I've heard that it's a common issue in some parts of academia for PhD students to write their dissertations only to find out that someone in the USSR already wrote about this topic decades ago. What were the implications of this in the early 1990s when the Soviet archives were released to the west?

Woo boy, there's a lot going on here.

So let's start out simply. I don't think this is a particularly common issue. First off, someone having written about your topic decades ago does not necessarily disqualify it from being your dissertation topic, regardless of where it was written. A good dissertation proposal isn't just about identifying a topic, but also making a clear argument for why your theoretical framework and contribution to the overall scholarship is unique - and that can be true even if someone else has written about it. Still, I understand the spirit of the question - what if nobody knows about this other scholarship? I've never heard of that happening. I can't say it never happened, but I do know a number of senior historians of the Soviet Union and I've never heard them tell a story about this. I'd be interested to know who you heard this from that said this was a "common issue"

Even as early as the 1970s, it was possible for a limited number of students to travel to the Soviet Union for research purposes (my own advisor was part of the first cohort of students to do just that, in fact). This put those students in direct contact with Soviet historians and Soviet students and gave them sense of what kind of research was being done. The foreign students in the Soviet Union often did not access to the material they wanted, but they weren't flying completely blind either. Scholars of the Soviet Union working in that time period had access to lots of published sources that gave them a reasonably, if incomplete, base.

Furthermore, there were political implications of writing history in the Soviet Union that was also a constraint on Soviet historiography. I want to be clear, this doesn't mean that Soviet historians were necessarily outright fabricating information. It does mean that the kinds of topics that historians chose to write about and the methodologies they used were informed by political considerations. Without dwelling on this, that meant that western historians had more differences from Soviet historians than just access to information. They were also writing from somewhat different methodological frameworks. I want to stress, even when western historians were using Marxian frameworks and who were more let's say sympathetic to socialism than western scholars of the 1950s-60s (Conquet et. al), the *kind* of scholarship they were writing was somewhat different.

If you look at the scholarship that came out of the 70s and 80s, a lot of the analysis of non-archival sources holds up. Rather than being entirely discarded, much of it has been built upon. Access to published sources was one thing western scholars really did have prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of the archives and, just like today, those scholars/doctoral students of that era were expected to have an understanding of the published sources available to them.

Opening the archives did make a big difference for scholars of the Soviet Union. Scholars like Stephen Kotkin (who people might know for writing a three-volume saga on Stalin) got into the archives very early. The work that came out of the early archival research in his case was Magnetic Mountain, a book about the creation of Magnitogorsk, is illustrative of the impact of the archives (full disclosure, I'm also choosing to write about it here because it's one of my very favorite works on the Soviet Union). Of course, it was not news that Magintogosk existed, or even that it was an important site but the level of detail was unprecedented and allowed scholars to rethink how they understood broader concepts like the relationship between the state and the Soviet working class and how the state tried to physically build socialism.

I just pulled my copy of Magnetic Mountain off the shelf to illustrate the point. The two broad sections of the book are "Building Socialism: The Grand Strategies of the State" and "Living Socialism: The Little Tactics of the Habitat." Kotkin's chapter in the second part 'Speaking Bolshevik' was a real breakthrough and a concept that historians of the Soviet Union still do. Perusing the end notes from that chapter, it's apparent that access to new archival information was critical to the development of that concept, but he also frequently cites published sources that were available prior to the opening of the archives that Kotkin was able to recontextualize and interpret in light of the archival information now available to him as well as being directly and explicitly in dialog with western scholars who had written before him.

So, that's a bunch of words that amount to something like "I don't think this was necessarily the case." Western scholars were not entirely ignorant of the historical work being done by their Soviet counterparts. The opening of the archives allowed for a new and more sophisticated understanding of topics new and old, but did not necessarily invalidate all that came before either, Soviet or Western.

Hey all,

If you frequent the sub, you know the drill. If you're here from /r/all, or browse only occasionally, please be aware we have strict rules here intended to enforce the very high bar we expect from comments, so before posting, please read our rules. We remove comments which don't comply, and consider everyone forewarned. If you have feedback or commentary about how things are run here, please don't post it in this thread. We'll just remove it. We love to hear thoughtful, constructive feedback via modmail however.

It can take time for an answer to show up, so we thank you for your patience. If you want to be reminded to come check back later, or simply find other great content to read while you wait, this thread provides a guide to a number of ways to do so, including the RemindMeBot or our Twitter.

Again though, please remember the rules, and keep them in mind while you browse. If you don't like how this subreddit is run, keep in mind that this method has seen us continue to succeed and grow for years, and isn't going to change, so at least try and make your complaint original. /r/AskHistory exists, so complaining about the rules to us is like going into a fancy restaurant to complain they don't sell chicken nuggets, even though Chick-fil-A is nextdoor.

Edit: While you're waiting, this awesome answer deserved reading!