Alexander V. Gordon (Russian: Гордон, Александр Владимирович) is a Russian historian, historiographer, socio-anthropologist, and culturologist. He is the author of important works on European history, modern civilization, peasant studies, historiography. His major areas of research are the history and historiography of French revolution, mass-movements in traditional and modern cultures, and peasant culture. Through his work at the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, he has considerably affected the exchange of information between Western and Russian academies and societies. He also authored several popular books on history and culture.
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Early life and education
Alexander V. Gordon was born in Dnepropetrovsk (USSR, currently in Ukraine) in 1937, in the family of a military engineer. The family moved to Slonim (USSR, currently in Belarus), where Gordon graduated from high school in 1954. Gordon had successfully passed difficult entrance exams and was admitted to the Department of History at Saint Petersburg State University. He graduated in 1959, majoring in history, with the specialist diploma (equivalent of Bachelor of Arts). His development as an historian was influenced by such Soviet historians as S.N.Valk, Ya.M.Zacher, and E.E.Pechuro. He spent next three years at an obligatory position as a school history teacher in Kaliningrad (in Moscow region)
Academic career
Writing and research
Upon finishing his work term as a school teacher, Gordon obtained a junior researcher position the Fundamental Library for Social Sciences (in Russian, Фундаментальная Библиотека по Общественным Наукам, ФБОН or FBON) a special research body of the Academy of the Sciences of the USSR. It was a closed-for-the-public library of the Academy, which doubled as a research think-tank, studying Western humanities and social sciences. In the 1968, this library was incorporated into the INION, and started publishing various research materials. Gordon has been working there since 1961, raising from the position of junior researcher to the top position of head researcher and the head of the Asian and African Countries Division. He published his memoirs about his work there.
At this time, most modern foreign literature in the humanities was inaccessible even to scholars in the Soviet Union. It was considered to be propaganda, or distorted description of reality, promoting capitalist ideas. While the most important foreign books were acquired by a selected few major Soviet libraries, including FBON, they were often placed into special storage, and "access to materials from Special Storage was conditional on special permission: a person had to either have the corresponding level of security access or to have a written permission from the First Department from person's job." (Spetskhran). Very limited number of scholars were able to obtain permission to work at the Fundamental Library for Social Sciences, and even of those, many had poor command of foreign languages.
One of paradoxal phenomena of the Soviet scientific landscape of that time were so-called "review collections of INION", which contained Russian-language analytical reviews of the freshest crop of the Western thought. The system, on one side, was barring scholars from first-hand access to foreign literature, on the other side, it fed to them the essence of the latest Western ideas in Russian language. Naturally, most of these collection carried "confidential" note of them, so they were a part of Spetskhran. However, some of the scholars, who got access to these "confidential" titles, allowed to copy them, which brought to life of sub-culture of scholarly Samizdat. These Samizdat "review collections" enjoyed great popularity in scholar circles, and hugely affected development of Soviet humanities, against the will of ideological hardliners. Some of most popular authors of these analytical reviews became "scholarly stars" in the USSR, having a cult-like following; especially, outside of Moscow, where original texts were practically inaccessible.
Teaching and lecturing
2007-2008 - lectures at Russian State University for the Humanities: "French Historical Tradition"
Memoirs
Alexander Gordon recently published a few scholarly memoirs, initially, "ФБОН-ИНИОН. Воспоминания и портреты. Вып. 2" ("Fundamental Library of the Russian Academy of Sciencies: Memoirs and Portraits of my colleagues", in Russian) in 2017 and then "Историки железного века" ("Historians of the Iron Age", in Russian) in 2018. These are not biographical books, but conceptual description of how Soviet historiography developed in 1930-1980s, through biographical portraits of his teachers and colleagues, and academic intricacies and intrigues in the humanities in the USSR.
Awards and honors
Order "For Merit to the Fatherland", II class (2022-01-20)