The foreign policy of First Republic Italy: new approaches

This introductory article deals with the most recent contributions by Italian historians on the Italian Republic's international role. It aims mainly to demonstrate that a new generation of younger Italian historians is successfully offering new views and interpretations on First Republic Italy's role in the international system, and is also focusing on aspects such as the culture of Italy's political parties, the economic dimension, the role of public opinion, and the influence of external actors on domestic Italian politics – in short, that there has been a turn away from traditional diplomatic history based upon the archives of the Foreign Ministry.     

On new Directions in the Development of Soviet Economic Geography

A review of new research areas in Soviet economic geography distinguishes three categories of topics in terms of the level of advance and the volume of research being done. The most viable new areas, with a large number of studies, include the resource-oriented approach to economic geography and the systems approach to settlement geography. In other research areas, such as the geography of services and the geography of land use, only the first steps are being made. The lag in land-use studies behind the West is explained in terms of the large territory of the USSR, which is said to have made this type of research unnecessary until recently. The potentialities of some research areas are only just beginning to be perceived, notably in the case of studies on spatial value relationships, involving regional accounts and balance of payments.     

Lev Gumilev: The Ideologist of the Soviet Empire

Summary

Russian intellectuals like to appeal to examples of foreign history. Lev Gumilev's views on history are a good example. Gumilev was one of the most well-known representatives of Eurasianism, which was in turn one of the most interesting intellectual constructs in Russian historiography. Gumilev believed that Russia was born not from Kievan Rus—the view of the majority of Russian historians of his time—but from the empire of the Mongols. While Gumilev saw Europe as a hostile entity to Russia/Eurasia, this was not the case with the neo-Eurasianists of the Yeltsin era. This article examines Gumilev's Eurasianism and its influence on modern Russian national identity.     

The shock of the old: architectural preservation in Soviet Russia

In Soviet sources from the Brezhnev era, the history of architectural preservation after 1917 was presented as a triumph of rational state‐building and cultural organisation: with the support of Lenin, the Bolshevik government had rapidly put in place effective measures to protect historic buildings for future generations. As this article shows, the evolution of legislative and practical measures was considerably more complicated than this optimistic representation would suggest. In the early Soviet period, a highly ideologised understanding of the past meant that preservationist ambitions might (especially during the ‘Great Break’ of 1928–1932) be seen as intrinsically reactionary. The canon of historical buildings was shaped by perceptions of centrality to Soviet values, as well as historical and aesthetic importance. The article also explores the transformation of attitudes to architectural heritage as a response to destruction by the invading forces during the ‘Great Patriotic War’, after which commitment to preservation became far more whole‐hearted, although enforcement and financial support continued to be inconsistent. The Soviet case indicates not just the importance of heritage preservation to the cultural ambitions and self‐image of the modern state but the limits of commitment to preservation and the pressure placed on this by the commitment to all‐out modernisation and to the propaganda of new identities and values.