In historiography, historical revisionism is the reinterpretation of a historical account. It usually involves challenging the orthodox views held by professional scholars about a historical event or timespan or phenomenon, introducing contrary evidence, or reinterpreting the motivations and decisions of the people involved. The revision of the historical record can reflect new discoveries of fact, evidence, and interpretation, which then results in revised history. In dramatic cases, revisionism involves a reversal of older moral judgments.
Historical negationism, also called historical denialism, is falsification or distortion of the historical record. It should not be conflated with historical revisionism, a broader term that extends to newly evidenced, fairly reasoned academic reinterpretations of history. In attempting to revise the past, historical negationism acts as illegitimate historical revisionism by using techniques inadmissible in proper historical discourse, such as presenting known forged documents as genuine, inventing ingenious but implausible reasons for distrusting genuine documents, attributing conclusions to books and sources that report the opposite, manipulating statistical series to support the given point of view, and deliberately mistranslating texts.
Stalinism is the means of governing and Marxist–Leninist policies implemented in the Soviet Union (USSR) from 1927 to 1953 by Joseph Stalin. It included the creation of a one-party totalitarian police state, rapid industrialization, the theory of socialism in one country, collectivization of agriculture, intensification of class conflict, a cult of personality, and subordination of the interests of foreign communist parties to those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which Stalinism deemed the leading vanguard party of communist revolution at the time. After Stalin's death and the Khrushchev Thaw, a period of de-Stalinization began in the 1950s and 1960s, which caused the influence of Stalin's ideology to begin to wane in the USSR.
Totalitarianism is a form of government and a political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high if not complete degree of control and regulation over public and private life. It is regarded as the most extreme and complete form of authoritarianism. In totalitarian states, political power is often held by autocrats, such as dictators, who employ all-encompassing campaigns in which propaganda is broadcast by state-controlled mass media in order to control the citizenry.
Soviet and communist studies, or Soviet studies is the field of historical studies of the Soviet Union and other communist states as well as historical studies of the communist parties that existed or still exist in some form in many countries, both inside and outside the former Eastern Bloc, such as the Communist Party USA. Aspects of its historiography have attracted debates between historians on topics including totalitarianism and Cold War espionage.
Kremlinology is the study and analysis of the politics and policies of the Soviet Union while Sovietology is the study of politics and policies of both the Soviet Union and former communist states more generally. These two terms were synonymous until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In an extended usage, Kremlinology is sometimes used to mean any attempt to understand a secretive organization or process, such as plans for upcoming products or events, by interpreting indirect clues.
The Islamic Army of the Caucasus was a military unit of the Ottoman Empire formed on July 10, 1918. The Ottoman Minister of War, Enver Pasha, ordered its establishment, and it played a major role during the Caucasus Campaign of World War I.
Justin A. McCarthy is an American demographer, former professor of history at the University of Louisville, in Louisville, Kentucky. He holds an honorary doctorate from Boğaziçi University (Turkey), was awarded the Order of Merit of Turkey, and is a board member of the Institute of Turkish Studies and the Center for Eurasian Studies (AVIM). His area of expertise is the history of the late Ottoman Empire.
Norman M. Naimark is an American historian. He is the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of Eastern European Studies at Stanford University, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He writes on modern Eastern European history, genocide, and ethnic cleansing in the region.
John Archibald Getty III is an American historian and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), who specializes in the history of Russia and the history of the Soviet Union.
The German Caucasus expedition was a military expedition sent in late May 1918, by the German Empire to the formerly Russian Transcaucasia during the Caucasus Campaign of World War I. Its prime aim was to stabilize the pro-German Democratic Republic of Georgia and to secure oil supplies for Germany by preventing the Ottoman Empire from gaining access to the oil reserves near Baku on the Absheron Peninsula.
As soon as the term "Cold War" was popularized to refer to postwar tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, interpreting the course and origins of the conflict became a source of heated controversy among historians, political scientists and journalists. In particular, historians have sharply disagreed as to who was responsible for the breakdown of Soviet Union–United States relations after the World War II and whether the conflict between the two superpowers was inevitable, or could have been avoided. Historians have also disagreed on what exactly the Cold War was, what the sources of the conflict were and how to disentangle patterns of action and reaction between the two sides. While the explanations of the origins of the conflict in academic discussions are complex and diverse, several general schools of thought on the subject can be identified. Historians commonly speak of three differing approaches to the study of the Cold War: "orthodox" accounts, "revisionism" and "post-revisionism". However, much of the historiography on the Cold War weaves together two or even all three of these broad categories and more recent scholars have tended to address issues that transcend the concerns of all three schools.
Sheila Mary Fitzpatrick is an Australian historian, whose main subjects are history of the Soviet Union and history of modern Russia, especially the Stalin era and the Great Purges, of which she proposes a "history from below", and is part of the "revisionist school" of Communist historiography. She has also critically reviewed the concept of totalitarianism and highlighted the differences between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in debates about comparison of Nazism and Stalinism.
The Soviet offensive plans controversy was a debate among historians in the late 20th and early 21st centuries as to whether Joseph Stalin had planned to launch an attack against Nazi Germany in the summer of 1941. The controversy started with Viktor Suvorov with his 1980s book Icebreaker:Who started the Second World War? where he argued, based on his analysis of historical documents and data, that Stalin used Nazi Germany as a proxy to attack Europe.
The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power is a book by Sean McMeekin, first published in 2010. It looks at efforts made by Imperial Germany during the First World War to use its connections with the Muslim world to defeat the British Empire, including directing an Islamic jihad against it.
The Black Sea raid was an Ottoman naval sortie against Russian ports in the Black Sea on 29 October 1914, supported by Germany, that led to the Ottoman entry into World War I. The attack was conceived by Ottoman War Minister Enver Pasha, German Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, and the German foreign ministry.
The Russian Empire's entry into World War I unfolded gradually in the days leading up to July 28, 1914. The sequence of events began with Austria-Hungary's declaration of war on Serbia, a Russian ally. In response, Russia issued an ultimatum to Vienna via Saint Petersburg, warning Austria-Hungary against attacking Serbia. As the conflict escalated with the invasion of Serbia, Russia commenced mobilizing its reserve army along the border of Austria-Hungary. Consequently, on July 31, Germany demanded that Russia demobilize. When Russia did not comply, Germany declared war on Russia on August 1, 1914. According to its war plan, Germany prioritized its offensive against France, declaring war on August 3. Germany deployed its main armies through Belgium with the aim of encircling Paris. The imminent threat to Belgium prompted Britain to declare war on Germany on August 4. The Ottoman Empire subsequently joined the Central Powers and engaged in warfare against Russia along their shared border.
Mark Edele is a historian who studies the Soviet Union. According to Karel C. Berkhoff, Edele is "a highly regarded specialist of the Soviet Union during World War II".
The Russian Revolution: A New History is a political history of the Russian Revolution written by Sean McMeekin and published by Basic Books in 2017. The release was timed with the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.
The Capture of Trabzon refers to the military operation carried out by the reorganized Ottoman Third Army, under the command of Wehip Pasha, which resulted in the seizure of Trabzon on February 24, 1918. This event took place during World War I.
