History provides insight into past political policies and consequences, and thus assists people in extrapolating political implications for contemporary society. Historical negationism is applied to cultivate a specific political myth – sometimes with official consent from the government – whereby self-taught, amateur, and dissident academic historians either manipulate or misrepresent historical accounts to achieve political ends. In the USSR (1917–91), the ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Soviet historiography treated reality and the party line as the same intellectual entity;[14] Soviet historical negationism advanced a specific, political and ideological agenda about Russia and its place in world history.[15]