IRKUTSK POLITICAL CENTER AS VIEWED BY THE SOVIET MEMOIRISTS AND HISTORIANS OF THE 1920s AND FIRST HALF OF THE 1930s

The article identifies Soviet memoirists and historians who wrote and published texts dedicated to the Irkutsk Political Center in the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s. It analyzes these publications and concludes that during the Russian Civil War, some authors of memoirs and articles were in the counter-revolutionary camp, while others opposed the Bolsheviks, and some were the Bolshevik Party members. However, after the war, almost all opponents of the Bolsheviks changed their party affiliation and joined the RCP(b). The initial ideological and political views of the authors and their subsequent transition to communist positions determined the set of problems that they considered in their texts and the way of their interpretation. The focus of memoirists and historians was on a limited range of topics that they regarded most important for understanding the phenomenon of the Political Center: the reasons and factors that led to its creation, the purpose and tasks that the Political Center sought to solve; its role and significance in ending the Russian Civil War in Siberia. The memoirists and historians of the 1920s showed significant differences in their ideological and political views, erudition, and independence of thinking on these issues. The lack of objectivity of most authors and the biased judgments they expressed sharply increased since the early 1930s and reflected the general situation in the Soviet Union and Soviet historiography. As a result, by the mid-1930s, the assessment of the Irkutsk Political Center as the second stage of the “democratic counter-revolution” had become established in the historical literature.