This book explores the political significance of the development of historical revisionism in the USSR under Khrushchev in the wake of the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU and its demise with the onset of the 'period of stagnation' under Brezhnev. On the basis of intensive interviews and original manuscript material, the book demonstrates that the vigorous rejuvenation of historiography undertaken by Soviet historians in the 1960s conceptually cleared the way for and fomented the dramatic upheaval in Soviet historical writing occasioned by the advent of perestroika.