Pavel Vasilievich Volobuev (January 1, 1923 - September 22, 1997) was an ethnic Azerbaijani Soviet historian who published the multi-volume History of the USSR in 1966. He was appointed director of the Institute of the History of the USSR of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union in 1969.
Biography Early years
Pavel Vasilievich Volobuev was born on New Year's day, 1923, in the village of Evgenevka, Kostanai oblast, Soviet Russia, today part of Kazakhstan, located in the northwestern part of the country.V.L. Telitsyn, Pavel Volobuev (1923–1997): A Short Biography of a Soviet Historian, Corvallis, OR: 1000 Flowers Publishing, 2026; p. 1. He grew up in the town of Semiozernoe, today a town of about 12,000 residents called Auliekol. An ethnic Azerbaijani, Volobuev was interested in history from an early age, particularly understanding the Russian Civil War that was so impactful in rural areas around the country.
Until 1935, history was not taught in Soviet schools; it was, rather, incorporated as a general subject field called "social studies" [obshchestvovedenie] — a subject which the young Volobuev found uninteresting. Only towards the end of Volobuev's secondary school career was the topic taught in a systematic manner and was his interest piqued. A bright student, Volobuev was accepted into Moscow State University (MGU), where he enrolled as an undergraduate student in the History department.
Following completion of his first year of study, an earthquake shook the Soviet Union — the invasion of the country on June 22, 1941, by the armed forces of Nazi Germany. Volobuev was sent along with other Moscow students to Smolensk to dig anti-tank ditches, where the former rural-dweller proved himself greatly proficient.Telitsyn, Pavel Volobuev, p. 2. Volobuev was drafted into the Red Army in January 1942 and immediately sent to the Volkhov Front, where he fought in a tank destroyer unit against Wehrmacht forces advancing on Leningrad. Shortly thereafter, Volobuev was severely wounded in the right leg, for which he underwent two major operations before being retired to the rear for reasons of disability.
Volobuev war returned home to Semiozernoe late in 1942, where he was put to work as a deputy of the People's Commissariat of Procurement, being later promoted as a chief for the district in 1944. He anxiously desired to return to university studies in Moscow, however, and in May 1945 he formally sought readmission to MGU — never receiving a reply.Telitsyn, Pavel Volobuev, p. 3. After sitting out a year, Volobuev again sought readmission, making use of a personal intermediary to expedite his appeal. He was readmitted in time for the fall term of the 1946–47 academic year.
At MGU, Volobuev witness first-hand the suppression of academic non-conformity remembered as the Zhdanovshchina — which was particularly focused upon those engaged in the study of literature or philosophy. Volobuev was at this time no dissident, dutifully echoing official Communist Party policy suppressing foreign influences in academia and the arts.
During his second year of study, Volobuev was identified by two of his professors — K. V. Bazilevich and N. A. Sidorova, both prominent historians — as being a particularly strong history student with a potential future in academia.Telitsyn, Pavel Volobuev, p. 4. Volobuev was pushed in this direction and began to focus upon becoming a historian as a career. Such an early career tracking of young undergraduate candidates may seem perplexing, but the situation is well explained by a fellow MGU history student in the same period who recalled of typical war veterans at MGU:
"The Department of History got a special breed of frontovniki: peasant boys who had become Komsomol and party functionaries in the military. The war had given them a taste of power, and now they were determined to stay in the ciity for the rest of their lives. Most of them visualized the same career ladder: a degree in the history of the USSR or the history of the Communist Party, then a position someplace in the party apparatus. They had no interest in history; they had no burning questions. They were incapable of critical thinking. They studied to become bosses."Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1990; pp. 30–31.
Volobuev's third years studies confirmed the early estimation of his professors, as his seminar paper on the foreign policy of Peter the Great completed that year won top honors in an academic competition and yielded his first publication, a journal article on the topic published under the pseudonym "V. Karpov."Telitsyn, Pavel Volobuev, pp. 4–5.
During his senior year, as a top student Volobuev received a "Stalin stipend," which significantly improved his financial situation.Telitsyn, Pavel Volobuev, p. 5. Following graduation, he was offered a place for graduate study at the elite Higher Diplomatic School of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but he declined the position, seeking to work as a historian. He was also offered a position by the Moscow City Committee of the Komsomol — the Communist Party's youth section — as an official in that organization, an opportunity similarly rejected.
Instead, Volobuev elected to remain at MGU, taking and passing the entrance examination to enter the History department as a graduate student. He entered in the fall of 1950, with Arkady Sidorov, regarded as one of the top historians in the country, his graduate research supervisor.
Sidorov proved to be one of the most influential historians of his generation focusing upon the history of Russia from the end of the 19th Century until the Russian Revolution of 1917, with particular emphasis upon the economic history of the country during World War I.
