The article examines the influence of the Cold War on the general dynamics of the international relations in the second half of the20th and early 21st centuries. It focuses on the reasons of the stability of this form of the conflict interaction between the US and USSR/Russia. Although the historiography extensively deals with the Cold War, the authors emphasizes that a number of issues concerning its fundamental characteristics remain insuffi ciently elucidated. Among them are the criteria for classifying any conflict or event as a manifestation of the Cold War. The article indicates the ways to find answers to some important questions concerning the Cold War, reviews its wide-spread historiographic concepts, and analyzes in its context such fundamental concepts of international relations as “sovereignty” and “security”. The authors offer the reasons for the continuation of the Cold War after the collapse of the USSR and the end of the bloc confrontation. Special attention is paid to the different phases of the Cold War, its transformations and the reasons that led to them. The research also answers the question of what factors influenced the intensity of the Cold War, intensified its heat and at the same time prevented its escalation into a full-scale “hot war” by a wide range of weapons of mass destruction. The authors express their point of view on whether the Cold War should be considered as a dangerous anomaly that threatens the development of the world community, or on the contrary, this global confrontation allowed to transform the conflict tensions between the world’s largest military powers into a relative strategic stability. The article highlights the issues in the history of the Cold War that require further study or conceptual clarifi cation. Particular attention is paid to the currently widespread approach of considering the most signifi cant confrontations of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in terms of the Cold War.

The article examines the contradictory results of the evolution of historiography of US political history in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. In the context of the multiplicity of research paradigms, it analyses the theoretical and methodological approaches that led to the renewal of the foundations of American historiography and identifi es the key trends that emerged on the basis of interdisciplinary alliances. The rejection of the study of the legacy of “great figures” and the shift of attention to ordinary people of past eras, their inner world and everyday behavior led to a sharp shift from macro- to microhistory, where the main emphasis is placed on the relationship between the goals of “big” politics and the interests of a specific person, who acts simultaneously as the subject and object of power relations. Initially, research focused on the specifics of the electoral process within the concepts of “party regrouping” and “critical” elections. Subsequently, scholars shift ed their focus to the sphere of the political culture of voters. Finally, the subject of the discipline itself dissolved into the vicissitudes of social policy. The study of political history, having undergone a protracted process of evolution, has not yet developed a coherent view of the past. The interdisciplinary alliances have resulted in the active use of tools from related humanities, leading to significant fragmentation of the subject field. This has resulted in the creation of a “new” discipline characterized by amorphousness, a lack of broad conceptualization, a loss of a holistic view, and a focus on micro-level analysis, devoid of any clearly defi ned boundaries. Concurrently, a radical shift has occurred in the societal perception of political history. Nevertheless, the dissemination of scientific knowledge has concomitantly engendered a transformation in its representation. The advent of the Internet gave rise to new forms of media, facilitating direct dialogue between representatives of academic and “amateur” history. These dialogues sought to adapt scientifi c knowledge to the needs of mass culture. The academic community is confronted with the challenge of disseminating objective historical knowledge to a general audience. It is the position of some scholars that in order to bridge the gap between armchair and online knowledge, political history must be reincarnated as a “synthetic and integrative” science, in which the concept of “political” is understood as broadly as possible.