Early years Mikhail Pokrovsky was born August 29, 1868, in
Moscow into the family of a state official who had gained
hereditary nobility from the Tsar. 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. He would graduate from that institution in 1891, going on to pursue a
Master's degree with Klyuchevsky; this work was not completed due to personal differences. A young man of progressive sympathies, Pokrovsky was finally prohibited from giving public lectures in 1902 owing to his radical views. Other key members of this faction included future Bolshevik education chief
Anatoly Lunacharsky and prominent writer
Maxim Gorky. Pokrovsky would remain in French exile until the coming of the
October Revolution in 1917. Bogdanov and the
Vperedists established a Marxist party school on the Italian island of
Capri early in 1909, with a view to educating and training ordinary working class Russians as future party leaders, intending the project to be open to adherents of the Bolshevik and
Menshevik organizations alike. Pokrovsky again participated in this project as a history lecturer, being joined by Lunacharsky, Bogdanov, and others. He was formally readmitted to the Bolshevik Party the following month and was soon in a position of trust and authority, editing the daily newspaper of the Moscow Soviet,
Izvestiia. 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 again ran afoul of charges of oppositionism in 1919 when he lent his support to
Nikolai Bukharin and the
Left Communists in opposition to the
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk — a matter of bitter and divisive debate within the Russian Communist Party. In 1918 he was the founding rector of the
Socialist Academy of Social Sciences, later renamed the
Communist Academy. 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. In 1925 Pokrovsky was chosen as the first president of the Society of Marxist Historians and was for a time also the editor of its journal,
Istorik-marksist. His influence was at its peak during the first and only All-Union Conference of Marxist Historian held in December 1928 and January 1929, when, to quote the historian
Konstantin Shteppa: In 1929, Pokrovsky was elected to the
Soviet Academy of Sciences. He achieved his highest position in the Communist Party apparatus the following year, when he was named as a member of the presidium of the Central Control Commission, a disciplinary body elected and sitting in parallel to the governing Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party. In his
Russian History from the Most Ancient Times (1910–13), he wrote that "Great Russia was built on the bones of the non-Russian nations...in the past we Russians were the greatest robbers on earth". He also downplayed the role of personality in favor of
economics and the
class struggle as the driving force of history. An example was his analysis of the destruction of the
Boyar class, the owners of large feudal estates, during the reign of
Ivan the Terrible, which Pokrovsky attributed to the development of a market economy that favoured smaller, more efficient estates, whose owners allied with townspeople in 1564 to overthrow the boyars, which, he argued, would have happened whoever was on the throne. Of
Peter the Great, Pokrovsky wrote: "Peter, whom fawning historians have called the Great ... lowered the well-being (of the populace) terribly and led to a colossal increase in the death rate".
Death and legacy Mikhail Pokrovsky died of cancer on April 10, 1932. His ashes were buried at the
Kremlin Wall Necropolis. Though there had been some criticism of him in the early 1930s, he continued to be honoured posthumously for two years after his death. His name was given to the Leningrad Pedagogical Institute and the Novgorod Agro-Pedagogical Institute. Also from October 20, 1932, to November 11, 1937, Moscow State University bore his name. His name was given to the Vologda Pedagogical School. In some cities (in particular, in
Izhevsk), to this day there are streets named after Pokrovsky. But a "new period in the development of Soviet historiography began on May 16, 1934" with the publication of a decree that criticised the way history was being taught in Soviet schools and universities. Dozens of scholars were put to the task of writing a new standard history textbook in 1934 and 1935. Though the decree did not mention Pokrovsky by name, its effect was to discredit the entire school of history that he had led. In January 1936 another history textbook commission was launched, this chaired by
Andrei Zhdanov and including a number of top Communist Party functionaries, including
Nikolai Bukharin,
Karl Radek,
Yakov Yakovlev, and
Karl Bauman, among others. 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." 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. This new official orthodoxy remained in place for the duration of Stalin's life. ==See also==