March 12 in Russian history

1899: The first international ice hockey match in Russia. Russian team Sport plays against the team of British citizens living in St.Petersburg. The game took place on the ice of Neva. The score is 4:4.

1940: The end of the Soviet-Finnish war known as the Winter War. On the one hand, USSR reached all the planned goals: the border was moved farther from Leningrad and Murmansk, obtained the Karelian isthmus, islands in the Gulf of Finland, Ladoga lake and territories in the North. On the other hand, the international prestige of the USSR both as a partner and as a possible enemy was seriously damaged. The consequences were much worse for Finland. The worst being that this war forced Finland to co-operate with the Nazi Germany, turning the country into the losing side of the WWII.

1964: General Pyotr Grigorenko is sent to the psychiatric investigation. General-major Grigorenko was born in 1907. In 1934 he graduated from the Academy of Military Engineering and in 1939 from the Academy of the Army General Staff. In 1939 he was granted an audience with A.Vyshinsky, the Prosecutor General of the USSR and informed him of "abuses of power" by the NKVD officials in Zaporozhye. The information was provided by Grigorenko's brother Ivan, who was arrested, and later released. Some time later a number of the organizers of repressions in Zaporozhye were arrested themselves. Grigorenko wrote later: "Only many years after I understood that the case ended to my satisfaction only because it coincided with the change of the leaders in NKVD. It was the new broom of Beria." After the war General Grigorenko works in the M.Frunze Military Academy. In 1961, he says a speech on a regional Communist Party congress, where he says: "We approve the draft programme where the cult of personality is condemned, but do we do everything possible to avoid the restoration of such cult?" He proposed to democratize the elections, to promote the accountability of the party authorities and their rotation, to abolish high salaries of the party officials. He was fired from the Academy after this speech.

In 1962-1964 Grigorenko works in the army on the Far East. In 1963 he creates "The Union of Struggle for Restoration of Leninism". He wrote leaflets where he demanded to dismiss bureaucrats, called for free elections, for the control of the people over the authorities, for the "replaceability" (is this the word for the possibility to dismiss the officials unable to cope with their tasks?) On the February 1, 1964 he and his sons who were also members of the Union, are arrested. He was excluded from the party, discharged to rank-and-file soldier, stripped of all awards and sent to the Leningrad special psychiatric hospital. After the resignment of Khrushchev he was release from the hospital. He wrote a book published only in Samizdat, where he accused Stalin of many errors in the first years of the war, which led to many tragedies. In 1967 he unofficially read lectures on the history of the World War II to the students of the Moscow State University.

The experience of the "Union of Struggle for Restoration of Leninism" led him to the conclusion that the underground resistance to the Soviet power is useless. "We know that in the underground one can meet only rats," he wrote. These words became the title of his book, which is available online in Russian (see В подполье можно встретить только крыс). In 1967 he supported the national movement of the Crimean Tatars, who demanded to allow them to return from deportation to Crimea. In 1969 he was sent to the psychiatric hospital again, where he was diagnosed in the following way: "suffers from a mental disorder in the form of pathological (paranoid) personality with reformatory ideas."

In 1974 under the pressure of the international community he was released. In 1976 he joined the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group and becomes a co-founder of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. In 1977 he goes to the USA to meet with his son, who emigrated earlier. Some months later his Soviet citizenship was cancelled and he lost the right to return to the USSR. The US army offered him a position in the West Point academy, but Grigorenko refused: "I am a Soviet -- former Soviet -- general and I cannot teach our enemies." In 1987, Pyotr Grigorenko died in New York.

In 1997 President Yeltsin signed the decree "On the perpetuation of the memory of Grigorenko P.G.". President of Ukraine L.Kuchma awarded P.Grigorenko with the order "For the courage". An avenue in Kiev is named after P.Grigorenko. Crimean Tatars built a monument to the general in Simferopol.

Historian Sergey Platonov

I plan to use this blog to publish a very condensed, sketchy translation of a course in Russian history, written by one of the best Russian historians of the XX century -- Sergey Fyodorovich Platonov. Wikipedia has a very short article about this outstanding personality, but since, in my opinion, he deserves a more detailed biography, I would like to start with a short description of his life.

All articles from this blog will also be posted at Sima Qian Studio history forum.

Sergey Platonov was born in Chernigov, not far from Kiev, on June 16, 1860. In 1878 he entered the St.Petersburg university. In 1888, he published his first large work, where he tried to use Russian folk-tales as a source of new information about the period called the Time of Troubles (the interregnum between 1598-1613), which remained his favourite period for the rest of his life. The work was published both as a thesis and as a monography and received the Uvarov Award of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In 1899, he became a doctor of sciences and published 'The Time of Troubles' (translation by John T. Alexander published by University Press of Kansas in 1987), an extensive review of the Russian society of the early XVII century.

Platonov became famous when he prepared two history courses: Lectures on Russian history (1899) for universities and a Coursebook on Russian history for schools (1909-1910). For some years, Platonov taught the children of emperor Alexander III, duke Mikhail and duchess Olga. Nikolay II, though, didn't like his works, since they "did not cause love to the fatherhood or the pride of the Russian people." Platonov attempted to avoid the subjective viewpoints of other historians of that period: Kluchevsky's liberalism, conservative monarchism of Ilovaisky, marxism of Pokrovsky. "There is no need to introduce any personal viewpoints into history, since a subjective idea is not a scientific idea."

His opinion of the Bolshevist revolution was negative. The political program of the Soviets is "contrived and utopian," he said. "My worldview was based on Christian morale, positivist philosophy and scientific theory of evolution. Atheism is just alien to me as the religious dogmatism." After the revolution, he worked as the chairman of the Russian administration of archives, director of Pushkin House and the Library of the Academy of Sciences. He published new works about Peter I, relations between Russia and Europe in XVI-XVII centuries, earliest Russian settlements on the banks of the Arctic Ocean, etc.

In 1929, OGPU (ex-Cheka) checked the archives, managed by Platonov and found some documents written by Nikolay II and his brother Mikhail. Platonov was accused of hiding these documents (he reported about them in 1926) and dismissed. Worse than that, in 1930, he was accused of participation in a counter-revolutionary monarchist plot and arrested together with many other famous non-marxist historians.

In August 1931, the main 'criminals' were sentenced to 5 years of exile and deported to Samara, where I live. In 1933, he died here in Samara, but I still do not know where.

(posted at SimaQianStudio)