Militsa Nechkina

Born Feb. 12 (25), 1901, in Nezhin, in present-day Chernigov Oblast, Ukrainian SSR. Soviet historian. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR since 1958 and a member of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the RSFSR since 1947 (of the USSR since 1966).

The daughter of an engineer, Nechkina graduated from the department of history and philology at the University of Kazan in 1921. From 1924 to 1927 she was a research associate at the Russian Association of Social Science Research Institutes (RANION), simultaneously teaching at the First Moscow State University (1924–26) and at the University of Working People of the East (1925–28). From 1934 to 1954 she was a professor in the history department of Moscow State University. Since 1946, Nechkina has been a professor at the Academy of Social Sciences, serving as head of the subdepartment of the history of Soviet society from 1958 to 1965. She has been a member of the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR since 1935.

Nechkina’s principal works are devoted to the Russian revolutionary movement and social thought of the 19th century, to developing an overall interpretation of the Russian historical process, and to historiography and the methodology of history. She is the author of several works on the history of the Decembrist movement: The Society of United Slavs (1927), A. S. Griboedov and the Decembrists (1947; State Prize of the USSR, 1948), The Uprising of December 14, 1825 (1951), and The Decembrist Movement (vols. 1–2, 1955). She has directed the publication of archival material in The Decembrist Uprising (vols. 7, 9–12, 1950–69).

Nechkina has made an important contribution to the study of the first revolutionary situation in Russia, directing the systematic investigation of this subject in a research group that she organized in 1958 at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Among her publications on this subject are “N. G. Chernyshevskii During the Revolutionary Situation,” published in Istoricheskie zapiski (vol. 10, 1941), “New Material on the Revolutionary Situation in Russia (1859–61),” published in Literaturnoe nasledstvo (vol. 61, 1953), and various articles on the history of Land and Liberty and the revolutionary societies that preceded it and were active at the time of N. P. Ogarev and A. I. Herzen. The last articles were included in the collections The Revolutionary Situation in Russia, 1859–1861 (vols. 1–6, 1960–1974), edited by Nechkina. She has directed the publication of facsimile editions of Kolokol (The Bell) (issues 1–11, 1960–64) and The Polar Star (books 1–9, 1966–68), which are major documents of the social movement of the 1850’s and 1860’s.

Nechkina is the author and editor of the first Soviet history textbooks for higher schools (History of the USSR, vol. 2, published in 1940, 1949, and 1954; History of the USSR, vol. 1, 1956, 1964) and for the seventh and eighth grades of secondary schools. Her research on the class struggle and the role of the people in the historical process was incorporated in the collaborative works History of the Proletariat of the USSR (1930–35) and Essays on the History of the Proletariat of the USSR (1931). She has supervised the publication of the second, third, and fourth volumes of the Essays on the History of Historical Science in the USSR (1960–66) and the collection of articles History and Historians (1965, 1966, 1972). Nechkina has been awarded two Orders of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, and various medals.