БЕЖАВШИЙ ОТ ВОЙНЫ: О РОССИЙСКОМ УЧЕНОМ-ЭМИГРАНТЕ Б.М. САПИРЕ

Abstract

The article is devoted to the life, work and documentary legacy of the well-known abroad, but little-known in Russia historian and archivist Boris Moiseevich Sapir. B.M. Sapir lived a long life (1902–1989), full of various events. Born in 1902 in the city of Lodz in the Kingdom of Poland (that then belonged to Russia) into a Jewish Russian-speaking family, B.M. Sapir did not always voluntarily find himself in the center of major political events and even wars of the first half of the 20th century. Already in 1914, he and his parents came to Moscow. There, Sapir became interested in the social democratic movement and joined the Menshevik Party. However, not being an enemy of the Soviet state, he joined the Red Army in 1919 at the age of 17, being demobilized only in 1921. Soon, however, B.M. Sapir was arrested, imprisoned and deported until 1926. In 1926, he managed to escape to Germany (then the Weimar Republic). There, he became an activist of the International Youth Social Democratic Movement. However, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, Sapir’s long ordeal began in different countries. It was the Netherlands, where he began to actively study the history of Russian Populism and Menshevism (that topic became the main issue in his scientific work). Later his fate led him to Cuba, where he started researching the history of the local Jewish community, then – to the United States. It was only after the Second World War, and even then not immediately, that Sapir managed to come to the Netherlands, where he finally began to study the history of the revolutionary movement in pre-Soviet Russia. There he found not only his favorite occupation, but also his family happiness. B.M. Sapir did not survive his rehabilitation. He died in 1989, and was officially rehabilitated in the USSR only in 1991. Boris Moiseevich’s relatives received the relevant documents only in 1992. The most significant part of B.M. Sapir’s documents is kept in the United States, in one of the Russian archives – the Bakhmetyev archives (at Harward University). A copy of the scientific reference apparatus for the collection (Fund) of B.M. Sapir was digitized and made available to Internet users. However, a detailed study of B.M. Sapir’s documents is a matter for the future.