“Let me point out that the volume includes the material you provided”: An episode from the making of Volume IV of “Essays on the History of the USSR,” 1953 (based on the personal archive of N.G. Berezhkov)

Abstract

This article examines the materials and circumstances related to the making and publication of the section on the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in Volumes III and IV of “Essays on the History of the USSR.” In the 1940s and 1950s, as the Soviet Union developed a new system of education, the Academy of Sciences of the USSR initiated work on a multi-volume historical compendium, “Essays on the History of the USSR,” to cover the development, up to the second half of the 18th century, of the territories incorporated into the Soviet Union. Under the chief editorship of B.D. Grekov, more than 50 historians contributed to the project. The working group involved N.G. Berezhkov, who was a prominent Russian and Soviet historian, a distinguished specialist in Lituanistics, and a pioneer in the systematic chronology of Ancient Rus’. He was asked to draft the section on the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the chronology for Volumes III and VI. The drafts, over 1000 manuscript pages, are now part of his personal archive. However, despite the scholar’s substantial role, he was not mentioned in the introduction to Volume III, where the names of all other contributors were listed. Instead, he was credited as the author of the chronology, with a brief postscript acknowledging the use of his materials. Here, the circumstances surrounding this situation are disclosed through an analysis of N.G. Berezhkov’s correspondence with his colleagues V.T. Pashuto and L.V. Cherepnin, both responsible for preparing the materials for publication.