The study of the history of Tsaritsyn's defense in the framework of the publishing project "The History of the Civil War" in the 1930s.

Kleitman Aleksandr Leonidovich Doctor of History Leading Researcher, The Institute of the History of Natural Science and Technology named after S.I. Vavilov of the Russian Academy of Sciences 125315, Russia, Moscow region, Moscow, Baltiyskaya str., 14 malk@bk.ru Other publications by this author

Savka Ol'ga Gennad'evna PhD in History Associate Professor; Department of Document Science, History of State and Law; RTU MIREA 86 Vernadsky ave., c2, Moscow, 119454, Russia olga-savka@mail.ru Other publications by this author

The problems of the development of historical science in the USSR in the 1930s have repeatedly become the subject of research by Soviet and Russian scientists. The greatest contribution to the study of the topic was made by A.M. Dubrovsky, V.V. Tikhonov and A.L. Yurganov. In 2017, a special study by M.V. Zelenov and D. Brandenberger was published on the history of the creation of the first volume of the work "The History of the Civil War in the USSR". Some issues related to the formation of the official concept of the history of Tsaritsyn's defense in the 1930s were considered in the works of B.S. Ilizarov, E.P. Vorobyov, A.V. Ganin, I.O. Tyumentsev. Special studies devoted to the history of the study of the events of the defense of Tsaritsyn in the framework of the M. Gorky publishing project "The History of the Civil War" have not been undertaken to date.

On July 30, 1931, the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) adopted a resolution on the preparation of the publication of the History of the Civil War (1917-1921), which was to consist of 10-15 volumes of collections of scientific and historical articles and literary and artistic works. This work was to be edited by the Main Editorial Board, which included: M. Gorky, V.M. Molotov, K.E. Voroshilov, S.M. Kirov, A.S. Bubnov, Ya.B. Gabarnik and I.V. Stalin. To prepare the publication, historical and artistic editorial offices were also established, bringing together leading Soviet historians and writers. The publication of the resolution was preceded by serious organizational work carried out by M. Gorky ^[1]. In 1932, the publication plan approved by the main editorial board was published ^[7], and work began on writing the text of the "History of the Civil War".

The history of Tsaritsyn's defense is a topic that occupied a special place in Soviet historiography and public thought during the Stalin era. It was in Tsaritsyn in 1918 that Joseph Stalin's ascent to the heights of party and state power began. In 1925, the city was renamed Stalingrad, and began to turn into a symbolic, ideological, memorial center dedicated to the history of the establishment of Soviet power in southern Russia. In 1929, in the jubilee collection published for the 50th anniversary of I.V. Stalin, K.E. Voroshilov's article "Stalin and the Red Army" was published, in which the beginning of the civil war was associated with the beginning of the defense of Tsaritsyn and the arrival of the future Soviet leader in the city ^[2]. According to the correct observation of S.F. Naida and V.P. Naumov, it was from this moment that the cult of personality began to manifest itself in historical science ^{[9, p. 94]}.

In the multi-volume History of the Civil War, the section devoted to the defense of Tsaritsyn was supposed to become one of the central, most detailed and ideologically verified. In volume IV of the Cossack Vendee, the events that took place in Tsaritsyn in 1918-1919 were devoted to Part III, which consisted of 7 chapters: "Tsaritsyn as the center of attack", "Tsaritsyn during the struggle in the counterrevolution", "The First Encirclement of Tsaritsyn", "Military Council, Stalin, Voroshilov, in Tsaritsyn", "Tsaritsyn's second entourage. "Take Tsaritsyn"", "Enemies about us" and "Results and lessons of the struggle" ^{[7, pp. 52-54]}.

The Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (hereinafter – RGASPI) has preserved correspondence conducted by the secretariat of the IGV editorial office with the authors of this section, which allows us to analyze how the history of Tsaritsyn's defense was written for the multi-volume "History of the Civil War" ^[10].

