Natan (Nota) Zalmanovich Strugatsky (; 26 May 1892 – 7 February 1942) was a Soviet art historian, bibliographer, and iconographer. He was the father of the writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, known collectively as the Strugatsky brothers.
Born into a prosperous Jewish family, he did not complete his legal education and was involved in the revolutionary movement. He joined the Bolshevik Party in March 1917 and served in informational and organizational structures of the workers' and peasants' councils. During the Russian Civil War, he was a political commissar in the Red Army. In the 1920s and 1930s, he was primarily associated with educational, publishing, and art institutions, completing postgraduate studies at the Communist Academy. His family resided permanently in Leningrad after 1927. From 1937 to 1941, he worked at the Saltykov-Shchedrin Public Library in Leningrad, including as chief librarian and head of the prints department, publishing works on Soviet graphics, posters, and illustrations for literary classics. From October to December 1941, he served as a volunteer in the army during the Siege of Leningrad, but was discharged due to illness. In 1942, he was tasked with accompanying the evacuated collections of the Public Library to Melekess, departing on 29 January by train with his son Arkady (his wife and younger son Boris remained in the besieged city). He died of starvation and heart disease on 7 February in Vologda, recorded in the lists of the deceased with significant errors in his name and surname. The circumstances his death and his burial place were only documented in the 2000s.
Origin and early years (1892–1917) Natan Strugatsky was born on in the shtetl of Dubovychi, Glukhovsky Uyezd (now a village in Konotop Raion, Sumy Oblast, Ukraine). He was the eldest of four sons in the family of a private attorney, an agent of the Salamandra insurance company, and a Sosnitsa burgher, Zalman Leibovich Strugatsky (1864–before 1937) and Genya (Evgenia) Aronovna Gorelik (1875–1942).In the 1906 census, the mother's name is listed as Genya (30 years old); the father's age is 41 years (JewishGen.org). His grandfather, Sosnitsa burgher Leib Zalmanovich Strugatsky, owned a house from 1876 and lived with his family in the shtetl of Sukhodol, Glukhovsky Uyezd.In the revision lists of 1878, Leib Zalmanovich Strugatsky, aged 40, a merchant, is noted as owning a house on Prikhodko's land since 1876, where he lived with his wife Sofia Aronovna Strugatsky, 38, sons Nota (16), Zalman (14), Yankel (9), Nokhim (7), Shmul (3), and one-year-old daughter Khaika (JewishGen.org). Natan had younger brothers: Aron (born 1895), Isaac (born 1900), and Alexander (born 1905). From 1906, the family lived in the shtetl of Romashkovo, Novgorod-Seversky Uyezd.Family composition according to the 1906 census (JewishGen.org): Zalman Leibovich Strugatsky (41, head of family), wife Genya (30), sons Nota (13), Aron (10), Isaac (5). Alexander Zakharovich Strugatsky was born in 1905 in Seredyna-Buda. In a personnel record dated October 22, 1937, Natan Strugatsky noted that his father had died by then, and his mother was dependent on him.
He studied at a real school and a gymnasium in Sevsk, stating in his autobiography that he struggled to gain admission due to the Jewish quota. In 1915, he enrolled in the Faculty of Law at Saint Petersburg Imperial University, where he studied for two and a half years without completing the course. According to his son, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1916, but documents confirm he became a member in March 1917. In the spring and summer of 1917, Natan Strugatsky actively participated in revolutionary and protest activities: in April, he was beaten during a demonstration against the Russian Provisional Government at the Mariinsky Palace, and on July 5, he was arrested for participating in a rally at Znamenskaya Square.
Political activity (1917–1928)
From February to November 1917, Natan Strugatsky was elected to the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. In 1918, he headed the Department of Public Education (ONO) of the Pskov Governorate Revolutionary Committee (Gubrevkom), served as a rifleman in food propaganda detachments in Malmyzh and Buzuluk, and as a political commissar of a food propaganda detachment in Melitopol. During the Russian Civil War, he served in the Red Army, and in 1920, he was an instructor in the political department and a military investigator for the 2nd Cavalry Army and deputy editor of the army newspaper Krasnaya Lava on the Southern Front. In battles near Rostov-on-Don, his younger brother, cavalry brigade commander Aron Strugatsky (1895–1919), was killed.On May 27, 1918, the Central Committee sent Sevsk Soviet worker A. Strugatsky to the Vyatka Committee of the RSDRP(b). In the post-war years, Natan Strugatsky remained an instructor of the political department of the 2nd Cavalry Corps (1922), served as deputy head of the political department, then head of the agitation and propaganda section of the 5th Cavalry Division of the North Caucasus Military District (1922–1923), and assistant head of the political department of the 9th Don Rifle Division (1923–1924).The complete list of Natan Z. Strugatsky's party and political positions is as follows:
In 1924, Natan Strugatsky married Alexandra Ivanovna Litvincheva (1901–1979), the daughter of a prosperous peasant from Seredyna-Buda, where the Strugatsky family also lived for a time, against the wishes of both her and his parents.Boris Strugatsky reported: "Our grandfather, Ivan Pavlovich, a tough man with rigid convictions, cursed his favorite, youngest Sasha, with the harshest curse. <…> In 1925… in Batumi, Arkady was born. The mother wrote a repentant letter to her father, the grandfather met them sternly, but upon seeing his grandson, he relented and lifted the parental curse." In his personnel record, N. Z. Strugatsky listed his wife's and her parents' surname as "Litvinchova." She received a pedagogical education.In 1939, A. I. Strugatskaya completed evening courses at the Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia and received the official title of a secondary school teacher with the right to teach Russian language and literature in junior and middle grades. There is also evidence that she previously graduated from a pedagogical technical school. She worked as an elementary school teacher. After moving to the northern capital, Alexandra Strugatskaya joined the staff of School No. 6 in the Vyborgsky District, becoming "an outstanding literature teacher known throughout Leningrad". Particularly challenging students were sent to her, and she "pulled them up to a grade of four". After the war, her student was Yuri Senkevich, who in his memoirs described Alexandra Ivanovna as "a true Russian beauty with a braid", who instilled a love for literature in her students: "with her arrival… I began to read a lot and with enthusiasm".
