Afterthoughts

Summary

A volume of essays envisaged more as an experimental workshop than as a set of definitive statements cannot aim to arrive at firm conclusions. Tentative and provisional findings, together with hints at the possible future agenda for comparative research, are also necessarily a reflection of the fact that the historiographies of Germany and Russia have, until now, tended to bypass each other. It was striking that the historians of both countries attending the conference from which this volume has emerged met each other in most cases for the first time. Germanists came armed with many open questions derived in the main from applying to Russian development analogous argument from the German case. They found they had much to gain from the most recent uncovering of sources about the USSR. Experts on Russia and the Soviet Union had the opportunity to see how new, probing questions on their own areas of study could be raised and sharpened by better acquaintance with the rich literature and advanced research on German history. For it remains true that specialists in German history have, on the whole, not concerned themselves greatly with the problems of understanding the structural development of modern Russia. And, vice versa, the same applies by and large to experts on Russian history, for whom the extensive debates that characterise the historiography of modern Germany are for the most part terra incognita.