Forced to become an academic: Two lives of Mikhail Groedinger

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the personality of Mikhail Osipovich Groedinger (1864–1936), a famous Belarusian legal scholar, one of the creators of the Belarusian Soviet legislation and the only jurist member of the Academy of Sciences of Belarus during its Soviet period. Highly honored in his lifetime, Groedinger became the subject of the various complementary publications after his death. However, according to the documents, previously unknown to the biographers, the future member of the Academy had significantly edited his official biography and had become a researcher largely due to circumstances. Besides the reconstruction of Groedinger’s true life and work before the Russian revolution, the article suggests a deep exploration of his family history, aiming to represent the models of acquiring and securing of the social status passed from generation to generation. The extensive material related to the Groedinger family also makes it possible to trace how the instrumentalization of the loyalty made it easy to adapt to the new conditions in a perpetually changing political situation. Furthermore, the Groedinger case provides a new approach to the study of the conformal behavior in the Soviet Union, genetically linking it to the similar practices in the Russian Empire.