Visegrad Lecture Series

Yurii Afanas’ev and the Reinvention of Post-Soviet Historiography in Russia

by Ksenia Polouektova-Krimer (ZZF-Potsdam)

The Russian State University for the Humanities (RSUH, 1991) was one of the earliest and by far the most successful educational projects to emerge from Perestroika's moral impulse to reckon with history and combat the ideologization, de-professionalization and methodological backwardness of Soviet historical studies. This university project was spearheaded by one of the most prominent "foremen" of perestroika, Yuri Afanas'ev (1934-2015): historian, prolific public intellectual, one of the leaders of the democratic movement, Gorbachev's consistent critic, one of the co-founders of the "Memorial" Society, an early proponent of the Annales school in the USSR, and rector of the Institute of Historical Archives, which he transformed into the RSUH. The project both documents the making of the university and traces Afanas’ev's complex intellectual legacy, focusing on his vision for the reinvention of historical studies in post-Soviet Russia and, more generally, the teaching of the humanities, and his struggle for the declassification of Soviet archives.