Defense of a doctoral dissertation on history during the Great Patriotic War: the experience of Ivan Matveyevich Kataev
Authors:   Defense of a doctoral dissertation on history during the Great Patriotic War: the experience of Ivan Matveyevich Kataev, Grishina Natalya V. 
Published: December 2024

The article is devoted to the problem of organizing and conducting thesis defenses by Soviet historians in wartime conditions. It considers the defense of a doctoral dissertation by the historian Ivan Matveevich Kataev, which took place at the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences (IHAS) in June 1944. The case of I. M. Kataev's defense allowed us to address important aspects of the topic of the dissertation culture of Soviet historians. I. M. Kataev is presented in the system of communications of the scientific community of the late 1930s - mid-1940s, where the fates and views on the development of historical science of scientists of different generations intersected. The organizational framework of I. M. Kataev's debate gives an idea of the practice of thesis defenses at the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences, including the formal procedure and traditions of thesis discussion. I. M. Kataev's disputation, placed in the context of the total number of historians' defenses, made it possible to reveal the dynamics and peculiarities of dissertation defenses at the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences during the Great Patriotic War. The defense of I. M. Kataev's dissertation is presented against the background of a wide range of factors that influenced the development of wartime historical science (evacuation and re-evacuation of the Institute of History, criticism of M. N. Pokrovsky's ideas, etc.). I. M. Kataeva's discussion raises the issue of the dissertations of “provincial” scientists, whose acquisition of academic degrees, especially doctoral degrees, was an important aspect of the personnel policy of regional universities. The source basis of the study was the transcript of the defense, deposited in the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ARAN), as well as a set of office documents accompanying the defense and included in the dissertation file of the applicant, found in the collection of the Higher Attestation Commission in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). In addition to the documents mentioned above, the sources of regional and local archives - the United State Archive of the Chelyabinsk Region (OGACHO) and the City Archive of Magnitogorsk - were involved. The documents used significantly supplemented the known facts of I. M. Kataev's biography, as well as allowed to reveal the system of interaction between the institutions of the center and the province involved in the awarding of academic degrees. The study draws conclusions about the incompleteness of the formation of the Soviet dissertation culture in the early 1940s. The organization of the disputation stretched for 4 years, which was due to both the influence of external factors related to wartime and the manifestation of intrascientific conventions, within which the defense of a dissertation by a researcher from the province did not fit into the current directions of scientific policy and its defense was postponed.