EMIGRANT PERIOD OF LIFE OF THE FORMER MINISTER P.D. KLIMUSHKIN

Abstract

The article attempts to reconstruct the emigrant period of life of one of the minor heroes of the novel A. Tolstoy Eighteenth Year, a native of the Samara province, a prominent figure in the Socialist Revolutionary movement, a member of the Constituent Assembly, the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Komuch Prokopy Klimushkin (18881958). Biographical information about P.D. Klimushkin is scattered in many sources, some of which contradict the others, but the least studied until today remains the emigrant period of his life, which began after, going to an illegal position, Klimushkin left together with the Czech echelon at first to Irkutsk, then to Vladivostok and, finally, to Prague. Studying the Prague period, the author of the article found it necessary to divide it into two twenty years before the Second World War and after it. Special attention is paid to P.D. Klimushkins activity within the framework of the so-called Russian action in Czechoslovakia, as director of the Russian Peoples University and in the Society of Volga Movement Members of 1918, for the first time information on the personal life of the former minister is systematized, and also highlights his walking on the agony, which began after 1945 and ended two years before his death, in 1956. Reconstructing the previously little studied period of P.D. Klimushkins biography, the author of the article is based on archival documents, publications in Russian and foreign sources and testimonies of contemporaries, among which the most important place belongs to the memoirs of S. Nikolaev In the first place truth and only truth.