Mikhail Lemke

Born Oct. 31 (Nov. 12), 1872, in Dem’iansk, present-day Novgorod Oblast; died Aug. 18, 1923, in Petrograd. Soviet Russian historian. One of the first to publish documentary sources on the Russian liberation movement of the mid-19th century. Member of the Communist Party from 1922.

Lemke received a military education but soon retired from military service. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries he was editor of many newspapers in the capital and the provinces. He published the works of A. I. Herzen (Complete Collected Works and Letters, vols. 1–22, 1919–25) and N. A. Dobroliubov (First Complete Collected Works and Letters, vols.1911). The commentaries to these publications contain important documents on the history of the Russian revolutionary movement, as well as important factual and bibliographic information. Lemke’s books about members of the Russian liberation movement and his works on the history of censorship and journalism are based on documentary materials that he was the first to employ.

Lemke received his training as a researcher during the transitional period of the crisis of bourgeois historiography and the inception of Marxist historical science. His emphasis on factual data allowed him to overcome to some extent the bias of liberal bourgeois historiography. Nevertheless, he was unable to free himself completely from liberal bourgeois methodology. After the October Revolution of 1917 he was engaged in lecturing and propaganda work in higher educational institutions, factories, and plants. He helped reorganize higher education and edited the journal Kniga i revoliutsiia (Books and Revolution). Lemke was the founder and chairman of the Society for the Study of the History of the Liberation and Revolutionary Movement in Russia.