One Biography of the Stalinist Manager: Efim Abramovich Milstein

Abstract

Using materials from the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Scientific Archive of the Russian Ethnographic Museum, the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, this article reconstructs part of the biography of one “Stalinist” manager, Yefim Abramovich Milstein (1902–1989). Over time he was a student at the Institute of Red Professors (1929–1932) and then its deputy director and acting director (1932–1934), first secretary of the party committee in Makhachkala (1934–1936), director of the State Museum of Ethnography (1937–1941, 1944–1953), senior editor of the Division of Catalogs (1953–1955), head of the socio-economic literature group of the State Public Library (1955-1969), and, finally, a pensioner of significance (1969–1989). The restored biography of this “Stalinist manager” makes it possible not only to characterize this difficult period of Russian history—from 1929 to 1953—through the eyes of a functionary of the political system, but also to find a personal, individual plan for its reading. The biography of E. A. Milstein was schematically similar to the fate of other representatives of the party elite in the 1930s and 1940s, yet it demonstrated the specifics of his personal response to this difficult period of Russian history.