Lev Vladimirovich Cherepnin’s Expulsion from Graduate School in the Context of Soviet Historical Science
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu02.2025.111Abstract
Lev Vladimirovich Cherepnin was expelled from the graduate school of the Institute of History of the Russian Association of Research Institutes of Social Sciences in 1929. The article examines the phenomenon the existence and energetic activity from among non-Marxist’s postgraduate students-historians in the USSR in the 1920s. It is based on the fact that Lev Vladimirovich Cherepnin’s expulsion from the graduate school of the of the Institute of History of the Russian Association of Research Institutes of Social Sciences in 1929. By the time of his expulsion, Cherepnin was engaged in scientific and archival work under the guidance of A. I. Yakovlev and S. B. Veselovsky, had unorthodox views on the methodology of history, within which he admitted the possibility of synthesizing Marxism with the M. Weber’s ideas. The views of some of the graduate students, which differed from the Marxist position, were generally known in the party structures, but were not perceived until a certain time as something requiring radical measures. However, the XV Congress of the Bolshevik Party proclaimed the intensification of the struggle on the ideological and cultural lines. Soon articles were written by B. F. Porshnev and V. Z. Zeltser signaled that Marx’s ideas were taboo for some of the postgraduate students. In 1928–1929, criticism unfolded against the Institute of History of the Russian Association of Research Institutes of Social Sciences, which resulted in an inspection of the institution, related to claims to the non-Marxist training of some postgraduate students, Cherepnin became a person who were attacked because of their scientific views and were subsequently excluded from graduate school without the right to submit a dissertation. An analysis of the course of Cherepnin’s exclusion suggests that the historians of the Russian Association of Research Institutes of Social Sciences’s Institute of History of the old school, based on representatives of the Moscow Historical School, conducted not only active scientific activities, but also made efforts to preserve their community.
Keywords:
L. V. Cherepnin, RANION, postgraduate studies, Soviet historiography, Moscow Historical School, Klyuchevsky’s school, history of higher education in the USSR, D. M. Petrushevsky
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Articles of "Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. History" are open access distributed under the terms of the License Agreement with Saint Petersburg State University, which permits to the authors unrestricted distribution and self-archiving free of charge.