History and Politics: Contacts of Russian and British Historians in the First Half of the 20th Century

The problem of inference of the politics into the scholar's communication and its influence on them examines in this article, based on a wide range of historical sources (correspondence and official documents) from the Archive of Russian Academy of Sciences (ARAN) and Russian State Archive of Postmodern History (RGANI). The main attention is paid to the contacts between Russian and British specialists in English medieval history. In the middle of the 20th century British and Soviet historians made serious attempts to overcome the ideological and state oppression and many times demonstrated mutual desire to defend the opportunity of international communication.