The Beginning of Scientific and Organizational Activities of Savely V. Volfson
Authors: Fomenko S. V. 
Published: October 2024

The author aims to draw the attention of historians to the personality of Savely V. Volfson, and also to reconstruct the history of his first major scientific project. At the same time, she occasionally calls Savely Volfovich, who for many remains still Savely Vladimirovich, just SV. (The fact that in the middle of his life he returned to the patronymic received at birth was an additional incentive to this). Savely Vladimirovich was born in the family of one of the first engineers of the Stalingrad Tractor Plant. 4 days before the breakthrough of the German units to the Volga, along with part of the factory equipment, the family was loaded into a train sent to Siberia - to Rubtsovsk. After graduating from the Faculty of History and Philology (IFF) of Tomsk University (TSU) in 1955, SV worked in Novosibirsk at a school, in the district committee of the Komsomol and, finally, as an assistant at the Department of General History of the Pedagogical Institute. Already an active lecturer, he wanted to study the history of the United States, on which (as well as the USSR) the entire post-war world politics was tied. In 1962 he entered the postgraduate course at TSU to the assistant professor Grigortsevich. Becoming in 1966 an assistant to “his” department of modern and contemporary history, after defending his dissertation in 1967, Volfson was an assistant professor of this department since 1968, and only in 2021 transferred to the department of oriental studies. The teaching work did not leave time to continue the active development of the previous scientific topic. But most importantly, it seems, it undermined the SV's interest in it. Possessing by nature an amazing intuition, he acutely felt the pulse of the times, which suddenly made itself felt by the “youth revolution” that broke out in the Western countries. The first major student riots occurred in the United States in the fall of 1964, and already in June 1968, under the leadership of Volfson, a graduate work on the history of the American student movement was defended. In early 1968, with the support of the Tomsk Regional Committee of the Komsomol and the Committee of Youth Organizations of the USSR (KMO), Volfson and his colleague associate professor N.S. Cherkasov held a student scientific conference dedicated to the riots of foreign students. Meanwhile, in April 1968, a ministerial order appeared on the opening of the Problematic Research Laboratory of History, Archaeology and Ethnography of Siberia (PNIL INPP) at Tomsk University. To speed up the implementation of the order, the dean of the IFF, Professor Mogilnitsky, sent Volfson to Moscow. SV negotiated with the State Committee on Science and Technology not only to speed up the opening of the laboratory. After his talks at the KMO about the organization of the study of the history of the international youth movement at TSU, the KMO turned to the State Committee for Science with a corresponding request. And in the summer of 1969 TSU received the first 4 additional rates for the creation of one more sector in the PNIL INPP. Thus, in the fall of 1969, for the first time in a Soviet university an “academic” structure appeared which engaged in foreign- general, world - history, albeit only as part of a laboratory for the study of the history of Siberia.