«Ukrainian crisis» of the Society of Marxist Historians

The article is devoted to the discussion that unfolded at the turn of the 1920s-30s between "Moscow" and "Ukrainian" historians on the principles of interaction between the Society of Marxist Historians at the Communist Academy and the Ukrainian Society of Marxist Historians. The study of the discussion allows us to come to the problem of building a model of interaction between the center and the regions in Soviet historical science. New documents from the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences demonstrate that the Moscow Society of Marxist Historians, headed by M.N. Pokrovsky set a course to build a relatively centralized model, which was opposed by Ukrainian historians who defended the principles of national communism. The confrontation was open in nature, in which Ukrainian historians relied on the leadership of the Ukrainian SSR. During the so-called "Great Turning Point", a wave of political purges swept through, which hit the Ukrainian intelligentsia hard, among others. After that, the obstacles to the Society of Marxist Historians were removed. However, it also found itself in crisis due to the death of its leader, M.N. Pokrovsky. The fruits of the discussion have already been "reaped" by other institutions: first, the Institute of History at the Communist Academy, and then the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences. The consequences of the "Ukrainian crisis" were massive. The opponents of building a centralized model of historical science, in which the republican centers were subordinate to the Moscow ones, were eliminated. This directly affected the process of creating the histories of the peoples of the USSR: the overcoming of the territorial historical and cultural approach, associated primarily with the Ukrainian political and intellectual elite, began, and projects appeared to create not individual histories of the republics, but the all-Union history of the USSR.