What type of study is this?

This is a Literature Review study (also classified as: Quantitative Study).

October 20, 2025

Local historians of the first half of the 20th century (1920–1950s) and the Soviet avant-garde (The problem of changing scientific paradigms in Russian culture)

Key Points

Local historians significantly contributed to regional cultural identity through their historiographic works.
The late medieval traditions and metropolitan societies influenced the development of local lore in the Russian provinces.
Changes during the cultural revolution led to new artistic trends and a re-evaluation of folklore studies.
The research highlights the importance of 1920-1930s local historians in documenting regional culture and history.

Abstract

The article attempts to define the role of local historians and their works in the process of historical self-reflection of the local cultural tradition. The purpose of this article is to clarify some of the conceptual approaches of local historians to the analysis of folklore and ethnographic material. The author believes that the roots of the formation of local lore should be sought in the late medieval regional annals, hagiographic stories and church chroniclers of the New Age. The next stage in the process of local historical identity is represented by local historiographic works of the late 18th century. The metropolitan societies of the Russian Geographical Society, the OLEAE of the Moscow University, and others had a direct impact on the formation of regional centers for the study of the region, and the Provincial Statistical Committees and the editorial offices of “Gubernskie vedomosti” played an important role in this process. Place of local lore in the period of the 19th century was determined by his attitude to academic science as an auxiliary purely source study discipline. Local history as a social movement in Russian culture underwent significant changes in the late 19th – early 20th centuries. Interest in the Russian provinces has grown and, accordingly, more emotionally, the ambitions of local experts in the history of the “small homeland”. In fact, there was a search for a “place of memory”. “Changes” in the socio-cultural situation, the era of the “cultural revolution” and the activities of Proletkult, significantly influenced the emergence of new trends and styles in art and social and cultural life of “new” Russia, these changes in the whole of the humanities, including the most open to innovation at that time scientific discipline – folklore. The works of the Solvychegodsk and Ustyug local historians of the 1920–1930s contain extensive material on the culture and history of this region in a certain period and are of great interest to modern researchers

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