Some Sketches for the Portrait of World History Historian in Dnipropetrovsk: M.O. Yuriev in Procrustean bed of Stalin`s Repressions

Abstract

In this article the biography of M. Yuriev has been analyzed. Yuriev was the head of the World History department of Dnipropetrovsk Institute of Public Education and worked at the University at the beginning of 1930-th. He graduated from Odessa University where he had studied law. His closest relatives emigrated to Europe. He worked in the museum and taught in Dnipropetrovsk University. At the beginning of 1930-th Yuriev headed the World History department. By the time he started working at the University, the most historians prepared before 1917 had been fired from the world history department. In the University there were companies against Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism. Yuriev was also involved in this ideological struggle. He criticized the teachers of the history of Ukraine for the “nationalistic bias”. He criticized them especially at the time of so called “socialist competitions” between the History and Philology Departments. Without having scholarly research works he was involved into the project of writing the history of Dnipropetrovsk plant named after Bolshevik Petrovsky The work of the most authors of this project was considered unsatisfactory. The texts were not printed, but they were seized and destroyed. During the “political cleaning” in 1934 Yuriev was expelled from the consignment and fired. In 1935 he was arrested and accused of Trotskyism. Yuriev was sentenced to 5 years imprisonment. He was sentenced again while serving a sentence in Leningrad region in 1937. The court judged him to capital punishment, in 1937 he was shot. In 1959 he was posthumously rehabilitated.