Farmer. Worker. Historian: The Case of Professor Glavatsky

Abstract

This article is dedicated to Professor Mikhail Glavatsky, an outstanding Soviet historian. Referring to population records, reference books, and personal documents, the authors of the article trace the history of his family and the fates of its members in crucial periods of the country’s life. The historian-to-be was born into a wealthy Jewish family of hereditary millers Logovatsky-Glovatsky in Uman. Trying to escape the famine that followed collectivisation, the family had to flee Ukraine, hiding their origins and changing their names. M. E. Glavatsky’s brothers worked in factories, studied, and as the Great Patriotic War broke out, went to the front. He himself worked at a military plant in Sverdlovsk, and in 1945, he entered Ural State University, where he remained until the end of his working life. M. E. Glavatsky devoted himself to the study of technical intelligentsia in the Urals. He was one of the few who could sympathetically present both the new Soviet intelligentsia and the fates of those that did not accept or were not accepted by the Soviet authorities. M. E. Glavatsky became one of the founders of the Russian school of intelligentsia studies, created the research centre “The Twentieth Century in the Fates of the Russian Intelligentsia”, and organised annual scholarly conferences. He published over 250 academic works, including 8 monographs; he taught at the University for half a century and supervised 43 doctoral dissertations. Professor M. E. Glavatsky made a significant contribution to the study of the history of his motherland: he prepared fundamentally new textbooks on the history of the USSR, which, for the first time, made it possible for people’s voices to be heard and different views to be represented. He also initiated an anthropocentric approach to the study of the history of metallurgy, viewing it through the prism of the biographies of the metallurgists themselves. Professor M. E. Glavatsky was a bright scholar, organiser and teacher who played an important role in the development of knowledge in the humanities and the formation of the historicism of thinking. The tradition of studying the history of the University and the resumption of the Izvestia journal is associated with his name.

Keywords

• м. е. главацкий
• история науки
• история интеллигенции
• история металлургии
• уральский университет
• источниковедение