Boris' parents - the geologist Petr Ignatyevich Polevoy (Петр Игнатьевич Полевой; 1873–1938) and Antonina Mikhailovna (Антонина Михайловна) Polevoy, née Golovachev - planned to reach Sakhalin Island, but ended up staying for a few months in Chita, in Russian Transbaikalia, where Antonina's relatives lived, and where she gave birth to Boris.
Even though his father was arrested in 1937 and died in prison the following year, Boris managed to graduate from the university with a history degree in 1941.
Although Boris' advisors recommended him for graduate school, the option was closed to him at the time, due to his father being labeled an "enemy of the people".
Commissioned as a Second Lieutenant (младший лейтенант) after short training in Andijan, Uzbekistan, he fought on the North Caucasian Front as a commander of a machine-gun platoon.
During the campaign against the "rootless cosmopolitans" in 1949 he was accused by the university ideologists of designing his US history course in a politically inappropriate way, and being influenced by "American capitalist literature", and fired from the department.
He was sick and unemployed for a long time, re-entering gainful employment only in November 1952, when the Soviet Navy's Office of Naval History (исторический отдел Главного штаба ВМС) hired him as a senior researcher.
dissertation only many years later, after which (in 1970) he was invited to join the Leningrad Branch of the N. N. Miklukho-Maklai Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
Polevoy weighed in on was the identity of the somewhat enigmatic Duchers (or Juchers) - the agriculturists whom the Cossacks of the 1650s encountered on the middle Amur and the lower Sungari, only to see them disappear from the region a few years later, when the Manchu government evacuated them further south, out of the reach of Russian tribute-seekers.
Particular attention is often paid to Fort Achansk, or Achansky Gorodok - a winter camp used by Khabarov's band in the land of the Achan people (a Nanai tribe) in 1651/52, which in March 1652 became the site of the first engagement between the Russian Cossacks and Manchu troops, and which has traditionally been considered the predecessor of the later Khabarovsk.
Polevoy, however, believed that Khabarov's Achansk was the village later known as Odzhal-Bolon (Russian: Оджал-Болонь), located on the left bank of the Amur, closer to Amursk than to Khabarovsk.
Khabarov's wanton killing of the natives who had already submitted to the Russian Czar's authority, and his murder of the wife of the Daurian Prince Shilginey, who was kept as a hostage and would not sleep with him, were antagonizing the local population.
[10] His reselling of government supplies to the members of his own band at extortionate prices, often on credit and on usurious conditions, did not foster cohesion in his crew.
In Polevoy's view, many of the future mutineers had come to the Amur in the hope to settle somewhere on the fertile lands along its banks as farmers, but Khabarov's abandoning of Albazin, captured by him from the Daurs in 1650, and his strategy of moving quickly up and down the river, collecting "tribute" from the natives to maximize his immediate profit, frustrated the Cossacks' plans for settlement.