Pavel Aleksandrovich Argunov

Born Sept. 5 (17), 1862, in Irkutsk; died Mar. 11, 1944, in Moscow. Soviet historian.

Argunov was one of the founders and active figures of the Translators’ and Publishers’ Society (1882), an underground revolutionary circle (which consisted primarily of students of the Moscow University). In the spring of 1884 the society was disbanded, and Argunov was expelled from the third year of the law faculty of Moscow University and arrested; he served about two years in prison. After that he was deported for five years to Eastern Siberia (Shushenskoe). He contributed to Siberian publications and to newspapers of the Upper Volga Region, cofounded the Minusinsk Museum, and compiled Essays on the Agriculture of the Minusinsk Region (1892). After the October Revolution he graduated from Saratov University in 1921 and became docent in 1925 and a staff member of the History Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1941.