Hienadź Sahanovič. Historical Revisionism of the National Intellectuals in the BSSR during the Thaw

The article first clarifies the understanding of historical revisionism.

The author joins those experts who consider the endeavour to revise (re-interpret) established explanations of the past to be a legitimate or normal practice of scholarly historiography, and should not be equated with the denial of historical facts, or negationism. The main part of the article is devoted to how the Belarusian academic intellectuals reacted to the official interpretations of the country’s history after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The statements of historians and cultural researchers against the schemes and assessments introduced by the Party are regarded as manifestations of historical revisionism in the BSSR in the 1960s. Despite the party’s retention of control over historiography, the revisionists’ efforts bore fruit. This was manifested primarily in an emancipation from the ideological schemes of the Stalin era, a conceptual renewal, and a higher scholarly standard in new synthetic works on the history of Belarus and the history of Belarusian literature.