Following the Pages of an Unknown Book. General A. N. Bogolyubov and his Monograph “The Defeat of Kolchak”

Abstract

This article focuses on a newly discovered military history: the monograph The Defeat of Kolchak, authored by famous Soviet military leader General Alexander N. Bogolyubov. Published in 1939 by the General Staff Academy of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, this book was one of the first full-fledged special works focused on an analysis of military operations on the Eastern front during the Russian Civil War. Due to a number of circumstances, Bogolyubov’s printed work has not been in circulation until today, and has remained an unknown variable for Russian historical science. The book is considered in two dimensions: as a typical creative phenomenon of the Stalin era, with its characteristic request for a uniform, unified interpretation of the events of 1917–1922; as a special phenomenon in the official activities of Bogolyubov, who, despite his personal aspirations and desires, was forced to turn to scientific and teaching work at the General Staff Academy of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army. Consideration of the set of issues associated with a previously unknown book helped the author come to the following conclusions: in the scientific sense, the work of Bogolyubov appears to be an important phenomenon in the early historiography of the Civil War, certain expressions of the book to this day retain their relevance and novelty; the fact of the presence of the mass of controversial theses and obvious mistakes in the work is a reflection of the ideological attitudes and stereotypical approaches to the interpretation of the events of the war that prevailed in historiography in the 1930s; the creative way of the monograph was directly attributable to the development of official activities of its author, reflects the varieties of fortune of General Bogolyubov.