality. This assessment makes it possible to maintain an important distance for history between "now" and "then".

Indeed, if we look at the historical narrative from the standpoint not only of relations between the present and the past, but also of relations in which the future is also present (the choice of interpreting the past is carried out in order to influence the formation of the future), then it turns out that one of the possible ways assessments of the proposed narratives - an assessment of the future to which they lead. Among the "constructs" of this kind, there are those that contribute to conflicts, wars, interracial and interethnic hostility. That is why in a number of countries they even came to the legislative restriction of some interpretations of history: memorial laws in many countries prohibit, for example, Holocaust denial. However, the weakness of such prohibitions is obvious: “forbidden” interpretations appear in neighboring countries, spread on the Internet; in addition, they are highly controversial, from the point of view of scientists, as well as consistent defenders of freedom of speech. There is another option related to moral and ethical responsibility and self-restraint associated with it. The appearance of a moral criterion in assessing the historical narrative seems extra-scientific, but it is quite natural and makes us think again about the content of the concept of "history".

The fragment is published with the permission of the European University Press in St. Petersburg