An unwilling officer: the engineer Mikhail Vasilyevich Lebedev in the era of social cataclysms

Abstract

In this article, through the prism of the anthropological approach and the theory of social adaptation, the biography of the representative of the Russian technical intelligentsia Mikhail Vasilyevich Lebedev is analyzed. He was given an alternate service in the Russian (imperial) army, the People’s Army of the Committee of the Members of the Legislative Assembly, the White Siberian Army, the Red Army, and Soviet institutions. The study was based on a set of unpublished sources from the funds of the Museum of Urban Life, the Historical Archive of the Omsk Region, and the archive of the FSB of Russia in the Omsk Region. The author concludes that, despite belonging to the category of «former people» and repression, the hero of the story has successfully adapted to the conditions of the Soviet society.

Keywords

• officers
• engineers
• intelligentsia
• social adaptation
• world war i
• civil war
• white movement
• soviet power
• soviet society
• red army
• omsk