EXCHANGE OF VIEWS When I became the editor of Volume V of the History of the East, I was perhaps even more confused at first than V. V. Naumkin, as he admitted when he opened the discussion on the pages of Vostok magazine. 1 Nevertheless, despite the fact that today scientists understand and interpret the history of the East of modern times in different ways, I came to the conclusion that it is quite possible to create a generalizing work on the history of the countries of the East in the XX century. After all, the disagreements concern not so much its history, but rather a global assessment of the era that came after 1917, the impact of the revolutionary events in Russia at that time on the East, the role of the USSR, the Comintern and the world Communist movement in the East, as well as the interpretation of world history that has developed in Russian historiography, including the answers to were formulated at the beginning of discussion 2 . The difficulty lies not in the existence of extremely diverse opinions, which in itself should be welcomed, but in the all-too-frequent desire to take extreme, extremist positions. Cave anti-communism can and does provoke a similar wild reaction of cave anti-liberalism. But it seems to me that all this is the cost of excessive politicization of our society, and of our community of orientalists. As the situation in the country normalizes and stabilizes, this politicization will inevitably disappear and is already becoming a thing of the past. But there remains, unfortunately, a craving for ideologization that has been cultivated for many decades and for a whole series of generations, without which it is somehow unusual, uncomfortable, and I would say lonely. If, for example, those who hold old-Soviet views continue to idealize such concepts as "working class", "dictatorship of the proletariat", "proletarian internationalism", then liberals do not always have the same concepts, but very often they sound like "red-brown", "commu ... Читать далее