One of the relevant problems in the study of Soviet historical science is related to organizational forms of research activity. It allows us to better understand the mechanisms of functioning of historical science in the Soviet era, as well as the features of managing the work of research groups. Based on documentation and sources of personal origin this paper is aimed at reconstructing the scientific and organizational activities of scientists in the preparation of «History of Russian Culture», a collective work that was drafted at the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences in the late 1930s – 1940s. In this article, the process of preparing «History of Russian Culture» is divided into two stages. At the first stage, it considers the circumstances of the creation of this collective work before the Great Patriotic War, the development of the first plans and organizational problems faced by researchers in the process of work. With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, the importance of this work was increased and it was included among the most demanded research areas of the Institute of History in the first half of the 1940s. Within the framework of this stage, the article analyzes the obstacles in the implementation of the next plans (including the period of evacuation of employees of the institutes of the USSR Academy of Sciences) caused, among other things, by rearrangements in the authors’ team, delaying work on individual chapters and editorial input. Despite the close attention of researchers to «History of Russian Culture», this work was not finished. In the final part of the article, based on N. Druzhinin’s memoirs, a hypothesis is put forward that the reason for the incompleteness of the project was related to ideological campaigns, which gradually gained momentum in the second half of the 1940s.
soviet historical science; history of Russian culture; collective research; Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR; Leningrad branch of the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR; B.D. Grekov; N.M. Druzhinin.