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Khrushchev's Russia: The Durability of Soviet Despotism
- Abstract
At every turn the historian encounters the unpredictable: contingency; historical accident; bio-logical accident intruding itself into history, as when the death of a history-making person brings a change of direction; changes of mood; emergence of new situations; sudden leaps that seem to turn an accretion of little events into a big one; the complicated interaction of multiple determinants on every event; the unintended consequences of intended actions.
Still, history is not so open that any event is just as likely as any other. As in the flux of things we note continuing structures, as in biology we note heredity as well as variation and mutation, so in history there is an interrelation between continuity and change.
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