“The End of History” and Dogmatic Historical Consciousness: Russia, Israel, and the Jewish-Soviet Past
This essay offers a comparative discussion of Russia and Israel, focusing on patterns of historical interpretation. On the theoretical level, the essay addresses the influence of dogmatic historical thinking, which adopts clear but one-dimensional – and therefore disconnected from reality – concepts of oppression and liberation, failure and correction.
The late 1980s and early 1990s, and especially the turbulent year of 1991, were a golden age of sorts for this form of thought. What began ostensibly as a complete liberation and rectification along the lines of the “end of history,” actually bore the seeds of repressive and anti-humanist trends – not because the liberal and capitalist forces that had the upper hand at the time sought to promote them, but because these trends were an inevitable outcome of the dogmatic interpretation of past and present.
On a thematic level, the essay discusses a specific element that was clearly common to Russia and Israel: Soviet Jewry. The author seeks to challenge the prevalent dogmatic interpretation that sees the collapse of the Soviet Union as a victory in the struggle for the “liberation” of Soviet Jews, arguing that this interpretation trivializes their historical narrative and fuels overly forceful and nationalistic interpretations in current-day Israel.
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