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ISSN 1019-3316, Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2007, Vol. 77, No. 2, pp. 187–191. © Pleiades Publishing, Ltd., 2007.Original Russian Text © V.M. Khevrolina, 2007, published in Vestnik Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk, 2007, Vol. 77, No. 3, pp. 245–249.

Academician Aleksei Leont’evich Narochnitskiioccupies a prominent place among outstanding Russianhistorians of the second half of the 20th century, suchas Academicians E.A. Kosminskii, E.V. Tarle,V.M. Khvostov, and others, who dedicated their lives tothe study of the most crucial problems of the history ofinternational relations and Russia’s foreign policy. Thescientific legacy of Narochnitskii is enormous—morethan 350 works: monographs, chapters and sections incollective works, articles, reports, textbooks, and docu-mentary publications on a wide range of foreign-policyproblems. In addition, he was an editor of many otherscientific publications.

Narochnitskii’s career came out of a continuousthirst for knowledge and self-improvement and tirelessdaily labor, which to a great extent resulted from theupbringing and industriousness of his childhood andadolescence in the restless years of WW I and the CivilWar. He was born on February 16, 1907, in Chernigovinto the family of a principal and teacher at a popularcollege; his mother was also a teacher. In pre-revolu-tionary Russia, the teaching community, especially inthe capital cities of the provinces, constituted the back-bone of the liberal intelligentsia, who lived on theirlabor and tried to ply their children with love of laborand a good education. Both the classical gymnasium,which Narochnitskii entered, and his family paid muchattention to knowledge of Russian and European litera-ture, several foreign languages, and medieval and mod-ern history. He displayed exceptional abilities in thesefields already in childhood and later at Kiev Univer-sity’s Faculty of Social Sciences, which he entered in1926. The desire to comprehend the complex processesof reality that he witnessed and his growing interest indifferent fields of knowledge made a scientist out ofNarochnitskii.

His creative activity is extremely manifold. Aresearcher, an organizer of science, an educator, a pub-lisher of historical documents, and an executive editorof the country’s major historical journals, he conductedtremendous work establishing international scientificrelations and participating in congresses and confer-ences in Russia and abroad. His vast knowledge, erudi-tion, inexhaustible energy, exceptional industriousness,and perfectionism impressed everyone who met orworked with Narochnitskii; made people admirethis wonderful man; and inspired creativity in his inter-locutors, associates, and students.

Narochnitskii’s contribution to historical science ingeneral (the circle of his interests included the historyof European, Asian, and American countries, historio-graphy, source studies, archaeology, etc.) and especiallyto the study of the history of Russia’s international rela-tions and foreign policy from the end of the 18th to thebeginning of the 20th centuries is exceptionally great.His familiarity with many foreign languages allowedhim to trace the development of historical sciencethroughout the world. Narochnitskii’s research worksare characterized by the use of a wide range of sources,

DOI:

10.1134/S1019331607020116

History Was His Mission

On the Centenary of the Birth of Academician A. L. Narochnitskii

Profiles

Aleksei Leont’evich Narochnitskii, early 1950s.

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detailed familiarity with the literature on the subjectmatter, deep penetration into the core of processes andphenomena under study, display of their progressivedevelopment, comparison of the views of historians ofdifferent schools, and in many cases convincing cri-tique of falsifications and one-sided approaches to thesubject matter.

The scientist viewed problems of international rela-tions and foreign policy in their close linkage withdomestic, socioeconomic, and regional aspects, tracingtheir global trends. Narochnitskii paid great attention inhis works to the role of personalities in foreign politicalprocesses, creating vivid portraits of both prominentstatespersons and less noticeable participants in theevents.

The limits of this article do not provide the opportu-nity to characterize in detail the scientist’s scientificlegacy, and we will point out only his major works.After graduation from Kiev University and entranceinto a postgraduate course at Moscow State Universityin 1934, Narochnitskii, at the suggestion of his researchsupervisor N.M. Lukin, started studying the history ofthe foreign policy of the Jacobin dictatorship (in 1942,he defended his candidate’s dissertation on this topic).Simultaneously, he was included in a team of authors ofthe major work

History of Diplomacy

, for the first vol-ume of which he wrote two chapters: “European Diplo-macy in the Years of the French Bourgeois Revolution(1789–1794)” and “Diplomacy in the Years of the Ther-midorian Reaction and Directory (1794–1799).”

The publication of this work was a major event inSoviet historical science. Narochnitskii among theother authors was awarded the Stalin (State) Prize. Hereceived his second State prize in 1983 for participationin another multivolume work

History of World War Two1939–1945

, published from 1973 to 1982. In the sec-ond edition of

History of Diplomacy

(1959), he wroteadditional chapters on the diplomacy of the MiddleEastern and Far Eastern countries, as well as on diplo-macy during the 1848–1849 revolution in Europe.