Work on this section was started in 1933. His writing was entrusted to Esther Borisovna Genkina ^[6] (1901-1978) and Grigory Efimovich Meerson (1892-1937) ^[8]. Both historians were graduates of the Institute of the Red Professorship, students of M.N. Pokrovsky. G.E. Meerson had also previously graduated from the law faculty of the Don (former Warsaw) University, was a member of the Menshevik Party, was arrested in 1922 and was under investigation for several months on suspicion of conducting anti-Soviet agitation and disorganization of the Soviet apparatus on the Don. In 1931, he replaced Professor P.G. Lyubomirov as head of the department of Saratov University, having previously launched harassment of the scientist and forced him to leave the university and leave Saratov ^[11]. In 1933, G.E. Meerson lived in Stalingrad, worked as a professor at the Stalingrad Institute of Marxism-Leninism. The third author of the chapter on the defense of Tsaritsyn in 1918 was to be one of the participants in the fighting, the military leaders of the Red Army I.F. Tkachev (1896-1938). In 1933, he studied at the Frunze Military Academy, was a member of the Presidium of the Nizhny Volga Regional Executive Committee ^{[10, l. 3]}.

On the instructions of the main editorial board, documents on the history of Tsaritsyn's defense were selected in the archives. E.B. Genkina, G.E. Meerson and I.F. Tkachev were sent books and copies of archival materials from the central editorial office. Writing the "History of the Defense of Tsaritsyn" was not the main work for the authors, it was conducted on a contractual basis, in his spare time. I.F. Tkachev was constantly busy with military service, never able to meet with other members of the author's team. Most of the letters addressed to him from the secretariat of the main editorial office of IGV remained unanswered. In the time allotted to him, he was unable to write the assigned chapters.

G.E. Meerson constantly complained in letters to the secretariat of the main editorial office about excessive academic (more than 30 hours a week) and party workload, asked to get a job for him in Moscow, or at least petition the regional committee of the CPSU (b) so that writing the history of Tsaritsyn's defense would be considered as the main type of his party work and he was a sabbatical was granted ^{[10, l. 4-5, 43-44 vol., 47 vol.-48]}. On June 19, 1934, an official letter was written to the chairman of the Stalingrad Regional Committee V.V. Ptukha (1894-1938) with the personal signature of M. Gorky with relevant requests: "The main editorial board of the History of the Civil War approved the author of the 4th volume, the 3rd section "Krasny Tsaritsyn", Comrade. Meerson. Comrade. Meerson has been working on his chapter for about a year now. The Secretariat for the “History of the Civil War” has selected a huge archival material for him, which should form the basis of his work. At the moment, Comrade. Meerson should start writing the chapter that both he and the scientific support staff of our Secretariat have been working on for such a long period. We are contacting you with a request to provide a comrade. Meerson took a sabbatical from September 1 to November 1 so that he could finish the chapter assigned to him by the Editor-in-Chief at least late against the deadlines set for him, but still finish the chapter entrusted to him by the Editor-in-Chief" ^{[10, l. 83]}. Support at such a high level did not help G.E. Meerson. In the summer of 1934, he fell ill with typhoid fever, was treated, and then underwent rehabilitation in Sochi ^{[10, l. 93, 96-97]}. He did not go further than collecting material in his work, neither drafts nor the finished text were submitted to the editorial office.  

In April 1935, letters were sent to I.F. Tkachev and G.E. Meerson with requests to return all received archival materials and books back to the editorial office. At the beginning of 1936, G.E. Meerson was asked to voluntarily return the 450 rubles received as an advance, which otherwise the editorial board was ready to recover from him in court. In a reply letter addressed to the head of the editorial office, I.I. Mints, sent on April 5, 1936, the historian burst into an angry rebuke: "For the secretariat, first of all for you, it is no secret that the main archival and newspaper material for the chapter on the struggle on the Tsaritsyn front was selected by me. I worked hard for two weeks at the Red Army Archive in Moscow, and according to my selection and my instructional instructions, your employee then selected the relevant materials. T. Genkina received a complete set of extracts from the newspaper "Struggle", which I spent at least 300 hours sampling in Saratov (we are talking about extracts for the whole of 1918). After all, I didn't even raise the issue of paying for my work. Even if you paid me 1/10 of what you and the Saratov Archive Department spent on typists, you would get an amount that would more than cover the advance of 450 rubles. I still flatter myself that this "notice" is a complete misunderstanding. Otherwise, as a communist and a researcher, I would be ashamed of you!" ^{[10, l. 311-312 vol.]}. 3 days after sending this letter, apparently even before it came to the editorial office, on April 8, 1936, G.E. Meerson was arrested by the state security agencies. On August 9, 1937, on charges of leading a counterrevolutionary terrorist organization and propagating Trotskyist ideas, he was sentenced to capital punishment by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR and shot on the same day. On June 27, 1956, he was rehabilitated.

