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samizdat
(self-publishing) literary underground.
In the late 1980s they were officially reissued.
of Russian historiography of the late imperial
period. After the
OCTOBER REVOLUTION
Platonov
was allowed to maintain his post at the univer-
sity, renamed Leningrad State University after
1924. During the 1920s he wrote other influen-
tial books:
Boris Godunov
(1921);
Time of Troubles
(1923), a more popular accessible synthesis of
his earlier work;
Moscow and the West in the
XVI-XVIIth centuries
(1925); and
Peter the Great:
Personality and Activity
(1926), his last published
work. By the late 1920s, at a time of increasing
ideological debate, Platonov's apolitical or non-
Marxist teachings were the source of suspicion
among his more ideologically intolerant col-
leagues. In 1930 he was arrested on fabricated
charges of participating in a monarchist plot
against the Soviet state. After a trial, he was con-
victed and exiled to the Volga River town of
Samara (known as Kuybishev during Soviet
times), where he died in January 1933.
Platonov, Sergei Feodorovich
(1860-1933)
historian
One of the leading Russian historians of the
early 20th century, Platonov contributed to the
development of Russian historiography by advo-
cating careful and thorough archival research
and analysis. Platonov was born in the town of
Chernigov in southwestern Russia near the
Ukrainian border. His father was a typographical
technician in the government's employ who had
been transferred from his native Moscow. In
1869 the family moved to St. Petersburg, and,
with the goal of pursuing a university education,
Platonov was enrolled in one of the city's gym-
nasiums. Although profoundly interested in his-
tory since his childhood, Platonov entered the
literature faculty at St. Petersburg University,
from which he graduated in 1882. After gradua-
tion he taught modern Russian history at the
Alexander Lyceum in St. Petersburg while pur-
suing graduate work toward a master's thesis.
Attracted to the period of the
TIME OF TROUBLES
he wrote a thesis analyzing tales and legends
about the Time of Troubles as a historical source,
which he defended in 1889. That same year, he
was invited to teach at St. Petersburg University
but encouraged to complete a doctoral disserta-
tion in order to be a full-fledged member of the
faculty. For this purpose he wrote the work for
which he is perhaps best known,
Essays on the
Time of Troubles in the Muscovite State in the
XVI-XVIIth Centuries
(1890). Platonov spent most
of his teaching career at St. Petersburg Univer-
sity and was elected to the Russian
ACADEMY OF
SCIENCES
in early 1917. During this time he
wrote two other works,
Lectures on Russian History
(1899) and
History of Russia
(1909), which
became standard textbooks until the early
1920s. The
Lectures,
in particular, published in
numerous editions, joined Vasili
KLIUCHEVSKY
's
Course of Russian History
as one of the two pillars
Plekhanov, Georgii Valentinovich
(1857-1918)
revolutionary
The “father of Russian Marxism,” Plekhanov
began his revolutionary career as a populist.
When the revolutionary organization Land and
Liberty, of which he had been a member in the
1870s, split into two factions in 1879 over the
issue of terrorism, Plekhanov became a leader of
its nonterrorist faction, Black Repartition. The
other faction, People's Will, went on to plot and
carry out the execution of the czar,
ALEXANDER II
,
in March 1881. Plekhanov emigrated to Switzer-
land in 1880, and there he came into contact
with the ideas of Marxism that would shape his
further development as a revolutionary. In 1883
he was the main force behind the foundation of
Ozvobozhdenie Truda (Emancipation of Labor),
the first self-proclaimed Russian Marxist revolu-
tionary organization. He represented Russia in
the Socialist International and became one of its
leaders. For the next decades Plekhanov worked
to spread the message of Marxism throughout
Russia while polemicizing with the populists, a
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