Oral History of the "Temple of Science": A Collection of Interviews and Reminiscences of the Staff of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Abstract

This article analyses You are going to the temple of science… (Moscow, 2021), a collection of interviews and memoirs by employees of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The collection was compiled by V. N. Kruglov, V. V. Tikhonov, and Yu. S. Filina. The author considers the heuristic potential of these texts and the peculiarities of their use in historiographical studies. The interviews are important for the historian of science for two reasons: they provide them with important details of the everyday academic life of the institution (the so-called “historiographical life”), which are difficult or impossible to obtain from other types of documents, and they help to clarify the details found in the office records. The interviews and memoirs of historians in this collection allow the historiographer to get acquainted with the process of a young Soviet historian’s entry into a scholarly corporation, to characterise the peculiarities of relations between members of the latter, to show the nature of production processes in Soviet humanities research institutes, to report on the peculiarities of the management of scientific institutes, etc. It is pointed out that the information in these texts should be treated with caution, that they are characterised by a certain subjectivity and reflect the mentality of researchers belonging to the late Soviet generation.