I.F. Tkachev did not receive an advance payment for the work on writing the defense of Tsaritsyn. I returned all the materials received from the editorial office. In March 1935, he was appointed head of the Main Directorate of the Civil Air Fleet under the SNK of the USSR, and was appointed to the Military Council of the People's Commissariat of Defense. In 1936, he was awarded the rank of commander. On January 29, 1938, he was arrested. On July 29 of the same year, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced him to capital punishment and shot on charges of participating in a military conspiracy. By the decision of the Military Board of February 8, 1956, he was rehabilitated.

E.B. Genkina's life was not so tragic. At the beginning of 1934, her main place of work (instructor of the agricultural department of the Regional Committee of the CPSU (b)) was not related to scientific activities, however, thanks to a petition from the editorial board of IGV to the party leadership of the Saratov Region, in September 1934 she was granted a sabbatical to work on the text of the history of the defense of Tsaritsyn. At the end of August – beginning of September of the same year, E.B. Genkina reported in a letter to E.N. German as the editorial secretary that she "got into the subject" and "found a foothold", asked to convey with L.N. Rubinstein, who regularly traveled from Moscow to Saratov, the first volume of L.D. Trotsky's book "How the revolution was armed", since it was withdrawn from all Saratov libraries, materials of the military section of the VIII Party Congress, as well as to organize an interview with K.E. Voroshilov and allocate funds for a business trip to Stalingrad to work in the archive ^{[10, l. 118-120 vol.In 1935, E.B. Genkina moved to Moscow and joined the IGV secretariat. As noted in the minutes of the meeting of the brigade of Volume V dated January 3, 1936, for the period from November 20, 1935, when she began work, she reviewed the manuscripts stored in the secretariat, conducted conversations and organized shorthand memoirs of comrades Magidov, Kamensky, Levin, Batov and Romanov, the whole was selected and finally planned the material for the chapter "The Military Council during the first encirclement of Tsaritsyn". In mid-January 1936, E.B. Genkina was sent on a business trip to Stalingrad to collect workers' memories of Stalin's stay in Tsaritsyn, to obtain some additional archival and illustrative materials [10, l. 293-295]}. She established contacts with employees of the Stalingrad museums, who subsequently selected and sent photographs, documents, and memoirs of participants in the defense of Tsaritsyn to the IGV secretariat. Thanks to the editorial board's request, A.I. Urgapov, a worker at the Barricades plant, was sent to Moscow to give an interview.

The results of E.B. Genkina's work on the study of the history of Tsaritsyn's defense were reflected in her doctoral dissertation "The Defense of Tsaritsyn in 1918", which was successfully defended in 1939. The following year, the dissertation was published in a revised form as a monograph. The author managed, by appealing to documents and eyewitness memoirs, to describe the events unfolding on the Tsaritsyn front in 1918 as the most important event that determined the further course of the Civil War. The general mood of the book is vividly conveyed by the words given in its conclusion: "In May 1919, the Tsaritsyn proletariat was awarded the red banner by the Central Executive Committee for military services during the Civil war, and from April 1925 Tsaritsyn began to bear the name of the leader and organizer of victories on the Tsaritsyn front, the name of the great leader of the Bolshevik Party – the name of Comrade Stalin… It became Stalin's city precisely in those harsh and menacing days of 1918, when victory on the Tsaritsyn Front was organized under Stalin's direct leadership. More than two decades separate us from the summer of 1918, from the heroic struggle for Tsaritsyn under the leadership of Comrades Stalin and Voroshilov… With a feeling of great gratitude and love, the Soviet people remember the military leadership of Stalin and Voroshilov, who ensured victory over the enemies in the civil war," etc. ^{[3, p. 217]}. In 1941, a collection of documents on the history of the Civil War was published under the editorship of I.I. Mints and E.N. Gorodetsky, in which the section on the defense of Tsaritsyn was prepared by E.B. Genkina ^[5]. The topic of Tsaritsyn's defense became particularly relevant during the Great Patriotic War. The researcher wrote one of the first books on the history of the Battle of Stalingrad, which was published in 1943 ^[4].

Thus, writing a work on the history of Tsaritsyn's defense in 1918, sustained in the spirit of a cult of personality, but possessing formal signs of scientific historical research, was an important task, the solution of which was followed by people who held senior party and government posts in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Two of the three authors who did not show diligence in in this work, they were repressed and shot. For G.E. Meerson, the failure to write the defense of Tsaritsyn could have been a decisive factor that determined his fate. E.B. Genkina, having managed to successfully complete this work, became a recognized authority in the community of Soviet historians.