A.V. Predtechensky at the beginning of his scientific career

Abstract

The article, based on unpublished sources and sources introduced into scientific discourse for the first time from the Scientific and Historical Archive of the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art and the Central State Archive of St. Petersburg, reconstructs the stages of professional development of the outstanding historian Anatoly Vasilyevich Predtechensky (1893-1966). An appeal to the youthful diary of A. V. Predtechensky, as well as his personal file as a student of the historical and philological faculty of St. Petersburg University, made it possible to supplement his biography, emphasizing the special role in his life in this early period of his cousin, the famous ethnographer S. A. Teploukhov. Apparently, it is precisely the influence of S. A. Teploukhov that can explain A. V. Predtechensky’s departure from revolutionary Petrograd and service in Tomsk at the Institute of Siberian Research until the end of 1920. Upon returning to Petrograd, A. V. Predtechensky actively taught and, previously far from narrowly specialized studies of Russian history, turned to such subjects. The surviving minutes of the meetings of the Section for the Study of the Decembrists and Their Time at the Leningrad Branch of the All-Union Society of Political Prisoners and Exiled Settlers, of which A. V. Predtechensky became a member in January 1927, record the young researcher’s interest in issues of economic and socio-political development of Russia at the beginning of the 19th century. Other young researchers, who by the end of the 1920s formed the main circle of contacts and professional connections of A. V. Predtechensky, also turn to these same themes. They were historians of the New Age (graduates of the Petrograd University of the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary era) - V. N. Kashin, A. N. Shebunin, I. M. Trotsky. S. Ya. Gessen became a true friend of A. V. Predtechensky, as evidenced by their sincere correspondence. In creative tandem with him, the historian prepared a number of scientific publications. In the conditions of the 1930s, the close circle of A. V. Predtechensky actually disappeared, but the scientist himself, already having experience in scientific work, continued his research practice within the walls of the Leningrad branch of the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences, strictly relying in his constructions on critically understood information from historical sources, thereby continuing the traditions of pre-revolutionary Petrograd historiography