After demobilization, Natan Strugatsky took up party work in Adjara, becoming in 1925 the editor-in-chief of the daily newspaper Trudovoy Adzharistan, founded that year in Batumi as the organ of the Adjara Regional Committee of the Communist Party of Georgia (CPG(b)); the newspaper ceased publication by the end of that year. In the same city, on August 28, the Strugatskys' eldest son was born, named Arkady in honor of his brother who fell in revolutionary battles.According to Boris Strugatsky, Arkady closely resembled his uncle Aron in his youth. From 1926 to 1928, Natan Strugatsky served as deputy head of the press department of the Leningrad Oblast Committee (Obkom) of the VKP(b) and head of the press department of the Vyborg District Committee of the VKP(b). The family lived at K. Marx Prospekt, house No. 4, communal apartment No. 16.Requiem for the Memory of Evacuated Leningraders Buried in the Vologda Region During the Great Patriotic War. Vol. II: L–Ya. Vologda: Vologda State Pedagogical Institute. 1991. p. 456. Alexandra Ivanovna even managed to secure permission to separate, and the Strugatskys had a separate two-room apartment for several years before the war. It was here, on April 15, 1933, seven years, seven months, and eighteen days after Arkady, that the Strugatskys' younger son, named Boris, was born. According to relatives, Natan Zalmanovich Strugatsky was impractical, helpless in everyday matters, and earned little; his wife claimed he aspired to be a writer. His work in censorship and cultural institutions was supplemented by a "book ration" ("any fiction published in Leningrad at the time — for free"), from which a large home library was amassed, occupying two cabinets.
Museum and library work (1928–1942)
Postgraduate Studies, Party Mobilization, and Expulsion from the VKP(b) From 1928 to 1930, Natan Strugatsky served as head of the methodological section of the museum and excursion sector of the Department of Public Education (ONO). In 1930, he enrolled in postgraduate studies at the State Institute of Art History under the Communist Academy. He was mentioned in the diary of Pavel Filonov in a highly negative context: at a conference held on June 5–6, 1931, Strugatsky, as secretary of the Bureau of Political Education Work, along with Vladimir Beyer and Moisei Brodsky, sharply criticized Filonov's art. "They acted in their usual manner: deceit, lies, distortion of facts, and outright slander of an anti-Semitic, servile nature. <…> Clearly, they had strong support somewhere along the party line… I was labeled a saboteur, a malicious kulak, while they portrayed themselves as friends of the proletariat, 'more proletarian than the proletarians themselves'.' A resolution was adopted in this vein". A friend of Strugatsky, Alexander Samokhvalov, noted in his memoirs that when working on the painting in 1932 (while Strugatsky was writing a short monograph about the artist), the art historian approached the image "with caution and even prejudice". Strugatsky believed that "the spirit of the era is primarily revealed through labor and overcoming difficulties on the path to achievements, leaving no time to be so beautiful", a view Samokhvalov strongly disagreed with. Natan Strugatsky was a member of the Union of Soviet Artists in the graphics section. In his 1937 autobiography, he noted that he was working on a candidate's dissertation. Based on his correspondence with Samokhvalov, Strugatsky viewed art as an arena for class struggle and a battle for the future, frequently issuing invectives against "petty compromisers" and "scoundrels, gravediggers of Soviet art". He once directly called the Union of Soviet Artists a "Noah's Ark", expecting no "principled or consistent" political line from the organization. In a letter to Samokhvalov dated March 12, 1933, he essentially outlined a programmatic manifesto: in his view, the Union of Artists should be led by a group that is the "bearer of the most progressive ideological and creative trends". Leadership should not act as a "guiding pole", as managing creative processes is always about "the line… that very tone which creates the entire creative music". Accordingly, a Soviet leader must combine "broad perspective, competence, and principle" to "set the tone".