RUSSIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY OF GERMAN NAVAL CONSTRUCTION IN 1898 - 1912

Urakov Igor Olegovich

The article deals with the issues related to the development of domestic historiography of German naval construction of the early twentieth century. The approaches and assessments of scientists of different aspects of this multifaceted topic are analyzed, the developed and still insufficiently studied issues requiring further development are revealed. As a result of the analysis some peculiarities of the available works devoted to the study of two naval programs of the Kaiser's Germany in 1898 and 1900 and additions to the latter in the form of so-called naval novels of 1906, 1908 and 1912 are revealed. One of them is that the considered legislative acts are “dissected” exclusively in a historical-political way, i.e. the influence of politics on the necessity of their adoption and the subsequent impact of the naval legal norms already approved by the Reichstag on the actions of the German authorities in domestic and foreign policy is determined. The organizational and legal components of the process of naval legislation, for various reasons, remain somewhat in the shadows. This, of course, negatively affects the completeness of disclosure of the topic of German naval construction in 1898-1912, which has been studied for a long time in Russian historiography. One of the main conclusions of the article is the statement about the actualization of the study of its historical and legal component.

Keywords:national historiography; German naval construction of the early twentieth century; Wilhelm II; A. von Tirpitz