The scientist first became interested in the history ofinternational relations in the Far East back in the 1930s.Right after the end of the Great Patriotic war, he pub-lished several articles on these problems and in 1956published the major monograph

The Colonial Policy ofCapitalist Powers in the Far East, 1860–1895

, havingdefended his doctoral dissertation of the same title ayear earlier. This book and the sections that he wrote forthe collective works

International Relations in the FarEast

(1951, 1956) were innovatory. They were based ona large corpus of documentary sources, publications inthe mass media, and journalism and covered the thenpoorly explored problems in a complex way. Themonograph is notable for a high level of theoreticalgeneralizations and a new approach to the issue understudy. The author showed that the fierce competition ofpowers for supremacy in the Far East was based on eco-nomic grounds, as well as on the strategic importance

of the region. The Far Eastern policies of the powersalso depended on international relations and domesticstruggles in Europe. Focus was laid on the reaction ofRussian society to the Far Eastern events and the role ofnational movements in India and China.

Narochnitskii’s works on the Far East were of greatpolitical value due to the region’s increasing role inworld politics; the growing presence of the UnitedStates there; the aggravation of relations between theSoviet Union and Japan; and the growth of national lib-eration movements in China, India, and Indochina. Theorigins of these processes were in the past; therefore, itwas fundamentally important to find out Russia’s role,whose policies to the Far East in the second half of the19th century were not as aggressive as those of Europeand the United States. St. Petersburg preferred to seepeaceful neighbors in China and Korea and did notwant them to be taken over by aggressors.

In the mid-1970s, the scientist’s studies into the Bal-kan vector of Russian foreign policy in the 19th centurysaw the light of day. A complex knot of contradictionsin the Balkans related to the crisis of the OttomanEmpire, the growth of national liberation movements ofoppressed Balkan peoples, and the competition of pow-ers in the region was a source of instability and a causeof several wars. It was quite logical for Narochnitskii toturn to these topics because he had been the leader ofthe Soviet section of the Commission of Soviet andYugoslavian Historians. This commission attemptedthe publication of two documentary collections, pre-pared jointly with Yugoslavian scientists and edited byNarochnitskii (on the Soviet part), which were pub-lished in 1984 and 1997. On the centenary of theRusso–Turkish War of 1877–1878, Narochnitskii pub-lished a number of articles probing into the commonal-ities and differences in the national interests of Russiaand the Balkan peoples. These papers are still topicalnow, especially the thesis that the Balkan peoples, hav-ing liberated themselves with the help of Russia, never-theless rejected autocracy and tried to create a politicalsystem based on liberal and bourgeois principles.

In addition to the above, Narochnitskii was inter-ested in other topics. A number of his works wererelated to the period of the Napoleonic wars, the inclu-sion of North Caucasus into Russia, etc. His works inhistoriography, source studies, and historical geogra-phy for schools and higher educational establishmentsare also praiseworthy.

This overview of Narochnitskii’s multifaceted activ-ities would be incomplete if we did not mention hispublishing historical sources, which he ranked veryhigh. He considered source documents the basis of his-torical research and rejected speculative conclusionsand sociological patterns based on ideological postu-lates, for which he was criticized by the followers ofM.N. Pokrovskii’s school. The publication of docu-ments was for Narochnitskii not only so much auxiliarywork during historical research but also a special form

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of research itself, which reveals the topic through thor-ough source selection and commentary. It is not bychance that documentary publications occupy so largea place in his research. The publications of diplomaticdocuments, which were very substantial in the 1920s,neared stopped in the 1940s. Only in the second half ofthe 1950s did the archives of the Russian Ministry ofForeign Affairs start to open for researchers. Systemicstudy of the history of the foreign policy of the RussianEmpire required major documentary work. Back in1945, the Soviet journal

Marxist Historian

publishedNarochnitskii’s article “Russian Documentary Publica-tions on Russia’s Foreign Policy Issues and Interna-tional Relations of Modern Times, Published before1917,” which posed the task of expanding publishingactivities and establishing a systematized printed cor-pus of sources from Soviet archives on these problems.

In 1960, the Commission for Publishing DiplomaticDocuments, established at the USSR Ministry of For-eign Affairs in 1957 also including representatives ofthe Head Archive Department under the USSR Councilof Ministers and several institutes of the USSR Acad-emy of Sciences, started to publish the multivolumedocumentary series

Russian Foreign Policy of the 19thand Early 20th Centuries

, of which Narochnitskii wasleader and executive editor. A brilliant expert in diplo-matic archives, he saw the goal of this publication to bea deep, comprehensive, and unbiased description of thesociopolitical nature and dynamics of the foreign poli-cies of Russia and other countries at that time. Hedirected the team of compilers to identify and selectdocuments that revealed not only the class-specific butalso national objectives of foreign policies, whichreflected, among other things, the general interests ofthe state. Special attention was given to the Russianpolicy’s progressive outcome for the peoples of Tran-scaucasia, for whom inclusion into Russia meant pres-ervation of their national identities under the threat ofannexation by the Ottoman Empire and Iran.Narochnitskii thought it important to complement sucha series with documents that show the influence ofsocioeconomic and especially financial and trade fac-tors, as well as the revolutionary process in Europe andRussia, on foreign policies and international relations.

