Vladimir Nikolaevich Ginev (1932-2025): historian, mentor, contemporary

This publication features autobiographical notes by S. V. Bukalova, a university teacher from Orel, about V. N. Ginev as her academic advisor and her research under his supervision, from her undergraduate coursework to her doctoral dissertation. The memoirs reflect both the mundane details of the educational process at a regional university and V. N. Ginev’s methodological approaches to organizing research, based on the requirement for rigorous argumentation of conclusions, a comprehensive source base, and objective interpretation of data. Spanning a quarter of a century, the memoirs touch upon changes in the academic community — the digitalization of sources, the emergence of publication requirements, and the formation of professional communities. Of particular note is V. N. Ginev’s connection to the emergence of new research areas in the history of the First World War.

This publication features memoirs and excerpts from letters from the last decade of the life of Vladimir Nikolaevich Ginev (1932–2025), a prominent Soviet and Russian historian of populism and volost self-government. In his autobiographical notes, Ginev recalls his childhood during the difficult times of the Great Patriotic War, his evacuation, his postwar years in Oryol, and his studies at Leningrad University and graduate school at the Leningrad Branch of the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Ginev’s work on his major historical works is covered in detail. The author also explores his relationship with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Marxist-Leninist ideology. As head of the St. Petersburg Institute of Historical Studies (SPbIHI RAS) Archive for ten years, Ginev reveals the history of the archive’s collections and the challenges it faced in the 2000s. His teaching at Oryol State University in the 1990s–2010s and his supervision of graduate students also occupy a special place in his memoirs. The chronological autobiographical memoirs continue with excerpts from letters from V. N. Ginev to his student at Oryol University, M. V. Kovaleva, written between 2015 and 2024. The letters contain memoirs about various stages of Vladimir Nikolaevich’s life. In them, he continues to participate in and follow the life of the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, documenting, as a contemporary, the changes in the country’s scientific life and all the hardships of life in one’s later years.