In the estimation of historian Vadim Telitsyn, Sidorov's passion for his subject was infectious, helping to spur the efforts of Volobuev and others who would subsequently gain prominence in the field. Unlike many historians of the day, who treated historiography as a form of propaganda with a functional intent of legitimizing and stabilizing the regime, Telitsyn notes that "Sidorov insisted that his students adhere to historical truth, work conscientiously with source materials, and draw their own independent conclusions."Telitsyn, Pavel Volobuev, p. 6.
This would have a lasting impact upon Volobuev and others of the so-called "Sidorov school."
Working with Sidorov, Volobuev selected the topic “Monopolies and the Fuel Shortage in Russia, 1911–1913" as his dissertation topic, which he successfully defended in December 1953. The General Secretary of the CPSU, Joseph Stalin, had died in March of that same year.
The Soviet Union was about to undergo a period of change.
Career
As a member of the Communist Party, Volobuev worked at its pleasure. Before his masters dissertation had even been defended, he was put to work on behalf of the Central Committee as a history instructor in its scientific department.Telitsyn, Pavel Volobuev, p. 7. After the years of relative academic freedom at MGU, doing archival research on the history of Russia in the pre-revolutionary period, Volobuev found work for the Central Committee intellectually stifling.
Working as a history instructor for the Central Committee did come with one notable benefit however — access to closed archives and restricted publications not available to researchers or public alike. These closed materials provided Volobuev with a deeper understanding of the nature of the Soviet system.
Volobuev worked on behalf of the Central Committee from October 1, 1953 through November 1955. During this period he was also assigned to the staff of the history journal Voprosy Istorii [Questions of History], which was run by Academician Anna Pankratova, herself a member of the Central Committee, and her assistant, Eduard Burdzhalov. Pankratova and Burdzhalov were ahead of the curve as critics of Stalin's cult of personality and drew heavy fire from conservatives, who were alarmed by the new critical line being pursued by the pair of editors.
Volobuev was in an uncomfortable middle position between the conservative-dominated Central Committee for which he worked and the tenuous liberalism of the journal editors, of whom he was moderately critical. Volobuev later faulted himself for his behavior during this period, declaring in the 1990s, "I should have been quicker on the uptake. What inpenetrable dogmatists we all were back then — myself included!"Telitsyn, Pavel Volobuev, p. 8.
Volobuev lost faith in his own actions as an informal political commissar and finally wrote a letter to new Gensec Nikita Khrushchev criticizing the work of the CPSU department for which he worked and seeking release. Late in 1955 he was freed from Central Committee work and transferred to the Institute of History of the prestigious Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, then directed by his old academic mentor, Arkady Sidorov.
Volobuev would remain at the Institute of History from late 1955 until early 1966, remembering this decade of research and writing as the best years of his life. Working in collaboration with other prominent historians on the staff, Volobuev was in important contributer to a massive two-volume documents collection, The Economic Position of Russsia on the Eve of the Great October Socialist Revolution and authored a monograph, The Economic Policy of the Provisional Government .Telitsyn, Pavel Volobuev, pp. 8–9.
In May 1963, Volobuev successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on the economic policy of the Provisional Government, which drew upon material found in seven separate archives in Moscow and Leningrad.Telitsyn, Pavel Volobuev, p. 9. Volobuev's work was notable for including a review of the literature on the topic published in the West — an extreme rarity in this era.
From December 1964 through the end of March 1965, Volobuev was assigend to the University of Havana in Cuba as a guest lecturer on the history of the Soviet Union.Telitsyn, Pavel Volobuev, pp. 9–10. He also presented a paper at the 12th International Congress of Historical Sciences in Vienna in August 1965.Telitsyn, Pavel Volobuev, p. 10.
The Insitute of History was split in August 1968 into two separate institutions, the Institute of World History and the Institute of the History of the USSR. As part of this administrative shuffle, Volobuev was made Deputy Director of the latter, with a promotion to Director coming the following year. In this capacity he was instrumental bringing in a steady stream of young historians to the Institute, placing a particular emphasis finding historians from outside Moscow.Telitsyn, Pavel Volobuev, pp. 10–11.
Dismissal and years of "exile"
The reform-minded but mercurial Nikita Khrushchev fell as General Secretary of the Communist Party in October 1964, to be replaced by the staid Leonid Brezhnev, initially ruling as part of a triumvirate with Alexei Kosygin and Nikolai Podgorny. The liberalization of Soviet Society that typified the late 1950s and first half of the 1960s was gradually halted and reversed, as conservative, neo-Stalinist elements gained places of power and recreated the institutions they administered in their own image.