Mikhail Pokrovsky
[1] Pokrovsky was neither a Bolshevik nor a Menshevik for nearly a decade prior to the October Revolution of 1917, instead living in European exile as an independent radical close to philosopher Alexander Bogdanov.
Pokrovsky was harshly critical of the nature of the multi-national Tsarist empire and deemphasized the personal role played by individuals such as the modernizing Tsar Peter the Great.
[2] He was well educated as a boy, completing work at a classical gymnasium before enrolling in the History Department of Moscow University at the age of 19, where he studied under Vasily Klyuchevsky and Paul Vinogradov, two of the most renowned historians of the era.
[3] Undeterred by his lack of an advanced academic degree, Pokrovsky began teaching in secondary schools and university extension programs, pursuing his ambition of becoming a professional historian.
[5] Other key members of this faction included future Bolshevik education chief Anatoly Lunacharsky and prominent writer Maxim Gorky.
[3] He would remain a non-Bolshevik radical until the revolutionary year of 1917, when he returned to Russia in August 1917, following the February Revolution, which overthrew Tsar Nicholas II.
[9] He was also chosen for the commission which drafted the first Constitution of Soviet Russia in 1918 and in March 1918 was elected Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars for the Moscow region.
[10] Pokrovsky would become Deputy Commissar of the reformed educational ministry in May 1918, overseeing direction of that body during Lunacharsky's frequent absences from Moscow during the rest of 1918.
Pokrovsky was also instrumental in the establishment of the Institute of Red Professors (IKP), a de facto graduate school for the advanced training of historians, economists, philosophers, jurists, and natural scientists.
[12] Pokrovsky was a consistent advocate of bringing moderate critics of the regime into the educational establishment, unsuccessfully attempting to gain teaching positions at Moscow University for prominent Menshevik intellectuals Iulii Martov and Nikolai Sukhanov.
[12] Pokrovsky was also a member of the All-Union and All-Russian Central Executive Committees of Soviets,[12] officially non-party bodies which atrophied in importance over time.
[22] In conjunction with the work of this commission, Bukharin authored a lengthy critique of Pokrovsky and his methodology, accusing the deceased historian of mechanistic adherence to abstract sociological formulas, failure to properly understand and apply the dialectic method, and a tendency to depict history as a crudely universal process.
[23] The Zhdanov Commission, in consultation with Stalin, issued an influential communique which categorized historians of the Pokrovsky school as conduits of harmful ideas that were at root "anti-Marxist, anti-Leninist, essentially liquidatorist, and anti-scientific.
"[24] Pokrovsky's relentless attack on the Tsarist old regime as a "prison of peoples" and "international gendarme" was henceforth deemed to be anti-patriotic "national nihilism" and a new Russian nationalist historical orthodoxy was established.
The entire history of the Russian state from antiquity to the twentieth century he imagined as piratic forays by a plunderer of constantly increasing strength.
[16]Only after the Soviet leader's death and the subsequent renunciation of his policies by the Communist Party did Pokrovsky's work regain some influence among academic historians in the USSR.
Although regarded as a rigid Marxist polemicist by his critics, Pokrovsky is also acknowledged as a "conscientious scholar who would not sacrifice intellectual honesty to the demands of propaganda" by others, leaving his an ambiguous legacy.
