Russian Historiography on the Origins of the First World War Since the Fischer Controversy

This article examines Soviet and post-Soviet historiography on the origins of the Great War, paying special attention to the reverberations of western historiographical disputes in the Soviet Union and Russia. The author argues that Fischer's thesis was mostly uncontroversial in Russia. Most Soviet historians were predisposed to view his stress on imperialism (and German imperialism in particular) in a favorable way. Later Russian historians have also mainly agreed with Fischer, though by now the controversy is far enough in the past that few of them refer to him directly in their works. Instead, current Russian historians largely seek to place their works both within the context of the Soviet historiography and with contemporary works in Europe and the United States.