Narochnitskii edited 16 volumes of the series, cov-ering the period from 1801 through 1830. The last twovolumes saw the light of day already after the scientist’sdeath. This edition includes several thousand docu-ments mainly of the Russian Foreign Ministry pub-lished for the first time. These are instructions, mes-sages, correspondence with monarchs and diplomats ofdifferent countries and with Russian diplomatic repre-sentatives in other countries, etc. Previously publishedrelated documents were abstracted in the series.Narochnitskii put forward special requirements to com-mentaries on documents. Lengthy commentaries con-tained information on unpublished sources and directedresearchers at further search and thorough study.Already the appearance of the first volumes received

positive responses of specialists both in Russia andabroad. They noted that this edition ranked among thefirst serial publications on the history of Russian andEuropean international relations and foreign policies ingeneral.

Although at present work on the series has been sus-pended (the 17th volume, covering the period from1830 through 1832, was published in 2005), whatNarochnitskii and his team were able to do is indeed ascientific achievement, and the publication itself is thepride of Russian historical science.

For a long time, Narochnitskii combined his activescientific endeavors with the education of historians.He lectured on the history of Russian foreign politicsand international relations at Moscow State University,the Moscow State Institute of International Relations,and several other institutions of higher learning and hadheaded the Departments of Modern and ContemporaryHistory at Moscow State University and the MoscowCity Educational Institute. The scientist believed thatknowledge of history widens the intellect and helpsdevelop the right understanding of past and currentevents, civil awareness, and patriotism, which is veryimportant for future teachers and educators. He pursuedthe same goals when writing and editing modern-his-tory textbooks for schools and in his university lecturecourses.

Narochnitskii was a brilliant public speaker and lec-turer. He tended to unleash an enormous number offacts on his students and still focus their attention on theessence of the historical process with all of its multipleaspects and interrelated components. He paid a lot ofattention to the role of personalities in history, whichwas very important for that time, when vulgar sociolog-ical theories prevailed in historical science. His lectureswere a great success with students, and the job contestsin the departments headed by him were always toughamong graduate and postgraduate students. He trainedmore than 70 candidates and more than 20 doctors ofsciences. Many of his students became famous scien-tists; some, academicians and corresponding membersof the USSR Academy of Sciences and the Academiesof Soviet republics.

Science rests on scientific schools; schools deter-mine the fate of young scientists. Narochnitskii may, nodoubt, be viewed as the founder of his own school, thetask of which is comprehensive research into the his-tory of Russian foreign policy and international rela-tions at the end of the 18th century and beginning of the20th century. The main characteristic of the works writ-ten by historians of this school is depiction of the basicproblems of this historical field based on a substantialcorpus of historical sources and in close relation withdomestic, socioeconomic, and ideological dynamics.Here priority is given to geopolitical problems, whichshape national interests and, consequently, foreign anddomestic policies.

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Narochnitskii was not only an outstandingresearcher and educator. His role was great in organiz-ing historical science. A member of the Academy ofEducational Sciences since 1968, full member of theUSSR Academy of Sciences since 1972, director of theInstitute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciencesin the years 1974–1979, chairman of the ScientificCouncil of the USSR Academy of Sciences on the His-tory of Soviet Foreign Policy and International Rela-tions since 1972, chairman of the USSR Ministry ofEducation’s Scientific and Methodological Council onHistory, chairman of the expert commission on histori-cal sciences under the State Commission for AcademicDegrees and Titles, and also executive editor of thejournal

Modern and Contemporary History

from 1962through 1974—this is an incomplete list of his posi-tions. We may only wonder how he found time andenergy to combine organizational work with research.The scientist’s contribution to the development of inter-national scientific relations is very substantial. He tookpart in many international congresses and conferences,at which his reports and presentations attracted generalattention to the high quality of Russian historical sci-ence. Being fluent in several languages, Narochnitskiioften conducted discussions with historians from othercountries in their mother tongues, which alwayspleased the audiences. He was perhaps one of the most

internationally famous Soviet historians and enjoyedgreat respect abroad.

