“we were Ready to continue our research. But the events THAT took place in the country crossed out our plans...”
Authors: Fomenko S. V. 
Published: October 2024

The quote in the title of the article belongs to Savely Volfovich (Vladimirovich) Wolfson. In issue 1 (33) of this Vestnik for 2022, the author wrote about the beginning of the scientific and organizational activities of this historian, well-known not only in Tomsk, sometimes allowing himself to call him simply SV - by analogy with FDR - the 32nd President of the USA. The fact that Volfovich, who for many still remains Savely Vladimirovich, in the middle of his life restored the patronymic received at birth, is an additional reason for this. The purpose of this report is to highlight the activities of the sector of the history of the foreign youth movement which was created in 1968 at Tomsk State University as part of the Problem Research Laboratory of the History, Archaeology and Ethnography of Siberia. Some of the sources needed by nouvist historians became available by the 1970s. and in Tomsk thanks to the development of interlibrary loans. But the books (mostly from Moscow) came to the TSU library only for up to a month and only from open access funds. Therefore, the capital remained for us the same as Mecca for believers - desirable, but not very accessible. It was almost impossible to settle in hotels in Moscow because of the small number of places there. And how much effort SV spent on ensuring that one of us lived in a hostel of the Higher Komsomol School (HKSh) or Moscow State University. In Moscow, we would come to this or that library at the time of its opening and work in it until the moment it was closed. Since the necessary information was almost exclusively in special storage funds, even after the appearance of copiers, we could not use them; information had to be rewritten by hand. Despite the difficulties unknown to the people of the computer age and the era of new Russian capitalism, the youth sector of the Laboratory did a lot, despite the fact that, as a rule, no more than 6-8 actual “youth specialists” worked in it simultaneously. 11 collections of articles "Issues of the history of the international youth movement" were prepared in 1971-76 and 1981-87. In 1987, collective monograph was published on the youth policy of the ruling circles of developed capitalist countries. The maximum circulation of books published in those years at TSU was limited to 200 copies. But the collections of the sector were published in the amount of 500-700 and even 1000 copies. Almost all the "youth specialists" became candidates of science. Under the leadership of SV 4 dissertations were defended in 1977-79. Five persons had defended themselves on youth topics in 1978-86 from Cherkasov wards. The sector of “youth specialists”, created by SV, had the potential to turn over time into a regional Institute of Youth, which would be engaged not only in academic research, but also would have a positive impact on the youth policy of the authorities, including through the training/retraining of personnel necessary for implementing this policy. The model for imitation here was the Youth Institute, which arose on the basis of the Higher Komsomol School in 1990. The counter-revolution of the 1990s dealt an irreparable blow to the sector of the history of the international youth movement. The last 2 dissertations on youth topics were prepared in 1990-1994 by "ordinary" graduate students of the Department of Modern and Contemporary History of TSU, more precisely, by graduate students of SV. And in the same years, the last 2 collective monographs were published under the editorship and with the participation of N.S. Cherkasov.