Intellectual Self-Reflection as a Method of Generating New Historical Knowledge
The article is devoted to the development and approbation of the innovative format of the historian's scientific activity, which differs from its classical option by more productive cognition of historical experience and modernity. The author identifies one of the key problems of modern historical science in Russia - the problem of communicative gap between the older and younger generations of scientists that makes it difficult for future historians to develop professional self-reflection. It is shown that overcoming this difficulty is possible in the transition from "observation" of the past to "participation" in it on the basis of self-awareness of the self-reproducing subject of the historical process. This thesis is proved on the basis of the author's life experience, who realized himself as a member of society, striving for self-reproduction and extrapolating the "product" of individual self-knowledge to historical reality. The result of this self-knowledge was the formulation of the research hypothesis about the Soviet man as a necessary intermediate link in the evolution of Russian society in the first half of the 20th century. It is suggested that the design of this link allowed the Bolsheviks to ensure the active interaction between the peasant society and the emerging industrial society and to make the national modernization irreversible. The main result of the research is the discovery of an effective instrument of cognition, which makes it possible to tap the inner personal potential of the researcher for staging and solving fundamentally new problems.