Narochnitskii’s creativity, self-organization, andperfectionism reflected in the work of teams headed byhim. He had the rare ability to consolidate talentedresearch fellows and guide their work efficiently. In1975, at the Institute of History of the USSR Academyof Sciences, Narochnitskii established the Departmentof the History of Foreign Politics, within which heheaded the sector of the history of Russian foreign pol-icy. Well-known specialists in this field—L.A. Niki-forov, A.M. Stanislavskaya, A.V. Ignat’ev, O.V. Orlik,and others—were invited to work at the sector togetherwith young historians. Soon, the team achieved goodresults; in particular, more than 10 monographs, 6 col-lective works, 11 documentary collections were pub-lished, and 4 researchers defended their doctoral disser-tations by the end of the 1980s. His idea to produce thefive-volume collective work

History of Russian For-eign Policy (Late 15th Century–1917)

was imple-mented only after his death and was highly praised inRussia and abroad. All this was possible due solely tothe daily attention Narochnitskii gave to the work of thesector and its research fellows, whom he treated verykindly.

Narochnitskii might seem severe and inscrutable topeople who did not know him well, because he wasalways concentrated, well groomed, and elegant, andthis is why students nicknamed him “Sir.” Yet we, hisassociates, knew a different Narochnitskii: in the circleof friends, he was open, kind, lighthearted, and witty.He helped people a lot with advice, sympathy, and pro-tection. Some postgraduate students were fully obligedto him for the defense of their dissertations. He wouldbring the lazy to order, encourage the irresolute torestore their self-confidence, and praise and promotethe conscientious. He helped many talented young sci-entists to obtain the opportunity to work at universitiesand research institutes.

It would be wrong to say that Narochnitskii’s lifewas rosy. He had to overcome many hardships. In the1930s, his brother was repressed and killed. He had tolive in dire straits for a long time. His road to sciencewas not at all easy. Not all historians sided withNarochnitskii’s concept based on the continuity of thehistorical fates and geopolitical interests of Russia andthe Soviet Union. The scientist opposed the sweepingrejection of positive aspects in Russian history andproved the presence of national interests in Russian for-eign policy and the narrowness of the class-specificapproach to international relations. He preferredresearch to exposure and pragmatism to rejection. He,as already mentioned, advocated the thesis of the objec-tive and progressive role of Russian policy for theoppressed peoples in the Balkans, Caucasus, and Cen-tral Asia and kept proving that the liberal and bourgeoissystems of the United States and Europe did notexclude but implied aggression in different parts of the

Collection and the collector.

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world and that Russia was not the “prison of nations,”as some politicians and historians held. He had to strug-gle against many opponents on this road, but historyconfirmed that Narochnitskii was correct. Now we cansee that the progressive and liberal systems of Westernpowers do not restrain them from pirating in the inter-national arena. Narochnitskii was able to defend hisstand, although he suffered greatly “on the battlefield.”He found understanding among historians and studentswho sympathized with him and held the same views.

However, his main and permanent support in all histroubles was his united family. He was its head, soul,and the highest authority. He met his wife Lidiya in1945, when she was a student at the History Faculty ofthe Moscow State Educational Institute. This beautifuland charming woman had unparalleled courage andvalor. Living in Smolensk while it was occupied by theNazis during the war, she worked in the antifascistunderground and was responsible for communicationwith partisans. Captured by the Nazis and awaiting exe-cution, Lidiya miraculously escaped death: the swiftoffensive of the Red Army saved her life. Soon after theliberation, she was sent to study in Moscow. TheNarochnitskii family rested on mutual love and respect;the spouses took tender care of each other. Their daugh-ters Natal’ya and Ekaterina followed the path of theirparents, choosing the study of history, political science,and philosophy as their professions.

Despite enormous loads, Narochnitskii found timefor other occupations. He collected butterflies for years,being especially interested in tropical species. The mostbeautiful exhibits were placed on the walls of his apart-ment. Knowing about his hobby, associates, includingforeign historians, sent him butterflies from all over theworld. Another hobby of the scientist was flowers. Hisdacha, unlike many others that were planted with vege-tables and crowded with shacks, was a fragrant gardenfull of flowers. This dacha near Moscow was his con-stant resting place in the last years of his life. Love ofthe beautiful also expressed itself in his collection ofancient porcelain. Yet his main hobby was books in var-ious humanitarian disciplines.

Until the very end, Narochnitskii worked a greatdeal; he was not used to spare himself and died sud-denly on June 14, 1989, almost at his workplace withina few steps from his office in the Institute of History.His intense life and his rich creative, educational, andorganizational activities are examples of untiring workfor the benefit Russian historical science and constantsearch of a scientist who is far from self-complacenceand who is ready to fight for his convictions. Time hasshown that problems raised and developed byNarochnitskii are still topical and, maybe, even moretopical than when he wrote about them.

V. M. Khevrolina,Dr. Sci. (Hist.)