The Cambridge and Soviet Histories of the Byzantine Empire

Recently a paper by the Soviet academician Sakharov, one of the creators of Soviet nuclear power, was published in which he discussed the "convergence" between the Soviet and capitalistic social systems, based on the obvious fact that such a convergence has already occurred on the level of scientific research-ideologies having very little to do with the technical processes upon which scientific progress depends. Unfortunately "convergence" is much more difficult to promote in the humanities, and particularly in the historical field. Nevertheless, the gradual development in the Soviet Union after the Second World War of Byzantine studies-a field which had been for all practical purposes suppressed in the late twenties and the thirties because of its association with Russia's religious history-shows that there is convergence even in this area. The very fact that a detailed collective history of Byzantium could appear in 1967 without being restricted to socioeconomic history, as earlier Soviet research frequently had been, is a remarkable sign of what has happened in the past decades. Ecclesiastical and religious history is given relatively large attention in this