first para: When Kritika published a special issue in 2001 on the state of the field ten
years after the end of communism, it was logical to include a reassessment of
the October Revolution and two pieces on the rapidly developing investigation
of the Stalin period. Transnational history went unmentioned, along with
international and comparative approaches, for they did not yet appear crucial
to the state of the field. If “culture” was “everywhere” in the Russian history
of the 1990s, talk of the transnational became ubiquitous in the 2000s. In
retrospect, however, the first post-Soviet decade laid the groundwork for the
proliferation of cross-border and cross-cultural approaches by furthering
a closely related phenomenon: intensive investigation of comparative
dimensions to Russian and Soviet history.