Authors

Discussion

The talk deals with the difficulties the Soviet culture had with counterfactual history, one of the most radical way of modelling disruption in master narratives. It argues that the attitude to counterfactuals was in Soviet times quite complex, oscillating between fascination and rejection, inevitability and impossibility. On the one side, the Marxist-Leninist view of historical progress that excludes the possibility of a contingency made it impossible to think of historical alternatives in any systematic way. On the other side, this, however, by no means implied a renunciation of counterfactual thinking, which was used to “prove” the inevitability of past events.